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Transcript
- 03:26 About Sara Vance
- 07:59 The Metabolism Summit
- 14:42 The Myth of Calorie Counting
- 27:00 What is Metabolism
- 37:10 10 Tips for Optimizing and Boosting Your Metabolism
- 48:13 Where to Find the Metabolism Summit
- 51:56 The Most Pressing Health Issue in the World Today
- 58:31 More About Sara Vance
Wendy Myers: Hello, my name is Wendy Myers. Welcome to the Live to 110 Podcast. You can learn more about me at myersdetox.com and all about my detox program, MineralPower.com.
Today, we are having my friend, Sara Vance on the program. She is hosting the upcoming Metabolism Summit, which I was very honored to be a part of to talk about of course the heavy metals that interfere in our metabolism. You guys know that my favorite subject is detox. I think it’s so important because it affects every aspect of your health and your weight and your mental clarity and just everything about your existence. But on this particular summit, I’d talked about how toxins affect our waistline.
Sara is going to be talking today about metabolism, the 10 ways that you can boost your metabolism. And she’s got a lot of very practical tips that you can start incorporating today to help to increase and heal your metabolism.
So today for the podcast, keep in mind that this program is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or health condition and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. So please consult your healthcare practitioner before engaging in any treatment or diet, et cetera that we suggest today on the program.
Wendy Myers: You guys should check out, if you haven’t already, my new supplement called Liver Rehab. It’s out on Amazon. This is a supplement that’s going to help you to heal and regenerate your liver and help it to work better, help it get it detoxing.
A lot of people don’t feel well if you have fatigue or brain fog or nausea. It can be because of poor liver health.
Our livers deal with so many toxins. It has to process our poor fat diets because we’re eating bad fats. It has to process all of our sugars for eating refined grains and sugars. It has to process all the chemicals that we have in our body. It has to break those down and take them out to the garbage. And our livers have a huge, huge job today. And even many children today have fatty liver disease because of their diets.
Our livers are in trouble. So I wanted to create this supplement to help you heal your liver and get it detoxing better. So go check out LiverRehab.com.
And right now in the works, I have a new supplement coming out. It’s a beef liver supplement because I think that beef liver is really helpful in a number of ways. It’s very, very nutrient-dense and it really helps to regenerate liver. Any kind of glandular you take can help to regenerate that gland in your body.
I love beef liver. A lot of people don’t want to eat it today. And our grandparents are very wise. They typically ate liver and onions and incorporated liver into their diet. And today, that’s something that we are not eating, that we’re missing from our diet. It’s very important nutritionally.
So my next supplement focusing on the liver, I’m going to stay in that same vein. So look for that coming out in the next couple of months.
Wendy Myers: Our guest today is Sara Vance. She is an advocate for nutrition and health. She was overweight as a child and suffered a long list of health complaints for decades. And she finally found the answers right at the end of her fork.
She’s a nutritionist and author of The Perfect Metabolism Plan and the host of the Metabolism Summit. And you can find all about that at the MetabolismSummit.com. Sara has contributed articles and healthy recipes to MindBodyGreen, Beaming and Livestrong and has appeared on eHow, Fox 5 San Diego on television and San Diego Living. She is also a powerful motivating speaker and you can find out more about her and her programs at RebalanceLife.com.
Sara, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Sara Vance: Oh, gosh! Thank you so much, Wendy, for having me. I’m so excited to talk with you about all this.
Wendy Myers: Why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about your background and how you got into health and nutrition and metabolism?
Sara Vance: It’s an interesting story because if you had told the 12 year old me that I would be doing this for a living, she would be on the floor rolling around laughing because I was definitely not into health as a kid. In fact, I weighed more in sixth grade than I do now.
I think I was always considered to be a hypochondriac. I never really felt great. I had digestive issues and tons of allergies. And I was a very picky eater and so I didn’t really like a lot of healthy foods. So the idea of having to come into this field, just I know, would have cracked me up then. I can remember being put on diets when I was a kid.
So I think having suffered for so many years makes me so passionate about this. I went down the wrong path for so many years thinking that it was about weight, it was about dieting and that the whole goal was to get to be in a healthy weight. And that’s not always really the ideal thing. I mean I did get to an ideal weight, but I still had a bunch of chronic symptoms.
I thought it was normal to have a bottle of Advil upstairs and a bottle of Advil downstairs and to have chronic aches and pains when I was in my 20s. That’s not normal, but I thought it was normal.
And when I finally really started to get it was when I looked at it as more of health. And when I started to take care of my health, everything started to come into balance. And the hard thing, I think one of the issues is I had been given really bad information for so many years. There are so many diet myths out there. How can you get good results when you have bad information? You can’t.
So I think that was part of the problems too, doing things like calorie counting and cutting fats. Think about how many of us have done that for how many years. I was trying to exercise super hard. I was in the fitness industry for many years and I worked out like a maniac and I thought that was good for my body. So I think really some of it was just misinformation. Some of it was just going for the wrong goal.
And once those kinds of things came into balance, I was so passionate about “Oh my gosh, I’ve got to tell people about this. I’ve got to help people realize that you don’t have to have chronic aches and pains. You don’t have to take Advil. You don’t have to have headaches all the time.”
My seasonal allergies, I was called the “bubble girl” when I was a kid because I had so many seasonal allergies. I have an allergy doctor that called me the “bubble girl.” I don’t have those anymore because I am not eating foods that creating inflammation in my body. I don’t have my aches and pains, which are inflammation in my body. So it’s powerful.
And I think that’s part of the reason why I feel this passion about telling people that you don’t have to settle for those things and it’s just getting the good information.
I think all change requires three things. You need to have good information. Already most of us are suffering there because there’s a lot of bad information. We have to have motivation. I think sometimes having a coach or being part of a group can help with that and then tools, things like recipes. When you have those three things, it can get that needle moving. It’s life-changing.
Wendy Myers: You’ve spent many, many years learning about weight loss and metabolism and what works and what doesn’t. And that’s why you decided to host the Metabolism Summit. And I was very honored that you asked me to be a speaker on your summit because I think you create a lot of amazing content and information for people to learn how to get their weight and metabolism under control.
Do you want to talk a little bit about that, some of your speakers that you have in the summit?
Sara Vance: Yes, I love to. The Metabolism Summit, it started with writing a book, The Perfect Metabolism Plan. I wrote that book and then thought, “You know what? Every single one of these chapters on my books, there are a dozen experts who have written whole books about this.” There are so many people.
I think the summits are such a powerful way to get information out there. It’s free and you can get 30 hours of information from some of the most amazing experts from around the world in a week’s time for free. And I enjoy attending summits and so I thought, “How amazing it would be also to just talk to these people that I have admired for so many years and have followed?”
And the word metabolism is tossed around. We think that if we have a fast metabolism, that’s better. And if we have slow metabolism, we’re stuck with the slow metabolism. I think there’s just a lot of misinformation.
Really metabolism is all the chemical processes in our body that creates and sustains our life. I mean it’s responsible for detoxification as you know. We talk about that a lot and you’re in it too. And it’s responsible for delivering energy into our cells. It’s responsible for growth and repair and recovery of muscles, removing waste from the body, absorbing minerals into our cells.
Basically, metabolism is life. It is if you really think about it. And it’s a very broad topic. I think a lot of people, when they think about metabolism, they’re thinking weight or maybe heart disease or something like that. But our metabolism affects our brain health, our moods and we take a metabolic approach to this.
I always think that when you diet and count your calories, it’s kind of like putting a burglar alarm [inaudible 00:10:24] without resetting it first. It’s horrible to diet. You have to really rely on motivation. Your cravings actually get worse because you’re cutting things out that help a lot with your cravings like fat and cutting your calories and you’re slowing your metabolism down.
When you get the metabolism reset – I did a post about this earlier this week. I put a big huge chocolate sundae up there with caramel and everything. I said that wouldn’t even appeal to me because when you have detoxed your body from sugars, you cannot even taste sugar the same way. And something that’s sickly sweet that I so loved and I just couldn’t wait to have would be overwhelmingly sweet. When your metabolisms level, your cravings diminish, you’re not going to be hungry all the time. You’re not going to be on the sugar roller coaster where you’re constantly needing to get up and then crashing down.
It really is the foundation so much of our health that if we can understand it and how to improve it, then we can put it into practice in another certain time. And I’m one of those people. I know I should have a standup desk. I have wanted one for a year. Have I done it? Have I bought it? Yeah, we got to put this thing into action.
Wendy Myers: I was thinking of that yesterday too. I’m like, “I need to get a standup desk.”
Sara Vance: I know. I’ve been talking about it for a year. I’m like, “I sit too much. I know I sit too much. Why am I not doing something about it?” So we do have to take action on these things. But that awareness is the first step and then putting it into action.
So that was a long-winded answer to your topic of metabolism. But really what I found is that people want – it makes your weight come into balance almost effortlessly when you can get it all balanced. Weight is just one symptom. It’s just one symptom of a bigger picture and it’s trying to deal with the symptom like putting a band aid on a cut that needs stitches or something like that. That’s how I view dieting and calorie counting. You’re not going to get to the underlying problem.
That’s why you see so many people, if they are able to lose weight, they’re gaining it back. More than 80% of people who were dieting gain it back and so on.
That’s I think what the issue is. Can we get people the information that they need to make this a life change that’s going to last and change so many other aspects of their life? It’s going to change their mood and their energy and their sleep and all those things.
Wendy Myers: Actually, my efforts to lose weight started me on my health journey because I had gain weight after the birth of my child and I was trying to lose it and it wasn’t coming off as easy. I thought, “Something is definitely wrong here.” So I’ve got to go to my doctor immediately.
At that point, that’s when I found I had adrenal issues and thyroid issues, et cetera. So sometimes, when you have trouble losing weight, it’s a sign of larger health issues. It can be.
Sara Vance: Yeah. It can be thyroid. We talk about that a lot in the summit. I’ve got a number of people that are talking about thyroid.
You mentioned adrenal stress. That is a huge one. And that’s the one that I battled with too because I work extra long hours when I’m on a deadline or something. I know a lot of people deal with that. And yeah, stressful, [inaudible 00:13:53] –
I mean, I can’t remember, I think it was Dr. Kirk Perkins on the summit who said something like, “Having your cortisol levels chronically elevated, you may as well just be eating Snickers bar because that’s the amount of sugar that’s coming into your blood stream.” So you’re being robbed off that opportunity where your blood sugar is elevated.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Sara Vance: So you found out you had some adrenal stuff.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, yeah, I had adrenal issues, I had thyroid issues and then I found out that I had a lot of metal toxicities and et cetera. And that’s what I talked about on your summit, the metals that can interfere in your body’s metabolic function and cause improper release of insulin from the pancreas, all kinds of different problems. So for me, my journey to lose weight has catapulted me into ultimate health.
But it starts with diet. That’s the foundation if you’re going to stabilize your metabolism and heal your metabolism and lose weight. Start with diet. So let’s talk about some diet myths. We’re in the new year and a lot of people are making their New Year’s resolutions, trying to lose weight, including myself. But some are finding the weight just doesn’t budge.
You say that one reason is we can’t get good results from bad information. So let’s talk about some of the common diet and weight loss mistakes and myths and ideas that you are talking about in the summit.
Sara Vance: Yeah. Obviously one, I think I had mentioned it a little bit before, is calorie counting. I think it’s a very common myth and for good reason.
If you think about it, it sounds so logical. Eat less calories and then you expand. You will create a deficit and lose weight. There is a little bit of truth to this. I know a lot of weightlifters and bodybuilders and things like that use calorie counting a lot to really fine-tune their diets.
But one of the things about calorie counting is not all calories are created equal. Let’s say for example, I cook one of those 100 calorie cookie packs. They have all those packs that are like, “There are 100 calories of this and so you can keep track of what you’re eating.” So you ate that, which has no fiber. It has mostly processed and there are no real nutrients in there. It’s just synthetic processed stuff. It’s mostly refined flour and sugar and it has no healthy fat because everybody is looking for low fat and everything.
So no fiber, no fat, no protein, those are the three things that’s my rule of three. Every time you eat, you have to have at least one of those to keep your blood sugar levels. So if you’re eating these 100 calorie packs of cookies, what is it going to do? It’s going to spike your blood sugar because it has nothing to keep it level. It’s going to crash. So then you’re going to be hungry and so you’re going to stimulate your appetite, which is one of the problems with dieting, we’re counting the wrong calories. We’re on the sugar roller coaster that I call it and we’re crashing and we’re fatigued and we’re craving more.
Let’s compare to say eating 100 calories of half an avocado. It’s a little bit more than 100 calories. You got fat and fiber in there. That keeps you level. I would say even an avocado a day to keep the doctor away is almost better than the apple a day because you got the healthy fiber and fat, healthy fat and that is what keeps us satisfied, to keep us fuller.
And so we need to eat less frequently throughout the day because our body has more energy to run on. So yeah, this whole calorie counting thing really depends on the calories.
And the other thing is if you metabolically have issues – for example, let’s say large percentage of the population has insulin resistance, which means that your body is not effectively processing carbs. So let’s say you eat that 100 calorie pack of cookies, what happens is that blood sugar is going to stay elevated longer because it’s not delivering that energy through the cells as effectively and it creates this whole problem where you’re fatigued, so you’re going to eat more. Your insulin keeps having to be released to try and get that glucose into the cells. When the insulin’s released, that causes the body to store fat with the mid-section. So it’s just a messaging system.
Whereas, someone who doesn’t have insulin resistance, they’re going to process those differently. So calories for this person are different than this person, depending on how they’re metabolism is working, depending on the types of calories you’re eating.
So trying to count calories is good for your brain health because you’re doing math. It’s good. It’s good for your brain to do some math problems. But it’s not going to really help you reach the goal because you’re not thinking about “What’s going to control my hunger? What are the things that are going to get my body out of that sugar roller coaster?”
When we’re eating a lot of simple carbs, we’re on this roller coaster. And then that gets the body really lazy. The body is only going to be looking for that glucose for that energy. It’s not going to convert fat. What you’re doing is you’re in fat storage. So why is the body going to be converting fat? That takes energy to convert and burn fat. So you’re just going to be relying on this simple sugars and carbs.
So then we get into that cycle where with insulin resistance, we’re not processing. We’re tired all the time. It’s a tough cycle to get out of. It really is a guarantee that if you are able to lose weight, it’s going to come back on. So it’s about really understanding those metabolic processes and how to reset it.
And I tell you, when I get people off of sugar and when I get them to eat fat, it takes some cajoling sometimes. They’re like, “Really? Really? Are you sure?” They almost feel guilty. They’re eating this fat, going, “Oh, should I really be doing this?”
But they feel so much better and their hunger is in control. That’s one of the key things. It’s getting those cravings under control and getting your hunger in control. So it really isn’t about willpower. It’s not a failure of will.
That’s one of the big reasons why I want to get this message out. It’s because you’re not a failure because you weren’t able to lose weight. You had bad information or you had some insulin resistance. And we’ve been told forever, “Don’t eat fat. Get six to nine servings of whole grains a day.” So how can we get good results from that information? We can’t.
So calorie counting is a big one or counting points, whatever you’re counting. That’s one of my pet peeves, the whole point system. If you ever look at a Weight Watchers’ Smart Meal ingredient list, it’s like who’s who of processed ingredients.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Sara Vance: You had mentioned before, heavy metal toxicities. The body, when the body is toxic, it holds on to fat because that’s the place where it stores it safely.
The body is wise. The body is smart. The body wants to protect the organs. It knows where to put if it has to store toxins and that our liver is in bad shape because we’re eating too much sugar and drinking sodas. So they are not working so well. So it’s probably not able to process all these toxicities. So what it does is it stores it in the fat and then the body says, “Protect it. Stay there. Don’t lose that fat because then you’ll release these toxins.”
So that toxic fat makes our bodies more weight loss resistant. And a lot of people don’t think about that. The more toxic our diets are, there are also endocrine interrupters and a lot of these toxins. So it’s really changing the game.
There was a study that just came out not too long ago. They’ve looked at people 20 to 30 years ago and people today and exact same calorie intake, exact same amount of exercise. It’s harder to be a healthy weight today than it was. And if you look at any photos of anything, of people in the ’70s, there were not overweight people. It was a very rare thing. I was rare to be an overweight child when I was in elementary school.
And now the game has changed. The game has changed. We have an uphill battle. You got a 250 lbs backpack that you’re carrying and going up on Mt. Everest because the decades stacked against us, we got all these chemicals in our processed foods. You’ve got, like you were saying, these heavy metals. And that’s the thing. A lot of these things, we have no idea these are going on.
We had Ann Louise Gittleman on the summit talking about parasites, right then and there. And a lot of them come hand in hand. I know you do a lot of looking at the gut in connection with the heavy metals and you have to deal with it all.
One of the things I talked about with [inaudible 00:22:49]. She has a gut program as well. If you just deal with one of them, they get a little bit better. So it’s to look at all of these things and really to understand.
But like you said, a lot of people, you can just start with the nutrition. Just start with your diet. I mean look at Dr. Terry Wahls. She’s also on the summit. She literally was in a tilt-recline wheelchair with progressive MS and now she’s a thriving doctor who rides her bike. And she cured herself with food, which is so powerful. So I think you’re right, we have to start there. And it’s so basic.
Wendy Myers: Yeah and for those women out there, my call to you is if you are like I was working out five days a week, busting your butt and you’re eating perfect, a lot of women out there, I know you’re eating a Paleo diet, you’re not eating grains, you’re not eating sugar, you’re not drinking alcohol, you’re doing all the stuff and it’s still not working, it’s because you need to detox.
And like Sara said, you have these metals that are interfering your body’s ability to regulate blood sugar and your body will hold on to fat because it has chemical somewhere. And there are so many estrogenic chemicals in our environment. And estrogens will grow more fat and fat itself will produce more estrogen.
That’s why people that are overweight, they actually have a harder time losing weight. Thinner people have an easier time staying thinner because the fat actively produces estrogen, which keeps the weight on. It’s like this evil catch 22.
Sara Vance: It’s so true. And I think a couple of other things that are playing into that are stress because the stress steals our hormones or our stress hormones are stealing from our sex hormones to turn more out. So we got those imbalances there and it tells our body to store fat in our midsection.
So the stress thing, I heard that throughout the whole summit. A lot of the experts are bringing that up. And then bacteria, that alone, just the bad bacteria in our gut, we’ve got all these pesticides, glyphosate that’s sprayed on everything. That is basically patented as an antibiotic. So in addition on the antibiotics that are in our meats and all that and the antibiotics that I know I took as a child growing up because I was sick all the time.
That’s again changing the game. We’re changing our gut bacteria. If you have the gut bacteria of an overweight person, that gut bacteria are going to want to keep it that way. They’re going to want to thrive in you.
We’ve seen this happen with the transplant, the fecal transplants that are curing the people of C diff. If they get a transplant from an obese donor – this has happened in the literature – that person will very quickly gain weight. It may cure their C difficile infection, which is life-changing, obviously you have to save somebody’s life, but they get obese quickly.
Wendy Myers: Oh, I would sue.
Sara Vance: Well, the interesting thing about the one they write about is it was the person’s daughter that was the donor.
Wendy Myers: Oh, no! [Inaudible 00:26:08]
Sara Vance: I think it was interesting. I think Dr. Perlmutter said something about how the amount of literature that’s happened in the last, 90% of the research that’s been done on the microbiome has happened over the last five or six years. So it’s just exploding. So I think that’s another big area that really affects our metabolism or weight or brain function and everything.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I keep meaning to go to uBiome.com and get my gut biome assessed.
Sara Vance: I know. I’m not doing that.
Wendy Myers: So I got to do that.
Sara Vance: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: Eventually if you join their e-mail list, they send out coupons for a 50% off. So you can test it for $50. So I need to do that.
Sara Vance: I’d joke that I want to know if I could be a donor. I’m curious. Isn’t that so nerdy and nutritiony for me to want to know if I could be a donor?
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Sara Vance: Is my bacteria good enough?
Wendy Myers: Yeah. So let’s talk about metabolism. What is metabolism? Let’s talk about what does work to get that needle moving on the scale. You said it all comes down to our metabolism. It’s a big buzz word right now, but do we really understand it?
Sara Vance: Yeah. I hear this so often. Like a lot of things, we think it’s not really in our control. Once you hit 40, it’s all downhill from there, your metabolism is just going to slow down. And it’s not true. We really do have control over it.
Yeah, sure, our metabolism slows down a lot of times when we hit 40, 45 or 50. But is that just age-related or is it due to all the accumulation of lifestyle effects and stress that we’re dealing with? And the truth is it’s really having to do a lot more with this insulin resistance that most people are dealing with now and don’t know about it, the stress and it’s all these different factors.
What I did in my book, The Perfect Metabolism Plan is I outlined the 10 keys that go into resetting our metabolism.
The first one is to really understand and get your blood sugar under control. One of the interesting people on the summit was this Damon Gameau. He did the film That Sugar Film. He did this experiment on himself.
He started eating 40 teaspoons of sugar a day, which is I guess in Australia, that’s the average of what they’re eating in Australia. That’s a little bit more than our average here in the United States. It’s no candy, no ice cream – they call it and I love his accent – no confections. And he was easily able to get halfway there about 8:30 every morning with yogurt or oatmeal or whatever. If you’re drinking sodas or any kind of sweetened beverage, you’re easily hitting that and way overshooting it.
He gave himself fatty liver disease in three weeks by eating 40 teaspoons of sugar, which is what the average person is eating. And it was all healthy things like the yogurts and the granola bars and things like that and he very easily was able to get 40. It’s a fascinating story, his movie and [inaudible 00:29:22].
But then also on the positive side, how quickly he was able to reverse those things. [Inaudible 00:29:29] is extremely resilient. So getting that blood sugar control, that’s number one and I think that’s very, very big for so many people.
And then the fats, understanding healthy fats and not being afraid of fats, avoiding the unhealthy fats, dealing with the gut, really understanding. Some of the most foundational things about our gut are just lifestyle, not eating on the run, not eating in front of the computer, not eating standing up, pausing for a moment.
Historically, in most cultures, there has always been a prayer before meal. What that does when you pause before you eat, you get to smell your food. That starts to begin to generate saliva in your mouth. That is an important stage of digestion because the saliva has most of our digestive enzymes for carbohydrates.
So if we’re just driving through the drive-through and eating all the stuff and we’re not paying any attention and we are not getting excited about meal for a few minutes, we’re right then and there messing our digestion up. Chewing our food slowly like in Ayurvedic nutrition, they want you to chew 30 times if we did have that. So some basic stuff can really go a long way.
I go into the book about toxins. I loved my interview with you. I think it was just mind-blowing about all the different places toxins are coming into our body and our skin. We need to think of our skincare products. It’s tough right now, our world is very toxic. So doing these things where you’re detoxifying your body or making your livers supportive and figuring out, “Do I have these toxicities?”
I love that you’re doing this hair mineral analysis because that gives you that information that you can go for, to really heal the body. So I think it’s just so cutting edge, what you’re doing for people. I mean you could maybe talk for a minute just here about the implications of these things on your health from not just metabolism, but brain function.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. And people are really surprised when they get their hair test. A lot of them are really blown away by some of the toxicities they have.
I had one client the other day that had tungsten toxicity, which is extremely rare that causes leukemia. I had another client who had cadmium toxicity just through the roof. And that causes a number of different issues, including eventually it can cause cancer.
A lot of my clients have uranium toxicity. They typically develop diabetes if they don’t have it already. My business partner, she has really high uranium and she has diabetes. And it’s in the water in Southern California. I just had my water tested. It has uranium in it and I have uranium toxicity. I have only drunk bottled water my entire adult life since my teens, but I’m getting it through my shower and absorbing it in my shower tower.
Sara Vance: Do you have a filter on it? Do you want a filter to take it out? We have our showers filtered.
Wendy Myers: A lot of the filters don’t get it. They deduce carbon, but those aren’t getting metals. That’s the problem. So I have a whole house filter, but I haven’t most of my life.
Most of my clients, not all of them, but most of them that I have tested in Southern California had uranium toxicity. And I worry about the ones that don’t have it. It’s just hidden. It’s just not coming on the hair test yet and so that causes major metabolic disturbance with eventually causing diabetes and interfering in blood sugar metabolism. There are a million different examples that I can go into.
Sara Vance: What that just tells me is so funny because again what we’re talking about is what beating ourselves up because we’re working so hard. We’re just getting into gym and just working out.
I know people say, “Go to the gym for two hours.” And they’re just getting nervous answer, “I’m eating like a bird.” And you have this toxicity that is just absolutely throwing your whole metabolism off.
And once you can get to the bottom of these issues, then the body can heal. The body wants to heal. The body is so resilient now.
Wendy Myers: Since I have been detoxing, my weight loss regimen, the calories I’m eating have actually gone up and my exercises have gone down and I’ve actually lost weight because I’m detoxing.
So if you are killing yourself on the gym, it’s like you’re a hamster in a wheel that’s just running in place and you’re aiming wrong in that respect. What am I trying to say? What idiom am I trying to think of? I don’t know.
Sara Vance: I love the hamster thing. It’s interesting because we talk about that a lot on the summit. I got a lot of amazing experts with exercise like Dr. Phil Maffetone. And Dr. Marc Bubbs, he’s the Nutrition Lead for Canadian Basketball League and Dr. Maffetone has worked with the athletes for decades.
One of the things that I think a lot of people don’t realize is that cardio can actually cause your metabolism to slow down because it’s a source of stress on the body and then you raise the cortisol and you’re doing marathons and things like that. And there’s a lot of research showing that those endurance sports are harming your hearts because of all this excess stress and especially if you’re not recovering.
I had Ben Greenfield come on. I know you’ve connected with Ben on your podcast and he talked so much about recovery. I love his book, Beyond Training. I think every athlete should read that book because it really just makes so much sense when you think about the body. And I know Dr. Marc Bubb has talked about this too on the summit. Your gains come from your recovery time and so many athletes aren’t even thinking about that.
So yeah, we knew a lot of cool stuff, but I know it’s a puzzle. When you have all this information and you have got all these experts that can help you to start – you experienced it yourself. I know I experienced. We have to figure out the puzzles ourselves and a lot of people don’t have doctors, functional doctors that are helping them. They’re trying to figure this out on their own.
So that’s what I’m hoping the summit can be, it’s introducing people to someone like you that can go, “Let’s test your hair. Let’s look at your toxicities. Let’s see. Do you have toxicity? Oh, you’ve got diabetes, let’s see. Maybe you’ve got this uranium.”
I think it’s so cool where we can introduce people to experts that they may have not known about that could hold some incredible answers. How amazing would that be to find out? You’ve been struggling with something like diabetes, find out that you have this toxicity. Clear that out of your body and the body is ready to heal. It’s so powerful.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I feel very fortunate myself in my healing journey. My functional medicine doctor did not help me. He helped me diagnose what was wrong, but he certainly didn’t give me tools to fix it that I felt were adequate. And I just got lucky and found mineral analysis and detox right out at the gate and other people search for a decade or more to figure out what’s wrong with them. I’m very fortunate.
Wendy Myers: Why don’t we talk about the 10 keys to optimize and boost our metabolism? Maybe you have some good take home tips for the listeners of things that they can do today to start boosting their metabolism.
Sara Vance: Yeah, I’ve talked about some of the keys like getting your blood sugar controlled and reducing your fats. Those are the keys. Figure out food intolerances and a lot of times, that can be toxicity or something or it could be parasites or something else, figuring out what’s going on there, getting inflammation under control, getting stress under control, getting rid of those convenient foods that are “who’s who” processed ingredients.
Hydrating, that’s such a basic one. That’s one of the ones that I like to start with because it’s the easiest one to do, right?
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Sara Vance: Yeah, it’s such a foundational thing. Start your day, if you like coffee, great. Have a glass of water before your coffee because a lot of times, you go right for the coffee. I know I love my coffee. Have that glass of water because you need to rehydrate the body in the morning. Hydration is so important for detoxification.
And choosing, like you said, good quality of water, filtering it and Ann Louise Gittleman is a huge one on that because tap water harbors parasites as well as toxic metals and things. A lot of people are not chronically dehydrated all the time. And your body is just not functioning optimally that way.
I read a study that said that kids today, some kids will drink zero water all day long. I know it’s true because my kids go to school and there will be kids that will go all day throughout classes not drinking. My kids’ backpacks don’t have the water bottle holder. So I’m like, “You got to shove that water bottle in your backpack. You could bring it with you.” So yeah, just the hydration is a big one.
Getting smarter about your exercise, there are a couple of swaps we can talk about. In the morning, first thing in the morning, start with that water and then swap out those carbs. A lot of times, we’ve been taught, “Load up on the carbs. It will give you energy all day.” What having a hard carb breakfast really does is it stimulates your appetite during the day.
So thinking about protein and fat for breakfast, that’s going to be something that’s going to keep your hunger hormones more stabilized. And you can start with more a Paleo kind of a breakfast like eggs and avocados and some sautéed veggies, coconuts and coconut oil. That’s a much better way to start your day because you’re going to be much more satisfied than on that sugar roller coaster.
I think I said this earlier. Instead of going for that apple a day, get that avocado a day. I love avocados. I can just have an avocado, put a little salt on it and just eat it right out of the avocado with a spoon. A lot of people don’t think about how much fiber actually is in avocado. It’s a high fiber food. It has healthy fats. You’re in California too. We are in staple here.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Sara Vance: Yeah, so things like avocados are great and just not being afraid of fats.
I tell a lot of people. Fat is like a beauty nutrient because there’s nothing that’s going to age you faster than sugar and a low fat diet. That will give you wrinkles galore and dehydration.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I was so lucky because then I was younger.
Sara Vance: Your skin looks great by the way.
Wendy Myers: Thank you. It’s coffee enemas, but that’s…
Sara Vance: Ooh, right. That’s the one thing I got to learn about it.
Wendy Myers: And infrared saunas too. But yeah, when I was younger, the low fat craze was going on. I was just too lazy to hop on that train. I guess the furthest I got was maybe some low fat yogurt or something. But I just can’t do it. I can’t do the low fat ice cream. I just wasn’t wanting to give that up. So I bypassed torturing my body in that way.
Sara Vance: I love it. I mean it’s so amazing to me how wrong. I mean literally you can turn a lot of these recommendations on their head and you think about eggs were for many years taught that you shouldn’t eat that yolk. That’s the best part of the egg. It’s got the most nutrients in it. “The fat is bad for you.”
And I think there are millions of people out there that still believe these things. Paula Deen just came out with a new cookbook that’s like, “Get rid of the fat.”
Wendy Myers: Oh, no.
Sara Vance: I’m like, “Oh.”
Wendy Myers: You can’t eat a stick of butter per meal. You can eat a pat [inaudible 00:41:53]. It’s not about eliminating. It’s about not having too much of a good thing.
Sara Vance: Exactly. Yeah, I think that you can overdo even the good things. So just little things.
One of the other things is the swapping out, the sweet and beverages. If you’re drinking the sodas, if you’re drinking, whether it’s diet, whether it’s – sorry, that’s my phone going there. Whether it’s diet, whether it’s sugar sweet, they’re both terrible for our metabolism and our health.
If we could swap one of those out and just replace it with something better like an iced tea with lemon or a sparkling water or just water. And one of the things that I love is kombucha. I love kombucha and that’s got the good beneficial bacteria.
Believe me, I was a diet soda. I loved the diet soda. That was my thing. I had it every day. When I was in college, I was drinking the 42 ounce once.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I did that. At least every single meal, I used to have a diet Coke. And about seven years ago, I went cold turkey. I never did it again, but every once in a while, whatever, in a blue moon. But yeah, it’s a very bad habit. A lot of people are doing it and thinking that it’s healthy because there’s no sugar.
Sara Vance: Yeah, we all believed it. “Oh, it’s diet. It’s the best of both worlds. It’s sweet.” We could do a whole podcast about diet sodas and artificial sweeteners.
So swap out one of those sweet drinks, just getting that extra water in there or if you like that fizzy, do the sparkling water or kombucha which I love. I was brewing it for a long time. Kefir water, I did that this summer. My kids are loving that. So that’s one other tip.
I don’t know if you like dark chocolate, but that’s my thing.
Wendy Myers: Oh no, I hate dark chocolate. I hate it.
Sara Vance: It’s funny because as a kid, I hated dark chocolate. “Oh, why would you want something like this? It’s bitter.” But now because I’ve changed my taste buds, super sweet things, I don’t enjoy them – hi Harley – but I love dark chocolate.
For people who don’t like dark chocolate, think about starting at 60% dark and working your way up to 70%. You can get all the way up to 90%. But I generally stay at 70%.
And think about replacing your dessert with a square or two of dark chocolate because you can have health benefits there. So you’re not totally giving it up. You’re having that something, but you’ve got all these polyphenols. You’ve got the magnesium that’s coming from the cacao. It’s one of the best food sources of magnesium.
There’s actually research that shows eating a little bit of chocolate every day can actually reduce your risk of heart disease and it’s probably the magnesium. There are other great ways to get magnesium as well, but at least you’re getting something good from that where you’re not going to spike your blood sugar as much. I think I’m giving up something a little sweet, but we’re doing it in a much healthier way.
And then one of the other ones is that standup desk. This is on my list for 2000 – the next time I talk to you, I’m going to have that standup desk with me because I’ve been talking about it for at least a year. For my work, I sit a lot. And when I was writing my book, I was sitting all the time. When I’m putting together the summit, I’m sitting, sitting, sitting.
And people say it’s the new smoking. And there’s a lot of research that show that you cannot undo. Even if you work out, even if you’re eating an amazing diet, if you’re sitting for than six hours in a stretch, you can’t do that by going to the gym. I’ve done it. So get that standup desk. Or if you’re in a conference call, you can stand up and walk around and doing what you can to not do so much sitting. That’s so big.
Just all these little things add up if you can just even take one or two things to do. Just pick the hydration thing for one week.
There’s an interesting thing that’s on the internet. A woman did this thing where she took a picture of her face at the beginning and then she started drinking 12 glasses of water a day. After two months, she took a picture of her face and it looked like she had worked out. She was just so much more hydrated and her skin just looked more beautiful. Even if it’s just for vanity’s sake, you just look healthy when you’re hydrated.
And that’s true I think of everything for eating, putting antioxidants, getting healthy thoughts. We’re just going to look and feel better. It’s just that how you feel on the inside shows upon the outside a lot of times. I know it’s true for me. If I have been working too hard and I’ve been sitting a lot, stressing out and I’m not sleeping well, I got these blacks under my eyes.
I view health as a journey and it’s not a destination. I’m always myself trying to fine-tune things and I think that’s how it’s always going to be. I’m going to have my things, my issues like sitting and why am I not buying that standup desk because I’m not. And so we all have our issues and things that we’re dealing with.
So just be aware and take action. And finding a support, I think that’s the other thing. Get a friend or reach out to someone that wants you to be successful and surround yourself with healthy people. There’s a study that showed that if you hang out with healthy people, you’re healthier.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. That’s what I’ve done a lot in the last five years. I have mixed a lot of people in my life – not a lot because some are not healthy people emotionally or physically or what have you. I’m much happier and healthier I feel as a result of that.
Sara Vance: Yeah. Emotions can be toxic too for sure.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. So why don’t you tell the listeners how they can listen to your Metabolic Summit, when it’s airing, et cetera? And how can they participate?
Sara Vance: Thank you so much. It’s coming up soon. It’s February 1st. It’s going to be live and totally free, February 1st through the 8th. The 8th is going to be the encore day.
Each day, we’ll release four – for a couple of days, we’ve got five experts and you have 24 hours to listen to those experts. And they can find out information at the MetabolismSummit.com. If you want to put a link on your podcast, that would be awesome.
Just sign up. You’re going to get some free interviews right away. So if you sign up now, you’ll get three of the interviews right away and a free chapter of my book. I’m giving away the first chapter about the blood sugar. Break Up With Sugar, it’s called.
If people don’t want to watch all the interviews that week, you can buy the summit. And if you buy it before the first, you get a discount. You’re going to get a really good price. It’s $59 or something like that, a pretty summit price.
So yeah, some people like to just attend to a few of the talks. Some people like to watch them all and then some people want to take them home and keep them. Honestly, if you are going to watch them, get out your pen and paper because every single one of the experts – it’s one of the things I said – every single one I said give people tips that they can put into action. I want actionable tips and you gave some amazing tips. People are going to want to take notes for every single talk because there’s so much good information. It really is.
I’m so proud of it and I’m so happy to have people like you that have come and given your time to just share your knowledge because you are so knowledgeable about what you are doing and it’s really cutting edge stuff and life-changing. You’ve just seen it transform so many people’s lives and this information can really change lives.
I was one of those people, I was beating myself up because I couldn’t control myself on sugar for so much in my life and I couldn’t control my weight and I couldn’t control my hunger. And it wasn’t my fault. It was because I was following all this bad information. It had all these things that I was doing that were harming my metabolism.
When I was 12, my metabolism was in worse shape than I have no in my mid-40s. And that’s the case. We’re seeing metabolic issues in kids that are 10 now. So this goes all the way down all the ages.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I understand. I’ve spent a lot of time beating myself up because I couldn’t control what I was eating or I was doing all this work and the scale wasn’t going down. And women, they blame themselves and the answers are out there. The answer is actually simple, but you have to have a plan that’s based in science, not based on the food companies’ agenda that you’re fed every single day and what’s reinforced by the media because they are the advertisers in the newspapers or on television. So people are fed so much wrong information.
So the correct information is in summits like this and on irrefutable websites that we try to spend a lot of our own lives dedicated to giving out correct information. But thanks for having this summit. And listeners, I absolutely encourage you to go check that out beginning February 1st. But you can sign up anytime.
Wendy Myers: But Sara, I have a question I like to ask to all of my guests. What do you think is the most pressing health issue in the world today?
Sara Vance: Oh, boy. I definitely think it’s our kids’ health. I think it’s really. What’s happening with our kids is we’re seeing diseases that were called adult onset diseases happening in 10 year olds.
They have really found out that one out of every kid that’s in normal weight has fatty liver disease. Half of kids that were overweight have fatty liver disease. The metabolic issues that are happening in our kids today, a lot of it has to do with the convenient foods. It has to do with sodas. There’s a lot of it having to do with the genetic modification.
And that’s one of the things, I’ve always had passion for kids’ health and that’s probably another area that I’m going to want to get into and really work. I’ve done school assemblies because I was an overweight kid as well, making it fun for them.
I think one of the best things you can do with kids is to get them into the kitchen. That’s one of the best things you can do with everybody. I think that there are a lot of people that don’t cook anymore. You eat out and buy convenience packaged foods. So the more whole foods that we all can eat – there are more schools that put in gardens in their schools.
So I’d say probably just the kids’ health situation. I think that’s the thing that just worries me the most because I think we need our kids to take on the world. But there are a lot of kids that are really passionate about it and I’ve seen it when I have talked to them. So it makes me excited.
And with a little bit of education, they can be the next Wendy Myers of the world and changing the game for people. So I am hopeful.
Wendy Myers: I agree with you. It really frightens me as well when I see so many overweight kids walking around that are 10 years old and even six or seven years old. They are so young and they are going to very likely grow up to be an overweight adult and have very early health problems, serious health problems very, very early on and die an early death. But it’s completely preventable.
I feel very fortunate for my daughter. We do a lot of cooking at home and I get her involved. I’m making her lunch and whatnot, get her excited about the healthy foods she’s going to eat.
But in her pre-school, they grow vegetables and they grow strawberries and things like that and they cook them. And they harvest them and they make little salads and do things like that. That’s what people have to do.
My mother, she had a garden my entire youth and I was always in the garden doing stuff and you just see where the foods comes from and it’s just normal. But for a lot of children, it’s normal just to eat fast food every single night because a lot of parents are doing it and some of them, that’s all they can afford unfortunately.
But that’s not true. Healthy food can be just as cheap as fast food, but it’s just easier. By the way, it’s a huge problem and hopefully there are a lot of parents out there right now listening to this, trying to get a hold of their own weight and hopefully that filters down to their children as well.
Sara Vance: And like I said earlier, starting small. I know a lot of times it’s hard to fit in the cooking, getting the grocery. A lot of it is just planning.
But let’s say you just started with – if you’re eating out every meal and you’re bringing in pizza and take out every single meal, how about just Sunday? Just start with Sundays. Just have a Sunday cooking day. You get everybody in the kitchen. You get people. Or start with your breakfast or start with something and take it step by step. If you try and do two too much at once, then you get overwhelmed and then you quit. But even if it’s just starting with that one meal.
So many people have a hard time – one of the reasons why I wrote my book is it started out as a group cleanse and a lot of the people that did cleanse went, “Am I going to have to cook on this?” I’m like, “Yeah.” “I don’t really cook.” And I’m like, “Well, you’re going to surprise yourself.” And they did. I can remember someone said, “Oh gosh, my husband thinks he’s in a gourmet restaurant.” And I’m like, “See? You can do it.”
I know the less I spend time in the kitchen, the more out of practice I get, the more clunky I feel and I get on those trips where I’m too busy to cook every night. We eat out in my household. We just have to. We know some healthy places to go. [Inaudible 00:56:56], I love it.
And the more you cook, you’re going to get 10 or so recipes that you just know in your head. You can go to it. You can just actually be in the store and go, “Oh, that’s what I’m going to make tonight. I’m going to put together.”
Like last night, I made chicken tikka masala. It took me half an hour. Just chop up some chicken thighs and put those in a pot with a bunch of enhanced spices, a can of coconut milk, some tomatoes, boom! [Inaudible 00:57:21] rice. So good!
And then you’ll find a few of those things that your family loves and you’ll surprise yourself. So yeah, I think that’s one of the best things people can do. Just go back to the kitchen and get your kids in that too.
Wendy Myers: And Rome wasn’t built in a day. I never, in my life, thought I’d be eating as healthy as I am now say maybe even five or six years ago because I used to be a fast food junkie. I used to eat fast food a lot and I used to eat sugar every single day. I couldn’t walk into a store without grabbing a candy bar. Or I used to eat a pint of Haagen-Dazs every single day.
Sara Vance: Oh yeah, I know. I had my ice cream fixed every night too. Yeah. It’s addicting. That’s why. We get hooked on it.
Wendy Myers: And those things, they don’t even face me anymore. I never thought I’d eat as healthy, but it took trying again and again and again and changing my habits one thing at a time.
First, I mixed the diet Coke and I only drank soda water with lemon or regular water or some tea. And now I only drink water for the most part. It just takes time. So just start somewhere.
Sara Vance: Cool.
Wendy Myers: Sara, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I really appreciate having you come on and sharing your wealth of knowledge about metabolisms. Why don’t you tell the listeners where they can find you and learn more about your book and your programs, et cetera?
Sara Vance: Thank you. My website is RebalanceLife.com. You can get there also by SaraVance.com as well. Yeah, I’ve got some videos on there. I go on some of the local TV stations around here sometimes and I got some of those videos on there.
I blog a lot. I got a ton of blog articles, a couple of hundreds on there. So yeah, there’s just a lot of free information.
One of the things I’ve been doing this year is releasing a lot more online programs and courses. So sign up for my newsletter and get some free gifts and then you’ll stay in the loop with what I got coming up. I have a link to my book, The Perfect Metabolism Plan there as well. That’s a good free stuff, which I like to do. It’s free. I give it away.
Wendy Myers: Thank you so much Sara for coming. I really appreciate it.
Sara Vance: Thank you so much for having me and all of what you’re doing, Wendy. You are doing so many great things.
Wendy Myers: Thank you.
Sara Vance: And I can’t wait to get my hair mineral tested.
Wendy Myers: I know. We’re doing your hair test.
Sara Vance: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: I’ll let you know when those results come in. We’ll see how toxic you are.
Sara Vance: I’m sure I’m highly toxic.
Wendy Myers: Everyone is toxic. Everybody is.
Sara Vance: Thanks, Wendy. Have a great weekend.
Wendy Myers: Listeners, if you want to learn more about me, you can go to myersdetox.com and learn more about my healing and detox program, Mineral Power at MineralPower.com. And that starts with a hair mineral analysis and we figure out how toxic you are and do something about it.
Thank you so much for listening to the Live to 110 Podcast.
