Transcript #393 How to Address Toxic Fat Accumulation with Dr. Stephen Cabral

Listen

Listen to this podcast or watch the video. CLICK HERE

Transcript

Download PDF

Click to jump to a section!

1. Find out what’s in store for this Myers Detox Podcast with Dr. Stephen Cabral who joins the show to talk about how to address toxic fat accumulation and how toxins are contributing to cellulite and to weight gain. Dr. Cabral also discusses why your body is forced to accumulate toxic fat, how to look out for signs of toxic fat, how to eliminate stored toxins in the body, and more!
2. After being diagnosed with Addison’s disease, type two diabetes, mass cell activation syndrome, and more in his late teens, Dr. Cabral used natural medicine to heal himself of these diseases. Learn more about Dr. Cabral’s journey.
3. When you are unable to process the excess toxins in your body, the toxins are sent into adipose tissue or adipocytes, which is your body fat. Learn more about toxic fat accumulation.
4. Learn about some of the signs of toxic fat, including the development of cellulite.
5. Learn about some of the first steps you can take to reduce your daily toxin exposure.
6. Dr. Cabral helps his patients eliminate stored toxins in their body by ramping up phase 1 and phase 2 detox, with 10 different tried and true products. Learn more about his process.
7. Find out about Dr. Cabral’s take on using binders.
8. Learn more about some of the things that can happen with the toxins in your body if you start rapidly losing weight.
9. You can learn more about Dr. Cabral and his work at equi.life  and stephencabral.com where you can find his new FREE book The Rain Barrel Effect

Wendy Myers: Hello, I’m Wendy Myers. Welcome to the Myers Detox Podcast. You can check out my work at myersdetox.com and on this podcast. We talk about everything related to heavy metal and chemical detoxification. We discuss how toxins are affecting your body, how to detox them safely, how you really can live a long, healthy life by implementing detoxification and adding it to your already healthy lifestyle. Just like what you’re already doing with diet, exercise and nutrition, detox needs to be a fundamental component of your health regime, too. Today we have my colleague, Dr. Stephen Cabral on the show. This is a really good show. We talk about how to address toxic fat accumulation, how toxins are contributing to cellulite and to weight gain. If you can’t lose that muffin top or you just find it impossible to lose weight, you’re going to really want to listen to this show. It’s really, really good.

Wendy Myers: We talk about why your body is forced to accumulate toxic fat. We’ll talk about the different types of fat and how to know what toxic fat looks like. I will then explore how to know if you have toxic fat and what can happen if you lose weight too rapidly. You can get this rush of toxins in your body because if you’re losing weight really rapidly, starving yourself, fasting or going on a low calorie diet, all the toxins stored in your fat starts releasing into your system. You can get really tired, fatigued and get headaches. That’s what part of the key to flu is, it is really toxins being released from your fat. We’ll also talk about how to eliminate stored toxins from the body. It’s a really, really good show. I know a lot of you guys listening to this show are concerned, and rightly so, about heavy metal and toxin accumulation.

Wendy Myers: I created a quiz at heavymetalsquiz.com where you can learn your relative body burden of toxins, simply by taking this easy quiz. Afterwards you get a free video series that is very extensive and talks about how to detox your body. Where do you start? How long does it take? I answer a lot of your frequently asked questions about detox. Go take it really quickly at heavymetalsquiz.com. Our guest today is Dr. Stephen Cabral. He is a Board Certified Doctor of Naturopathic Medicine and founder of the Cabral Wellness Institute and StephenCabral.com. At 17 years old, Dr. Steven Cabral was diagnosed with a life altering illness and given no hope for recovery. He suffered endlessly, every day, for many years. It was only after Stephen traveled all over the world and discovered how to combine ancient Ayurvedic healing practices with state-of-the-art Naturopathic and Functional Medicine, that he understood how to finally fully rebalance the body and re-energize it with life.

Wendy Myers: Today in Dr. Cabral’s online and Boston practice, he and his team have completed over 250,000 client appointments. He uses Functional Medicine, Lab Testing and Personalized Wellness plans to help people rebalance their mind and body, to recover from auto-immune, thyroid, fatigue, hormone, weight gain, digestive, childhood, mood, skin and dozens of other hard to treat health conditions. His mission is to help people understand that there’s always a reason why you have not achieved your ideal wellness or weight loss goals, and that you can and will get well again. I firmly believe that also. You can learn more about Dr. Cabral and his work Equi.life and at stephencabral.com. Stephen, thank you so much for joining us.

Stephen Cabral: It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Wendy Myers: Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your story? You have a really compelling background story about how you got into functional medicine.

Stephen Cabral: For me, being a natural health practitioner is a strange field to get into. To say when you’re eight years old, I want to become a natural health doctor of any type or practitioner. For me it was like with many others. When I was 17 years old, I got extremely sick and the difference with this, it was called an idiopathic disease. Which simply means that medical doctors or the best of the best in Boston, Massachusetts couldn’t figure out why I had swollen glands over my entire body. I ended up having blood sugar dysregulation and they just couldn’t pinpoint it. They passed me on from specialist to specialist. This went on for about two years. Think about the prime of your life, your senior year of high school when you’re taking your SATs and you’re trying to get ready for college, relationships, friends and all those great things. It was a very difficult time for me.

Stephen Cabral: So much so, I almost did not graduate because I had to leave school for a period of a few months. I was not able to keep up my education on my own because my body was so debilitated and I couldn’t control inflammation in my body. I had swollen glands all over my entire body. A couple of years later, fast forward, I ended up meeting a natural health practitioner. This was in the late nineties, so there was no real internet, I always say at least where I was in Bedford, Massachusetts. What I realized was there was a whole other world to health that didn’t have to do with just palliating symptoms, pharmaceuticals and blood work. I started to run things like the organic acids test, food sensitivity testing, adrenal based testing and when I found out all of the different imbalances in my body, I unfortunately took these to my PCP. They started running advanced blood work.

Stephen Cabral: That’s when I got diagnosed with actual diseases such as type two diabetes, Addison’s disease which is the inability to produce cortisol, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, what’s called mass cell activation syndrome and a lot of other issues on top of that. Then I got, like most people, prescribed a handful of pharmaceuticals. Lo and behold they worked, so I actually started to feel better. The problem was of course, I started reading about all of the different side effects. As a 19 year old kid, my life didn’t look like it was going to be too long. I wasn’t going to live that long if I continued down this path. That’s really what led me then to natural health. I can go on from there, but I was fortunate enough to be able to have a lot of great mentors along the way and be able to now go on and heal myself. I no longer have Addison’s disease, type two diabetes or anything. Actually every year that goes by, I always say I’m feeling healthier and younger than ever.

Wendy Myers: I can say the same thing too. I feel fantastic. I keep getting better and better and better. I love hearing stories like this. It’s such a testament to natural health and healing. You use detoxification in your practice as well, when you’re working with patients. I think that as a rare functional medicine practitioner, it’s looking at the toxic component and how that’s contributing to people’s symptoms.

Stephen Cabral: One of the reasons why they came about is, when I was doing my doctoral work as a doctor of naturopathic medicine, I preferred to do my internships overseas. The reason was, I had already seen about 100 practitioners and I know it seems like a ridiculous number, but I’d seen about two dozen or so different conventional medicine doctors and specialists. I went through literally everything from ear, nose and throat. I went to the best allergist and they put me through a battery of tests and then after that I went to see kinesiologists. I went to see… you name it. I went to see all these different practitioners and honestly, they all taught me something new, which was great, but none of them were able to put it all together. I was really looking for somebody that said, “There’s not one box you fit into,” because I clearly didn’t. I would get a little bit better and then I would relapse.

Stephen Cabral: I would get better for like six weeks, eight weeks or 12 weeks and then relapse again. I would have chronic sinusitis infections and chronic pneumonia. I just couldn’t regulate what’s called cytokine production, histamines and the inflammation in my body. It just kept wearing me down. I was reading hundreds of books a year and trying to figure this out because again the answers were there, I knew they were, I just couldn’t figure it out. I kept reading this book that my mentor wrote, Dr. Pete, and it really spoke to me. It was about combining Ayurvedic with functional medicine and that’s what she did. She was doing this in the early 2000s, which is rare, to combine Ayurvedic medicine with functional medicine.

Stephen Cabral: Once I met her, she combined at-home function medicine lab testing with Ayurvedic medicine, detoxification protocols and genetics and I got well. I got well within six months and I’d been trying for 10 years. After all that time, I finally just had it all put together. She’s certainly who I attribute that success to. Then I said, “I want to study more about Ayurvedic medicine.” I ended up doing three internships overseas, two in India and one in Sri Lanka. What I realized was, in Ayurvedic medicine and many of the Eastern based philosophies of medicine, it’s a subtractive process. You don’t really get better until you remove first and it’s because we have so many great nutritional supplements. We have so many great things that we can add to our body and a lot of it’s through biohacking, et cetera which I don’t love that term, but they don’t usually stick.

Stephen Cabral: You don’t get well until you empty that cup first, right? It’s hard to pour into an already full cup. In Ayurvedic medicine, you move through Panchakarma where you move through detoxification protocols that they’ve been using for over 6,000 years. It’s not dissimilar to traditional naturopathy. You would literally go out into the woods and you’d be doing forest bathing and cold water therapy, back then. All these different things to remove from the body, as you then begin to build it up. I learned from Ayurvedic medicine that oftentimes healing is a subtractive process while then also replacing your deficiencies. I took that to my practice and that actually was such a big part of it. Of course, not doing Panchakarma per se, but bringing in the functional medicine protocols that we now know so much about.

Wendy Myers: I want to talk today about toxic fat and weight gain, because I think so many people are overweight and it’s not their fault. I was in the same boat myself, where you think that if you just exercise more and eat less, then you’ll finally be able to lose weight. People do that, they starve themselves or work out for a couple hours a day and still the scale doesn’t budge as much as it should. People blame themselves, so I want to kind of dispel that myth and talk about toxic fat. What is toxic fat accumulation?

Stephen Cabral: You’re absolutely right. I want to make a point about that, that a lot of our practice is helping people with weight loss because weight loss is not to be viewed as something necessarily negative. Getting to a healthy body weight is actually one of the best things that you can do for overall wellness and anti-aging. In our practice, the number one thing we want to help people to do if they’re not already at a healthy weight, is to help them get to a healthy weight. A lot of the wellness issues will disappear as you’re doing the things that you need to do, in order to lose the weight properly, of course. Just like you said you can’t over diet and you can’t over exercise because when you do, your body’s actually getting to be more in that starvation state and you’re going to be at a lowered metabolic rate. We see it all the time in clinical practice, especially with women more so than men, their thyroid just starts to plummet. Their TSH starts to creep above a three and then a four. You see all these issues going on with the stress hormones they’re promoting, but not intentionally, by dropping their calories or making their fast a little bit too long.

Stephen Cabral: When we look at toxic fat though, my practice is about 75% or so females. This is more predominant in women and there’s biological reasons that we can talk about with estrogen dominance, as well as adipose tissue in general. When you look at it, a lot of women were coming in feeling puffy, swollen and holding a little bit more water.

Stephen Cabral: At the same time that this was creeping up, they were also feeling a little bit lower in mood and a little bit tired. They all went together. We started looking at this and said, “This is really interesting.” It’s not dissimilar to a lot of chronic illness that we see in other areas. In our practice we originally started using these functional medicine detoxes, over a decade ago. You had to use a lot of products back then because they didn’t combine them altogether, like they do now. We were seeing as a side effect of helping people with a lot of autoimmune issues, with these functional medicine detoxes, a massive weight loss too. What we realized was that this toxic fat, and we can go deeper into what it is, is really the accumulation not of excess calories in many cases. There’s over 100,000 manmade chemicals in the environment right now. That’s the minimum from the World Health Organization. The average person, and again, this is female based but men are not far behind at all. There were 126 different chemicals that a woman was exposed to before leaving the house in the morning. Just from household products, bath products, beauty products, cosmetics, et cetera.

Stephen Cabral: When you see that statistic, you look at it and you say, “That doesn’t seem like it’s that enormous of a number,” but it’s that these are man made chemicals that the body was never made to process and it’s not able to keep up with. There’s a lot of people out there that say, “You don’t need to detox, there’s no such thing, your liver does it all the time.” That’s cursory knowledge. That’s like the outside of the onion. Yes, your liver is always detoxing and we can get into that if you’d like. I’m sure you’ve explained this before because you have obviously a breadth of knowledge within this space, when you talk about it. People have to understand that our body is always detoxing, it’s what keeps us alive. However, there are hundreds of different microparticles that your liver is not able to detox and where do those go? They actually go into your blood and your body knows exactly what to do with them. It’ll move them into adipose tissue or adipocytes which is just your body fat. It does that because it stores them away, locks them away potentially forever, until that body fat is broken down.

Wendy Myers: People don’t realize it. Let’s say you’re working out and you have got that last 15 pounds that you just can’t lose. Your body will not let it go, it’s using that as a storage receptacle and it’s vital for you to not release all those toxins into your body, because it can redistribute in your brain or in your nervous system. Your body’s very, very intelligent. You’ve just got to start a way around your middle and your other body parts, and so part of weight loss is detoxification. Talk to us a little bit more in detail. What does this toxic fat look like, exactly? Is it different from a typical fat? There’s white fat and brown fat. Give us some of these distinctions.

Stephen Cabral: We call it toxic fat. You can actually look at an individual and you can actually see, is this subcutaneous fat? Is this the typical fat that a person may have? We’ll do a quick breakdown. Visceral fat, if we’re looking at that, would be looking at someone with more of a harder, potbelly type look, right? It’s protruding a little bit but it’s firm. You can’t really grab it, it’s that firm. That is one of the worst types of fat that you can have. That’s going to be fat around the actual essential organs, the internal organs and distributed through your muscle fiber tissue, as well. That, for sure, is one of the worst. Subcutaneous fat is if you were to roll over a little bit and crunch down, you might have a little bit of a roll of fat or a couple of rolls of fat there around the midsection.

Wendy Myers: Or three or four roles.

Stephen Cabral: It just depends, right? It all depends on what we need to lose at that moment in time. That can of course change. Then you’re also looking at cellulite. Cellulite is going to be more of this subcutaneous fat however, the actual structure has now changed from the fascia, that is essentially holding this subcutaneous fat in place. Oftentimes that cellulite is caused specifically by toxins. It swells the adipose tissue and it does not swell it uniformly. Along with the lack of exercise, oftentimes that can lead to greater amounts of cellulite. We’ve seen tremendous changes in cellulite with functional medicine detoxes, as well as body fat. 

Stephen Cabral: There is a lymphatic connection to this. Let’s say you’re wearing socks or you have a bra on or something like that. If you take it off and you see the line there, it can mean that there is this water. There’s this edema that your body is holding on to. Remember it’s not just body fat, it’s also the amount of water you’re holding onto from the inflammation caused by these toxins themselves. The toxins are both internal and external. I know we can get to that in a bit if you’d like, but all of these things begin to accumulate and cause inflammation. Essentially processes like you just spoke about before, where your body knows what to do with it. It has to move these either through the liver, through the kidneys which are going to come out through your urine, through your stool, through the sweat or you huff off a little bit through your lungs. If that’s not happening, it needs to put it somewhere safe which is the fat.

Wendy Myers: I think people don’t realize that. There’s a lot of people out there whose lymph is not moving and they can accumulate 10, 15 or even 20 pounds of this lymph fluid throughout their body. You’ve got to move, you’ve got to walk. Rebounding is great. I do massages on a regular basis. I do dry brushing and I do all kinds of things. I’m very, very highly aware of moving my lymph because it doesn’t just move on its own. You have to exercise and things like that. That can be part of what you think is you being overweight and it can just be this kind of blocked lymph fluid, so to speak. It can even get kind of the cottage cheese consistency as well. There are places that you can go to get this inert gas lymph treatments, to help get that lymph melting and flowing. You talked a little bit earlier about what causes toxic fat. Is there anything else that you want to add to that? What’s going on here or any specific toxins you want to talk about?

Stephen Cabral: I have a term that I often use and it’s used in functional medicine. It’s the Rain Barrel Effect. What happens is that most of us are able to deal with a small amount of these man-made toxins. Again, our bodies are not meant to process them but luckily we have a phase one and phase two liver detox system. As long as we’re getting the right nutrients, we’re able to move most of these through on a daily basis. When you actually look at the research and again, all of this is well-researched on PubMed and other publications, there seems to be a three to 5% increase every single year in organic pollutants. Organic makes it seem like it’s a good thing but organic is just basically outside in our environment or internal environment as well, and these begin to accumulate.

Stephen Cabral: Three to 5% on a small amount is not a big deal, but that accumulates every single year. If we’re looking at that, the accumulation happens over time although we are seeing it now more in teenagers, unfortunately. It used to not be something that we would see until late twenties at the earliest but now of course we are seeing it earlier. Of course, once you get to your thirties, forties and beyond, it becomes that much more difficult. Ayurveda has known for thousands of years that the Kapha body type, the body type that has a little bit thicker joints, typically have great hair, great skin, great nails, a great immune system but their body’s an accumulator. Those are the people where they have to be a little bit more careful with the carbohydrates.

Stephen Cabral: They have to exercise a little bit more where they might have friends who can eat all the carbs they want, barely exercise and they lose weight. Again, we have different body types so there’s pros and cons to both. If they accumulate more, they actually hold a bit more. What we like to make sure of is that that body type is specifically aware that detoxification is even more for them, since they’re more of an anabolic type than a catabolic type. A lot of people do need the data to back that up and so they’re saying, “I don’t know if I necessarily believe this.” I get it. I was the biggest skeptic for 10 years and the reason was that I tried everything and nothing seemed to work, in order to get well.

Stephen Cabral: The nice thing is it’s very difficult to refute data. Nor do I believe that you should refute data that is on your own body. You could actually run an environmental toxicity test right now. It’s a small amount of urine that you take first thing in the morning. It’s just 10 milliliters of urine, you can run it through the lab and you can ship that in. You can actually look at a lot of these organic pollutants. These would be things like xylenes, volatile organic compounds and different pesticides for the environment. That’s a really nice lab to run. I’ll get to the statistics overall, in case you don’t want to spend the money on those labs. You can also run heavy metal labs right at home. You’re able to just use a small amount of blood from just a little finger prick, that’s it.

Stephen Cabral: Like you would take for a glucometer or from a urine strip. You’re able to look at lead, mercury or aluminum which are a lot of the most invasive ones in the environment, the same with cadmium. These directly affect the thyroid and your body’s ability to burn calories and burn body fat which allows for more accumulation. That could be looked at as toxic fat as well, since if the toxins weren’t there, then they wouldn’t be causing inflammation at all. It also would be causing things like the fluoride buildup, cadmium buildup or bromines that directly affect the thyroid.

Wendy Myers: What are some of the easiest and first steps to reduce people’s daily toxin exposure?

Stephen Cabral: This is an amazing study. You may have already shared it before but it was by the Environment’s Working Group. What they found was that in unborn children, they actually looked at fetal cord blood. They only tested for 400 toxins. Out of the 400 toxins, they averaged 232 for each one of those 10 children or 10 unborn children. We already know that these toxins are coming in from our mothers, unknowingly from them, into our bodies. We were born already with some level of toxicity. The main toxins that we need to be aware of are the things that we expose ourselves to the most often, that’s typically what I say.

Stephen Cabral: It’s so difficult to actually be so careful, that you’re worried all the time about being exposed to all these different toxins. What I always say is you need to look at the things that you do on a routine, daily basis. The most important thing is you have to look at clean water because we keep seeing it over and over. It’s now no longer an anomaly that this city pops up. All of a sudden they’ve let in their water, all of a sudden there’s pharmaceuticals in their water. I write about that and I talk about that. It’s really, really important. Water filters are one of the first things that we do want to look at but also shower filters. You might have fluoride in your water which you can debate if it’s good for your teeth or not, but certainly it’s not good to swallow. When you swallow it, it destroys or begins to break down a lot of the gut bacteria, along with the chlorine, but also it affects the thyroid. As part of the halogen group, when you take in fluoride you’re displacing iodine and iodide, which is needed in order to create active thyroid molecules.

Stephen Cabral: We want to be careful with our water and we want to be careful with our food. The easiest thing to do is follow the Clean 15 & The Dirty Dozen. If you can’t purchase all organic then you’re going to want to stick to the Clean 15. These are vegetables or fruit that can be purchased non-organic, or conventional, because they’re not sprayed as heavily or you can peel away the skin. For the dirty dozen, either don’t eat those at all or purchase them organic. There’s kind of no in-between. Meaning they’re so toxic that you don’t want to eat them, even though it’s a fruit or vegetable, if you can’t get them organic. That’s a good place to start. Also, cooking utensils. If people are using aluminum pans, I would recommend switching over to a stainless, ceramic or glass so you’re not getting the microscopic particles of aluminum. Don’t use aluminum foil. Those types of things can be really beneficial. Then, of course, we can talk about bath products and shampoo, if you’d like.

Wendy Myers: How do you go about detoxing your patients? How do you eliminate stored toxins from the bodies?

Stephen Cabral: We do a true functional medicine detox which is ramping up phase one and phase two liver detox. Previously, in my practice, this was over 10 years ago, I used to use around 10 different products. It’d be NAC, it would be a good fiber-based product, it would be a lot of different things. Now, I formulate for a company named EquiLife, but you can use other brands as well. There’s no doubt about that, but they all should do the same thing. The first phase is a lot of the B vitamins, it’s a lot of the minerals that you need, selenium, zinc and all of your B vitamins should be in there. That’s just the basis. What happens is your body breaks down a lot of these fat soluble toxins that are coming in and changes them into what’s called intermediate metabolites.

Stephen Cabral: The problem is this, a lot of people are getting in a good amount of vitamins and minerals every day. They might be taking a good functional medicine, activated multi or something like that. The problem is people are not getting in enough of the sulfur-based amino acids. When they don’t get those, they actually change them into an intermediate metabolite, think of it as almost a free radical. It creates a lot of inflammation in the body. It doesn’t have a home yet and it can’t be excreted that easily. Your body knows how to do this but it needs what’s called sulfur. Sulfur-based amino acids. It uses cruciferous vegetables, that’s a big part of it. Broccoli, cauliflower, bok choy and these types of things, which people are not eating a lot of, and need even more if you’re exposed to a lot of these toxins. You can get it through taurine, N-acetylcysteine which they’re actually looking at banning right now believe it or not. Glutathione, glutamine assisting all the different precursors to essentially glutathione, that helps then make it water-soluble, so that you can easily excrete it through your stool, urine or through sweat.

Wendy Myers: Yeah. There’s so many different nutrients you need to take to detox. I think vitamin E is super important also. It helps to recycle glutathione which is the master antioxidant. There’s a lot of different substances you can take in addition to chelators or binders, and all kinds of things like that. Do you use those in your practice too?

Stephen Cabral: A lot of people are big on binders. I am not big on binders except for short-term use. For example, my daughter got sick after we went out to dinner. We don’t know what it was, assuming it was bacteria. Right away she’s getting binders. She’s getting vitamin C which recycles glutathione just like you spoke about, it’s a powerful antioxidant which helps free radicals. Get the bowels moving a little bit as well, with magnesium and then we’re using binders to try to bind up whatever she ate. The problem with binders that’s really never talked about is that one, if it’s charcoal it’s carcinogenic. That’s a big part of it. The second is that it’s binding up a lot of other nutrients as well. I use binders on a remote protocol, I use it on a parasite protocol for an intestinal cleanse. I will use it for specific other reasons as well. However, I much prefer to keep the bowels moving once, twice or three times a day and then use the nutrients that we just spoke about to get that detox process happening. Again, in special cases, I’ll use more binders as well. I’m not against them, it’s just a lot of people talk about binders on a daily basis and I just get a little worried with that, with what else it’s binding up.

Wendy Myers: Absolutely. You have to be careful, you have to have everything in moderation for sure. Let’s talk about when people are losing weight, what can happen? If you’re losing weight rapidly, which for a lot of people, that’s their goal. They’re fasting or whatever they’re doing. All these toxins start coming out of their fat. What should people do in that case? What is your recommendation to be aware of when you’re rapidly losing weight?

Stephen Cabral: This is also one of the biggest overlooked parts with weight loss and one reason why people often don’t feel very well, when they’re losing a lot of weight, especially rapidly. It is because any excess toxins are being stored in your body fat or adipose tissue and potentially in your brain. Your brain is predominantly fat as well. When we look at this, when you break down body fats, you are essentially releasing stored energy. You’re releasing all those stored calories to be used now as fuel. A lot of people doing keto, low carb or whatever it might be, don’t realize that toxins from years ago are coming out. They found DDT in people’s sweat, from fat loss from detoxification. DDTs are still in our environment, but it’s been banned for about 40 plus years.

Stephen Cabral: I work a lot with certain elite athletes. Some of them, not athletes that I’ve worked with, but athletes that I know have tested positive for banned substances even though they haven’t used those in years. The reason is, they will drop 20 pounds in 24 hours. Yes, most of that is water, however some of it is body fat. They don’t have a whole lot of body fat left by the end of that cutting period. We know they didn’t take those banned substances in the last year or two, but they were stored in their body fat. They’re not looking at that part of it because they’re being released.

Stephen Cabral: Here’s the big problem though, you can end up with what’s called a Herxheimer reaction, from a release in all of these stored toxins. Your body wasn’t able to deal with them in the first place and now you forced them into your blood. When adipose tissue is essentially broken down, what you’re looking at is all the different heavy metals, PCBs, fluoride and whatever’s been stored is now coming out into your bloodstream. Now your bloodstream has to say, where are we going to put these? We can’t really put them in body fat because blood sugar is low and most likely, insulin’s low. We need to use them for fuel, now we have to process these things to the liver again. The liver is congested, it is not a great word for it, but it is simply not able to keep up so your body now has toxins in the blood.

Stephen Cabral: If you want to kind of put a name on, what is this toxin? We’ll think of it as like PCBs that we’ve heard about before, DPA’s, phthalates, sodium lauryl sulfate, fluoride or chloride. Think of any of those things that’s now in your bloodstream. What happens is the body creates a lot of inflammation and free radicals. Free radicals are created from that position. They found, again, this is well studied, this is on PubMed. What the body does is it ramps up its own internal production of antioxidants. Superoxide dismutase, it looks at producing more glutathione but how does it do that? It only does that if it has the raw material. Again, when someone’s losing weight, one of the safest and best ways to lose weight is actually on a functional medicine detox because you’re getting the nutrients that are supplied for your liver while you’re losing the weight at the same time. It works really well. If not, again, you can end up with really bad fatigue, headaches, brain fog, low mood, et cetera.

Wendy Myers: I had a girlfriend that lost 110 pounds. I actually had her on the podcast many, many years ago. She did a 600 calorie a day diet and lost weight very rapidly. She developed a cyst at the base of her spine and she had to have it surgically removed. I told her that cyst is how the body stores toxins because it’s just trying desperately to find some way to put these toxins somewhere. It was really very painful for her. I think her doctor probably had no idea that it was full of toxins but it could be very problematic to remove surgically, if they burst in the body, and then release all these toxins back into the body.

Stephen Cabral: Absolutely. That is one of the big ones. Your skin, oftentimes, will show you what’s going on internally. Whether it be skin rashes, acne, psoriasis, eczema, rosacea, starting to get dandruff or dry scalp on the top of the head. What looks like sores on the edge of the mouth but not cold sore, that’s a lack of vitamins there. The skin, the external, will show you oftentimes what’s going on internally. We have to heed that advice. Again, we can’t use all sorts of different potions and creams and things like that to get rid of it. There’s nothing wrong with using nice natural oils and items on the skin, however, internally is where we are going to need to focus.

Wendy Myers: How can someone work with you, do your toxic fat detox or functional medicine detox? How do people find you?

Stephen Cabral: You can find that heavy metal toxicity test, the environmental toxicity test or the mold toxicity tests at a website which is equi.life. That’s essentially our virtual practice. We work with people all over the world. We are able to ship those labs, which typically you would need a doctor to sign off on. You still do, we sign off on it and send protocols all over the world. We can, of course, do consultations with anyone, anywhere and then the actual protocols like our functional detox are on the same websites. If people are looking for more information, I wrote a book called The Rain Barrel Effect. That’s essentially an intro into the top 10 toxins in the environment and then how to use something that I called, The De-stress Protocol, to begin to rebalance the body, whether it’s chronic illness, weight loss or aging based issues.

Wendy Myers: Fantastic. Dr. Cabral, thank you so much for coming on the show. It’s so interesting. I love talking to other functional medicine practitioners about detoxification. There’s always so many little pearls of wisdom there. Thanks for coming on the show. Any closing words or thoughts about something we haven’t talked about yet?

Stephen Cabral: I would just say that I’m really happy that you move this topic and subject forward, for everyone out there. The reason is that this is one of the most overlooked areas in terms of getting your health back. You can do everything in your power to balance hormones, your adrenals or your thyroid but if you don’t work that subtractive process, if you don’t empty first before adding more, oftentimes it is not the answer. I just appreciate all the work you’re doing and thanks again for having me on the show.

Wendy Myers: Thank you. I love what I do. I love teaching people about toxins. I agree that a lot of the reason these different hormonal and body systems break down, is toxins and heavy metals interfering in those processes, from functioning properly. It’s a very important component of health and anti-aging. I’m ready to be talking a lot more about anti-aging on the show and how we go about that. Dr. Cabral thanks for coming on the show and everyone thanks for tuning in to the Myers Detox Podcast. I wake up every day just so happy to be able to learn more about the body and detoxification, and share that information with you and all of our experts that come on the show. Thanks so much for tuning in. I appreciate you taking the time you share with me, every week. I’ll talk to you guys very soon.