Healing assist intestine

hello. can you all hear me? can you see me?i'm standing up. good. thanks for being here. thank you to the functionalforum team. thanks for james maskell. this is a great gathering. how many people here are colorado residents?show your hands. how many people came from out of states? alright,the brave ones. how many people love good quality japanesefood? few. got to know your allies. here�s what i want to do. i want to talkabout digestion from a mind-body-energy approach. i'm going to be a little bit more soft. we�regoing to try to combine science, psychology, a little bit of practical information whenit comes to digestion.

you know, i'm thinking back for a moment tothe ancient greek. apollo was the god of medicine and poetry, and i find that kind of interestingbecause i've always had a hard time separating out science from sort of the metaphoric mind.and, my mind tends to work that way so when i see digestion, i get excited because there�sa science to it and we�re going to talk as well about, i guess, it would be calledthe psychobiome. how is the content of my mind and emotionsand thoughts and feelings and beliefs and everything that lives inside of me, how isthat impacting how i digest assimilating calorie burn a meal? what i'm going to try to do a little bit ofthe impossible, in 50 minutes or less, which

is expand how we view digestion. i would loveto advance, as best i can, how we treat digestive concerns and maybe even share a few tips aboutwhat you can do to empower your own digestive experience. so that's kind of where i'm comingfrom. so for me, digestion is sort of beautifullycomplex and it has a simple elegance to it. there's an old arabian saying that goes, "weeat ourselves sick and we digest ourselves back to health." that's kind of ancient. wheni first heard that i thought, "ha, kind of makes sense. kind of ties in to the wholesense of that so much of immunity lives in the gut." so the gut is not just about digestionper se. so yes, it's taking our food, it's breaking it down. we take those breakdownproducts it creates us. it gives us energy,

it becomes our building blocks, but at thesame time digestion in a lot of ways, i like to say, is nutrition. you know, back in the early days of nasa whenwe were figuring out how to send guys up into space, one of the first challenges was, "whatare you going to feed these people? what are you going to give them to eat? because youcan't cook up in a little space capsule." so, we had our best nutritional minds in the1950s; late '50s, early '60s come together to figure out "what are we going to feed theseguys?�"and somebody came up with the idea, "let's just take all the known nutrients;macronutrients, micronutrients put it in a powder and mix it with water and feed theseguys."

so wisely, they tested it on the ground first.and, what happened to the test pilot astronauts where they had rectal bleeding, they had diarrhea,they had...it didn't work. and to me, what i took from that, and also we notice thiswhen you're getting fed through a feeding tube, there's a problem when we don't digest. digestion literally strengthens us. it's kindof like food is the weight. if we're weight lifters we're weightlifting food, and as youdigest you become stronger. so there�s this place where we're taking something that'scompletely foreign in digestion, it's not you. you're taking in food and somehow youhave to turn it into you and you have to excrete what isn't you. and, i just think that's areally interesting process that kind of runs

a little deep. looking at digestion from an evolutionarystandpoint, when our dissonant ape-like ancestors are running around the environment, what eventuallyhappened was we realized that we needed to survive. and we realized that you could bechased by a lion. and, if you're getting chased by a lion and you're going to be somebody'smeal, what happens is we develop this mechanism - stress response - such that your heart rategoes up, your blood pressure goes up, blood is shunted away from the mid-section, twoarms and legs for quick fighting or fleeing, blood rushes to your head for quick thinkingin a full-blown stress response, digestion completely shuts down. that to me is interesting.

now, like many things that go on in the body,the stress response is a graded response. so you could have extreme stress which wouldbe complete digestive shutdown. and, why is there complete digestive shutdown when you'rerunning from the lion or fighting it for your life? nature knows you have about two to fourminutes to survive. so any good fight out in nature either the lion is going to eatyou, you're going to run away, you're going to defeat it, by the way, you're about 500,000calorie meal. you are fattening. we have a few minutes to survive and in that time youdon't need to waste your metabolic energy digesting your dunkin donuts. all that metabolicenergy wants to go into survival. make sense? what's fascinating is we could be eating thehealthiest food in the known universe and

if you're not digesting it under that optimalstate of digestion and assimilation which happens to be the physiologic relaxation responsethen you're not going to fully metabolize that meal. in fact, you will be excretingnutrition. a lot of times, we talk about indigestion,malabsorption but literally what's often happening is if we're in any degree of stress response,we are in some degree of digestive shutdown. which means micronutrients will be excreted,even some macronutrients will be excreted through the feces; so urine, sweat. point being, you could be eating the healthiestfood on the planet, whatever that is whatever you believe that is, but if you're not underthe optimum state of digestion and assimilation,

parasympathetic nervous system dominance,relaxation response, we're not getting the full value of that meal. to me that's kindof profound because all of a sudden it points back to me. what am i doing? what state ami in? what's happening in mind? what's happening in emotions? early on in my career, i had a client whokind of turned my head around. this was, gosh probably about 30 years ago, a man came tosee me. he flew in from toronto in canada to massachusetts, where i was living at thetime. a chinese medical doctor living in canada, originally born and raised in china, educatedthere in chinese medicine and he's coming to see me because he has over 20 years ofjust digestive complaints. every time he eats

a meal, he's in distress and he has at hisdisposal, everything in the universe to help him - chinese medicine, western healing, nothingworks. so i'm kind of his last resort and like any decent practitioner, one of the firstquestions i ask him is "so, what do you eat?" here's what he tells me. "breakfast on myway to the office, i stop by mcdonald's, i have two egg mcmuffins and i eat them in thecar on the way to work." great. how about lunch? "lunch, i get back in thecar, i go back to the same mcdonald's, two big macs, eat them in the car on the way backto the office." got it. dinner. "dinner, on the way home, stop bypick up pizza, pick up a subway kind of sandwich, eat it in front of the tv."

i'm thinking in the back of my mind, "i thinki found your problem." as i'm thinking that on cue, he says to me, "oh by the way, i'mnot changing anything i eat, i love my lifestyle, i love what i do, it all works for me." so, i take a deep breath and i said to him,"i can help you." my thought to him was "listen, what i would love for you to do is when youdrive to mcdonald's in the morning, get your egg mcmuffins, i want you to slow down, stopthe car, take five to ten long slow deep breaths, take about 15 - 20 minutes and eat your eggmcmuffins." "for lunch, i want you to do the same thing, have your big macs, slow down,put your body in to a relaxation response, take about 30 minutes and sit in the car."

he negotiates me down, 10 minutes for breakfast,15 minutes for lunch and goes back to canada. and, two or three weeks later, i get a phonecall and he says, "marc, you're not going to believe this. after 20 years, my digestivedistress is completely gone," and he says, "you're going to believe this, i hate bigmacs." and, i say to him, "what do you mean?" he says, "have you ever tried to savor a bigmac and eat it slow?" he said, "you have to drown it in ketchup." he said, "i can't standit." so he changes his diet on his own. not because i told him, "you fool, you're eatingjunk," i asked him to slow down really. i asked him to get in contact with his body.i asked him to put his body in the optimum state of digestion and assimilation whichis the relaxation response, which also happens

to be the ideal state of natural appetiteregulation and day in, day out calorie burning. when you're in a stress state, your brainis not actively able to scan the nutrient profile of a meal. figure out what you need.determine, am i hungry? am i full? did i get the right nutrition? in the stress state,your brain thinks it's running from a lion. i think in contemporary nutrition and digestion,what's often happening is the world that we live in these days is kind of a high pressureworld. we move fast, we're focused on nutrition and nutrition for a lot of us means, "i eatthe right foods," and this is a great thing. this is wonderful. we, to my mind, must turnour attention to "who are we when we eat? what is the optimum state under which i ameating?" to me that's kind of where the rubber

meets the road. 1822, alexis st. martin was a canadian trapperand he had wandered into the great lakes region in united states. he accidentally, his musketwent off, it blew a hole in his stomach. it just so happen there was a doctor; a medicaldoctor with the u.s. army named william beaumont for those unintelligible [00:12:15] to studythe history of digestion, you know this guy. if you know, i'm going to tell you brieflyabout him. william beaumont treats alexis st. martinand he has a gastric fistula. so, it's this wound where literally the contents of hisstomach is completely open, and dr. beaumont sews it up, but it never quite healed. now,alexis st. martin lived to be 83 but the hole

in the stomach didn't close, so what happenedis you could look right in and being a good doctor he thought, "man, i'm going to experiment."so what he would do is he would take these little silk pouches and he would fill themwith food. he put meat, he put in porridge, he put in vegetables, inserted them into thisguy's stomach and watched what happens. so he was observing. he could literally see thestomach lining change color as the blood flow is coming in and out. he can watch gastricjuices. he could see different meals breakdown at different rates. he also even noticed thatwhen alexis st. martin was irritated that the food wouldn't digest as fast. in 1822,the observation was made that mind was impacting digestion. i find that fascinating.

by the way, if you google, "beaumont's stomach",it's not even alexis st. martin's stomach, we give it to the doctor, it's "beaumont'sstomach." i love doctors but.... so, compare that as well to china and youlook at the origins of chinese medicine and the story goes that chinese medicine was bornfrom the yellow emperor and it said that the yellow emperor had a see-through stomach,very helpful. and, in his see-through stomach, he would eat food and he would watch whathappened. in the world view of chinese medicine, he wasn't looking at enzymatic content, hewasn't looking at acid, he wasn't looking at proteins, fats and carbs and how they'redigested. the yellow emperor was looking at the forces of yin and yang. he was lookingat fire and water, and earth, and metal, and

wood and how these things interacted. in somany ways, it was for the yellow emperor, it was an energetic stomach. so, i'm interested for these two stomachsto sort of have a baby, and for us to start to recognize some of the subtleties of digestion. i read about this many moons ago in guyton'sphysiology textbook when i was 18 years old, the cephalic phase digestive response. cephalic means of the head. cephalic phasedigestive response is a fancy term for taste, pleasure, aroma, satisfaction, visuals ofa meal. textbook physiology, we'll be told that when you do a math analysis and you sumtotal up all the research, approximately 40%

to 60% of our digestive power at any mealcomes from this head phase of digestion; our awareness on the meal; taste, pleasure, aroma,satisfaction. do the math. if you don't have that, you're breaking that meal down and you'remetabolizing and assimilating it at 40% to 60% less efficiently. again to me, that is mind-blowing becauseit points to how once again you could be eating the healthiest food in the universe. if weare not there for the meal, if we are not present to the meal, if we are not receivingtaste and pleasure which seems so frivolous, even when we're discussing good nutrition,"what's right for the body? what's wrong for the body?" the mind comes into play, emotionscome in to play and oftentimes in a pretty

profound way and to me, the cephalic phasedigestive response points back to us. i think we can no longer put aside who we are andwhat we bring to the table. you know, the whole field of mind-body science really movesus in that direction that what's going on in our inner world, in our psyche can havea profound effect on how we digest and assimilate calorie burn a meal. so from that perspective, digestive aids beginto look different. pleasure. for me, pleasure then becomes adigestive aid and i mean that quite literally. all organisms on the planet at the most primitivelevel of brain function are programmed to seek pleasure and avoid pain. this goes truefor a single cell organism, it's true for

a lizard, a lion, a human, we are programmedto seek pleasure and avoid pain. what's interesting is we talk about how parasympatheticnervous system dominance, same thing as saying relaxation response, it's how we are hardwiredthat's where we are in full, healthy, digestive, assimilative and day in, day out calorie burningcapacity pleasure catalyzes a relaxation response. have a rough day at work? come home, get ashoulder massage, relax. in that moment that you relax, you are sending signals. directnervous system signals to the spinal nerves, hormonal signals, chemical signals, electrochemicalsignals, you're sending out into the body to relax. you are creating the optimal stateof digestion simply because pleasure catalyze that. the pleasure might be from music, thepleasure might be wherever you get it. all

of a sudden to me, vitamin p becomes a crucialpart of the meal. think how many times you put somebody on adiet. and, it's a miserable diet and there's no taste, there's no fun, it's hard to stickto and we miss the human component. a human is going to be in stress if they're followinga diet that they're not bought into and yes, sometimes we have to dig a little deeper inour healing strategies and we have to move beyond our resistance, our anxiety, our fearbut at the same time, there's places where we have to be able to relax into what we'reeating. so, not only will pleasure stimulate digestive response but also sensation doesthat as well, our awareness once again of "how does the food taste?"

if you're in a stress state right now, there'sa couple of tricks to move the body into a relaxation state within less than a minute,one of them is deep breathing because every emotional state has a corresponding brainwave pattern, breath pattern. the breathing pattern of relaxation tends to be regularrhythm, it can be deep. the breathing pattern of stress tends to be shallow, a rhythm thatcan frequent when you adapt the breathing pattern of relaxation, body relaxes. digestioncomes in to play, it comes into full force. sensation another way to relax the body is simply tofocus on sensation. so if you're really stressed out right now, and i ask you to just focuson the color of that window over there and

you focus on a sensation the body relaxes.if you focus on the sounds of the birds outside, your brain will start to relax, the body startsto relax. so when we focus on sensation, i.e. don't multi-task, don't watch tv, be on thecomputer, have a conversation and eat at the same time. it's kind of what i'm saying. slow it just so happens that the act of eatingfast is a stressor for the body. dietitians told us what like 30 years ago that it takesthe body approximately 20 minutes to realize it's full. that's about time the body needstime, digestion is so complex that the body want some spaciousness. it wants time formeal because in that time it can scan the

meal, determine the nutritional profile, seeif you need to eat more, "am i full? do i need more? what's happening?" so when you're eating a meal quickly, thebody will go into a stress response. appetite will be deregulated, and then it is easierto overeat which can lead to digestive distress and we think we have a willpower issue. "ohmy god, i can't control my appetite." how many times have people ever said that, "ihave a willpower issue, i can't control my appetite." anybody in here? just me. okay.got it. two people. what's happening is that you don't have awillpower issue. and, a lot of people who are struggling with weight loss oftentimesyou're going to have digestive patients who

at the same time have a complex of issues.it could be weight, whatever it is, and they don't have a willpower issue. they have anissue around being present. they have an issue around dropping in and being with what they'redoing, in this case the act of eating. vitamin t - time as well, a digestive aid becomes vitamin t(time). people who know me think when i say vitamin t, i mean tequila. i don't know whythey say that, but it's time. time is really a great equalizer when it comes to allowingbody, brain being to kind of synergize and figure out what's going on with the meal. you know a lot of times, imagine a patientclient comes to you and they have a digestive

problem. it's interesting how we frame digestionas it has a problem and oftentimes there are problems. another way to look at it, what i hear insidemy head, when i hear somebody talking about what's going on in their digestion, digestionis giving us feedback. a lot of times, for people there's actually nothing wrong withdigestion. so if you're eating foods that you're allergic to, in a way there's nothingwrong necessarily with your digestion. your digestion is giving you feedback about what'shappening. we don't always look at digestion in that way as this brilliant feedback mechanism.the average person immediately goes to "what's wrong with me?"

really when digestion is screaming, oftentimesit's what's right. it's giving us information. it could be about the foods we eat, it couldbe about the state under which we're eating it, it could be about other organic causesthat are going on in the body, but it's digestion giving us feedback. enteric nervous system, brain in the belly,second brain, you've heard of it. there are as many neurons in the digestive system, nervoussystem as there are nerves in your spinal cord, approximately a hundred million. sothat's a lot of brain power, right and that's why we say oftentimes you'll say, "wow, youknow i had a gut feeling about that guy." we don't say, "i had an elbow feeling or kidneyfeeling, it's a gut feeling" because indeed

there's a tremendous amount of intelligencethat's happening in the gut. you know there's a lot of controversy aroundthis. i remember hearing as a young man it's like "oh, you only use like a few percentof your brain or 10% of your brain and now that's being disproved. oh, no, you use allyour..." come on, we don't use all the brain. i think the same thing with the gut brain.i don't think we use all of it for feedback and it's interesting because just as you canimprove brain. power, memory, cognition, etcetera, with more blood flow, which is really moreoxygenation. the same way we can improve digestive capacity with breathing, with oxygen. junior high school biology: food + oxygen= calorie burn. you must have oxygen to metabolize

a meal. a lot of people are shallow breathers,a lot of people are in stress, they're in fear, they're in anxiety and in those stateswe are shallow breathers. we are taking in less oxygen so it is predictable, oftentimes,that there will be some form of digestive distress or upset. you know, one of the great successes thati see practitioners have when it comes to working with digestion, working with the stressresponse, gastroesophageal reflux, what's fascinating is that it's so connected to stress,fear and anxiety. and, oftentimes when you take a person whose complaining of gerd, i'mgoing to guesstimate that 95% of the time if you ask them, "are you a fast eater? amoderate eater? or, a slow eater?" they'll

tell you, "fast." active eating fast is astressor for the body, will put you in sympathetic nervous system dominance, not the ideal stateof digestion and assimilation. help that person relax. help that person slow down. help themlearn a few breathing techniques or a meditative technique or an autogenic technique and youcan change their gerd in a couple of meals. to me it's fantastic. so, i'm just saying to everything that wasshared on this stage and, and there's this other place that we have to look at wheremind is impacting body. you know dr. jill said, "wow, i could spendtwo hours on the mind-gut connection." i think it's true we can probably spend a couple ofweeks on that one. i want to say this - mind

and gut really track one another. they tendto track one another. a constipated person, how would you describetheir personality, right? automatically you know. a person who has constant digestive upset,they're going to have trouble focusing, they're going to have trouble thinking. if you put me in a room and you started describingsomebody's digestion to me, i can probably describe their personality and vice versa.the two tend to track one another in a very profound way. and, where my mind goes withthat, and look at how in language, we use similar words for digestion as we do for mentation.let me chew on that. let me ruminate over

that. digestion and how we think, in a strange way,are very similar processes. can you stomach your own life? i can't stomach that person. we're often describing our world in termsof how the digestive system works, and what i would like to suggest is there may verywell be a metaphoric connection in there. and, what i mean by that is what i've noticedis that on one level, we're all learning to metabolize our journey, to metabolize yourlife. there's a lot that goes on in a human life that you have to digest, assimilate,excrete what doesn't work and absorb what does. that kind of describes human life.

from that place, we can start to look at somethinglike post-traumatic stress. post-traumatic stress, a real simple way todescribe post-traumatic stress is that it's an intense stress or that we experience thatnever metabolize. the stress still is in the system. we didn't drop into relaxation response.you watch an animal and nature, and i've seen this in africa, where you get a bunch of springbokand they're being chased by a hyena. and, the hyena grabs one of them and all of a suddenall the other ones relax. your springbok, which is like a deer, it'sgets eaten by a hyena and all his family and friends, they're just now sitting around munchingon grass because they know, "i ain't going to be eaten." so they go from stress responseto relaxation response really quickly. they

don't carry any trauma around that, they'renot going to need psychotherapy because, "my brother got eaten by that guy." they're prettygood. humans are a little different, we tend tohang on to the stuff and we call it post-traumatic stress in its extreme. and, we know from theresearch, this is so common, that people who have suffered from physical abuse, emotionalabuse, sexual abuse what will often show up is digestive complaints. this especially occursfor women who have been sexually abused from a young age. i see this a lot in militaryclients and patients. i had one military guy, he was the equivalentin england of like a navy seal, like a green beret, he was like a special ops guy, andhe came to see me because he was chronically

nauseous. he would never vomit, but he waschronically nauseous. before he ate, during he ate, during when he ate, anytime he's nauseousand especially when he had a meal. he's had unbelievable medical intervention. nothing'sworking, so now they're sending him to the shrink guy and the first thing i want to knowis okay, "talk to me, like what happened, you're special ops, tell me some story." ican't. not allowed to and i can't tell you the story even if i was allowed to. i wouldn'ttell you. in that moment, i just took a deep breath and i thought, wow, he was serious.i really asked him, i said, "listen, let me just be straight up with you. in my experience,what you're experiencing chronic nausea, to me this is post-traumatic stress. you're probablyseeing some nasty stuff, you might have done

some nasty stuff, it's okay with me, you'rewelcome to share it but i think this is connected to your nausea." he didn't like my statement,wasn't interested, kind of thought it was airy-fairy, that was our only session. nowhe was recommended to me by his closest friend, who was client of mine. couple of months later,i'm seeing his close friend, a client of mine and the close friend says to me, "thank youso much for the great work you do with my friend." i said, "he walked out at the endof the session. it was''t such great work." he said, "no, well, my buddy like never talksto me and he started talking. and, i just sort of been coaching him and he's been sharingwith me his experience of you know what happened and some of what he couldn't handle. he neededto talk to someone, literally needed to get

it out. his nausea is gone." so for me, that'sa wow. so, yes, there's the level where we have tolook at all the organic conditions when it comes to digestion and there's this otherinteresting place where mind impacts body. give me a few minutes. i want to talk aboutthis thing that i call toxic nutritional beliefs. normally, when we're thinking about stress,it's easy to think of "my kids, my parents, work, money," whatever it is that stressesus. we don't always think as well that stress can be generated by the thoughts that i amthinking, by the beliefs that i am holding. many humans, when it comes to food and bodyand health, have these interesting beliefs. i'll share with you a common toxic nutritionalbelief, such beliefs to my mind, can be as

toxic to the human body as a toxic food. so an example of a toxic nutritional beliefis "food is enemy." does anybody ever have that one before? justshow your hands. food is the enemy. why would food be the enemy? well, food makes me fatand if i eat this food and it makes me fat then i'm not loveable, no one's going to likeme, i'm going to be shamed and that would be the worst thing in the world. so there'sa lot of people walking around; your clients, your patients, your friends, your loved ones,who literally believe food is the enemy. young people absorb this one. of course, they likefood on some level but it's the enemy. and, if you're telling your brain that there isan enemy, as it goes, the brain does not distinguish

between a real or imagined threat. scientific definition of stress - any realor imagined threat and the body's response to that threat, real or imagined. you couldbe thinking about the guy that did you wrong 20 years ago and literally go in to the samestress response as if that guy was sitting in front of you doing the same wrong. so in our brain, we are generating a physiologybased on a belief. that can now impact how we metabolize a meal. so, i notice over theyears with so many clients especially when it comes to people who are dealing with weightissues where there's this whole emotional realm that we have to wrap around, and oftentimes,their secondary complaint is poor digestion.

you can clean up their diet, you can get themon the healthiest food and they're still in digestive distress. and, for so many peopleuntil we begin to do the inventory of what's going on up here, what's happening in my innerworld that is driving my metabolism, what remains undigested in my life? what remains undigested is often past experiencesthat were too difficult to metabolize. it might have been divorce, relationship breakup,moving to a new country, changing careers, financial loss, you name it. when those stressfulexperiences live in the body we've known, hans selye talked about this in the 1930s,he said that "the digestive system is exquisitely sensitive to stress." we know this. it reallyis.

so part and parcel of the healing processwhen it comes to digestion is the mind. part and parcel of the healing process when itcomes to digestion is heart and soul and emotions and what's going on. to me, headline news that every medical studentshould learn and that should be on every blog, is that all healing happens in a relaxationresponse. all healing, maintenance and repair of body tissue happens in a relaxation responsei.e. when you're sleeping, when you're in meditative repose, when you're relaxed. youcome home, you had a bad day at work, you feel like you're about to get sick, you don'tsay, gee, i'm about to get sick, i'm going to go run around like a crazy maniac. yougo, no, i'm going to lie down on the couch.

we instinctively know that healing happensin a relaxation response. so to my mind, you can be doing the best strategies in the universewhen it comes to healing a faulty digestion. when it comes to repleting a gut microbiomethat's been depleted and if we have not put ourselves in that optimum state of digestionassimilation and in the optimum state of healing, the, we cannot fully get where we are tryingto go. and, we won't receive the full benefits of all the brilliant supplemental and medicalstrategies that we're doing if we're running around like crazy. if we aren't looking atour lives and saying, where are the places that i need to lean into more and to relaxinto more? what are the difficulties that i need to metabolize?

so, mind, heart and soul that help set thetable for how we metabolize a meal, i hope some of this was helpful for you. thank you so much. thanks so much for watching and for more greatclips like this, please subscribe to our youtube channel. i've created a special free video just foryou, it's called the 5 steps to becoming a leader in your wellness community and i'llgive you some of the starting points on how to position yourself as the leader in yourzip code of your health community. all you have to do is click on the link below.