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Transcript
- 04:05 How Wendy Myers got into Detoxing
- 11:45 Why do people need to detox? Why is it so important today?
- 14:40 Nutritional Balancing Science Explained
- 21:07 What does a hair mineral analysis reveal?
- 30:04 Part 2: Analysis of Leigh Lowery’s Hair Test Results
- 1:08:12 Significant Mineral Ratios
Wendy Myers: Welcome to the Live to 110 podcast. I’m your host Wendy Myers, you can find me on myersdetox.com. Here is my co-host, the tough as nails, General Leigh Lowery.
Leigh Lowery: Hi you guys. I’m excited to be here with you all today.
Wendy Myers: Today Leigh and I are going to have a little bit of fun. We are going to demonstrate how to do a Hair Mineral Analysis. That’s a protocol that I’m certified in. It’s a program called Nutritional Balancing that I’m going to put Leigh on. It’s what I put all my clients on and we’re going to use a hair mineral analysis as a basis to design her personal program. So the hair test will show the diet she should be on, the supplements that she should be on and it also incorporates detoxification protocols and lifestyle changes.
Leigh Lowery: So she will be cutting my hair today. Ha ha!
Wendy Myers: Yeah. So we’re going to be cutting a little tiny section of her hair right at the base of her skull and that’s going to show us a little bit of info, a little bit of insight into what’s going on inside Leigh.
Leigh Lowery: So let me just say the disclaimer before we start. Please keep in mind that this program is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or health condition and it is not a substitute for professional medical advice. The Live to 110 podcast is solely informational in nature. Please consult your health care practitioner before engaging in any treatment or fitness regimen that we suggest on this show.
Wendy Myers: And if you are interested in shedding a few pounds, you can download my Live to 110 by Weighing Less e-Guide© on the site myersdetox.com. Just go to the big welcome graphic on the front page and enter your email and you’ll immediately be sent the free 35-page guide that is based on the latest science on weight loss.
Leigh Lowery: Ok. I have a question for you Wendy. How is the book coming along first of all?
Wendy Myers: It’s amazing. It’s almost going to be up on the site. It’ll probably be up on the site by the time this podcast airs and I’m really excited about it. This is my first book. It’s called the Modern Paleo Survival Guide. It’s basically obviously about the Paleo diet but it’s a more modern version that’s based on the latest science because a lot of stuff has transpired. A lot of research since Loren Cordain published one of the first books on Paleo called The Paleo Diet.
My book is also about incorporating healthy lifestyle tips that are in line with how our bodies have evolutionarily been designed since caveman times. So we kind of need to get back to basics, how we used to live ages ago. It’s also, more importantly, and the subject of today’s podcast, about detoxification. Because you can be eating the best Paleo diet, following it perfectly, living the caveman lifestyle, going to bed at 8PM every night and doing all these healthy lifestyle things. But if you are not on a life-long detoxification plan, it’s not likely you’re going to live a long disease-free life. That’s reality of modern life today. So my book very much touches on the three essential components of health which are: diet, lifestyle, and detoxification.
Leigh Lowery: Wow. So how did you personally get into detoxing?
Wendy Myers: Well one day, I got my hands on a copy of the China Study stupidly and I at that point, decided I had to go vegetarian and then I went vegan. Then I spent about two years doing that. At the end of that 2 years, I did not feel well. I couldn’t think, I had brain fog, my energy level totally had decreased, my memory was horrible, emotionally I was depressed and then I was going into rages, my poor husband I abused him so badly. And I realized now that was copper toxicity because many people on a vegetarian and vegan diet, become copper toxic and it becomes worse and worse and worse. And there’s a blog post on my website called Copper Toxicity Syndrome if anyone wants to learn more about that.
So I was copper toxic clearly. I got so ill at one point, I went to the doctor. I had $4000 worth of tests done, and I found out that I had adrenal fatigue. I had thyroid insufficiency, I had B12 deficiency, vitamin D deficiency, I had anemia and all these health issues were combining to make me feel like crap and I was having trouble losing weight as well. I was going to bed hungry every night. I was working out like 68 hours a week and it just wasn’t working. Nothing was working. Who am I? This is not who I am. I want my old metabolism back, my old brain, my old energy level, this optimistic feeling I had when I was young, I wanted that back. And clearly these health conditions did not develop solely as a result of the vegetarian diet. These things take years to develop, the adrenal fatigue and thyroid insufficiency. But the vegan diet was the nail on the coffin in my health. And I’m very thankful that I did try that diet because it brought my health conditions to a head, to a point where I had to take action and do something about them so I’m thankful for that.
But when I went to the doctor, I had all these problems; her solution was to put me on a hormone replacement therapy to replace my low estrogen and testosterone levels and to put me on thyroid replacement therapy which was putting me on syntheroid basically to replace my thyroid hormones. And I thought, “Hmm no! I don’t think I’m going to do that.” Because I had read so much about how new studies show that hormone replacement therapy causes cancer. And this is not surprising because we know when you have too much estrogen in your body, which most hormone replacement therapy causes too much estrogen imbalance that leads to cancer. That is one of the reasons why we get cancer. It’s just too much of an estrogenic state in our body. So that set me on a search for other answers, alternative ways. I thought I just don’t want to supplement the hormones my glands are making, I want to heal my glands. I want my thyroid to make the hormones it’s supposed to make. How do I do that?
So it took me so long. It took me probably six months of intense reading. Reading all kinds of books and websites, all these stuff and I finally was just writing my blog and I was researching a blog post on infrared saunas, and I happened upon Dr. Wilson’s website drlwilson.com. I was reading about it there and he started talking about Nutritional Balancing and how it heals health conditions in the adrenals and thyroid and I thought, “Hmm, that’s interesting.” And it looked like a pretty comprehensive program and so I called up a practitioner in my area, mine was Nikki Moses at mosesnutrition.com. And it was $250 for the test and I did the test and I was skeptical at first how a hair test is going to do a whole lot for my health. But I started the program, I took a leap of faith, and I took all the supplements that were recommended to me based on my hair mineral analysis and my health improved dramatically. My physical and mental health today is dramatically different than it was two years ago when I started this program I mean like night and day.
And for you too Leigh, I’m very excited for what this program is going to be able to do for you. One, we’re going to do a hair test today to show where her health is at, what heavy metal toxicities she may have and what mineral deficiencies she has and what the implication those have for her health.
Leigh Lowery: It’ll be really interesting to see how they correlate with what’s been going on with me. I feel pretty good overall but I think I do have some symptoms. I think everyone has little symptoms that we just don’t pay attention to because they don’t completely interrupt your life but you’d rather live without them so I’m really excited to see how they correlate with some of the mineral deficiencies and things that might be toxic in my body right now.
Wendy Myers: Yeah because you were just filling out the little symptom form and you’re like, “Oh, I have the bruising and some spider veins and things like that.” And I thought, “Oh, that’s copper toxicity.”
Leigh Lowery: Yeah. Get rid of those spider veins! If I can stop having spider veins, I would be thrilled. That would be great.
Wendy Myers: And the bruising is caused by copper toxicity and the spider veins are weakened veins. Those can be caused by zinc deficiency because zinc is used to repair our veins. For me, I had so many little things resolved on this program. When I first started, I wasn’t sleeping well. I was waking up every night for years in the middle of the night. I’d literally be up from 1 to 3 hours. I’d be up from 2am to maybe 4 or 5am. Luckily, my husband was supporting me at the time. I didn’t have to work. Thank God or I’d just be dead.
Leigh Lowery: That will stress you out just being up those hours in the night. I can’t even imagine.
Wendy Myers: It is because cumulatively, it really impacts your health, your mood and everything in your health. Immediately within a month, boom! I was sleeping well. I just had a calcium deficiency. Calcium and magnesium are the minerals that really relax your body and then so many little things cleared up. I don’t get canker sores anymore, I don’t have sensitive teeth anymore because my teeth had been totally mineralized on this program. It just really does so many things not to mention that my adrenal fatigue and thyroid insufficiency have healed for the most part. They’re not completely healed. It takes time to heal those health issues but for the most part, I feel so much better. My brain fog has cleared to a large degree. I still have my days thought. Ha ha. Where I just could not find a word or I just lose my train of thought but it’s getting a lot better. My memory has improved drastically. So basically, that’s what we’re going to do today. We’re going to do a little hair test on Leigh.
Leigh Lowery: It’s exciting. Is it good for the average person who is out there that they need to detox? Does everyone need to detox?
Wendy Myers: Yes. Everyone today, it’s just depends to what degree, has toxic levels of aluminum, cadmium, arsenic, lead, mercury, nickel. You know copper is an essential mineral but many people have very high levels of copper like I did when I first started the program because I had been vegetarian.
Leigh Lowery: How do we get copper? If so many people are having these high levels, where’s copper coming into our system at such a high level?
Wendy Myers: Well, it’s coming from copper water pipes. It’s in tap water because copper is very good at killing bacteria so they actually add it to the tap water and that means people don’t think of it as toxic. It’s in a lot of food. It’s in soy. It is in avocados. It’s in chocolate which is my personal favorite. Ha ha.
Leigh Lowery: Maybe that’s where I’m getting so much copper. We’ll find out.
Wendy Myers: It’s in organ meats. It’s very very high in organ meats except for heart so if you are copper toxic, I tend to tell people even if they’re on a Paleo diet, to lay off the liver and other organ meats until their copper levels normalize. So I don’t personally eat it even though I want to, I read so much about how healthy it is but it’s not right for me at this time until my copper levels even out. There are so many things in our environment. Beans and nuts, soy as well and these are all vegetarian proteins so this is one of the reasons why people get lots of copper accumulated but it’s also; more importantly, from low zinc levels.
Everyone has low zinc and the reason they do is because we’ve been told for decades to not eat red meat. Red meat’s bad for our health, saturated fat is bad, it causes high cholesterol, BS ok! The latest research does not show this. It just does not jive. Eating red meat does not cause high cholesterol and heart disease so we put that to rest. So because people are trying to be healthy and not eating red meat, they have low zinc levels because red meat is full of zinc, so are shellfish, and zinc is also found in very small amounts in pumpkin seeds or pepitas. But unfortunately because we’re zinc deficient, and since zinc opposes copper, we have too much copper. So that’s the long version. Ha ha.
Leigh Lowery: Great. I love it. So tell me now, we go to the solution and that’s really the Nutritional Balancing Science. Can you explain to me and everyone else out there what that is?
Wendy Myers: Before I do that, I forgot one thing. Another reason people need to detox is because there are a 100,000 environmental chemicals in the world today. Because of industrial dumping and manufacturing, there are so many chemicals. The EPA has done studies and established that we have over 700 chemicals on average in our body. These are coming from our personal care products; they’re in the air, food, and water. You cannot escape them no matter what you do. We also are getting heavy metals from our air, food and water as well. So this is why people need to do a life-long, comprehensive detoxification program like Nutritional Balancing Science.
What this program is, is it’s a program that was developed by Dr. Paul Eck about 40 years ago and he was a brilliant biochemist that did about 100,000 different hair tests and correlated them to health conditions. So he kind of cracked the code in what hair test will show when someone has a certain health condition like adrenal fatigue or thyroid function. The test shows these health conditions and it correlates other things too as well and he also figured out; because he’s a mad scientist, he loved studying minerals and their effects in the body and whatnot and heavy metals’ effects in the body. And so he learned through supplementation and other tricks, how to balance the body’s biochemistry to the point where when all of your minerals are balanced, you enjoy a perfect state of health. You enjoy boundless energy like you had when you were young. You can have a disease-free life, you can heal health conditions. At the very least, you can improve them.
Some conditions like neuropathy or that neurological damage is very impossible to reverse, it could be reversed a little bit but those are the health conditions that tend to be kind of resistant to help with Nutritional Balancing Science. And so that begs the idea that you want to start thinking about your health and working on your health to improve it before you get really sick. You want to start working today before your get sick. So Dr. Eck worked with Dr. Lawrence Wilson who is the main proponent today of Nutritional Balancing Science and he spent about 14 years working with Dr. Paul Eck and kind of trained under him and learned the whole science and now he continues to develop it. You can go on his website drlwilson.com. He’s got 900 articles on his site about toxicity and every imaginable health condition, about Nutritional Balancing. And you can go on my site too I have lots of stuff about Nutritional Balancing as well.
So basically, Dr. Wilson is the main proponent today. He personally looks at every single hair test, every hair mineral analysis and recommends the supplements that person should be taking based on their medications, their diet, and their hair test. It’s all overseen by a medical doctor. So what the program essentially does, what it entails is diet, lifestyle, supplements, and detoxification protocols. So someone is going to work on their diet. The diet is basically eating meat which is very mineral rich, and lots of cooked vegetables which are very very mineral-rich. You take about 7 to 8 supplements that are all designed specifically for your hair mineral analysis. They’re based on your test and we do detox protocols like infrared saunas and coffee enemas which you can find articles on my site in regard to that, lots of stuff on infrared saunas and coffee enemas, podcasts as well because those are extremely important detox protocols. And then we adjust lifestyles as well like sleeping, exercising, resting, meditating and things of that nature.
Leigh Lowery: I really like it because I like the sound of it. I’m excited to do it because it’s not a one-shoe-fits-all, one-size-fits-all. I think in so many experiences I’ve had, I’ve had somebody come to me with supplementation and say, “Here’s the magic pack. You’ve got your calcium, you’ve got your magnesium.” But it’s not a personalized look at my specific health. It sounds great. They tell me my cellular health is going to be perfect so I’ll be getting everything I need out of the supplements that my foods aren’t giving me but really how can they know that? That’s what sounds amazing to me.
Wendy Myers: Yeah you really need to know what’s going on inside the body. You need to know your mineral levels to be able to give you what you need because some people need more calcium than others. Everyone needs calcium. There’s all this BS going around about how we shouldn’t be supplementing calcium. There are these new studies out. I don’t buy them for one second because it’s insane. What we need is bio-available calcium. What most people are supplementing with are bad forms of calcium that we don’t absorb very well or they’re eating pasteurized dairy products which deforms the calcium in it. It changes it into a form that’s bio-unavailable, that we don’t use. For me, my first hair test, I had really high calcium levels and all these stuff was just deposit in my joints, in my tissues. I had really stiff muscles, I had achy stiff joints. There was this calcification in my tissues. My body was just trying to get rid of it however it could: dumping it in the hair and dumping it in the body. But when I started supplementing bio-available calcium, my calcium levels came down on my hair test.
Leigh Lowery: Wow. That is really interesting. I’m interested because I had a hip fracture back in 2007. I was pretty young and so I’ve had some things in my life along my path and journey that don’t make sense and I’m excited to see if we can make some sense of it.
Wendy Myers: That’s pretty profound that you had an injury like that that your hip broke. So that’s a sign. Maybe you have some weaknesses. Certainly there’s some blunt force traumas no matter how strong your bones are they’re going to cave but this program, because you’re taking so many minerals, it just totally mineralizes your body, every aspect of your body not just your bones. So it’s really really profound.
Leigh Lowery: So we are going to cut my hair and do this little hair mineral analysis. I’m actually going to have you take a picture of it and I’m going to put it on my Facebook page later just so people can see how big the chunk is. It’s not that big. Then can you tell me exactly what we are going to see? What does it show?
Wendy Myers: Yeah. There’s going to be Leigh’s hair mineral analysis posted on the blog post. Did I mention that, Leigh? Ha ha ha!
Leigh Lowery: Oh no! I’m excited. We’ve got to take some pics.
Wendy Myers: Yeah there’ll be her hair test posted on the blog post to this podcast so you will see exactly what we’re talking about and you can look at it. On the first part of the show we’re going to cut her hair then we’ve got to wait a couple weeks to get the results back and so the second part of the show which we’re going to record later will be reading her results. You could be sitting right there for the campfire-side storytelling of a clue into Leigh’s health.
Leigh Lowery: It’s not as exciting as maybe the results show for The Voice but in the same category for me.
Wendy Myers: You could look at her hair test on the blog post and follow along with the reading of the results and interpretation.
Leigh Lowery: I’m so excited!
Wendy Myers: So right now, let’s cut! Sit closer to the mirror and then just hold up some of the back of your hair and I will cut the rest.
Leigh Lowery: Oh so exciting.
Wendy Myers: Hold up. I’m going to be cutting her hair right on the very back of her head at the base of the skull. You don’t notice it at all. It’s maybe a width of the hair that’s about the width of a pen so to speak.
Leigh Lowery: It’s not that bad.
Wendy Myers: No its’ not too bad at all. Let me just get a nice little chunk here. I might have to cut two chunks. Ha ha ha.
Leigh Lowery: Oh. That sounds like fun.
Wendy Myers: Well, you can cut chunks from two different sides of the hair. You can cut it from different areas if you need to. Basically what the hair test shows is, it shows your calcium levels, your magnesium, your copper levels, your sodium potassium, your toxic metals like arsenic and lead. So you got a nice little chunk there.
Leigh Lowery: Yeah, I can’t wait for my hairdresser to see my chunk.
Wendy Myers: You want to take a picture of it? Ha ha ha.
Leigh Lowery: Yeah. Let me take a picture of my chunk.
Wendy Myers: We’re going to cut another chunk just to make sure we have enough.
Leigh Lowery: Do you just send that little portion that you cut? You cut the whole strand but you actually send the portion that’s closest to the roots.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. We just send the first inch of the hair because that inch shows what’s going on that’s been dumped into the hair the last 3 months.
Leigh Lowery: I have thin fine hair which is the funniest.
Wendy Myers: That’s why I thought maybe since your hair is thin, you have to have 1.1 grams of hair so just to be on the safe side, I’m going to cut a little bit of extra so that we don’t get the call saying we have to send more hair. Your results are delayed. I know you want them so badly. Also what the hair test is going to show is all of your heavy metals. You don’t have to worry if you went out drinking one night if it’s going to affect the hair test results or whatnot, whatever you’re doing that’s bad but it’s going to show the last three months of any kind of stress patterns.
If you’re super stressed out, that will show on the hair test. Like if you have a family member who passed away or if you’ve had surgery, or any kind of really stressful event, that will show on your hair test because it shows certain stress patterns. It’s hard to explain but we’ll be explaining it more when we get Leigh’s hair test results.
Leigh Lowery: I’m excited because I told her some of my symptoms and I’ll just share them a little bit with the audience. I have had some strange bruising and some nightmares, staying up at night a little bit and lulls and I would say lethargy. I had almost lethargy at times that feels a little bit like depression from time to time. And lastly, those ugly spider veins which I think my mom gave me but I’m finding out that genetics aren’t the only thing here.
Wendy Myers: Yeah I mentioned to Leigh that we are not a victim of our genetics. There’s a new study of genetics called epigenetics where we’re finding out that we’re not just a victim of our genes. We’re not going to get the exact same diseases of our parents because diet and lifestyle and environment play a tremendous role in turning on or turning off genes. In destroying DNA or building DNA up. In enhancing cell replication or hindering that process so if you have developed healthier lifestyle habits and diet than your parents, you may or may not develop those health conditions. Only 2-3% of cancers are hands down you’re-going-to-get-them-no-matter-what. There are some people, for whatever reason, they are going to fall victim to cancer but the rest of it, just because your father had cancer doesn’t mean that you will too.
Like for me when my father died from cancer, that kicked me into gear into getting answers. How do I not go out like that? I do not want to end up with cancer. This program is the exact, perfect cancer-prevention protocol because you eat a species appropriate diet if you will. You take the supplements that you are personally missing. You do detoxification protocols to detox all the chemicals that are destroying our bodies. Our bodies are so overloaded today. Our livers are overloaded and our kidneys. It needs assistance with doing the infrared saunas and coffee enemas. But coffee enemas are optional. I know some of you guys out there are going to be like, “Oh, hell no. I’m not doing that.” They are optional but highly recommended. Every person and client that I suggest do them that tries them, gets totally into them because they make you feel so good.
Leigh Lowery: I’m going to try it.
Wendy Myers: We ask you to sleep more and just slow down more. Slow your lifestyle down because most people are just going going going. They’re doing way too much and when you’re in a stressed out state, you cannot detox. You have to be in a relaxed state like when you’re sleeping in order for the body to go into a state where you can detox. If you’re stressed all the time, you build up toxins even more than normal. That is why there is a nearly 50% cancer rate not to mention, the auto-immune and heart disease and the strokes, the high blood pressure and diabetes and all these other things that we’re afflicted with. They’re completely preventable. You just have to balance your body’s biochemistry. That’s it for today’s show. We’re going to read Leigh’s hair test results on part 2.
Wendy Myers: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to part 2 of reading Leigh Lowery’s hair test. Are you excited?
Leigh Lowery: I’m kind of nervous. Ha ha ha!
Wendy Myers: Everyone gets kind of freaked out when they’re about to get their hair test results, but it’s fun. It’s very informative and I really find it fills in a lot of the blanks for people that they’ve been missing from their physician, answers they’re not getting from their doctor, or they’re not really able to piece together the pieces of the puzzle on the Internet. It really answers a lot of questions for people. This is a really great tool. And if you guys want to understand what the hell I’m talking about, you can look at Leigh’s hair test. You can find her hair graph on the blog post of this podcast. It’s called “Leigh Lowery Gets Her Hair Test Results” on myersdetox.com. That way you can follow along and understand what I’m saying and referencing it.
So basically, what we’re going to start out with is looking at these first four minerals. You’ll see the calcium, magnesium, sodium and potassium. Those are our stress indicators. They indicate basically our stress reaction. They show whether we have adrenal fatigue or not. Basically you’re showing a really good pattern here. We’re looking for a pattern that shows our stress levels. It’s hard to get it into on this podcast but it’ll show basically Leigh’s has a step-down pattern, a very good pattern to have. She also is a slow metabolizer. She has a slowed metabolism which is normal. Most people do have a slowed metabolism once they hit 30. It can even happen even younger. Today people are getting really toxic so our metabolisms, our adrenals and our thyroid are really kind of slowing down. We’re not able to get rid of toxins as quickly in our body and it’s just this vicious cycle. It’s easier to gain weight. We become sicker and sicker and it just continues.
Leigh Lowery: I knew it. Ha ha.
Wendy Myers: You find if you gain weight easier than when you were younger. Guess what? You have a slowed metabolism and it’s pretty much the norm. Most people have a slower metabolism than they did when they were younger. This program speeds it up. You can get your metabolism back to where it’s supposed to be by healing your adrenals and thyroid. That’s actually the reason why I’m on this program ha ha ha ha ha.
Leigh Lowery: Its’ like you’re going to hear things like, “You’re this toxic and that toxic.” But if you can tell me that I can possibly make my metabolism increase and start burning fat then I’m down!
Wendy Myers: The second I heard that, let me pop these pills and suck those down every day happily. So basically, first we’re going to look at your calcium levels. It’s 104 and that’s pretty high. We want it down to this 40 level. It is pretty high. It’s not as high as I’ve seen. I’ve had some people in 250 level so it’s not that bad. It’s kind of around where I started. We want to see you down at that gray bar but what that means is that you’ve got bio-unavailable calcium building up in your joints, arteries and soft tissues.
What this means is that you’ve got all this bio-unavailable calcium that’s from pasteurized dairy, just from other sources maybe poor quality supplements. Lots of additives in foods today have poor quality calcium in them and even though they sound like they’re really healthy with vitamins added. All those stuff builds up. Your body can’t use it and it shuttles it away into your tissues, in your arteries, in your joints just to get it out of your body. It can’t use it. So what this program does is, even though you have high calcium, we supplement with bio-available calcium and you’ll see these levels start to come down back to normal. That’s what I do. I had really high calcium. I take calcium every single day of really high quality form and it’s coming down.
Leigh Lowery: That’s so interesting. You take calcium to lower your bio-unavailable calcium. It flushes it out of the body.
Wendy Myers: It’s counter-intuitive but it’s one of the most important parts of this program, is giving you the calcium your body needs. Your body’s actually starving for calcium.
Leigh Lowery: How wild is that? And you know, I don’t really have a lot of dairy in my diet so I was always supplementing but you’re right. In my past, I always supplemented with probably a low-grade, grocery store version of calcium. The other fact that I had told you previously is that I had fractured my hip in 2007 at 31 years old. The question is, “How could it be at that age?”
Wendy Myers: It’s possible. You possibly can have some osteopenia which is the precursor to osteoporosis. But anyone, no matter how strong their bones are, there’s that force that could happen. But it’s good that you are on this program because you will prevent osteoporosis. You will completely re-mineralize your body and heal that breakage point too.
So the next thing we are going to show is your magnesium levels look pretty good. What we’re aiming for is this blue range in here, the little blue area. That’s the ideal ranges. Ideally we’d love to get to that gray bar but the range is good too. So your magnesium looks good. At some point you could be releasing toxic forms of magnesium and that’ll be shown as a big jump in that level. This applies to any of the supplements or any of the minerals or heavy metals. If you have a big jump at any of them, you’re releasing a toxic form. Because all the minerals, there are many many different forms but there are only specific forms the body can utilize. So we want to get rid of the bio-unavailable or toxic forms that we have been accumulating.
The next items we’ll see are sodium and potassium. These are basically adrenal functions. These show our adrenal function. They’re little glands on top of our kidneys. They produce about 10 different hormones –estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, cortisol, epinephrine– all the nice little hormones that make us feel so stressed out and anxious and whatnot. When they’re not working so hot, we’re more susceptible to stress. We more quickly elicit a stress response and feel stressed out and anxious and irritable. So when the adrenals are working better, not only does it produce less cortisol, less of the stress hormones, but we produce more of the estrogen and progesterone, testosterone and keep those levels at normal ranges. So we want those adrenal glands working real good. So that’s what is evidenced by the sodium and potassium levels.
Your levels look deceptively good. Unfortunately, this always happens on every first hair test. The levels are artificially elevated because we have toxic heavy metals that are irritating the glands and kind of propping them up so to speak. These heavy metals serve a purpose in our body. They irritate the glands and they show them to be working better that they are. What’s going to happen on the next test is that those will come down and we will see fairly significant adrenal fatigue. It’ll reveal your truer level of health on the second test.
And the next one is iron and I think that you’ll be interested in this one because you’re into weightlifting and whatnot. You have quite of a high level of iron for the first test and that’s good because it shows that you’re pushing it out because we know that there’s more stored. Because this is a high level, we know you are pushing out the toxic forms of iron. Are you taking iron supplements by any chance?
Leigh Lowery: At this point I pop multivitamins that I know include it but I don’t take it by itself.
Wendy Myers: So you are getting some iron. We don’t really recommend you supplement iron. And that is one thing on this program. Our vitamins don’t have any iron in them because it’s almost always a toxic form of iron. It’s better just to get it from red meat.
Leigh Lowery: I think that’s probably why you see it at such high levels, I’m a big carnivore.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. The levels in meat would give us just the right amount but what we find is when iron levels are high on the first test, this shows on ideal level here deceptively, because we know just from looking other hair tests, usually the first test of iron will be quite a bit lower. We know that there’s some toxic levels of iron coming out just from other indicators in the test. It’s a little bit confusing because all the minerals affect each other. Mineral levels don’t correspond to levels in our blood. It’s just showing what’s dumping into our hair. Essentially we know that the iron is deceptively high just because of other indicators on the test. I won’t get into it. It’s kind of complicated but just take my word for it. Ha ha.
Leigh Lowery: Sure. I think it’s kind of what you told me before as you flush other things out of your system, other things are going to raise and they’re all going to affect each other.
Wendy Myers: Yes. One level will affect another and it’s kind of this domino effect and what this program does is it supplements in such a way as to allow all the mineral levels to raise to ideal levels. It’s interesting. Basically for most people, they eat too much red meat that does affect your iron levels as well. And I do advocate red meat. I think we need to have red meat. It’s probably good to keep it at once or twice a week maybe three if you’re lifting weights quite a bit as you are.
But one thing I want to let people know is, avoid cooking in cast-iron cook wares unless it’s coated like Le Creuset or something because the cast-iron gives us a toxic form of iron but this is mostly a problem if you cook acidic foods or you’re scraping the pan like when you have an iron fork or you’re stirring with an iron spoon. You can scrape the iron and it can get into your food.
Leigh Lowery: I had no idea. I have Le Creuset but I also have Season cast-iron pan that we quite frequently use.
Wendy Myers: Maybe that’s where this is from.
Leigh Lowery: Yeah. Interesting.
Wendy Myers: I thought that too. Actually, before my first hair test I had gone out and bought a big cast-iron pot because had read an article on the Internet saying, “Get some iron.” Because I was vegetarian. I thought, “I need some iron.” So I went out thinking I would get some from a cast-iron pot. I was schooled by my first Nutritional Balancing practitioner. Maybe that’s not such a good idea. One of the biggest problems with high iron is inflammation. This occurs because iron attracts oxygen directly to it and then when it contacts delicate body tissues, the little single oxygen molecule, turned to free radical, detaches and destroys body tissues. So if you have too much iron, you’ve got all this oxidant damage or free radical damage going on which causes inflammation. So we want to bring those levels down.
There’s also a concern for cancer because iron does have that oxygen attached to it. It stimulates the growth of bacteria and infections because it’s an oxygen transporter. High iron is also associated with diabetes, with heart disease, arthritis, Alzheimer’s and other health issues and chronic infections because it feeds them with oxygen, it can cause hair-loss, hypothyroidism, hyperactive behavior and even violence. And a big source for iron overload is flour which not only contributes to huge diabetes epidemic, but also because of how it spikes blood sugar and also because it causes iron toxicity. Flour is enriched so to speak with the toxic form of iron not used by our body so this just builds up in our liver in our body. It stores in the liver and it causes diabetes. It’s a big cause of diabetes, people don’t realize.
Not just the carbs, it’s what’s in the carbs too. Iron is also associated with anger and rage. The liver can be saturated with iron. In Chinese medicine, the liver is the seat of iron. This is also why toxic congested liver is associated with an attitude of anger and rage. Iron additionally, accumulates in the amygdala. It’s the part of the brain associated with anger and rage. So whenever you have had a friend or spouse or someone who’s really angry all the time or they have issues of anger, that’s one of the causes. They just need a coffee enema to shut up. Ha ha ha.
Leigh Lowery: I’ve got to go get coffee enema. I’ll tell you a story another time about I did have brain scan and they did see that area of my brain lit up more red area. Obviously in the temporal lobes as well. One of the things he said was, “Do you have anger? Do you have rage?” and I don’t. Don’t get me wrong. In traffic. But at the end of the day, it was a highlighted area so for me that’s really interesting that that correlates because maybe it’s destiny that I’m supposed to hear this. Maybe I can fix that.
Wendy Myers: That’s what I said. This program fills in the gaps. It gives you a lot of answers that’s why I love it so much. And then we’re going to talk about copper. Your copper is really high. That’s the next little mineral next to iron. Pretty much everyone today is copper toxic unfortunately. I’m copper toxic. Every person I’ve tested either has over or hidden copper toxicity. It’s a big problem because zinc opposes copper and when people are low in zinc, they don’t eat red meat, they’re vegetarian, if they drink too much alcohol and other problems, all deplete zinc and many other things that deplete zinc. So we become copper toxic. We’ll go on to a little bit about it. A lot of your symptoms are copper symptoms.
I had some bruising, some depressions and brain fog. Those can all be due to copper toxicity. One of the main reason for copper imbalance is adrenal fatigue which is showing on your hair test. The main benefit of copper toxicity is emotional instability. Ha ha. I had this really bad when I first started my hair test. One of the reasons I sought help with my doctor, and then I found Nutritional Balancing by just a stroke of luck. I was really having a lot of emotional instability, torturing my husband shamelessly. Ha ha. It was because I was copper toxic. It was not me. It was just my body. My whole life, I had never been emotionally unstable. I was cool as a cucumber but over time, I became copper toxic and my personality changed.
But now I’m back to me. I spent a year in a half doing this program I balanced my copper. It’s really great. But copper can really contribute to almost any mental disturbance. Like I said, zinc opposes copper and zinc is needed for the new brain or the cortex to function and to thrive and to develop and this is the part of the brain that developed specifically when ancient man began eating animals, animal brains and the guts and things that were left over. Humans were scavenging what other animals had killed and they began acquiring zinc in their diet. So this area of the brain is associated with the higher emotions such as reasoning, compassion and love.
It’s how the more highly developed areas of our brain developed. It is with this introduction of zinc. That’s why this area of our brain needs zinc to function. And often when there’s an imbalance between copper and zinc, the person resorts to the older emotional part of their brain. In other words, they go cray cray. Ha ha. And their emotional animal brain rather than their thinking brain and rational reasoning brain. And this is the one thing that I love to lecture vegetarians about. Because if you’re not eating meat, you are going to become copper toxic and then you’re going to become cray cray. Ha ha.
Leigh Lowery: It’s funny. I know a lot of crazy vegetarians. Actually vegans.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Vegans have it worse off but I’m not saying every person who is vegetarian is crazy. I’m just joking. But you will find, if you are not as emotionally stable as you used to be, this is why. Other symptoms and conditions associated with copper toxicity include moderate to suicidal depression and anxiety, violence, migraine, headaches; a very common one: PMS, spaciness, brain fog, you could have mind racing, you could have insomnia, nervousness, irritability, even anorexia.
Zinc deficiency is a huge contributor to anorexia, allergies. People think that they’re just born with allergies. No. They’re caused by nutrient deficiencies in part. Obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, phobia, Tourette syndrome, schizophrenia. The list just goes on and on and on. And others that respond really really well to balancing their copper include epilepsy, ADD, ADHD, autism, and any kind of mental or emotional developmental delay. Another reason that you want to balance your copper is because if you have high copper, you have low libido.
That causes one to lose interest in sex for many many reasons. Of course the person’s energy declines and the body can become numb because when the body’s excessive tissue calcium is high, it tends to render the nervous system less sensitive and it took compensation mechanism when we have high copper our bodies will compensate by increasing our calcium. It’s one of the reasons you have high calcium. It’s one of the ways that our body will prevent us from being too emotionally or physically sensitive because of the high copper and what happens is it desensitizes the body so you get a low sexual interest in men and women and it also interferes with zinc metabolism. Men’s sperm and fluids are very rich in zinc so if they become depleted, male fertility and sexual performance will also suffer. So men if you’re having impotence issues take some zinc. Skip the Viagra. Start taking zinc, you need zinc. You have to replenish that.
And the next thing we’re going to see on here is manganese but we will not really go into that too much on the program. We’re only worried about it if it’s really high. A lot of people if they’re drinking well water, a lot of my clients in Texas have very high manganese levels. It’s in the water there. Yours is not looking too bad. We’ll probably see it dump at some point but it’s not concerning.
And on your zinc, your zinc is really high but again it’s artificially inflated due to the high copper. It’s a defense mechanism.
Leigh Lowery: Well, I have taken some supplements that are prescribed by your program over the past month from a friend of mine. She just lent them out and said just start taking some of these. I don’t know what that is but I only picked ones that I was like “I know what that is”. But I picked zinc and I picked the multivitamins that’s why I’ve been taking that almost every day. So who knows?
Wendy Myers: Ok. It probably won’t cause that. This could be from if you ever used a dandruff shampoo. A lot of dandruff shampoos have zinc. It could be from other things but it’s just a little bit high but I think it’s because of the high copper. Your levels are probably pretty good here. Zinc is much likely lower but it will eventually balance out as copper reduces and we re-mineralize your body with good zinc and almost everyone today is zinc-deficient, about 70% of the population is zinc-deficient because we’ve been scared to death out of eating red meat which is one of the richest sources of zinc.
Zinc is a dark-colored mineral and it’s found in dark-colored meats. Unfortunately this is one of the main reasons why we’re deficient. One thing that is maybe of significance for you since used to drink alcohol, is that alcohol reduces zinc. This is one of the reasons why you’re copper toxic because you said before you had used alcohol pretty frequently for a period of time and that’s very likely one of the reasons. You probably have been correcting that but sometimes it’s hard for the body to correct everything on its own.
Leigh Lowery: It needs to be flushed and detoxed.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. You can need a targeted supplement program to get it balanced out. It’s hard to do everything with diet. This happened to me as well. Unfortunately, after my first divorce about 7-8 years ago, I was drinking a little bit too much when I was in my not-so-healthy phase and I think that’s one of the reasons that also led me to become copper toxic as well. It happens. I haven’t had hardly a drink in 5 years but 3 years later when I finally did the hair test, my copper was out of balance.
Then your chromium is not looking too bad. It’s low but that’s very common. Everyone has low chromium. It’s just deficient in the soils. Chromium is important for blood sugar metabolism and to reduce cravings for sugar and things like that. Your selenium is low. Everyone, pretty much across the board, is low on selenium. We supplement that specifically on the program. Then your phosphorous is looking good. It’s looking good. It is a bit low, it’s lower than we’d like to see. This is a vitality indicator so that we kind of know your overall vitality is low.
The phosphorous reading is really sensitive. So even a one little point drop in that is huge in significance. So on the next couple of tests, we’re going to see that raise quite a bit to a good level. One thing that’s really important for you to know is that low phosphorous is indicative of poor protein synthesis in the body and digestive issues. Many people who have digestive issues don’t have enough phosphorous. And you have to have phosphorous to make stomach acids. And you have to have stomach acids to digest the meats you’re eating and the vegetables to break them down. That’s the most essential first component of our digestive system. It has to be on point or the rest doesn’t work very well.
And your protein synthesis is imperative to regenerate and repair your tissues in your body which is very important for you since you’re breaking that down every day. You’re breaking down your muscles lifting weights. So all protein contains phosphorous so I’d like to see you eat more fresh meat and you said you were eating some protein bars and powders, less of that and more fresh meat so we can get you what you need. Protein synthesis also depends on the health of the liver and the intestines. Once this program whips that liver into shape and you eat a little bit more meat and take the digestive enzymes that we give you on the program, these level will start improving.
Leigh Lowery: Sounds awesome. I’m ready.
Wendy Myers: Then, we’re going to get down to your toxic metals and you’ll see down here it’s lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic and aluminum. There’s many other heavy metals that are not shown on this hair test but all heavy metals do eventually come out of the body on this hair test. People typically need to be on this program about 2 to 3 years to remove the bulk of heavy metals on their tests. It’s a slow process but the body can only eliminate so much at a time. It’s very dangerous to do heavy metal chelation and other programs like that because it’s very hard on the kidneys. It can damage the kidneys and this program is very slow. It just feeds your body’s minerals and your body’s able to push out the metals when it’s ready and in the order in which it needs to do that.
And we assist that process with some detox supplements and coffee enemas and infrared saunas. Those are optional. Not everybody is into coffee enemas but we highly recommend them. They detox your liver. You guys have heard me babbling a lot about coffee enemas. We don’t have to get into it so much. There are other podcasts on the coffee enemas. There are blog posts on the site so just check that out if you want to learn about how to clean your liver. Ha ha.
I’m also going to post on the blog post, the ideal metal levels that we want to see on our hair tests but one important thing to note is that all these metals, the lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic, aluminum, and others, you have all those in your body. Everyone has all of these in the body. It’s just a reality of modern life. But because you have adrenal fatigue, because the test shows slowed thyroid which we’ll get into in a minute, and why we know that. You metabolism has slowed and the body just doesn’t have the energy to push these things out. One thing that it does is when we don’t have enough minerals in our body, the body is forced to accumulate metals to do certain jobs that has to be done. Enzymatic process and other things that it has to do but can’t because it doesn’t have the minerals it needs. So our bodies accumulate these heavy metals and over time they make us sick. That’s why we have to re-mineralize the body and get that process going.
So the first one is lead. It looks good but like I said, a lot of lead is stored in the bones so a lot of times, people can do a bone density test and it looks better than it really is because there’s lead in the bones. So that will start coming out at some point. Your mercury is high. You have really high mercury because you said you did eat a whole lot of fish. Your ideal mercury level should be .025mg% or .25 parts per million. And yours up here is almost 0.206. So that’s really high. For most people, their main source of mercury is fish but you can also get it from drinking tap water and from vegetables and seeds sprayed with fungicides. It’s very common if you’re not eating organic, you’re eating fungicides.
Leigh Lowery: It’s probably where I’m getting it because I do eat quite a bit of vegetables but a lot of the times I’d just grab the easier, cheaper way thinking maybe I should be looking at the organic and then go, “I don’t want to pay another dollar.” But I don’t want to pay for the rest of my life for that choice. I’ll probably be switching to organic.
Wendy Myers: If you’re trying to save money like everybody’s trying to do, the farmer’s market has organic vegetables for the same price as conventional at the grocery stores. It’s a lot cheaper and it’s much fresher and so it’s much more nutrient-dense and that’s what I write about in my book. I talk about all these little things, how you should be shopping at farmer’s markets. It’s perfect.
So, back to you. Mercury is also really good anti-fungal and microbial agent. Preparation H has mercury in it and as do other medications. Silver amalgam fillings also contain mercury but this is an inorganic form of mercury. It does not show in hair tests but it is detoxed on this program. We just don’t have any way of testing it. You can test it at your doctors if you’re dying to find that out but it does get detoxed in this program, it just doesn’t show in the test. Mercury tends to accumulate in the thyroid and blocking its function. Pretty much almost every person I test does have high levels of mercury. Mine have stayed consistently high because of my sushi habits ha ha! Which I’m getting better at. I’m just in denial of coming to the conclusion that I cannot eat sushi and pass my mercury portion of my hair test.
Leigh Lowery: You keep trying to cheat your way and like, “I’m just going to have it one more time and see what happens”
Wendy Myers: I’ve had it once in the last two months. I used to have it twice a week.
Leigh Lowery: I used to have it all the time. Now I have none. I can’t eat as much rice right now in my diet so I’ve stayed away from it not because of the fish but because of the rice and now I’ve heard from other people who are on this program that certain kinds of fish are okay but for the most part, the kind of fish you’re eating, the tunas and things like that are mercury.
Wendy Myers: Skipjack has a lot less mercury in it because they only live about 8 years but the tuna that most people are eating, the cheaper brands of tuna, the fish lives about 20 years so they have a lot longer time to accumulate mercury so if you’re going to eat it, eat skipjack but I don’t even recommend that. What we do recommend is sardines and any little fish. Anchovies, herring, mackerels, things like that. Salmon is very good. I prefer wild caught of course but those fish are not mercury-free. They’re low mercury but those are safe to eat.
Leigh Lowery: So like sole. It’s probably my favorite white fish.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. It’s a small fish. Any small fish is good. So basically that’s why on this program it’s critical to detox mercury to heal thyroid. We’ve got to get the metabolism going and you’ve got to have a healthy working thyroid to maintain a healthy weight. Also your thyroid regulates your cholesterol levels. A lot of people have high cholesterol. Their doctor gives them cholesterol medicines rather than checking their thyroid. It’s always the thyroid! So you’ve got to get the thyroid working and not take statins. Also your thyroid maintains your body temperature. It burns calories, the higher the body temperature, the more calories you’re burning and so you have to have enough body temperature to kill infections. That’s why a lot of people when they got low working thyroid, they have low body temperature and they just develop these chronic infections that never go away. Sinus infections, yeast infections, candida, all kinds of stuff. The body just can’t fight it. So you see a whole host of issue resulting from too much mercury. That’s why I love this program. It detoxes that, feeds that thyroid, gets everything worked out.
Cadmium, you’re going to have some of that come out. Everyone does. It’s really prevalent in our environment from industrial dumping. Unfortunately, all over the planet, India, China, where they don’t have hardly any industrial dumping regulations, all that manufacturing pollution is floating over here. It’s floating to even the most pristine environment in the world. The Antarctic, the Andes Mountains, they’re all finding all kinds of toxins, PCBs and other pollutants from this manufacturing so no one can escape this. Unfortunately it accumulates in our body.
Mercury, we breathe it in the air, a by-product of coal-burning for fuel. This cadmium is real nasty. It causes cancer. It causes hardening of the arteries. It causes kidney disease, all this stuff so you definitely want to get that out. Arsenic, you don’t have levels of that now but that will pop up at some point on a subsequent test. Arsenic is fed to chickens to prevent infection. Any conventional chicken you eat, you’re going to El Pollo Loco, you’re eating any kind of chicken in any restaurant, it’s all full of arsenic.
Leigh Lowery: I have seen that recently actually. A lot of my vegan friends try use that as an excuse but there’s chicken that you can get that’s arsenic-free.
Wendy Myers: Oh yeah like if you get pastured chicken, they are not allowed legally to be routinely fed arsenic. They have to feed them real food and raise them in conditions that promote health so they don’t have to feed them antibiotics and arsenic and things like that. They also feed them the arsenic because it makes the chickens grow faster. For whatever reason, they discovered that arsenic makes the chickens’ meat grow faster.
Leigh Lowery: My family, we have chickens in the backyard so we’re growing them there. They’re home-grown and so the eggs are also coming from them so that’s great.
Wendy Myers: Yeah that is perfect. I want that so bad. I don’t have a yard here for chickens. Ha ha. One day I want a little ranch with chickens. Ok your next one is aluminum. You do have some aluminum here. There’s going to be more where that came from. Everyone has aluminum in them. It has an affinity for nerve cells and it concentrates in the brain. Unfortunately this contributes to brain fog. Many studies show that it contributes to Alzeimer’s and aluminum is one reason why half of Americans will experience dementia in its many forms during their lifetime. Aluminum is found in anti-depressants. It’s one of the biggest forms. Cook ware, most restaurants cook with cheap aluminum cook ware. Beverages in aluminum cans, tap water, table salt, it’s put in table salt and flour to keep it from caking. It’s in baking powders, antacids, any guys out there popping antacids, a handful every day, guess what? You’re getting aluminum toxicity. Processed cheese has it, bleached flour, and vaccines.
They don’t put mercury in them anymore but some vaccines have mercury like the flu shot. But now they put aluminum in the vaccines because they have to have some sort of irritant in them to trigger your immune response. There’s also many other medications that have aluminum. Another big source is teas especially mint teas. All teas have aluminum in them. That doesn’t mean you have to completely avoid them. I personally avoid mint tea because it has such high levels. But herbs and teas just have an affinity of drawing these metals up into them from the ground. They just have a high concentration. All the big tea drinkers. We’re from Texas. I grew up drinking tea morning, noon and night. I might have gotten some of my aluminum from that.
Too much of a good thing. Every once in a while is great but morning, noon and night maybe not a good idea. Your other metals here, because we don’t show them that much, they’re what we call poor eliminators and once we get your metabolism going, they’ll start coming out. The additional minerals here, we don’t tend to worry about those too much. They do show on the test but like I said, they all will start coming out if they’re at toxic levels. For some people, for nickel, that’s termed the suicide metal. If some people have really high levels of that, they can be very very angry individuals. They can be very depressed. That’s not a fun toxicity to have. I’ve seen a few clients that have a nickel toxicity from drinking red teas like Roibos teas and any other red tea. They’re very high in nickel so I advise avoiding those. Many people aren’t aware of that.
Next, we are going to go over the mineral ratios on the significant mineral ratios at the bottom of the test. The first one is the Ca/Mg. That’s the calcium to magnesium. The ideal ratio is 6.67 and yours is 11.6 so it’s about 173% of the ideal and if you look to the right here, you’ll see the blue, light blue and white boxes. We want to get everything in the middle, the ideal area. So what the Ca/Mg means is your carbohydrate tolerance ratio. That means that you’re probably eating a little too many carbohydrates than your body can handle and even if you’re trying to eat a really low-carb diet which I’m not sure if you are or not, but even if you are, for some people they can still be getting too many carbs. It’s just so easy. They just sneak it in everywhere. They in sugar in everything. It’s hard to avoid.
People maybe are unaware of a little piece of chocolate or a little bit of lemonade or whatever it is, it’s very easy to sneak in. But every person is different. This ratio shows that you’re eating just a few too many carbs for your particular body metabolism. That’s just something to think about when you’re designing your diet. The next ratio is Ca/K, that’s the sodium to magnesium ratio where the ideal is 4. Yours is at 17.33. This is the adrenal ratio. That’s why we know sometimes the individual mineral levels will give us some indications of what’s going on, but the ratios really tell us what’s going on. And you’re showing some pretty significant adrenal fatigue here based on that.
Leigh Lowery: Because I am a trainer and I am doing a lot of weight lifting, doesn’t that suppress the adrenals a little bit? Doing excessive amounts of exercise?
Wendy Myers: It does unfortunately. We see this in every athlete, any person who’s a professional athlete. They all pretty much across the board are going to have adrenal fatigue. Our bodies weren’t really designed for a lot of excessive work outs. For instance, hunter-gatherers worked about 17 hours a week and the rest of the time they were resting and playing. But for us and you, we’re working out 6 days a week at an hour or an hour and a half. Plus, we’re going going going, plus the stresses of life, plus not sleeping enough, plus too much sugar. All these things add up and BAM! We have adrenal fatigue. There are some people, that’s the reality of your life, you do a lot of working out and so that’s not going to change, so you want to compensate in other areas of your life.
Make sure you have 8-10 hours of sleep at night. Make sure you try to do the mediation that we recommend on this program. It’s the Roy Masters meditation. Just try to curb other areas of your life where it could be stressful. That’s what I recommend. So for a lot of people, the adrenal fatigue or insufficiency is simply defined as the inability for it to produce the required level of hormones and like I said before, it produces about 10 hormones. For a lot of people, they have normal blood tests but this is a tissue test so it shows a little bit different angle than a blood test. Like any test, this test can have inaccuracies. Any test done by your doctors, if they’re sending it to a crappy lab, you will not be getting accurate results. Hopefully, a lot of doctors are sending their tests to really good labs like Xyrex or Biodata or Medimetrix or other labs that are really good but if they’re not, your blood test could be inaccurate as well. You can have false positives or false negatives.
The hair test is a good, fairly accurate tool. Is it always a hundred percent? No. It depends on if you wash your hair properly. You have to prep the hair properly prior to being tested. It also has to go to a good lab that does not wash the hair. Most labs wash the hair. That’s why a lot of people and doctors dismiss hair tests as not being accurate and they’re correct because if you don’t send it to a good lab, you’re not going to get accurate results. The testing company I use is called Analytical Research labs. They do not wash the hair. They’re a very good company but still there can be inaccuracies in the hair test but not enough to affect the designing of your program. It’s accurate enough for the purposes of designing the Nutritional Balancing program.
My original point was that your blood test can be normal but this tissue test can show reduced function and that’s what I like about it. It reveals a deeper level of the body functioning and I will always go with the results based on the hair test. Blood tests have their limitations. They’re only a 1 minute picture of what’s going on in your blood. Your blood constantly changes. It’s constantly changing but a lot of adrenal tests, they’re doing the saliva test, and the cortisol saliva test is more accurate than a blood test. There are many different ways to test this. I prefer a hair mineral analysis because it gets to a deeper level of testing.
Plus, the hair test is a way to design a comprehensive program to actually heal the adrenals and get them functioning. When I went to my naturopathic doctor, and I found out that I had adrenal fatigue for the first time, she suggested hormone replacement. I would never do that. Studies show that contributes to cancer. It does not heal your adrenals. I think for anyone, the ultimate goal is addressing the cause of what your health problem is so that’s what this program does. It addresses the cause and heals the cause so that it gets those adrenals working.
Low adrenal function is also evidenced in the reduced ability to handle stress. So if you don’t handle stress as well as you used to, and you just get flustered really easy. Guess what? You have adrenal fatigue. The adrenals get fatigued due to stimulants, light caffeine, sugar, coffee, prescription recreational stimulants like amphetamines, Adderall, Ridolin, cocaine and diet pills like fentermine, etc. Excessive exercise can also contribute like we talked about.
Leigh Lowery: It’s really interesting because I had, what I told you in the past is when I got sober, one addiction that I would have is Adderall. That was my main addiction for about 9 years of my life. It was very long ago. I haven’t used Adderall in many many years but still, I’ve always felt like with the amount of Adderall that I’ve used back in those days to keep myself thin, it had to have an effect in me in the long haul.
Wendy Myers: You probably went into a state of adrenal fatigue at that point and stayed there. This is just one of those things that just continue to get worse and worse but you can heal it with this program. But a lot of people are using some form of stimulants. The main source of antioxidants in most people’s diets is coffee. There’s a reason Starbucks is so popular. Everybody loves their coffee. Most people are doing some form of a stimulant and there’s a reason. It’s just because they don’t have energy. They’re naturally compensating for that lower…
Leigh Lowery: Giving a false boost.
Wendy Myers: Yeah! We need it. I need it. Ha ha. So basically when the thyroids and adrenals are not working properly, our metabolism and our oxidation rate slows, hence your hair test will show slow oxidation. The implications of this are that your body slows down preventing you from being able to detox. The toxins accumulate and you become more toxic over time and become sicker and sicker. The next ratio here is the Na/K. That’s the vitality ratio. Yours is 2.5 but your current ratio is 3.17 so that’s pretty good. You’re not dead yet. Ha ha. This could change. We know that metals could push this up and we’ll get a truer rating on re-tests. This ratio is also intimately linked to adrenal function. Yours is in a good range right now but like I said, it’ll be likely lower on your next test.
The first three months on this program, you’re going to remove some metals and it’ll come down a little bit. The next one is the Zn/Cu. It’s showing copper toxicity. There are many other indicators of that on your test but that’s what the ratio reveals. Basically for your program you’re going to be on about 12 supplements that we’re going to recommend, four are optional. Really the minimum that people need to take on this program are 8 supplements. You take them at every meal. It’s a lot of pills but minerals are really bulky. We need a lot of minerals in our bodies.
Our bodies are very very deficient. We have about 3 pounds of minerals in our body. We have to take a lot of minerals to replenish them. Unfortunately. And we have to do that for a number of years. Ha ha. So this program is not for the weak of heart. This is not for someone looking for a quick fix. This is for people who are serious about regaining their health.
It does take a commitment but the least you have to do is take the supplements. Your diet is a very important source of minerals. Meat, cooked vegetables, we want you to eat tons of cooked vegetables so you can access the minerals that are inside the vegetables. You’ve got to break down that cell wall. Cook the vegetables. Diet is very important. The supplements are very important. The other aspects are not as important. We only recommend the coffee enemas and the infrared saunas, meditation. Those you can do as needed or as you have time and the drive to incorporate them into your life but the very minimum is try to do the diet that we recommend. You’re going to be doing this low-oxidizer diet and that’s on the website. You can do a search for that. That’s what most people need to be doing and then you take your supplements and do the other things as best as you can. Incorporate those as best as you can.
And for lifestyle, we definitely recommend sleeping for 8 to 10 hours a night and meditation is very good at calming your body down because you have to be in a calm state to detox. If you’re on that fight-or-flight mode, the adrenal fatigue mode, where you’re constantly running on the adrenaline, that’s called the sympathetic nervous system state. When you’re in that sympathetic nervous system state, you can’t digest your food, you can’t detox because your body is in fight-or-flight mode. It’s life-or-death mode. It’s only when you’re in a relaxed state that your body detoxes. So this is another reason why stress kills. Ha ha. And basically, that’s about it. We recommend a retest about every 3 months.
Leigh Lowery: That’s perfect. I wasn’t feeling terrible but there were many things that I had question marks in my head about and today I feel like for the most part I can see that as time goes on, I’ll be able to feel the difference of what occurs. It did really answer a few of my questions about bruising and things that were going on. Like I told you, I’m not very sensitive. I think I said that in the first part of the podcast. I’m not very sensitive and it’s funny because in here it’s saying my body is somewhat desensitized so sometimes I’m not even feeling the effects although I am somewhat lethargic.
Wendy Myers: You’re going to start crying. Ha ha. I was very desensitized when I first started my program and I thought I just never cry, that I’m just not that kind of person. But as my calcium level started coming down, I started feeling more and I found that I was just much more in touch with my emotions and much more in touch with myself and my feelings. I would cry easier and whatnot. I’m watching a movie and I’d cry. Ha ha.
Leigh Lowery: Where is this coming from? I was never this person before.
Wendy Myers: Yeah and what’s also a beautiful part of the program is that because you are feeding your mind, your brain, the minerals that it needs. Your body is balancing it out. Your mind is going to start working better and you’re going to have this profound sense of spirituality. I can’t explain it. It sounds really corny and my practitioner first told me that and I was like, “Whatever. I just want to know about the physical stuff.” Ha ha.
Leigh Lowery: Like let’s talk about the metabolism. Ha ha.
Wendy Myers: Yes but it’s true. I can’t explain it but I really have developed a profound sense of spirituality in this program.
Leigh Lowery: That’s amazing. I’m excited to start and see what happens with all these levels and then tell you what my feelings are because I don’t know what they are. I’m just kidding.
Wendy Myers: Ha ha. One reality of this program is that you will have healing reactions. That’s what we call your detox symptoms as body chemistry changes and deep healing occurs. So you could experience headaches, fatigue and nausea. Fatigue is a big part of it because we’re taking away those heavy metal crutches that the adrenals were using. You can have any kind of imaginable symptom but they go away.
Leigh Lowery: Just like detoxing from anything. Usually it has to come up and out.
Wendy Myers: Yes it does. Retracing is a process where the body kind of goes back and revisits old chronic infections in order to heal them completely. You can have flare ups of chronic infections like sinuses or yeast infections. You can have inflammation at the sites of infection or old injuries like your hip. Inflammatory process may occur for a few days or less on old injury sites. Common sites are the eyes, ears, throat, sinuses, blood or intestines but they’ll pass usually in a few days with supported measures like more rest or really a varied way of managing detox symptoms is the coffee enemas. Whenever I have a headache or I feel nauseous, it’s usually just the body just detoxing. All this gunk is floating around. If you do a coffee enema, it’s able to dump it all. Nausea instantly gone. Headache, gone. It can be from the caffeine in the coffee diluting the blood vessels but I just feel better after I do one.
Leigh Lowery: I hear that all the time. I’ve got to do that. That’s my next thing I’m going to do.
Wendy Myers: When you start it’s a little freaky but most people that have started doing them, get really into them because they feel so much better after they do them and they really are life saving for some people that are really toxic. You have a pretty good hair test here. Some people are really toxic and they’re sick. So they’re going to have a lot more stuff coming out and the coffee enemas can really save them from some of the detox issues and brain fog. Brain fog is a big problem for a lot of people. Coffee enemas are amazing for that. That’s about it. I keep saying that but I start babbling again. Ha ha. Do you have any questions?
Leigh Lowery: I don’t yet. I can’t wait to start the program. I’m sure I’ll have questions as I come along. I’ll bring those up on the podcast but for today I just feel a little bit enlightened, slightly overwhelmed, and ready to start.
Wendy Myers: It’s a little overwhelming. That’s the thing I do on the first test. I do throw a lot of info at people but you don’t have to feel like you have to absorb or remember everything I’m saying. You get a 17-page lab report that goes a little bit more detailed about the test. The only thing you have to know is to take the supplements that I recommend and do the diet. That’s all you have to do. Then you slowly will learn and understand more of what I’m talking about and it’ll start to sink in. It’s overwhelming but it’s not. All you have to do is take the supplements.
Leigh Lowery: And like you said, the mineral analysis packet that I have from my hair test really does explain in full detail what each of these things do. I don’t have to remember it. I just go back and see what copper toxicity is and what it does. Thank you so much.
Wendy Myers: Everyone, if you’re interested, I have got a new store on the site. It’s called the myersdetox.com/store/ where you can find it. Basically I’m going to sell all the supplements. I started it as a way for my clients to be able easily purchase our supplements but anyone can purchase them and I’m going to have a free program supplement pack. If you’re not able to afford a hair mineral analysis, there will be a free supplement program pack where you can take the supplements that I recommend for every person to take. Even if they’re not on a hair test, it will be the exact nutrients that your body needs, the best ones that I recommend to anyone, that every human being should be on. You can follow the slow oxidizer diet and it’ll bring you about 50% – halfway if you’re not able to do the whole program. I also have saunas. I’m manufacturing little mobile near infrared saunas.
Leigh Lowery: That is so awesome. I got a little sneak peek of it. First of all, it’s crafty and smart. I can’t even believe you can get this done but on top of it, not everyone can have an infrared sauna at home but now they can.
Wendy Myers: That’s what I use. I first started going to little spas that had far infrared saunas but they’re $20-40 per session. They’re expensive. So finally I just succumbed and bought a little 3-bulb contraption. It’s $350. It’s not that much and I just have one in my shower. You just got to seal it off after shower. But I just sit in there with a little space heater and I cook out those toxins.
Leigh Lowery: That’s so cool.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Also, everyone, I’ve got a contest I’m doing every month so you can win a free hair mineral analysis. There’s a blog post on the site. Just search for free hair mineral analysis and it’s also on the side bar. You’ll see a little graphic for that. To win a free hair test, just enter there. We draw a person at random every single month and you will do a hair test reading exactly like you heard on the show today.
Leigh Lowery: That’s so cool. For myself, the General Leigh, Leigh Lowery, I now have my online training program in full effect. So I have 2 programs available, one is a 13-week program, really helping you get into shape and then the other one is an extended 26-week program. You can find both of those on generalleigh.com or you can go to my facebook which is now General Leigh Fitness and Nutrition. I’ve changed the name of my page to officially be General Leigh Fitness and Nutrition so I’m excited about that but the opportunity to do my online program is there as well so please check me out.
Wendy Myers: I can’t wait to start your in-person program.
Leigh Lowery: I know. I can’t either. I was telling you earlier. We’re going to do a booty blast. That’s my specialty. It’s the tush.
Wendy Myers: That’s what I need because I’m going to be a speaker on Jimmy Moore’s Liven la Vida Low-carb Cruise and I need a booty blast before I go on the cruise. Haha.
Leigh Lowery: That’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to do the pre-cruise booty blast. Anyone, if you guys want to join me, the cruise is May 18th to the 25th. We’re going to Coco cay in the Bahamas. We’re going to St. Thomas in Virgin Islands and to St. Martin in the Dutch Antilles. If you guys want to join me, I’m going to be speaking on that, talking about how chemicals make you fat. Obesigens. Obesigens are chemicals that make you fat. Guys, go on myersdetox.com if you want to learn more about me, Wendy Myers and learn more about Nutritional Balancing which incorporates all kinds of stuff that we talked about today on the show. You can also follow me on Facebook and twitter at I will Live to 110. I’m also on youtube at WendyLiveto110.
Leigh Lowery: If you want to know more about me or watch me work out and help you, you can find me at generalleigh.com. You can also find me on my facebook that we just talked about at General Leigh Fitness and Nutrition. You can follow me on Twitter as well and I’m on intagram under the Genleigh. If you like what you heard on the show, please give us, the Live to 110 podcast, a review on iTunes. We would love your positive review.
Wendy Myers: Thank you listeners for tuning in. Remember, health is not just the absence of disease and symptoms. Thank you so much for listening to the Live to 110 podcast.