ORGANIC SUSTENANCE
The Second Strand of HOPE
And in the beginning...
I graduated with my doctorate in 1980 and went on a mission to fix broken people. My first health optimization protocol began in 1980 while working for an established private practice doctor.
As time passed, and after working under the tutelage of three seasoned wellness practitioners, I eventually opened my own practice in 1986.
I developed two specialties, writing up protocols that optimized health and writing up protocols to optimize doctors' offices.
“During those formative years, I learned how to organize a doctor’s office and the human body.”
When I opened my own practice, we saw over five hundred patients in a week in my first six months of practice. At the time, my wellness practice was considered one of the busiest wellness practices in America.
I practiced my two passions, natural pain relief and health optimization. Health optimization came down to one main specialty: Nutritional Medicine.
As my practice grew, I discovered that Nutritional Medicine really meant Weight Optimization. Ironically, the “Father of Medicine” knew that health optimization was Nutritional Medicine. That is why he said…
“Let food be thy medicine.”
Though people came to be our patients to optimize their health, which meant, in most cases, that they didn’t want to die as their parents or some other loved one.
“Wellness meant they wished to avoid one of the chronic diseases: cancer, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, or Alzheimer’s.”
These chronic diseases will most likely cause our end.
But, after opening up their heart, metaphorically…what it really came down to was that they wanted to weigh their “best” weight.
My curiosity about “best” weight was born as a boy. When I was ten years old, my mother started calling me husky; worse, she had to purchase me clothes labeled husky. I am glad that label or word isn’t used so much today because it would probably trigger many emotions.
To make things worse, my father was a diabetic, and nearly all his nine siblings were diabetic. Then, of course, my mother eventually became diabetic, and it turned out that nearly all of her ten siblings were diabetic.
Medicine could not cure my huskiness, nor would it stop me from genetically becoming diabetic.
You can see why wellness became my passion.
As my clinic was filled with patients who sought to be the best version of themselves, I fell in love with helping them achieve this desire.
I began learning from weight optimization gurus that sold me weight loss shakes, herbs, vitamins, magic potions, MLM schemes, etc.
With all these potions, it wasn’t too long before I fell in love with intense exercise, so much so that I built a gym next to my office for me, my staff, and my patients. I let my patients work out for free in the gym with a personal trainer I had hired.
After trying all these gimmicks on my patients and straining every muscle in their bodies, I learned quickly that gimmicks did not work and intense exercise didn't either.
After much experience, I discovered the first truism regarding both weight and health optimization.
“Let God-made food by thy medicine.”
After probably a thousand patients, the only tool that worked so far within my practice was eating "real" God-made food and avoiding human-made food.
"Unfortunately, we all grew up in an era where food has become engineered and processed."
As you read in Book One of The Hormone Strand, we didn’t take menopausal women into our weight loss program without first explaining to them that they had a 90% chance of failure even if they switched to eating only God-made food.
“When it came to women in menopause, we could not guarantee success in our weight optimization program. We explained that they only had about a ten percent chance of succeeding.”
Then in 2010, my wife went into menopause, and she gained weight and could not lose it no matter what diet or menu we tried. It was particularly frustrating for her because she worked as a nurse and nutritionist in our clinic.
We knew it was hormonal, but we weren’t trained in hormone optimization; in fact, neither of us knew anything about menopause. We went searching for help and found no one.
We eventually discovered that doctors went to The American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine to learn about hormone therapy. We took their courses, and I eventually took their test to become board certified in Anti-Aging Medicine and passed.
We returned to our weight optimization clinic and combined Hormone Optimization with our Weight Optimization protocols.
The menopausal women who enrolled in our plan felt so much better with the combination of protocols, but they still didn’t lose weight.
WHAT THE HECK!
Then...while we were attending one of The American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine conferences, Vicky accidentally went into a classroom. They were teaching an old diet protocol anew.
She texted me to get over to her class immediately.
I left my class and went to hers; there was no way I could get through the door. A large overflow of doctors flowed out into the hallway.
The class was teaching a diet called The Simeon Diet. There was a doctor who, in the 50s, had one of the largest weight loss clinics in the world. He was a British Physician practicing in Italy, and his name was A.T.W. Simeons.
"The Simeon Diet was a menu of 500 Kcal a day and daily injections of a hormone found in pregnant women called Human Chorionic Gonadotrophin (hCG)."
Vicky learned all about it and then told me everything she had learned. I went on a research journey and discovered everything this doctor was doing. I was particularly interested in hCG because this could be the key for menopausal women.
When you go to the National Institute of Health website, this is the synopsis of what hCG is and does.
“Human chorionic gonadotropin is a hormone produced primarily by syncytiotrophoblastic cells of the placenta during pregnancy. The hormone stimulates the corpus luteum to produce progesterone to maintain the pregnancy.”
In the Hormone Strand of HOPE, I explained how the first hormone condition a menopausal woman faces is called Estrogen Dominance. I also wrote that I believe it is misnamed and should be called Progesterone Deficiency.
Since hCG stimulates progesterone production, I thought it could be an elixir for Estrogen Dominance.
We started experimenting with hCG and Dr. Simeon's menu. I immediately modified his menu because I am all about eating God-made whole food. We also increased the Kcal to 600 because it made eating three meals of 200 Kcal or two meals of 300 Kcal easier.
“The Simeon (hCG) Diet caused us all to lose a crazy amount of weight quickly.”
As I continued my research, I discovered where the hCG came from. Most of the hCG was produced in China. They would take the urine from pregnant women and extract the hCG.
An interesting fact about hCG is that it was a hormone available to the public that came from another human being.
At the time, the FDA had only approved hCG for use in improving fertility.
“Today, the use of hCG is being banned state-by-state across the country.”
The controversy surrounding hCG became public, and doctors started to shy away from using hCG.
"That raised a question for me. Was it the hCG or the low Kcal intake causing the rapid weight loss?"
When we had our patients eat 600 Kcal per day without using the hCG, they lost weight rapidly, but it was more difficult, and they didn’t feel as well as those that injected hCG.
Another problem we discovered with hCG was that our patients became immune to its effects after several weeks. hCG quit working!
My next modification was to replace the hCG with bioidentical progesterone. Initially, we dosed the women with 200 mg of progesterone; 200 mg was considered the maximum dose.
We found that just like the hCG, women became immune to progesterone, but instead of it taking weeks, it took months for the immunity to occur. Even though it took months, our patients were unhappy when their Estrogen Dominance symptoms returned.
We slowly titrated the dose downwards. We found that the lower the dose, the longer it took for our patients to become immune to the positive effects of progesterone.
The ideal dose that appeared not to create immunity was cycling 20 mg of bioidentical progesterone cream.
Once we figured out how to create similar and more long-lasting effects that the hCG did, I moved on to try to find a replacement menu for the stringent 500 Kcal Dr. Simeon used.
"I want to be transparent; none of this is scientifically proven. All of this was just what I observed."
Now let's get to how our menu evolved.
As I mentioned, I had already increased the Kcal to 600.
This is when it got tricky. When it comes to science, weight loss is accomplished by taking in fewer calories than the body uses. You need a caloric deficiency. Eating 500 or 600 Kcals a day would definitely cause a caloric deficiency.
Eating 600 Kcal daily is called a Ver Low Caloric Diet, or VLCD for short.
And VLCDs work wonders when it comes to weight loss, but as soon as my patients started eating more calories, they regained the weight they had lost.
By the way, science has shown that VLCDs extend life in animals.
Canto, left, a rhesus monkey, is aging fairly well at 25 on a calorie restriction diet. Owen, though only a year older than Canto, is frail and moves slowly. He eats a normal diet.Credit...Jeff Miller/University of Wisconsin-Madison
Then, I was in Lake Tahoe with my oldest son and father. We were sitting in our hotel room. My son and I were there for a Jazz festival, and Dad was there to gamble. He sure liked to gamble.
Dad leaned over and smelt me. My son and I crunched our faces. He then did it again.
“What the heck, Dad? Do I stink?”
“No, You’re diabetic.”
Dad being severely diabetic, carried his glucometer with him everywhere. He pulled it out and checked my blood sugar.
It registered a 357 reading. Normal is between 70 to 100 mg/dl.
I had decided that I wasn’t going to turn out like the rest of my family. If you came to one of my Mom and Dad’s family meals, you’d see most of the people sitting around the table raise their shirts or blouses and inject insulin.
My doctor placed me on some oral medications, one after another, and it turned out I was allergic to all of them. They made me feel like a zombie, brain-dead.
I decided I would do everything I could to avoid insulin injections. I developed a diabetic menu for myself. It worked wonders, and I was able to avoid insulin. Then we started using it on other diabetics, which worked wonders for most of them.
"To make this very long story shorter, the diabetic menu I used for myself and other diabetics is the only menu we have found that worked for my menopausal patients who wished to lose weight."
The menu is not based on Kcal. It is based on blood sugar and insulin spikes. It’s a menu that bottoms out blood sugar, therefore, bottoms out insulin and keeps both bottomed out.
TODAY'S TAKEAWAY
"When I started using 20 mg of progesterone and a menu that bottomed out blood sugar and kept it bottomed out, voilà, the excess weight came off my menopausal patients just like the hCG Diet using hormone injections and a VLCD of 500 Kcal, though we were eating a more “normal” amount of calories and not having to inject the hormone hCG into our bodies."
Of course, the menu has evolved, and in the next newsletter, I will share the first step of this menu called “The Lose The Bloat Menu.” With this menu, my clients lose 5 to 15 pounds of bloat in three days. I am not kidding! And they can eat up to six meals a day.
Over the next several weeks, I will share the menu I call The Meso-Menu. I suggest you accept my invitation below if you want to know it instantly and quickly.
WHO WANTS TO LOSE WEIGHT AND FEEL GREAT?
If menopause adversely affects your life and has caused you to gain weight, I will coach you for free. In this free coaching session, I will teach you how to naturally optimize your hormones and weight without using dangerous prescription hormones or low-calorie deprivation diets.
THIS WEEK’S SELFIE
Nothing but fun!
VALLEY SPRINGS CALIFORNIA
Over the Father's Day weekend, Vicky took me camping, where we sat in hot tubs and experienced communal conversations that went on for hours. Then we went home and had Prime Rib with the family. Then our youngest son took us to watch the play Billy Elliott. And I didn't take one picture.
This selfie was taken on my birthday the week before while visiting friends. Yes, we got photobombed.
And remember...
"IT'S ALL ABOUT YOUR HORMONES!"
"Because when your hormones are sound, your weight, health, and mind will follow."
🎉 Doc
© 2023 | Doc Mac Coaching
The FDA has evaluated none of the statements on this website.
Furthermore, none of the statements within this post should be construed as dispensing medical advice, making claims regarding the cure of diseases, nor can these products prevent disease. You should consult a licensed healthcare professional before starting any supplement, dietary, or exercise program, especially if you are pregnant or have any pre-existing injuries or medical conditions. The Food and Drug Administration has not evaluated these statements. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent diseases.
Comments