How I Reversed A Terminal Diagnosis: The Metabolic Root Of Healing & Addiction

 

What if addiction isn’t a moral failure — and it isn’t just a brain disease either? What if it’s the natural expression of a terrain that never got the support it needed?

In this episode of I Love Being Sober, Tim Westbrook sits down with Dr. Nasha Winters — naturopathic oncologist, bestselling author, and 35-year stage IV ovarian cancer thriver — for one of the most clinically rich and emotionally honest conversations this podcast has ever hosted. Recorded live at Camelback Recovery’s outpatient treatment center in Scottsdale, Arizona, in front of a live audience of clients and staff.

Dr. Winters scored a perfect 10 out of 10 on the ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) scale. She came from a family shaped by alcoholism, addiction, mental illness, and trauma. She was days from death when she was diagnosed with terminal cancer at 19 — and she was sent home to die. Instead, she spent the next three decades building one of the most comprehensive frameworks in integrative medicine: the Terrain Ten.

This conversation bridges two worlds that rarely talk to each other: terrain-based medicine and addiction recovery. And the overlap is exact.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why sugar and ultra-processed food activate the same dopamine receptors as cocaine and heroin — and how that keeps recovery stuck
• How unstable blood sugar mimics and worsens the craving cycle in early sobriety
• Why Dr. Winters now puts mental and emotional health FIRST in her Terrain Ten — flipping the framework she published in 2017
• The ACE score, what it predicts, and why a score of 3 or above dramatically increases disease risk
• What intermittent fasting actually does to the brain in recovery — and how to start without white-knuckling it
• The emerging field of metabolic psychiatry and why ketosis has reversed bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and addiction in clinical trials
• Why being “never sick” is a red flag, not a health flex
• How chronic stress puts the body in a state where treatments “bounce off” — and what to do about it
• EMDR, ibogaine, and psychedelic-assisted therapy in the context of trauma and addiction recovery
• The two things that showed up as universal common denominators across 500 cancer and mental health patients: not feeling seen, and not feeling heard

The audience Q&A goes even deeper — covering sleep and metabolic health, keto and depression, sexual abuse and trauma processing, and what it takes to rebuild a life after violence and addiction.

This is not a light episode. It’s a complete one.

Resources mentioned:

Website: Dr. Nasha Winters | Tend the Terrain

YouTube & Podcast: Tend the Terrain Podcast with Dr. Nasha

Instagram: Instagram.com/drnashawinters

Substack: Tending the Terrain: Reflections by DrNasha(TM)

Facebook: Facebook.com/drnashainc

Book: The Metabolic Approach to Cancer

Book: Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind — Dr. Georgia Ede

Book: Brain Energy — Dr. Chris Palmer

Book: The Circadian Code — Dr. Satchin Panda

Camelback Recovery outpatient treatment: CamelbackRecovery.com

#AddictionRecovery #SoberLiving #MetabolicHealth #TraumaHealing #MentalHealth #DualDiagnosis #SubstanceUseDisorder #ILoveBeingSober #CamelbackRecovery #Scottsdale #Phoenix #TerrainTen #DrNashaWinters #BloodSugar #DopamineRecovery #IntermittentFasting #MetabolicPsychiatry #ACEScore #SoberLife

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Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

How I Reversed A Terminal Diagnosis: The Metabolic Root Of Healing & Addiction

Naturopathic oncologist and 35-year stage IV cancer thriver Dr. Nasha Winters breaks down why your terrain — blood sugar, gut health, stress, trauma, and circadian rhythm — is the missing piece in addiction recovery.

Surviving Terminal Diagnosis: A Journey Into Integrative Medicine

My guest has spent more than 30 years living at the intersection of science, survival, and service. At nineteen years old, she was handed a stage four ovarian cancer diagnosis and told she had about three months to live. The doctor sent her home. She did not go quietly. Instead, she started asking why. Digging into the origins of disease, the role of metabolism, the microbiome, blood sugar, trauma, stress, and everything the conventional model was not looking at. What she built from that question became one of the most influential frameworks in integrative medicine, the Terrain 10.

The idea is that your body is not a battlefield to be conquered but an ecosystem to be understood and supported. She is the author of The Metabolic Approach to Cancer, a bestselling book that has changed how thousands of patients and clinicians think about disease. She is a naturopathic doctor, board-certified naturopathic oncologist. Her current work lives at DrNasha.com under the banner, Tend the Terrain. Her philosophy is soul-first and science-backed, and it has a lot to say to anyone in recovery. Please welcome Dr. Nasha Winters.

Thank you.

We have got Wayne as part of the audience, and he occasionally uses his outside voice.

It is all good.

Is there anything that I missed?

You did a pretty good job. It was like, who are you talking about? Really thorough. Thank you.

We planned this a while ago, and we met at Genius Network through Joe Polish. Thank you, Joe. You were nineteen years old with a terminal diagnosis and three months to live. The conventional system sent you home. What happened in the space between that moment and deciding you were going to figure this out yourself?

When you are given no options, you are left to your own devices. To be fully transparent, I did not expect to fight it, to win it, to battle it, because I was just told there was nothing to be done. I just wanted to understand it. That was really where this journey started for me. Here I am. It will be 35 years on October 21st since I was given a terminal diagnosis. Apparently I am doing something. Thank you. I am still trying to understand it, not just for myself, but for the tens of thousands of patients that had direct care of and hundreds of thousands indirectly, and just understanding that cancer is not just a rogue genetic process. It is very much an expression of a very beat-up environment internally as well as externally.

 

They said three months to live. How long did it take before you realized that that was not true?

Fast forward, after my clinical training, I realized I was probably days from dying. It is helpful to give a little context, because I am going to speak more specifically to this room and this group. These are not conversations I typically have in a lot of public environments, but I came from a lot of trauma, a lot of addiction. I feel like this room gets some of the things I can share and will not squirm under it all. I appreciate that. I am sure everyone in this room is familiar with the ACE score, adverse childhood event score.

That is the scoring system that, for these ten questions of things you had experienced before the age of eighteen, when you have three or more of those experiences before the age of eighteen, your likelihood of having a very aggressive cancer or other health condition goes up exponentially. For me, I was a 10 out of 10, or I should say, I am a 10 out of 10. What I started to learn later, after I accidentally lived, was that that was a huge part of why I expressed cancer. I wanted to understand that. I give that context because I think that is very important.

People just think, “There was a genetic component being so young, or there was maybe an original toxin or something that did it.” Those things might have been a little bit like the straw on the camel’s back, but for me, it was much more of the whole container of what I came from and through. Because of course, we do not just come from our own traumas and experiences. Those who shared theirs with us had their own. They hurt people. It comes from a lineage, and I am still learning at 54 years old about the lineage of what it really came from.

I am learning about self-compassion, but also compassion for those who caused harm for me in my younger years, which really helped me even understand the process. Another piece of this, initially, when I was diagnosed, I was so sick. I had to leave campus. I had to leave school. I was a sophomore in college. I was pre-med. I wanted to go into the medical field. I did not even realize that basically since the time I was popped out of the womb, I had been sick because it was so normalized. There was a pill for every ill all through my youth, with a diagnosis of irritable bowel syndrome as a little girl, like before I was even age nine.

TMI, but I started my period at age nine. No one questioned that in 1979. No one questioned that, which today is more normal or common, I should say. It was absolutely not common back then. My third-grade teacher knew something was happening at my home, tried to address it, tried to get me help, and no one would listen, not my family members nor the administration of my grade school. Having one person, I am sure you can relate, just one person who sees you was an incredible life raft for me at nine years old and understanding of that. Over time, I just layered-caked the diagnosis, but it was all normalized.

In some places of that type of trauma, we can go into the bucket, which my brother did. My brother became basically as bad as he could be. I was the other end of the spectrum, the societal as good as I could be. Our paths. We were living in the same environment, living in the same terrain. My brother also had, do you guys talk about single nucleotide polymorphisms here? Do you talk about SNPs, or genetic patterns that are inherited, but we have control over changing their expression? My brother and I both carry a gene called the MAO gene, monoamine oxidase gene, which has been highly associated with addictions and mental illness.

In women who have a homozygous expression, which I do, they become the worrier. They become hypervigilant. They become the one who is managing the space, the energy constantly. The male version with the Y chromosome, they become what I call the batshit crazy gene. That is actually the gene that is most associated with psychoses, with extreme illness, addictions, those patterns. The other part of my brother’s terrain that was different from mine is he was an in vitro kid. There were a lot of fertility drugs. What that did is it actually created an extra Y chromosome.

We do not just come from our own traumas and experiences. Those who shared theirs with us had their own. It comes from a lineage. Share on X

We would later learn that when he was about 9 or 10 years old. That chromosome, interestingly enough, is associated with the criminally insane. This might be interesting to this group. The highest rates of having the extra Y chromosome are on death row in prison systems and the police force. That is an interesting little swoop of that piece. That paints the picture of the type of environment that it came from. That is just my brother’s story. It does not even talk about everything else. By the time I graduated high school, a week later, I moved away because I thought moving away from where I grew up would fix it.

Of course, doing that geographically. It works temporarily.

It gives you a perspective shift. What I did not realize was that I had, like, a U-Haul that dragged along behind me that I went there with. It was in that moment of leaving that place that I also had the opportunity. My body felt somewhat safe for the first time in its nineteen years. As such, in my huge push to continue to still ignore all the stuff in the U-Haul, I just overcompensated by taking more classes, working more jobs, staying up all hours studying and trying to be the top of everything I did, trying to be the best of the best. It finally collapsed me.

Collapse, Resilience, And The Psycho-Neuro-Immunology Connection

In the summer of 1991, where I thought I was just dealing with more irritable bowel syndrome, more polycystic ovarian, more endometriosis, more thyroid dysfunction, more all the things, rheumatoid arthritis, it was when my roommate came home from school and found me unconscious and rushed me to the emergency room because they just kept telling me it was just more and more the same every time I tried to get medical attention. It was at that moment they realized she had a complete bowel blockage. She has kidney dysfunction.

Her kidneys have stopped functioning because I had a huge tumor pressing against my right kidney, shutting that down. My liver was full of tumors. My whole belly was full of tumors. I had fluid in all the wrong places. I had an oxygen level under 80, which is not compatible with life. I was extremely malnourished because I could not eat for days on end, weeks on end, because there was so much pain from that bowel blockage. What was interesting, it was all normalized. Everyone just thought it was more of the same.

It was on that opportunity that when the doctor who came in to tell me the news of what was really going on was crying, because he had a nineteen-year-old daughter as well. I comforted him. When he first told me, you have cancer, there was a moment of relief. For two different occasions prior to this diagnosis, I had tried to take my own life. There was just nowhere I came from. There was seemingly no way out. I was like, “This is the path you got this lifetime, and you are just a victim of it.” That was the mindset I was raised in and what I was believing in myself in that moment.

In 1991, on October 21st, when the official diagnosis came through, that fleeting moment of relief, but then something else happened. I am hoping that this is what this room can believe in or can latch onto when someone tells me I cannot do something. It also flips a little switch inside of me that is like the double dog dare gene. It is like, “F you, I know exactly. I do not know what it is yet, but I will show you. Yes, I can.” That was what started this journey because I still did not expect to live, but I wanted to understand.

I was pre-med, who was biology and chemistry minor or major and minor. I switched my degree to psychology and biology. In 1991, this was unheard of. Something called psychoneuroimmunology, and I started learning about it through my own diagnosis, through this concept that things that happened to your psychology impacted your physiology, your biochemistry, and, in particular, your immune system. Now I have this framework to understand that the environment in which I came from laid the perfect foundation, the perfect field for me to get sick of all the different layers of sickness that I had.

In that, it put me on a new path. I started reading everything you could imagine. In fact, I thought I was not going to go to medical school at that point. I really thought I was going to go into psychiatry or psychology. My goal was to work with the addictions population. That was where I was moving first because that was the environment I knew, and I thought it was something I could keep learning from and helping others. That is when I started to really go down. In fact, I worked and became a certified addictions counselor in Colorado, a level three CAC.

 

I was the head of the night shift lead. I worked that, which was not great for my immune system, working grave shifts, but I did not know that till later. That world opened up so much for me to understand that trauma plays a much bigger role in our health and healing process than we have been led to believe. It has been a passion and purpose. Even though I bring a lot of tools to the table, it is one that I cannot ignore for any patient I work with in the cancer space. That was a lot of background, but I think it is important just so you get a sense of this is the part that I think so many people ignore in the medical field.

Off the top of my head, what I think of is the mental, emotional, spiritual, physical. They are all tied. They all influence each other. I am pretty into exercise and fitness. I remember this guy, Tom, or people in general. I have heard people say, “You do not have to work out every day. Why do you work out every day?” It is like you do not understand. I do not work out just because I want to become strong. It is mental, emotional, and spiritual. They are all part of it, and they all feed off of each other. I went for a hike this morning. I got out in the sun. It was beautiful. I got my heart rate up. I worked my muscles, and that sets me up for a good rest of my day.

Those first moments of your day set the tone for the rest of the day. 100%. For the rest of the week and the rest of the month, it is just cumulative for sure.

You talk about the concept of tending the terrain, treating the body as an ecosystem rather than a war zone. For someone in our audience who has spent years treating their body like an enemy, what shifts when they start seeing it that way instead?

The biggest thing that shifts first is that you start to have more compassion for yourself and for those around you. That is a really tough one because I have also found, and I am not sure if this is true in this room, but I find that first of all, when I was working in the addiction center, we worked in a residential facility, and it was shared. It was a shared facility. We had a residential recovery center, but we also had a residential mental health center. The psych ward was literally one end of the building, and we had a detox there as well as a recovery center.

I will tell you, one of the first things I learned being in this space were the people who really needed to be locked in the psych unit were actually the other therapists that were on the floor. I learned that pretty quickly, and that we can outrun our stuff, but bringing the U-Haul with you. Just because you have that fancy label over you sometimes is a detriment because you somehow think your work is done. You got it figured out. What I started to learn is I learned to be humble in that environment to be like, “I am getting as much of my healing from the folks that are here as I am offering to them. It was very much this reciprocal place.”

That helped so much to equalize the field that we are all a little bit crazy. We all are only doing the best we can. There are so many layers and reasons for why we show up and express in a certain moment at any given time, and so that was a huge piece because I had a ton of judgment against my family of origin. I somehow thought I was better than them because I got out. I did not get out of anything. I just jumped into a deeper well in a different way. That was part of it. I just think being curious, like there is a level of curiosity when you realize, “I am not broken.” That is where we think when we have an addiction or a diagnosis.

We think that that is somehow a brokenness. What I would really like to offer from the terrain perspective, this is your body’s way of trying to protect you, of trying to help you, of trying to support you. When you did not have a healthy tank to draw from, you had to draw from wherever you possibly could. It was a strategy of survival, not something inherently wrong or broken within. That really reframes things to give you a little more tenderness for yourself on the journey.

We are all just surviving. It is like someone who has experienced childhood abuse, trauma, whatever it may be. It is like we are all just here surviving, and if somebody does something or says something, or it is like that pisses me off, I have to kind of step back and put myself in their shoes and realize that they are doing the best that they can. We are all doing the best that we can. We do a Four Agreements book study at our residential school every Saturday.

He talks about the domestication process, and we are all being domesticated by our parents, our aunts, our uncles, our coaches, our teachers, and they are all doing the best that they can. We are all doing the very best that we can with the tools that we have been given. Again, do not take things personally. Everybody is doing the best that they can.

I love that you bring that up because there is this component of when someone pisses you off, when your reaction to something outside of you, that is just an opportunity to go, “What’s that really about? What is this?” If we can all even practice the power of the pause, and really take a breath before we react, we will not do it perfectly all the time. In fact, I would be psyched if we did, as an 80/20 rule would be. Let’s do it really well. That is the opportunity as well because that is the feedback loop.

What happens for most of us is we are so uncomfortable with our reaction that we will go to great lengths to not have to face it. Managing our own emotional terrain is really where it starts when something triggers you off. In that moment when your brain says, “I want to reach for this,” or “I want to behave this way,” or “I want to say or do this thing,” that is an opportunity to go, “Is that really? Is that going to be the best option right now?” Sometimes you will still make that option. Be kind to yourself even in those moments. It is like playing the tape forward.

Play the tape forward and pause when agitated or doubtful. It is like, “How is this going to land? Is this really what I want to say?” Now we have Claude or ChatGPT, and it is like, “Let me put this in Claude. Do you think I should?” No, do not say that.

You can do the raw version first.

Are you sure? I really want to know. No, you really shouldn’t say that. That’s going to be inflammatory. It’s like, it’s really helpful.

Claude has become our own little inner voice. It’s interesting how you can use AI for a positive effect in the world. Yes. That’s interesting.

Decoding The Terrain 10: Mitochondria As Information Receivers

It has been helpful. Terrain 10 framework, it includes mental and emotional health as one of its 10 domains. Can you walk us through that one specifically? Of course, our audience here is going to lean in hard when they hear how central emotional terrain is to physical disease.

Just to give you the Terrain 10, the drops that go into this bucket are for the collective of you and specifically to your mitochondria. Is everyone here familiar with the mitochondria? That is, we were all taught in biology that it is the mighty mitochondria. Those little buggers, first of all, are dated back at least 170,000 years old. They are bacteria that somehow merged with humanity and became part of us. We have co-evolved with them for thousands of years. They make up upwards of twenty percent of our body composition.

They are an important part of our being. They are also the receivers of information in, on, and around you, including people, places, and things. They are constantly scanning and taking in data. They also interpret that data. They translate it and say, “This collection of inputs? What does this mean?” The third thing they do is they communicate, or they signal the rest of the world, the other mitochondria, the other cells, the other tissues, organs, structure, what to do with that information. When we are humming along, they are doing their job really well.

They take about 60,000 hits a day, just living on planet Earth. They are remarkable at how they know how to, like Wonder Woman’s bracelet, all of the offenders and still move through the world. They accumulate over time. As we get older, they take a bigger hit, and major illnesses or whatnot usually take a big hit. Certain medications take a big hit. Certain things like alcohol take a big hit on them. The ten things I have learned that really affect the mitochondria are in my first. When the book came out in 2017, I had it ordered in a particular way. It was ordered as epigenetics, which is the idea of the gene.

We can trace back at least twelve generations to each of us that have impacted who we are today through the maternal mitochondrial DNA line. Great-grandmothers have brought a thread of their truth and life experience and all the things they were exposed to, people, places, and things for generations back all the way down to you. That also means that what you pass forward will impact twelve generations downstream.

That is one of the things we learned. These are also the things that are not in stone, as I mentioned. These are things we know that about 95% of the time you can impact how they express themselves with your diet and your lifestyle choices and even the choices of who you hang out with. Who is the closest to people in your circle?

You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

It is huge. That was my number one at that time. The second one was metabolic being what was the fuel you are sourcing those mitochondria with? In the world, most of us are living on about 70% carbohydrates. That is the average of what people are ingesting today. A few just 150, 200 years ago, about 30% of our dietary intake was carbohydrates. In a short period of time, we flipped fuel sources, and that kind of gummed up our mitochondrial work. It has made our fuel sources more inefficient and more unable to properly scan the environment and respond appropriately.

That is where we see an increase in certain conditions over the last hundred years that did not even exist. We did not even have cardiovascular disease 110 years ago was not a thing. Cancer about 100 years ago was about one in 300. It is one in two. Diabetes is about one in two. I was just reading a statistic, and you probably know this better. I think 46% of Americans are on some type of mood medication. I do not even know that number. It is big. Something has changed in a short period of time. The third thing is just environmental toxins. It doesn’t matter if you have got toxins.

It is just how it interacts with your genes, your SNPs. Then the fourth one was the microbiome. Now, I mean, we have been talking about microbiomes forever, but Western medicine pretty much ignored it. Now it is all the rage and research, especially in the cancer space. You cannot have a good response to chemo or immune therapies in cancer if your microbiome is messed up. If you have had basically antibiotics in the last six months and you have got cancer and you start chemo, you are not going to respond to it. This is a big damn deal. It is also true that how you respond to other medications depends on what’s going on in your microbiome.

Even when people say they are not responding well to certain antipsychotics or mood enhancers or even anti-diabetes medications, it depends on what’s going on in that microbiome. We have just your overall immune system. Most of us do not even realize how our immune system is off track, and very quietly. If I hear someone ever say, “I am never sick.” Does anyone say that in this room? That is a problem. How many of you say, “I am always sick?” That is a problem too. The spectrums. Your body should have a good illness or two a year to keep it in training.

If it is not responding, that means that a lot of things are getting past its surveillance and landing in a way that causes you a bigger expression than something that might have caught your attention earlier on. It is like nothing, up cancer, nothing, up autoimmunity. You want to have a little bit of entertainment there. Especially when people tell me they do not get fevers or they suppress their fever if they get a fever, you want to get a good fever. Fever is your entrainment to your immune system. We have been taught to just take a pill for that and suppress it as quickly as possible, especially to our little ones out there in the world.

Why Mental And Emotional Health Are The Root Of Healing

We basically have entrained a couple of generations of immune systems that do not know how to do their job. Of course, that is going to be a big one. We have inflammation, we have oxygenation and circulation, we have hormone balance, we have circadian rhythm and stress response, and the mental-emotional. It was in that order. Those ten drops in the bucket all impact how we thrive or dive on the planet. This last year, I flipped the narrative. I have now made epigenetics what came down the gene pool the tenth drop because, really, everything you do affects that at the end.

It is almost like it is all. It is like the spilling tank into that piece. What I have made the first now is the mental-emotional. I flipped it, and then the second now is stress and circadian rhythm. I flipped things around because of what I have seen over my 35-year career. When I wrote the book in 2017, I knew if I started with everybody saying, “it is time to deal with your emotional traumas or the skeletons in your closet.” The book would have never left a shelf. It would have just stayed closed.

I think something shifted in the last decade. There is a lot more willingness to. We have destigmatized mental health. We have destigmatized addiction. We had a very different conversation. It feels appropriate to now scoot it to the front of the line. The reason I am still standing today, 35 years later, is not because I started with a ketogenic diet and a supplement. That is not why I am living here. I am living here today because I dealt first with the mental-emotional.

That was really paramount to my own recovery and understanding and starting to build compassion and new neural pathways of how to be and survive in this world. For me, that piece, even if I have folks who have done everything right, they are taking the best standard of care, the best alternative care. They are eating perfectly. They have got their sleep dialed. They are getting their first sunshine in the morning and all the things, but they are still sick, or they are still progressing, or they are having a recurrence of their cancer. That is when I know they have ignored the most important part. You cannot really change it until you address it.

You cannot really change it until you address it. Share on X

The mental and the emotional. You said that people should get sick once or twice a year. For what reason? I think it builds their resilience.

Totally.

It is like working out. It is like you want to work out. You want to go to the gym. You want to work out. And if you do not get sick, then you do not know how to get well.

That was good. You should say that again. It is true, actually. What has happened in our culture in the last, I do not know, 56 years is we all strive for just being good. We do not like to be hot or cold or irritated or hungry or sad or angry. We meditate into neutral territory, which means you may not feel the pain or the rage or the anger or the sadness, but you also do not feel the joy.

It is like the yin and the yang. Jason Campbell talks about that. He came out to our RTC, and he talks about wanting the anger and the pain and the loneliness and the sadness because that makes the happiness and the joy and the laughter so much better. You do not want to just be right there in the middle.

How many of you in this room have known for yourself or someone you know has ever made a big life transformation or change just because they were comfortable? You know someone who is like, “I just came out of nowhere. I can just totally upgrade myself out of no distress or friction whatsoever.” I have never met, that is amazing. You have met someone like that. I have yet to meet them.

I understand your question.

We are not usually inclined to make changes unless we are extremely uncomfortable.

It is like, as they say, nobody ever gets sober when they are on a winning streak.

There you go.

It is like, you are at your bottom. Who shows up because things are going well? Do you guys come here because things are going well? No, right?

I do not know any human that really does. Would it not be great? People, the only real cure for cancer is prevention, but here is the reality. Most people will not jump into the prevention world. It is just the reality of it. As much as I can be compelling and show people the stats and explain a flip of the coin in this room, we are all going to face this. It likely will not make you change anything until you have to change something. That, to your point with the addiction world or anything, when we are complacent or too comfortable, we do not have enough input friction or hormetic stress to actually get the energy or the vitality to make something change, to make something happen in our lives. That is a big one.

Recently I had high blood pressure. I talked to a provider, and he put me on this blood pressure medication. That was his first go-to.

They’re not asking you why.

No. They did not really ask any questions. He puts me on this blood pressure medication, and he says, “No real side effects or anything.” I am like, “Okay.” I started taking this blood pressure medication, and I am a cyclist. I am realizing that my cycling is not like I am not doing well. I am not feeling strong. I am typically one of the stronger people in my group. Then over a period of about a month, I had this big ride.

Mingus Mountain is a 6,000-foot day, and I was last. That is not me was very humbling. I had to put my ego aside, and I was like, “I had a bad day. I did not sleep well yesterday. I did not eat enough yesterday.” I just chalked it up to a bad day. Then that week, the following week, I made sure that I ate enough, I slept enough, I took care of myself, and I had another big ride the following Saturday. Same thing. I was last.

 

Now you are like, “This is not my diet and lifestyle.”

This is not right. This is not right. Then I talked to another provider, and she said, “Why did he put you on this if you are an endurance athlete?” I am like, “I am not the doctor.” I got a hold of Dr. Jack Wolfson. The natural heart doctor. His thing is we got to figure out what’s at the root of this. What is at the root of this? All these other things are just band-aids. It is like, I am not sleeping well. I have sleep apnea. I have high blood pressure.

I have some of my friends say, “Man, you are the healthiest person I know.” Dr. Jack will say, “You are not healthy.” If you have sleep apnea, you are not healthy. If you have high blood pressure, you are not healthy. If you have issues with your digestion, you are not healthy. We’ve got to figure out what’s going on, what’s underneath it.

It is something because you speak to very much what was happening to me as a kid, as everything was normalized. No one ever asked why. I was a three-year-old needing basically Gas-X pills, because they did not understand what was happening in my body. No one asked why. By the time I was eleven, I was put on birth control pills to deal with such extreme period pain and whatnot. They just kept layering that. No one asked when they started putting me on rheumatoid arthritis drugs at sixteen. No one asked why, like, just the layers. They just put me on a drug, and no one even questioned, including me, not even my mom, nobody. We had normalized it to the point where once I finally got sick enough for the rest of the world to go, “She’s fucked.”

That’s really what it came down to. It took me about ten years of very slow unwinding and rewinding to get back to the moment where, and this is where this is going to sound a little esoteric, but my mom had a stillborn baby before I was born. She knew something was wrong in her body during that entire time, but no one would listen to her. When she finally convinced them to listen, they realized the baby was no longer alive. They then forced her to carry this baby to term and then forced her to deliver it naturally. The trauma of that was there. It traumatized the entire family.

This was the first grandbaby to be in the family. That was the energy my mom carried when she got pregnant again with me is this, so imagine being stewed in that. It was also really clear for her by then that she was not in the right relationship. My father was already very far down the severe alcoholism path. He died of Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome and liver cancer. That’s how much he committed to the bottle. She was in that place, and she thought I was conceived to fix things. I was conceived to fix the wound of the loss of her father, who took his own life, the loss of a baby that she thought would fix the marriage. A loss of a marriage that she thought I would fix.

The weight that came through and the expectation onto me, you do not understand that as a baby we are like little people, our little sponges. We do not have to have a language for it and an understanding. We empathically take on the environment. We just do. I was already expecting, the second I popped out in this world, to be the fixer. Crazy, the field that I am in, I am a fixer. That is the world. It is like, “That runs deep.” When you cannot fix things, you overcompensate in other places in how it comes out. In sharing that piece here, it is like the understanding, the unwinding.

No one once asked what was happening except for that one teacher when I was in third grade, and everyone so quickly put the lid on that because that was not a comfortable discussion to have that there could be a nine-year-old who is dealing with sexual abuse at home. No one wanted to have that conversation. It was so deeply buried. By the time I got to the age of having cancer, it was me understanding and unraveling it all. The work of people like Deepak Chopra, Caroline Myss, Bruce Lipton, these are people who wrote about the concepts of psychoneuroimmunology, the concepts of trauma and how they express in the body, like certain symptoms like high blood pressure is like what are you pushing down in the pressure cooker that needs to be expressed? That is one manifestation.

My blood pressure was 125 over 69 this morning.

Clear, and are you off the BP meds?

As soon as I found out that that was the issue or that it was causing problems, I was done.

It is crazy. Here is even what a blood pressure medication will do. We then get onto a blood pressure medication because no one asked us why we had the blood pressure to begin with, and it will cause depression. It will cause erectile dysfunction. It will cause performance like you just cannot perform at the level because your vascular system is not responding the way that it needs to. It is a whole collection. Then what do you get put on? You get put on an antidepressant and an erectile dysfunction drug and then a sports enhancement beverage, or go see a doctor to pump you up with testosterone.

All of a sudden, you are layer-caking when someone did not say, is there some unprocessed stress that you are not dealing with right now? Was there something else? Did you overtrain for too long and maybe throw off the electrical unit of your body? There are a million different ways that your expression of high blood pressure was not initially explored. Dr. Jack got you to go, what’s the source of it, and get off this band-aid that will only lead to future band-aids.

One of the things that he said, which I really appreciated, was that these other doctors, they are just doing what they have learned.

It is a very narrow path. A plus B equals C.

They are doing what they are trained to do, which is to put you on medication and just manage the symptoms. As opposed to asking the deeper questions and as opposed to really figuring out, what’s at the root of this?

In 30 years of working directly with patients in the cancer space, the questions I ask them, I mean the intake process and now the questionnaire that goes with the Terrain 10, especially the updated version, I would say 99% of them tell me no one’s ever asked them about their mental emotional health, their mental emotional background, how they process grief, how they process stress, how they process rage. Are they in a supportive environment? Are they in a non-supportive environment? What’s their family of origin dynamic like?

Those are important because that’s how I know what that person may be needing to help them be successful in whatever treatments we bring on board, because you can throw all the good stuff at someone. If they’re in a sympathetic nervous system overdrive state, if they are running from the saber-toothed tiger, treatments will simply bounce off. It’s like they’re made of rubber. It does not matter how good the treatment was. If they cannot receive it because they’re so wired in stress physiology, it does not matter what you give them.

That’s what’s really critical. Our medical system is just not geared to giving people the space to have these conversations. The clinicians sadly are not given the time because they do not get paid for that time. When an average consult I do is an hour and a half on average, most of my colleagues in standard of care get 7 to 15 minutes maximum. When do you get to go down the rabbit hole with somebody about what’s really going on in your life? What’s going on at home? It’s rarely something tangible, acute, and tangible.

The Metabolic Psychiatry Of Addiction: Blood Sugar And Dopamine

Fascinating stuff. Let’s talk about blood sugar, dopamine, and the addiction metabolic connection. One of the most overlooked conversations in addiction recovery is what’s happening metabolically. Blood sugar crashes trigger cravings. Sugar becomes a substitute addiction. Gut health tanks after years of alcohol or substance use. Dr. Winters has worked at the intersection of all this in oncology and maps it directly onto recovery.

That’s huge. I love this. That’s a juicy question.

That was the tee-up. You’ve talked about the relationship between blood sugar dysregulation and dopamine. Our clients are people whose dopamine systems have been hijacked by substances. How does unstable blood sugar either worsen or mimic the craving cycle? What does someone in early recovery need to know about this?

Where to begin? First of all, there is an entirely new field in psychiatry called metabolic psychiatry. Has anyone heard of this? Anyone heard of Dr. Georgia Ede? Dr. Chris Palmer. These are two of the most important books they’ve got. Chris Palmer’s book is Brain Energy, I believe, is the name of it. The other book by Georgia Ede is Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind. Both of these books I would recommend to anybody in dual diagnoses, mental health and/or addiction, period. They are like a must-read for every clinician as well, but they are written so that just anybody could understand them.

Even looking up those two, Dr. Georgia Ede and Dr. Chris Palmer, and watching some of their podcasts will change your life. Because they talk about someone who destigmatizes both addiction and mental health, like just in such a beautiful way to help you understand this pathway you just described. The millions of twelve-step programs I’ve sat in, from Codependents Anonymous process here to going with clients when I worked in the addiction space to Narcotics Anonymous and AA and all the different things. You have this great room of people who are not taking drugs, but the back shelf is covered with donuts.

Everyone is going and having coffee, but it is really sugar with some coffee added to it. They are all out there smoking their cigarettes. You know that all tobacco is soaked in sugar. That addiction is not just nicotine. It’s the sugar that it’s drenched in. All your tobacco leaves are soaked in that as well. It is just keeping the little bing, bing, like the little mouse pushing on the little lever that keeps impacting and lighting up the brain pathways. Even if you are someone who is not using a substance anymore, you need to really look hard at your diet because you may be keeping that craving and that addiction physiology active because of the food choices you are putting into your body and not even knowing it.

Everyone, just in the cancer space, even people like me, I do not eat sugar. I am like, “Tell me about breakfast.” They are like, “I have a bowl of Cheerios. I have it with skim milk, and then I have a banana topped on top of that, and then I have an orange juice.” That’s the ADA, American Dietetics Association, healthy heart-friendly breakfast. That is also about 300 grams of carbohydrate. Even RD nutritionists say we should have no more than 100 grams of carbohydrate a day in total. For men, less than 25 of that being sugar. For women, less than 20 grams of that being sugar.

When you are having three days’ worth at breakfast, on average, or you reach for that quick muffin, the bran muffin that has 75 grams of carbohydrates in it, and then your mocha or your coffee or your frappuccino that is another 100, 150 grams, you have now eaten three days of your sugar quota. Now that dopamine brain part of you is lit up, and it is seeking. It is like this dog right here, and my dogs are like the food seekers. They are highly motivated to find more to get that fix.

Sugar impacts that same part of the brain, the same dopamine receptors as cocaine, as heroin. I would offend so many doctors at conferences while I am sitting there watching them drink their sodas in the audience and tell them they are all a bunch of crackheads. They did not like that. I am like, you’re telling your patients, because they say, “Diet’s too hard. Do not worry about it.” I’m like, that’s because you have a problem. I am not very nice in that part. It’s because nice does not get us change. In that, you need to check yourself, have your own self-awareness of this. Little free trackers like Cronometer or MyFitnessPal, that’s a free way that you can start to get a sense of how much sugar you are taking in, even if you modify it.

You can use Claude now.

Can you really?

Yes. I use Claude. You can type in just like this for breakfast and dinner. I just speak it there. This morning I had four eggs, four ounces of bison, and half an avocado.

Sweet. That is, or no pun intended at that moment. I do not know what came up. It’s like, first of all, that’s amazing. I did not know that.

I put the screenshot from Strava of my hike. It puts that in there. My sleep data from my Oura Ring.

Dude, we have a lot to learn from this, man. That is exciting. This is where you get excited about where technology has helped you. Where we can use it as our friend. When we talk about this and what the metabolic psychiatry world has shown is that the belief system in the metabolic psychiatry lens, similar to the belief system in the metabolic oncology lens, is that until you metabolically reset and make your body metabolically flexible again, meaning it knows how to burn the fuel sources efficiently and effectively, flipping into ketosis and regular carb burning without effect, you will stay in the loop of the mental illness, the cancer, the diabetes.

The conditions that people think of for metabolic disorders. They think of diabetes. It is also mental health, cancer, cardiovascular disease, things like osteoporosis, autoimmune conditions. It is basically all of the conditions of modern society today. Just a quick reference. Before the industrial food revolution kicked in in the early 1800s, we were averaging 5 pounds of sugar per person per year. Per year. That was all coming from natural food sources. From fruits that were seasonal, etc. Anyone have a guess of how much we take in a year today?

I love that. 175 pounds a year per person per year. We put sugar in cheese now and mayonnaise and peanut butter. It’s hidden in so many places, and we did not really like the food sources of our breads and whatnot we had back then were like bricks. They were very non-leavened. They were not sweetened. Everything, like what draws you into the pastas and whatnot, is the sugar. That’s what you’re actually craving. When you start to shift that energy, one of the people to follow is from the Chris Palmer world. There was a young man who was homeless from a severe addiction. He had seen 47 different psychiatrists for his extreme bipolar disorder.

Therapeutic Ketosis And Fasting For Metabolic And Mental Recovery

His family lost him more times than you can imagine to the streets and to jails and whatnot. This was a family. They were the family that started Roblox. You know Roblox, right? We’re talking gazillionaires. Their son, they had all the resources. That’s why they sent him the best of the best. He nearly died by suicide, multiple occasions of attempt, and lived on the streets. Basically, after 47 different medications and therapists, someone recommended a ketogenic diet, and they were like, whatever. He was institutionalized at that time.

They had control over what he ate. Within two weeks, they had their son back. He is now almost four years in therapeutic ketosis and is 100% recovered from bipolar disorder. In the three years before, as he was getting better, he would cheat a little bit and like to see what would happen, and he would slide back into the symptomatology very quickly. The same family sold Roblox, and now they fund all the clinical trials globally on the impact of therapeutic ketosis, metabolic reset of the brain in the treatment of all conditions from addiction to all aspects of mental health.

They have funded over, I think, $250 million of research thus far, and I think they’ve committed $75 million a year in ongoing research. What I’m telling you is well-backed. They’ve even reversed anorexia with this. They’ve reversed schizophrenia with this. Bipolar is one of the most studied and most known, but most mental health conditions, because when I worked in that hospital in college, we were always in a dual diagnosis environment.

They often went hand in hand. That’s where there are a couple of different centers like that around the world that are applying this to their in-house patients. They are completely going into remission, both of their addictions as well as their mental health challenges. This is the future of where we’re going with this.

It gets me really excited to realize, even if you do not go to the extremes of getting into ketosis, starting to play with your Claude or your AI or some of these things just to get a sense of where you are in this moment, to realize, “I should at least be ingesting less than 100 grams of carbohydrate a day.” Just see what that does. You could start to play with it. You get into ketosis when you get under 50 grams of carbohydrate. You can even do that if you are not even altering your carb count in the beginning. You could play with intermittent fasting to do the same. Do you guys talk a lot about that in here?

We do not.

Dr. Jason Fung has a great book on intermittent fasting. There is a simple rule they call it the 8/16. Basically, fast sixteen hours a day. That includes your nighttime, and eat within an eight-hour window. That’s the simplest way. They say do that five days a week and then do not worry about it two days a week. It is a 5/2, 18/6 dance, which means that basically, and what the studies have shown, they did not even change what people were eating in that eight-hour window.

It made all the difference in many of their metabolic symptoms, including mental health, cravings, and other physical conditions that they were dealing with. That I love so much because it’s not even telling you what to eat. It’s just telling you when to eat. That can be a great place to start when people are really like white-knuckling, “I do not know if I can give up my bread.” Try and eat it within this window and see what that does for you.

That’s the way to start testing your mental resilience. It’s like, can I say no for eight hours or for 16 hours?

Sometimes with patients who are really white-knuckling it, we start with twelve. How do you do with finishing, say, dinner at 7:00 PM and breaking your fast at 8:00 AM with nothing but just water? If that feels okay, push it to 13 hours, to 14. You work towards it. You do not have to hit it because also what I find with a lot of folks that’s addicted, like we want to go all in or not at all. Set yourself up for success to do baby steps towards it. Any improvement, it will help with any improvement. There is a really cool breast cancer study that they did.

They told people, just eat how you normally eat. Then they went through all of those folks and said, when was your last meal, and when did you break it the next day? Are you drinking anything besides water in between? What they did over years of watching these studies, this is an MD Anderson trial, by the way. This is a big academic institution. The women who fasted 13 hours a day or longer had a 70% reduction in recurrence compared to those who ate ad libitum, meaning anytime they wanted. They did not even specify what they ate. To see the power of fasting that we evolved with, we never had access to three squares a day and snacks ever in human.

I can eat whenever I want to. I am bored. I am going to eat.

I will just run it off. You cannot outrun a crappy diet. It will catch up to you eventually. All those pieces, if you start to play, where we really evolved from was maybe one to two meals a day.  We were then having much longer times of fasting just naturally, which allowed our body to metabolize all of those hormones and the insulin, etc.

I can tell you when I first started fasting, before I started fasting, I would think that I needed to eat. If I did not eat, my muscles were going to fall off. That was what I thought. I always needed to eat. I just realized I learned how to embrace being hungry. Once I learned how to embrace being hungry, it was great. I was clear. I had clear thinking, and it was a good thing for me to learn how to do.

That’s what we talked about earlier about that place. If it’s okay to be uncomfortable. When we get hungry, the first question I ask a patient when they’re going through maybe fasting is I say, when you first get hungry, that hunger, the pang, there are a couple different types of hunger. There’s the hunger of true physiologic hunger where your stomach is grumbling, and that is an actual chemical, like a ghrelin and leptin signal from inside your body that says “Time to eat.” When it’s time.

If you are not dealing with disordered eating patterns or certain medications or certain addictions that can cloud and bog up those leptin and ghrelin signals, we should have natural hunger signals, but most of us today have effed that up a little bit just in life on planet Earth today. In that place, though, as you start to go, you ask yourself first, “Am I really hungry? If I am not really hungry, what is this really about?”

I tell people when the hunger first hits, drink a big glass of water, because most of us are chronically dehydrated. Our hunger is often because most of us do not experience thirst anymore. That’s also a system that we’ve overridden in our modern times. Drink water first, like a big 16, 20-ounce thing of water. Wait a few minutes. If you are still hungry, reach for some protein. Protein is something that will stabilize your blood sugar very quickly. If you were hypo or hyper, it will stabilize it. Wait a few minutes and maybe have a hard-boiled egg or a piece of cheese or a bit of jerky, or, like, if you’re a vegetarian, maybe a couple pieces of edamame, something like that.

Wait a few minutes. If you are still hungry, then something fat. Maybe that cheese, a little bit more cottage cheese, maybe a spoonful of coconut butter, which is quite delicious actually. If you are still hungry, then for the love of God, go and have the sandwich or what have you. 99.9% of the time, you will find that one of those things negates that hunger. When people first start to fast, they will always say the first day is the hardest. It is hardest not because you are actually hungry. It is hardest because you are mentally looking. When you get to about 36 hours in, that sensation starts to go away.

You start to know what true hunger feels like again. You start to really appreciate it, and by day two or three into a deeper water fast, because we take our patients with cancer through pretty extensive water fast. You get to the point where you feel like “I could go like this forever because now you have, by 36 48 hours in, you have ketones flooding the brain, and people will always report in is a sense of calm and a sense of clarity and a sense of awakening.”

That’s why every spiritual practice on the planet since the beginning of humanity has had some type of a fast along with it, and we can measure things changing in their chemistry, but it’s you who becomes a spiritual light and being in it as well, whatever the practice is. These are the opportunities, and they’re free, so you can really explore and be a living laboratory of what type of fasting helps for you.

Maybe you start with a twelve-hour water fast meaning okay just from dinner to breakfast I’ll see how I do because I’ll tell you when I ask people, most people say things to me like, “I have to have a snack at bed or I do not sleep,” or “I have to get up in the middle of night and have a snack,” or “I do not stay asleep,” or “I have to eat the second I get out of bed or I am in trouble,” or “I get the hangries if I am not eating every two hours.” Those are all signs of being metabolically broken, every one of them. If you’re hungry, if you need to eat something before bed, you’re already basically diabetic or well on your way.

Please throw away the idea of pre-diabetes. That’s like being sort of pregnant. You are either, or you are not, and we have spread out. We have normalized blood sugars to say a hemoglobin A1C of 5.7 is pre-diabetic. No, you are already well on your way. You are there. It is a matter of how much you are resting on the inside now. How much is your kidney taking a hit, or your heart taking a hit, or your vascular system taking a hit?

Please throw away the idea of pre-diabetes. That's like being sort of pregnant. You either are, or you are not. Share on X

You have got to have this off at the pass. When you start to feel the power of taking command of your life through simply avoiding food and being a little uncomfortable for a short period of time to create more resilience and more self-empowerment. It is amazing what you can overcome in all conditions that afflict us.

Q&A: Overcoming Metabolic Dysfunction, Weight Loss, And Cravings

I love that. I want to open it up to questions. Let’s open it up.

Luckily, most of you do not look like you are completely in deer and headlights right now. I feel like you are with me with that. Was anything I shared new for you? Was this stuff you have heard before?

A lot of it was new for me.

Any a-ha moments for you specifically?

For me, ever since I had my daughter two years ago, I have not been able to shed the weight. Most of the time, I cannot be with my son, but I was taking a psych med that helped put the weight on. For as long as I can remember, I have always needed to, well not every single night, but I always felt the need to eat before I go to sleep. When you said that that is a sign of diabetes, I was like, “Holy shit,” because they were telling me I was headed towards pre-diabetes, and dieting has always been very hard for me. I am trying to be more mindful, and some days I am really good at being mindful about what I eat. I am definitely going to use Claude and just talk to it. I love Claude. I am definitely going to talk to Claude about it.

I love it. Now you have the framework. Remember, Claude is only as good as the information you put in. Now you have got some of the frameworks, like maybe some of the metabolic psychiatry people, like through the framework of Dr. Georgia Ede or through the framework of Dr. Nasha Winters, and what my symptoms are, my experience has been. My historic cravings of this, what would you recommend is a good starting point for me? Maybe it is intermittent fasting, or maybe it is just carb counting, or maybe it is that there is some unprocessed grief or something in there, or just hormonal changes or different things that happened with your most recent kiddo.

The medications, like that is one of the things that the son of the folks that ran Roblox, he just had extreme weight issues from all of the medications for his bipolar. That was an accidental side effect as he started to change this, as he did not need those meds or needed less and less of them over time. The weight also started coming off. That is what people like Dr. Georgia Ede speak about in her book, and Chris Palmer is just those side effects and how you can mitigate them as well. I love that we got Claude. Dr. Claude in the house. Again, that’s just it, the tracking. Learn your pattern, and then you will get your, because it is not a one-size-fits-all. I bet you will quickly see a pattern and know how to most gently, lovingly support it. Thank you for sharing that. Very cool.

Thanks for coming out. I have got a random question. I just moved, and going to bed has changed. Maybe the past 4 or 5 days I have been going to bed around one or two. I still get like seven hours of sleep. I had three meals the day before yesterday, and then like yesterday I did not have a single meal until like 10:30. I did not go to bed till like 1:30. Is that, if I were to do that consistently is that like pre-diabetic type stuff?

First of all, I think that’s really interesting because you’re already accidentally or purposefully playing with some intermittent fasting. I do want to add a little element just to be aware that the studies show that if you are awake basically past 11:00 PM, it is very difficult to get you into metabolic balance. It is really tough. My folks who work shift work have to work a lot harder than the average person because being up after 11:00 PM, that is the time our liver processes our glycogen and our insulin, and that’s the cleanup crew time. If you’re awake at that time, it’s not doing that.

Even if you get a full seven or eight hours, you’re missing the prime window between basically 11:00 and 3:00 AM is when your body is doing the cleanup so you can deal with your daily life. My encouragement would actually be to work on your sleep first, eking it back in fifteen-minute increments to as early as you can get it. Playing, I love that you’re keeping at least three hours from your last meal to when you do go to bed. That is making a huge impact. There’s a book called Circadian Code by Dr. Satchin Panda, who talks about how to play with the rhythms of your sleep.

For folks who are working shift work here? There’s a whole different way you would work around the reorganization of that. I basically retrained someone’s circadian rhythm around their shift work. Some people think that’s the only way they can make a living in this world, and we need those shift workers for anything. There are ways to hack that. If you’re not a shift worker, working yourself back to as early as possible to get to bed will make the biggest bang for your buck for your metabolic health.

Playing with at least, for now, while you’re doing that, keeping the three-hour window from your last meal to bedtime is going to be really helpful. Maybe for you, when you are up, just plan on eating for sure in an eight-hour window, because that’s going to give you a little more positive impact on the system. If you sleep from, say, 1:00 to 8:00, then maybe only eat from, say, 2:00 to 10:00. Does that make sense? At least you’re pushing some pressure in a few other places while you’re slowly eking back the sleep time and then moving that eight-hour window with it. That’s great. Be curious to know what you learn about yourself.

I appreciate you.

Thank you.

I am actually very familiar with ketosis and everything that comes with it, especially things like the improvement in things like Alzheimer’s and how it prevents it.

Do you mind me asking how you got interested in it and what you learned from it?

I used to bodybuild a lot back in the day, so I think my longest run in ketosis was about a year and a half.

What did you learn about yourself? How did you feel in that window?

Completely took away my inflammation, joint pain, gut health, and mental clarity. I hardly ever got sick. It was just honestly the best year and a half of my life.

That gives me chills.

I accomplished a lot in terms of goals that I set for myself. I guess my question is, other than if you have any tips on getting rid of the keto flu.

I do actually. I will help you with that, yes. That’s a doozy.

I tried to get my mom into it because they told her she was prediabetic, which I think is BS. She did not listen to me, of course, because mom knows best.

You are her baby.

She started taking insulin and stuff. I told her, do not do it. You can get rid of it by yourself. Three years later, she is still on insulin. She has not gotten any better. I really do not think she needed it, honestly. I forgot where I was going with this. Spit out too much.

That’s right. No, I am with you. I will hold for a moment. You were talking about your own experience going into ketosis. You were familiar with it. I interrupted you by wanting to understand how, and then you brought up your mom. It sounds like you had a specific question about the keto flu. Any other part about maybe getting back into it?

I am typically on a low-carb diet. Even right now I have, for lunch, some eggs and bacon and then a chicken breast, so it’s very low in carbs, but I guess how does that tie into mental health? That’s something I have not looked into because I do have depression and anxiety.

Q&A: Using Ketosis To Manage Depression, Anxiety, And Inflammation

If anyone you are talking to knows someone taking notes, Georgia Ede’s book is Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind. She goes into the beautiful rationale, like the mechanism of action of it on the mind. Since you’ve already played in this field, I think you will love it because she’s also probably the best nutrition book. I wish every doctor just read it because it teaches them actual nutrition that we never learned in med school. You would love that piece. First of all, it’s completely changing insulin in the brain. Now they call Alzheimer’s type 3 diabetes.

Maybe you did not. They understand that it’s an influx. The blood-brain barrier is very leaky to glucose and to insulin. It will preferentially take glucose. If you’re giving it sugar, it’s going to just gobble it up, but that’s going to definitely change the neurochemistry, and it will definitely change the inflammation in there. It actually changes the physical structure of the brain. When you start to lower the insulin levels, when you start to bring the glucose down, it quickly, the brain quickly switches into burning ketones. Within about 48 to 72 hours, your brain is more than likely only burning ketones.

That’s when you have dropped the inflammation in your brain. You have basically tuned up those axes you talked about. The hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, and you are now basically scavenging up the reactive oxygen species, so the things that create inflammation and irritation in your brain get gobbled up and pushed out of there. That’s where the clarity comes in, but it also cleans up because there have been many people thinking that depression and anxiety are actually inflammation in the brain. It has a very strong anti-inflammatory effect. The ketone bodies themselves have been shown, again, in the research of people like Shebani Sethi at Stanford and Chris Palmer at Georgia Ede at Harvard.

Chris Palmer, I cannot remember where he is, somewhere in Boston, I believe. These big academic institutions have done all the trials and studies to show exactly what’s happening in all the thousands and thousands and thousands of patients that no longer are on anxiolytics. Depression meds, psychosis meds, the whole bit. I love that you share that you had a moment of a year and a half of feeling the best you ever did. Do you mind me asking what pulled you off that path? I know life happens, but was there one incident that you can recall? You do not have to go there if you do not want to.

It’s fine. I got back with my son’s mother, which was a bad move.

I love this because we talked about how we are impacted by people, places, and things. She was a toxin for your terrain. Was it hard to maintain that lifestyle because she was not into doing it with you? Did she stir up the stress that made you reach for the self-soothing things again?

It’s funny you say that because I mentioned it to her. She talked down to it so much. Probably like three months later, she’s like, “I’m going to go on a keto diet.” I do not know anything. It definitely just put me into a depression because it did not end up working. Alcohol followed. Just a spiral.

To the keto flu side, when you do get back into it, because you have done it before and you know what it feels like, you know what it feels like to be uncomfortable and then pop through to the bliss side. Electrolytes and a lot of them. That’s often what most people underestimate. The amount of electrolytes you need, because as insulin drops, so does your salt. They go hand in hand. The leg cramps, the flu-y sensation, the headache, the cloudy thinking, even the stomach cramps that can happen, that is a need for good-quality salt and additional electrolytes.

I prefer things that are not like a Gatorade, something that does not have added sugar or food additives. There’s a bunch. You probably have your favorites because you’re out there. LMNT works great, although there are some lawsuits. Go with the plain one. There’s a lot because, unfortunately, I know Robb Wolf really well, and unfortunately they were lied to by their manufacturer as well. They used high, because we were seeing things in my patients because we all do continuous glucose monitors and Keto Mojo, ketone testing, and whatnot.

I would see spikes from people after taking the LMNT, and I was super confused. What do they call it? The excipient that was in there was actually a high-carb base, and they did not know that. The simple one, because I always just did the unflavored because the flavored ones were too sweet for my palate. I never saw it on myself, but all my patients who were having the spikes were on the flavored ones. Those are the ones. What do you see as a blip on your blood sugar?

I have not seen it.

You will, as you will. Although they’re theoretically going back to me, like redoing it. That’s a good one. An LMNT is super clean, typically outside of that. That will make all the difference. Tons of magnesium will help, and a big Epsom salt bath will help. If you’re in that, it can really help. I also like cold plunge. Immersion will help pop me through it really quickly in the discomfort. Do you have some cold plungers in here? Do you guys have one here?

We have one at the RTC, and we have one at the THC. Actually, we have one at Papago too. We have one at two of our homes.

I just spoke at a cold plunging conference this weekend with Tom Seager. It was a blast because we had like the best of metabolic health, from metabolic psychiatry to metabolic oncology to metabolic, you know, all the things there, and we had a cold plunge in the back corner. We were all going and taking turns, and I brought my husband along for the ride, who thought he had done cold plunging before until he was submerged in 39-degree water for three minutes, and he was like It is very chilly. Humble pie, but it is such a man.

My husband has dealt with bipolar his whole life and his whole family. In 2009, he went along for the ride with me to go into low carb for my own health and accidentally completely cleared his bipolar. That’s what was amazing about that. I know, and Steve knows, when he gets too many carbs on board, we go, “You’re passing to a crazy town, you better wear those down.” Booze was the big one for him that can get that. Of course you can have a glass of wine or a margarita, no problem. A couple and a couple of days in a row, it is all game on for the brain changes again. It is very humbling. The cold plunge was a really great addition as well. Can really pop you through that discomfort. It’s very cool, guys.

Thank you so much.

Thanks. Great insights there.

Q&A: Trauma, Psychedelics, And Breaking Generational Patterns

I was paralyzed three years ago. I was in a wheelchair. I could not walk. All that fun jazz. I was just wondering, like, I sympathize with you having that bet mindset of being like bet, “I left this.” I was like, “Watch this, I’m a walker.” How do you get over the mindset? I am still in the mindset that like, “I am sick.”

Can I ask you a question?

Any question.

Did you benefit from having that condition for a period of time?

I jumped off a building.

When you came out of that, did you jump off to take your life?

Yes.

When you came through the other side, were you given love and attention that you did not get before?

Yes.

That’s why. You got more benefit from being harmed than you were getting when you were prior to being harmed. Part of that is going to be deep. It makes me emotional just thinking about that because I have a lot of patients that are dealing with terminal illnesses. The story they will often say is this is the first time my husband has been there for me, or this is the first time my family showed up, or this is the first time I can say no to like doing all the things for everybody else, or that you know it’s like suddenly they have agency where they did not before, exactly.

Suddenly you’re getting benefit from the very condition that’s caused you harm. That switch is about starting to get curious and look for things that bring you what you want without needing to be sick. It sounds like maybe the first step is to look at those five people closest to you. Those people who showed up for you after this, those may not be your people. Does that make sense?

Yes. I lost a lot of people. I did not have any friends because of it.

After the fact, you lost people. Kind of cleaned out some, but who rallied around you? Are they people that are bringing joy to your life and wholeness, or people that are maybe keeping you in this container?

I feel like they are not good people. It was my parents, and they are not good people, and then my sister, and she does not say the best things.

One thing is when I was met with my diagnosis, I did a two-year family fast. We talk about fasting on some level. That was something I had to do because I kept thinking, I will just separate, I will not react, or I will not go to this event. I will just keep a little arms’ length, an arms’ length, or maybe need to be a state away. In 1991, it was easy to be unlisted, when our phone numbers could be hidden easily. I totally understand that.

I am from Texas, and I am here to get better. That’s really real.

It started to lift yourself out of the environment. Are there still some threads, some umbilical cords to them?

Yes. They do a lot of my financial stuff, and they have my car, and they also do not want me to get it. I lost my birth certificate, my social, and all that jazz to my ex-fiancé and all my stuff. They do not want to help me until I get back home, which is like controlling.

That might be something that you start to seek some guidance outside of your family of origin and even friends. I am sure there is some access, like a free legal counsel type of environment, especially for women in recovery and whatnot, that could give you some other ways of getting back those things on your own. That will also be that that will start to create that barrier that helps change the pattern of the dynamic between you and your family of origin. I am really grateful that you let me kind of go there with you.

Go for it. I love it.

That’s part of what is keeping you in that place is that you have got a lot of it. I am so grateful that you are here to be shown another way to live on this planet. As someone who tried to take my life on two occasions and had a terminal diagnosis, it dared us to do it for me. I promise you that it is so worth it, even if it is incredibly lonely for a period of time. It is so amazing to me how many people can still be surrounded by a lot of people and still be incredibly alone.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate that. Who’s next?

I have a question about the psycho genes more? Obviously, I am not on death row. I found the other spectrum and, like, military police. I would like to know more about that.

With my brother, he had violent tendencies even in his youth. That’s when he was institutionalized at eleven years old. They did testing because they knew my mom’s history of IVF and whatnot. That’s when they found, when he was eleven, that he had this extra Y chromosome. There is genetic testing that can be done on that.

Even if you do not have that extra Y chromosome, there can still be that tendency because this process of managing your emotions, like learning how to understand your emotions as they are, to be like, I am fucking pissed or I am really bummed about that, or yes, this is really something exciting. It can come out very skewed depending on how you were raised. Whatever your training ground was can set you up in similar patterns. I do not know, do you come from a history of violence and have you been a perpetrator of violence?

That’s a loaded question.

I know. I am not good at non-loaded questions.

There was a lot of violence. The first recollection I have of violence is about four, between 4 and 6 years old. Violence throughout my teenage years. I went to war three times and was involved in a couple of shootings and stuff.

Violence is just the thread, the common. What we’re exposed to before the age of seven sets basically the terrain for our entire lives. It takes us, similar to what we’re talking about here, for you to lift yourself up out of that terrain and plop it into a brand new one. I am just curious. Have you done any psychologically assisted psychedelic medicines?

That would be fun.

No, it’s not fun. When I have had folks who have come from extreme violence in particular, and the tendency still within them to be a perpetrator of that, even if you are like, “I do not want to do that, that’s not who I am.” It’s just that the groove is so deeply dug that it’s hard to climb back out of that. That’s where something like Ibogaine has completely turned patients around that were literally on death row or in criminalized institutions. They’re actually trying. It’s been passed in a few states now as part of, like, prison environment treatment settings.

It is used to remediate in a lot of those environments, and especially, it has now been legalized for PTSD and military personnel. That’s where I have seen a place, because when that is so deeply entrenched since you were such a little boy, it takes something like a knock you out of your socks psychedelic experience like that, but it needs to be facilitated. Please do not go try and do this on your own. There are places around this country that have funding and have resources to get you into a facility like that to do a treatment.

Do you know any of those?

I know Joe had some access to people in the Genius Network who’ve done a lot with the Ibogaine work. I know that’s a tender discussion in this environment because we think of it as an addiction like the first. I promise you Ibogaine is not something you could ever do recreationally. It is not like this is something you get addicted to. This is an ancient plant medicine that has evolved with us and is done psychologically. It is actually done in a hospital setting because you’re basically in a hospital bed and you’re hooked up to all kinds of monitors, and it’s a very medical procedure. This is not, like I said, recreational.

If you have a game party.

You have done, like, sorry to have a heart attack. I met one person who went to a gathering, I think in some place in Spain, or something, that they did an eye, and every person had a full-on psychotic breakdown. I am like, “Do not do that again.” A really bad idea. She is done. Someone who knows better. It just was so unraveling. You do not want to do it in a social environment. This is very one-on-one, especially with your history, my dear. That would be the place to do it. Please, I am happy if you like, send me a message, and I will dig down. I know there are at least three in this country that are doing it with that.

I am just a little scared.

The fact that you’re scared of getting violent tells me what your true soul is about. Like right there. It just makes my heart very happy because people like my brother, he’s a diagnosed sociopath. They have no remorse for that. They cannot feel remorse or have anything inside of them that says, “I am scared of hurting someone, or that is a bad idea.” He did not get that side of the equation, which tells me you are completely remediable, if that makes sense, and that your heart and soul are pure, and that you just need something to help peel that little boy out of that environment and plop you into a new one. That’s what a medicine like that can do. I am going to want to be in touch with you on this.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Congrats.

Yes.

I am Yanny. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us. You touched briefly on sexual abuse. As someone who was sexually abused for five years, from ages 5 to 10, I was wondering how you went about speaking to your family about it and any advice on how to speak up to your family about it. I have kept the secret from them. None of my family has known for the past 26 years. It was something that I have been struggling to try to let them know this happened to me and all that.

The person or people who did this to you, are they still around?

One of them is. He is my mother’s uncle, and then another one passed away in Mexico.

The one person that’s still around, there are still interactions with him and the family dynamic.

Yes, with my mom. I stay away.

I feel like I have been blessed to hear on two occasions over my entire 30-some-year career of people who were able to come to their family, and their family believed them and their family did something about it. Two times out of 20,000. As someone who, as I said, was nine years old. When I had a teacher try to advocate for me, and not only did my family completely put it down, bury it, pretend it did not exist, but neither did the principal of the school, and nothing happened. It was like that was a moment when you are that young to realize, “No one is going to do this. No one is going to be there for me.”

That can set up an entire life of realizing I am on my own here and isolating. On one level, you are right not to go to them because what has shown me is that, for most of them, it is like such a cognitive dissonance to believe that someone could cause that harm, that it is easier to blame the victim or to think that you are making it up or over-misunderstanding a situation. The stories are endless, from what I hear. Instead, you can still deal with this away from your family of origin, and you can still choose to stay away from that person however you can. You live here in the valley? Have you worked with this with a therapist or anybody in that?

Not in full depth, but yes.

One of the things I think helped me start to manage, like to deal with this in the beginning, and it’s still like it’s like once you’ve had, especially if you were very young when these things were happening, that residue stays with you. It has opportunities to get flared again in uncomfortable situations or even in really intimate situations with people that you do love. In transparency, that’s how I really learned that I had those experiences in a safe, loving environment, which was really foreign. It was in that that I was so petrified that you could almost cause harm to that sacred relationship because that was unprocessed. One tool that helped me still is a really good tool that I can lean on today is something known as EMDR. Have you heard it?

No.

To me, that is like such a non-invasive way to get in there and rewire, and actually I think EMDR could be interesting for you as well if you have not worked with it. It can get in there and start to rewire those pathways, those memories. It does not erase them. It just helps you tell your body a different story that you are safe now and that that no longer is the dynamic. I think EMDR, do you guys bring in an EMDR person to this group?

We have one at this very moment.

That’s the newer term for it? The eyeball? It has grown up since I did it.

That’s how long it was.

Have you all played with that? It does? I love it because that’s also like a nice way, because with the Ibogaine, I would lead up with some EMDR and after just to keep reinforcing that might be a really good knowing you guys have it part of your community here. That would be a great place to start. They likely know because there’s so much to do with this type of abuse and so much trauma, but I would personally start with a therapy like EMDR so you can create safety in your body so you can fully address it in the right way. There may be a time when there’s someone in your family that you feel safe enough to try.

For me, when I tried to talk to my cousin about this years ago, my best friend growing up, it destroyed a relationship for seventeen years. Until seventeen years later, she came to me telling me that the same person who perpetrated against me perpetrated against her daughter. She’s like, “Here,” and I can feel the emotion around that and her despair of not believing me, and then her despair of going to her family saying, ‘This is what’s going on and them negating it.” It was like talking about fucked up stuff that just kept going. That person is now dead. Her family members who have really denied it have all died.

She listened to her daughter, and she believed her daughter, and she said, “I do not know if I would have had you not planted that seed those seventeen years before.” I like to think that maybe I helped my cousin’s daughter have a different experience with this because you really have a different experience when it has been acknowledged. It’s so powerful when that happens. Having this EMDR, maybe a therapist there, and then if there is a trusted family member down the road, if it feels safe. If it does not, do not go there. It can just set you up for more disappointment. Thank you.

Thank you.

I love this group. This is where the work happens. This is where healing and prevention of chronic illness happen, and this is exactly where it happens.

Are there any questions that I should have asked you that I did not ask?

I think you nailed it.

I got a lot of questions that I did not ask, but we are good. Is there anything you need from us? Anything that we can do to help you?

I might recommend so one of the things you mentioned in the beginning, I’m a former executive director of a nonprofit, so I am not doing that work right now. Now I’m really focusing on writing a new book, which really is going to be Trauma Forward, a more mental-forward instead of more biology-forward. That’s probably coming out sometime in 2027. I started a free Substack in December because I had a year. We all think that life is like a linear, like it was shit and then it gets better, and then you crest and whoa.

No, do all the things. I had a year that was just beyond. Cancer was easy compared to what this year was. In that processing, I started a free Substack for myself, not expecting anybody to read it, not at all. It has taken off, and I think it’s taken off because it’s speaking to all of this. We are all looking for someone who can see and hear us. It was part of a big research project where we took about 500 patients dealing with cancer, and we put them through a trauma mapping process. Basically, we looked for common denominators among this group.

We are all looking for someone who can see and hear us. Share on X

The two that rose to the top across the board did not matter what type of diagnosis, what stage, what gender, what age. It did not matter. The two things that were the common denominators of everyone in this circle. We later redid this in other environments, like mental health environments and cardiovascular, was that people have a feeling of not being seen or heard. That I think is what our culture is really looking for because those two things can heal. What I write about a lot in my Substack is being pretty vulnerable about my own stuff. Give other people permission to slip, to be vulnerable about theirs. It’s free. You do not have to comment or anything.

You just go find it. Just Tend the Terrain. Dr. Nasha, Tend the Terrain. My website is DrNasha.com. My podcast actually is now renewed to Tend the Terrain of this. I would love to first have you on the podcast if you would be willing to join me. It would be an absolute honor. There are some really interesting conversations. We’re going there. It is not light and fluffy. What do you do for cancer? It is like what’s underneath it all. There’s some really powerful, a lot of people from the trauma-informed space speaking in there. I think you guys would really resonate with us. That’s about it.

Do you guys like that? Let’s give it up for Dr. Nasha Winters.

 

Important Links

• Dr. Nasha Winters
• Dr. Nasha Winters on YouTube
• Dr. Nasha Winters on Instagram
• Dr. Nasha Winters on Substack
• Dr. Nasha Winters on Facebook
• The Metabolic Approach to Cancer
• Brain Energy
• Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind
• Circadian Code
• Camelback Recovery outpatient treatment

 

About Dr. Nasha Winters

Dr. Nasha Winters is a naturopathic doctor, board-certified naturopathic oncologist (FABNO), and bestselling author. At nineteen, she was diagnosed with terminal stage IV ovarian cancer and given three months to live. Thirty-five years later, she is one of the most recognized voices in integrative oncology.

She is the co-author of The Metabolic Approach to Cancer and the architect of the Terrain Ten™ framework — a ten-domain model for understanding the physiological and emotional terrain that shapes health and disease.

She currently writes a widely read Substack at drnasha.com under the banner Tend the Terrain. Her work lives at the intersection of metabolism, trauma, and meaning.