Dr. Alejandro Junger
Appearances
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits & Hustle. Crush it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Do you actually feel the effect?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
It's not like .
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Like the Dalai Lama, like Jesus Christ, like the Buddha. At any given point in the world, there are a number of enlightened beings. I've met a few that I think are. I mean, I can't assure you, but you can feel something. I mean, you could definitely feel a presence. You can see thousands of people follow them, you know?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
So how do you tell between a real enlightened being and non-real enlightened being? You know, it's a big subject.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Well, number one, well, some may be on Instagram. It's not about that, but it's the way they behave. You watch and you see a consistency of a state. And the reason I believe that she's fully enlightened and has... Because when you are fully present, you have powers, as it were, right? And now this woman, when I met her, she slapped me on the chest.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
It's a long story, but the moment she slapped me on the chest, she put me in a state that no... drug or plant or had before or after even came close to. I tried ayahuasca, ibogaine, mushrooms. I mean, you name it, huachuma. I've tried everything. I've tried ecstasy. I didn't do it for fun. I always did it for looking good.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Searching for something, right? For my peace, for my... But nothing, and even all combined, had put me in the state that she put me in when she slapped my chest. And I cannot even explain it to you, and it would feel weird to you if I tell you, because basically it was like as if there was no body, and my consciousness was everywhere. I could see everything. I could read people's minds.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
It was like... Very, very powerful. And it changed the course of my life because I realized that that state that she put me in for a few minutes is what actually we came here to earth to be. We came here to learn how to be, not how to learn, but to be in that state.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Muktananda. And when she was a baby, they took her to him and he picked her up and he blessed her. And she grew up in the ashram, in the monastery. Oh, okay. And Muktananda kind of trained her and she meditated all her life. I don't think she ever had a...
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Do you like it? I like it. It's good, right? The taste is great.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
I think it's possible. I think everything is possible. I think it can happen actually by the grace of God. Really? It just can happen.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
That's how some saints, when you read about it in the Bible, they just suddenly became enlightened. So there's all possibilities. When I read the scriptures, when I was in the ashram, I used to read all the scriptures. It's hard work, you know. The monks do it and monasteries. That's how it's easier.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
I mean, in L.A., running up and down, going to the gym and having a business, it's going to be harder, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
The thing is that, first of all, people don't even look for that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Yeah, yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
So I was there for a little over a year.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Year and a half or something.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
So this is a big ashram. Okay. And there was about 2,000 people at any given time. Indians and people that came from all over the world. Okay.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
It's kind of famous. The first day that I went there, there were so many famous people. I mean, I don't know if I can name names.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Meg Ryan was there. Donna Karan was there. I mean, there was... Anyway, there was a lot of famous, and there was a lot of non-famous people. Right. And there was even poor people, you know, that saved for a year to go there for three days, you know.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
I feel smarter already.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Well.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Yeah. I know you want the details, but that's going to take us— It doesn't matter.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
It doesn't cost anything to go there.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
If you take a course, then—like, for example, what happened to me is I took a course called the initiation course, and there was like 400 people there, and I think it was $400 or something like that. Okay. And during that course, right, I was looking around. We were in a big hall, and there were a lot of people.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
And some people were having this, you know, you know when you see on TV the Christian, they go and touch, and people fall.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Yeah, there were people that were, you know, and nothing was happening to me. I was like... Maybe I wasted the $400. My mind was... And then, by the end of the... And then you meditated, and then the guru comes, and you sing with her. And then a monk comes and gives a talk. And then somebody came in and gave a talk of their experience. And when he was talking, something really weird happened.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
It was as if everything started getting dark, and only his face... was in my view, and then we're getting closer and closer, and then we swapped. And I was sitting in the middle of like 400 people, but my experience at that time was looking through his eyes, and I was seeing this body of mine, I was sitting there in the crowd, and it was weird, right? As if I switched places with him.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
That was the experience that I was having.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
It was weird. And so suddenly he finished talking and everybody started clapping. And I came back to my body. And I was sweating and I was so nervous. And so I stood up immediately and left. And when I was going out, people were stopping me. They said, hey, great speech. I was like, no, no, it's not me. Yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
And so I left and I went to the cafeteria before everybody left the hall and I'm sitting there sweating and there was this girl who's a famous makeup artist now. Her name is Prema Dubrov. I don't know if you know her.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Patti Dubrov. And she actually lived in the ashram at the time, and she was assigned to me as my buddy, because when you go there, it's not the usual thing, how it operates, right? Right. So they tell you, hey, if you have any questions... Go ask this person. Yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Yeah, like a buddy. Like a buddy system. Yeah, like a buddy system. So she was passing by and she saw me and said, what happened to you? So I told her this story. I think, I don't know, somebody put something in my drink or something. I mean, this was strange. And she said, no, no, this is good. This is good. I actually think that you should come to the next intensive.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
And I said, you know, hold on. Let me, no, no, no, come, come, come. She grabs me and she takes me down this hall. We were walking to go to the office. She was going to ask when the next intensive was, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
But then it's when this guru, Guru Mai, comes walking alone, which I didn't know at the time, but now I know it's a very unusual thing that she's always followed by like hundreds of people, you know? Everybody wants to just be close to her. Wow. And she was walking alone and she meets us in the corridor and she's like, hi, Prema. Hi, Guru Mai, how are you? And she says...
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
who is your friend and she said oh my friend is Alejandro he's a doctor and she looks at me and says what kind of and already I was feeling at the beginning it was like intimidated because she's like this presence you know but also very simple and very kind and you know it's difficult to but you could you could feel I felt that she knew everything about me and she said well what's your name Alejandro and what kind of doctor are you I said cardiologist oh the heart and she smacks me in the heart
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
And she starts laughing and she leaves. In that moment, I started losing sensation on my feet, my legs, then my torso, then, and it exploded. And it was like, I was everywhere. I was everywhere. I was everything. I had what is called the experience of cosmic consciousness. So I had that experience that you read in books. And I remember everything was slow motion and people were walking.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
I knew what they were thinking because I was them, you know. It wasn't like the experience. I'm having now a normal experience. I'm inside my body, sitting in your house, in your podcast, looking through my eyes, talking and there's a microphone. But that wasn't what it was going on. That wasn't it. I was everywhere. I was everything, you know.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
So suddenly I feel my hand is being, you know, tugged on.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
And it was prema. And she said, are you okay? Because I was crying, you know, tears. And it were tears of joy. I mean, I never felt such peace in such the state that I was put in or that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Well, it changed my life. You know, I went to the United States from Uruguay determined to be a cardiologist. I was going to invent a way of opening the arteries. And, you know, I thought I was going to dedicate my life to that. And I didn't care about that anymore. After that experience, I only wanted to... be able to be in that safe all the time.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
I said, this is the possibility that we have. And I understood that this is what we came here for. This is what we were looking for. Of course, when I came back to my, you know, she's like, are you okay? I come back, I'm looking at her, and I'm like, Yeah, I'm okay. And then for about two weeks, I would go in and out, in and out of that state. I was living in New York at the time.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
And suddenly I would go, you know, fall into that state. And when I came back, I was taking my... I had a really beautiful leather jacket with a sheepskin inside. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was giving it away to a homeless guy. And, you know, it was like, it was weird. If... Somebody would have caught me at that time and spoke to me at that time.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
They would have put me in a mental institution and would have medicated me.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Abraham Maslow, which is a very famous… What's his name? Abraham Maslow. He writes about this… Yeah, I know who that is. He writes about this awakening or spiritual experience that seems a lot like mental disease, like you are completely mentally gone. Yeah. And that's what happened to me. And then slowly with time, about two weeks, I just never went into that state again like that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
So that state, I went in and out. You said for two weeks. For two weeks, I was in and out. In that state, little time.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
No, no, no. I was living in the city and I was driving to the Catskills where this ashram is.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
No, no, this ashram was in New York.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
They have ashrams all over the world. There's one in LA too.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Yeah, yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Well, it changed everything because after that, I ended up going to India as a cardiologist When I arrived there, they put me as the director of their clinic. But there was a lot of other doctors. There were Ayurvedic doctors, there were Chinese medicine doctors, there were chiropractors, hands-on healers, Reiki masters.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Whoever came to the ashram, whatever skill they had, they put them to work on that. So there were people that were engineers that were working on the lighting system and the water filtration system. It's a community. Everybody's doing something.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
It sounds like a kibbutz. Yeah, it sounds like a kibbutz. But it's a different kibbutz because in kibbutz you're just working. Right. Here you're working... On yourself. Yeah, yeah. So there's lots of time for meditation. But I was the medical director of their clinic. So what we used to do is we used to put a patient that came in a circle. Right. And we were all there.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Yes. I was born in Uruguay, in South America. And when I was born, there were not even supermarkets there. We used to go with my dad to the farmer's market and we'd buy and choose our fruit. And we knew the guy that sold us the meat. And so life was very simple at the time when I was born. Later on, it became very Americanized.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
So the Ayurvedic medicine doctor asked some questions. I asked some questions. The Chinese medicine doctor asked some questions. So everybody asking questions by the end. If we have to examine, we examine. And by the end, we all give our opinion. And at the beginning, it was like, you know, like a woman came with hives all over her body. I wanted to give... And she was actually starting to wheeze.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
So she was having a severe histaminic or allergic reaction. I wanted to give her antihistamines or even prednisone. But the Ayurvedic medicine doctor said... because it was mango season. And there's like 300 types of mango in the, you know, it's a big ashram, lots of trees, you know. So we were eating mango all day long and mango juice and mango, you know. So are you eating mango?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
I love mango, said the woman. Okay. And are you eating, yeah. So basically the Ayurvedic medicine doctor said, she's a Pitta constitution. And we have to stop all her fiery, Pita is fire. We have to stop all the fiery foods. So she stopped all the spices, you know, and the mango. And she said she doesn't need any medication if she does that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
And within two days, I mean, the first day she left and I was checking on her because I thought she's going to need antihistamine or prednisone. But with the dietary changes and a few other instructions, there were some oils that she gave her. In two days, she was completely fine. So I was blown away. And that happened to me with all the practitioners there, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
The Reiki master, the meditation master. Wow. Sometimes I had to take over and said, no. I remember there was a monk that came. He was having chest pain. And the Ayurvedic doctor said, oh, we have to take all the food. He's a vata.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
I said, nah, this guy has to go to the hospital right now because his artery, he's having an unstable angina, which means that there's a blood clot that's forming and unforming.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Yes. So that patient, everybody had an opinion. I said, no, we have to give him this herb. I said, no, we need a car right now. And I am actually going to go in the car with him to Bombay, into a hospital to get a... And it was the right decision. It was a right decision because he got a cardiac catheterization. There was a blood clot. There was a severe lesion.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
They put a stent in him and immediately he felt better. And it saved his myocardium. Otherwise, he would have had a bigger heart attack. Okay, well, this is my point.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
This is a huge problem today.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
People take sides. Right. Just like in politics, just like in sports, just like they take sides. So there's people that would never see an MD with a gun to their head. And there's people that would never go to a, you know, a homeopath or whatever. You know, that's bullshit. The truth is that everything is useful. Everything. Everything has its place.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
But meals were cooked from scratch at my mother's kitchen, and we ate all together as a family, and life was simple.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
The big distinction, in my understanding, is this. When there's an acute problem, Western medicine has incredible solutions, incredible tools.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
For example, if you break a bone or you're having a heart attack, or even if you're having a stroke, something acute, you go to the hospital, you get a cardiac catheterization, you put a stent on, you go to a good traumatologist, orthopedist who can, I mean, I had a car accident. I had my leg reconstructed, pins and metals and things, you know, and I can use it now.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
So modern Western medicine is incredible for acute problems. For chronic problems, not so much. So they want to use the same tools and solutions for chronic problems than for acute problems. So what do they do? They cut you and they give you medications, surgery and medications, and it doesn't work, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
The thing is that of the problems that human beings are suffering from, and I don't know this to be 100% accurate, but just to give you an idea, 10% are acute problems. 90% of people are suffering, or 90% of suffering is caused by chronic problems. And for chronic problems, then you have a lot of things. And it's an art to combine. It's an art. It's an art to combine.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
And healthy by default. Once I went to medical school and graduated from medical school, I went to New York, I moved to New York to do my postgraduate training. So I started with three years of internal medicine at NYU Downtown Hospital, and then three years of cardiovascular diseases to become a cardiologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
And what that experience gave me, it gave me a taste of the palette of healing modalities that exist. I mean, there wasn't every healing modality practitioner in the world, but there were a lot. There were Chinese medicine doctors, Ayurvedic medicine doctors, chiropractors, and other things that I hadn't even heard of.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Yes. So it's changing now, you know, with the advances and the growing of functional medicine, which I know you're familiar with. Functional medicine is a new way of thinking about the body, right? Who was created or invented or designed.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
And an easy way to tell somebody what functional medicine is, I say it's as if you grab a modern medicine doctor, but you teach him how to think like an Ayurvedic medicine doctor or a Chinese medicine doctor. So what does that mean? That means that modern medicine divides and conquers, meaning there's specializations. They divide the body in organs.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
You have an eye problem, you go to the eye doctor, ophthalmologist. You have a brain problem, you go to the neurologist. You have a heart problem, you go to the heart doctor, cardiologist. You have a liver problem, you go to the hepatologist. You have a gut problem, you go to the gastroenterologist. Right. It's divided by organs.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
But functional medicine tells you, like Chinese medicine and Ayurvedic medicine and many other ancient modalities. Yep. that the body is not really a set of divided organs. Actually, it's a set of systems. So in functional medicine, we think in systems. And there are seven systems, right? And each system has many organs participating in it. And different organs participate in different systems.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
For example... the intestines, right? They are part of the digesting and absorbing system. They are also part of the immune repair and defend system. They're also part of the nervous system. The intestines participate in most systems or all systems of the body, right? And that's where all systems kind of meet, physically meet in the intestines.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
So that is the big difference between functional medicine and Western modern medicine.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
So if I'm having a chronic disease, If I'm having a chronic problem and I don't know, I'd rather have both opinions. I would go to a functional medicine doctor and be thought of holistically.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
The drastic change of lifestyle from moving from a simple place like Uruguay, where life was simple and healthy by default, to a fast-paced city like New York, living in hospitals, a lot of time in the emergency room, three days in a row being on call, eating garbage, never eating home-cooked meals. I remember going to the supermarket and looking at
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
This goes back to when we started talking about our separation from nature. So when you look at ancient civilizations or cultures, you see that the people that were in charge of healing, the, you know, what we would call the doctors now, were not just the doctors. They were also like spiritual healers. And sometimes the priest and the doctor was the same person.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
You know, the healers in the Amazon tribes, you know, It's a different thing. Medicine today in our culture, in our modern culture, became completely prostituted and degenerated and distorted by interests, right? So you go there. They have five minutes to see you. They're going to write you a prescription. Next.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
That's it. Insurance pay is not paid. It's a...
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
But listen, that's what's happening with modern civilization.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
It's degenerating not only in the healthcare aspect, in many aspects, right? So we're living now the consequences.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
You can have 10,000 problems until you have a health problem. Then you only have one problem.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Listen, I am talking about these things and I agree with you and I won't even further to tell you what I think of it. I am also here to talk about some of the products that I... It ends up affecting everybody.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
The boxes and the smells and the fact that you got this colorful box and then you put it in the microwave and in five minutes you had something that looked like a meal that my mother would cook, you know, like a piece of meat or chicken with mashed potatoes. And it looked like it, right? But it wasn't really. Right.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
By the way. By the way, you're one of them. These help me really focus. It did?
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Yes.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
I know you. I like you. I tell you one way in which I myself distinguish myself between who is just doing it for business and maybe this is not humble of me to say, right, but my company and my program is a result of my own problems, a solution searched for. I was searching for a solution for my own problems when I found the solution, which I was coming into, I spent the time in India.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Right, right, right. We got sidetracked. With all the meditation and the vegetarian food and all this. So my symptoms got a little better, right? But when I finished my time in India, I had to come back and go work. So I started working in a hospital again. And again, seven minutes per patient, eating in a hospital cafeteria, running, being on call. Again, my symptoms doubled, doubled down.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
I was more depressed and more allergic. And until one day, some guy that I knew, I had seen 10 days before, knocks on my door. He was from LA, a producer, always very edgy and red in the face from alcohol and coffee. And when I opened the door, he came to visit me and I was like, oh my God, what happened to you? He was like 10 kilos less. His skin looked amazing. His eyes were white.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Junger.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
And he didn't have the redness that characterized him. I said, what happened to you? Did you get plastic surgery? And he said, no, no, no. I come from a detox center. I said, detox? I didn't know that you were on drugs. He said, no, no, no, no, that kind of detox. He said, come, come, I'll show you. And he took me to...
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
10 minutes away across the highway to this place called the We Care Spa, that is a detox center. You go there, you juice all the time, and you have colonics, and you have massages, and this and that. And I was blown away when the results came. I go there and it turns out that the owner is an Argentinian woman. I'm from Uruguay. We get it off immediately. She started telling me.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
I told her about my issues. She said, why don't you try the program here? I did. And my depression lifted and gone away. My allergies disappeared. My irritable bowel syndrome disappeared. And I was like, oh my God, this is kind of magic. I didn't know why. I couldn't explain in my medical mind what had happened to me until I found functional medicine.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
And when I found functional medicine and I learned about the detoxification system and the other systems of the body and how the gut breaks and how to repair, that's when I said, oh my God, of course, this is how doing that program completely resolved all my issues. So I started studying and eventually I quit the work in the hospital and I went on my own path. on my own path.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
No, no. There are similarities, right? But no. After learning functional medicine and really understanding and having more and more and more experience, I came to my own conclusions and put together from different sources, and I put together my own.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
I started eating from the hospital cafeteria, which now I know it's... I don't know that it's consciously designed, but it is designed to make people sick and as is hospital food for the patients. And when I was on call at night, there were vending machines. And I used to think, oh my God, these Americans, they figure it out. It's amazing.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
The CLEAN program has been around since 2000. I mean, as the CLEAN program. Yeah, as the CLEAN program. It's been around since 2008. Right.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
That's a spot in Desert Hot Springs, yeah.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
It's very famous. All the models go there, all the actresses.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Yeah, yeah. So then, you know, when I learned that, and at the time... I was working in Palm Springs. The heart surgeon in the hospital that I was working, Desert Regional Medical Center, was Dr. Gundry. And he was like the top surgeon in the world. And, you know, he invented a way of stopping the heart, which was new. Yeah. retroverse cardioplegia with cold.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
I mean, the guy is like a genius, right? And they had hired, we call him the bionic surgeon because he was in Loma Linda and they paid $6 million to transfer him to Desert Hot Springs. They wanted to create, to Palm Springs, they wanted to create like a Mayo Clinic in Palm Springs and they wanted the top cardiac surgeon and they brought him over. Dr. Gundry? Yeah, Dr. Gundry.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
No, no. I think he lives in Santa Barbara now. He quit. But what happened was he was there and I started talking to him and telling him and he was like a little bit skeptic. And then his wife had a problem. So I helped his wife with this allergy problem. And he said, oh, my God. So he started paying attention. Eventually, he quit working as a heart surgeon. Now he's doing functional medicine.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
No way.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
He wrote a book, you know, about the gut recently.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
I think he's like a super genius kind of guy. He's a, you know, he's a... He's an interesting guy. I like him a lot. We went to India together.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
We were very good friends.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
He talks a lot about lectins. He wrote a book called The Plant Paradox. Yes. Dr. Gundry and I don't agree in a few things. Is that one of them? That's one of them.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Well, because as a molecule in itself, these are molecules that are thought to be a defense mechanism of the plants because plants cannot run and escape from the predators. So they manufacture these chemicals that deter, that make the animals that eat them feel bad. Either itchy or allergic or something, right? Or stomachache. And some of these chemicals are these lectins.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
But I think that focusing on that is a mistake because there's also something called hormesis, which is the good stresses in life, right? So some of these lectins actually cause... Some stress in the body, but the adaptation mechanisms that the body trigger and turn on to deal with that are actually reinforcing you. Really? Yeah.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
I was like an aboriginal in a supermarket, like discovering this new world. I was excited and admiring all this. But then I started eating these things and I started getting sick. I started gaining weight. I started having seasonal allergies that then became a year-round ordeal. Then I started having digestive problems, you know, bad digestion, bloating and pains and constipation, diarrhea.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Yeah.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
So now this is a great way to jump into really the meat of what I came to talk to you about.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Which is this. I told you 10% of problems, approximately, ballpark in my head, that people suffer from are acute. 90% are chronic problems. Now chronic problems, 99%, if not 100% of chronic problems are, directly related to gut, to the gut. And this is why the gut became such a fashionable thing. And everybody's talking about the gut now and the microbiome and the, right?
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Well, thank God we're putting our attention there because this is true. And this is my understanding and my experience in my practice around the world. I see people all over the world. I don't have an office. I Most people I treat, I treat for free. These people, my ex-wife's cleaner in the UK, when I went there and I saw her, and I can send you some videos to edit on the podcast.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
She had severe eczema. She's such a nice and hardworking girl. And I saw her hands, they were cracked and bleeding, right? And I couldn't help myself. So I went to talk to her. And I said, I think I can help you with this. And she said, okay. So I put her on a gut repair program. And you should see what happened. I mean, it changed her life. And this is a problem she had for years.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
And then she went to all the doctors that she could in the UK. I mean, she doesn't have access to, you know, a lot. But, you know, there is a good health system there. Nobody could help her. They put her on a...
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
they call biologicals you know which are basically basically a immune depressors because what happens is many of these these problems are autoimmune and your immune system can goes haywire and gives you what we see as a disease right we understand it as easy but but the thing is that
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Nature is incredibly intelligent and we are not born with any information or pre-information or programming to get sick. In fact, the body doesn't know how to get sick. What we see as diseases are adaptation and survival mechanisms that have been turned on for too long and then they become a problem. That's when we detect them as a disease. Right? But it's not really a disease.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
And I'll explain to you with something from my own specialty, cardiology, right? Which happens to be the number one killer of people in the world. Heart attacks, cardiovascular disease, right? Coronary artery disease. So what's happening? So this animal, the human being, is now running like a fish out of water, stressed out of high blood pressure, diabetes, chronic inflammation.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
So the artery starts getting fissures, starts getting... Little injuries, right? And the body intelligently deposits a little bit of cholesterol. Just like a scab forms when you cut yourself, the scab forms and under the scab, the skin heals. And then when the skin heals, the scab falls and it's healed, right? The same thing would happen in the artery.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
The plaque of cholesterol would go there, it would heal, and then the cholesterol would be reabsorbed. if the injury was just a short-term injury. But the injury is there every day, so the cholesterol is deposited every day.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Now, eventually, the cholesterol deposits so much that it narrows the passage of blood through the artery, or it breaks, it bleeds, a clot is formed, and you have a heart attack. But it's not a disease. It's an adaptation, survival mechanism. The problem is that we keep on, the injury is permanent. In nature, injury is momentary. You know, let's say... Yeah, yeah, I get what you're saying.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
How do you change it? The gazelle that's being run by a tiger, you know, it... The cortisol goes up, adrenaline goes up, blood pressure goes up, heart rate goes up. There's going to be microfissures. But then when they escape the tiger, they go back to being present and eating what nature designed them to eat.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
And so plaque of cholesterol would deposit, it would heal, and then it would be reabsorbed, right? But no.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
What I'm saying is that 99%, if not 100% of chronic diseases are either directly initiated by gut injury or related to gut injury. So what do we do? So what we do is we need to, first of all, when people come to me, the first thing I do when a chronic problem comes to me is I put them on a gut repair program. Even before I get the blood tests. Really?
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
And then I started getting depressed and I started getting really depressed. So I couldn't take it anymore. I took three days off. And because I was working at Lenox Hill Hospital at that time, I was almost a cardiologist, I knew everybody. So I knew the head of psychiatry. I knew the head of gastroenterology. I knew the head of allergies. So I went to all of them for consultations.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
If I send blood tests or whatever tests are needed. So I only send tests when they're really needed, in my opinion. Before the blood tests come, many times, already with a gut repair program, by the time the blood results are there and you have the second appointment, the problem is already even much better or completely gone in two or three weeks.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Yeah.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Well, sometimes I do blood work anyways. Okay, but what you're saying is... There's a lot of things to consider, but gut repair is... That's where the Achilles heel of human health exists. And I'm going to explain it to you. Oh, sorry, this is yours. Yeah, I brought a model of a part of the intestine. This is the intestinal wall. And these are the microvilli.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
An anatomical model.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Okay, go ahead. So the gut is a tube, right? And the tube has a surface, right? And this surface in the gut is increased by foldings, which are called villi and microvilli. So... Why does the body, or why did the body evolve to do that? What we think is that it's to increase the contact surface of the intestines because there's a lot happening there that needs to happen, right? Okay.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
digestion and absorption, right? And life depends on it in nature. Sustenance in food is very important. So the gut is, in all animals, is a really important organ and system, right? So what happens is this surface, if we now get an intestine and iron it out, and we flatten out all this villi and microvilli, the surface of your intestine would be
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Between one and two tennis courts of size, one and a half. I mean, you're little, so probably one and a quarter. Oh, yeah. I'm a little bigger, so one and a half. Some people have two tennis courts, surface of an intestinal wall.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Between one and two tennis courts, depending on your size and size. You know, and age and sex. Wow. Yeah. And this is what happens. Each microvilli has a blood supply system and a nerve and muscle system. This yellow here is the nerves, this artery and vein, and this is the wall. So this is inside the body and here would be outside the body. Here's where the food would come.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
right this is obviously a tube right and this is just a little part of the wall so here's where the food comes so this is where the bacteria would live right and once it passes see this there's a one layer of cells here this one layer of cell is like a brick wall each cell is like a brick and it's stuck to the next cell and it's sent right next to it by cement This is called the tight junction.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Now, why did the body design this wall so hermetic? It's because it doesn't want undigested food or even digested food to go directly into the blood. The cells are intelligently selecting The small, broken down, digestion breaks down proteins into amino acids, carbohydrates into simple sugars, and fats into fatty acids.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
And I ended up with three diagnoses, severe allergies, severe irritable bowel syndrome, and severe depression. And I ended up with seven prescription medications. Now, I get home from my home, my studio apartment that belonged to a building that belonged to the hospital, right, for the residents and fellows. And I put the prescriptions on a little desk that I had.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
So those little components are the ones that these cells select, absorb, meaning they go through the cell, the nutrients, and they're dumped into the blood. But if the cement between the cells is broken down and there's a gap between the cells, this is what's called the leaky gut. So what happens is everything that's happening outside the body,
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
meaning inside the digestive tube, it's outside the body. Now, many things are just seeping in without the intelligent selection of the body. The body selects only the building blocks, amino acids, fatty acids, simple sugars. But when these gaps are broken and the gut is leaky or hyperpermeable, undigested food starts, peptides or proteins start passing through. And here...
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
In the gut is where we're most exposed to external stuff because your skin touches your clothes and the air, and if you're in the swimming pool, the water. Your lungs is only water. That's all the limits between the outside of the body and the inside of the body. Your skin, your eyes, your lungs, and your intestines. What's happening in your intestines? You're dumping...
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
thousands of kilos in your lifetime of stuff there that the body has to deal with. So the body is exposed to external stuff in the gut more than anywhere else. So that's why the body deposited or sent all its troops, like 70, 80% of our immune system is in the gut. See these cells here?
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
This is one cell, it's showing you one cell from the immune system. So the immune system is in the gut wall, but it's also in the blood.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Leaky gut and changes in the microbiome are the gut problems, the gut disease, I mean, the gut injuries or the gut problems that trigger most diseases. And I'm going to explain to you, for example, autoimmune diseases, right? What's happening is the immune system works by recognizing surfaces. It's called the HLA system. human lymphocytic antigen system, right?
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Antigens are surfaces that your body, each immune system cells is like a computer and it has like a scanner. And it scans surfaces all the time, all day long. And then it compares it with its record. And if there's a certain, and genetically you have all the surfaces that are acceptable to you, like your proteins and your muscle.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
that you have them, you have like a code, right? So the immune system scans the surface of what it sees, and if it doesn't recognize it, it attacks. So what happens is when you absorb amino acids into the blood, It doesn't have a surface. Amino acid is a building block, but a protein already has a surface. So we have many amino acids together.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
So the immune system starts scanning surfaces, and because this is broken, the gut is leaky, it's hyperpermeable, now the blood is getting undigested food and bacteria and viruses. Okay. So it starts reacting.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
So, see, this is the problem with the medical world. I know, it's not simple. And even the functional medicine world and every healing modality world that you want to talk about. There is no simple digestive... There's no simple. People, here you want the... Well, no, what I want... Give me the... So what happened is this.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
And I said, I know because I'm already a doctor and I'm already trained. And I know that these chemicals... are not going to heal me. They're not going to correct the problem. They're just going to force certain chemistry in my body that's going to suppress symptoms. But it's not going to correct anything, right?
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Everybody's talking about gut health and gut injury and gut repair and leaky gut and everybody wants simple information. So you hear, oh, Akkermansia mucinus, mucinophila. Oh, they start taking Akkermansia. And there's this new probiotic. Oh, glutamine. So they start taking glutamine. Oh, you have to avoid gluten. So they avoid gluten. And there is no...
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Integration of, you know, because the number one reason, cause of gut injury is actually mental and emotional. It's stress. trauma, pain. So how can I give you a probiotic and glutamine and expect easy answer? It's not like that.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
That's the latest thing. So now they detect this bacteria. Totally true. And this bacteria makes this mucinous carbohydrate that coats the gut wall.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
So you get these geniuses that come and they talk to you about this and this. And you put a patient in front of them and many times they don't really know what to do.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
So my program, the CLEAN program... Yes. Let's put it this way. Most people with medium to severe gut injury will not heal completely just by changing a few things and taking a few supplements and like simple things. Yeah, they may get a little better, but it's not going to heal completely, right? It takes more. So that's what the CLEAN program does. It gives you the parameters in many aspects.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
There's an aspect about anxiety, so there's meditation. There's a bunch of things, right? And then also every expert has their way of looking at it, right? But it... Who do I trust? The people that have been at it for the longest time and that have the best results. I have incredible results with my patients because I understood for so many years and I've been exploring for 20 something years now.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
I've been practicing.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
So for example, when you take glutamine, you have to take it on an empty stomach. You have nothing to eat before. The best way is when you wake up in the morning, nothing to eat afterwards for at least 30 minutes. There's a lot of details. Oh, okay. There's a lot of details, you know? And if you don't do it that way, yeah, it may work a little bit. You may get a little better.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
But the type of healing that I am interested in, the... really creating the conditions for the healing mechanisms of the body to do their work optimally, because the body can heal of anything. There are no incurable diseases, only incurable patients, those who didn't find the way, right? So you need to find, if you have a chronic disease, you need to find a solid, good gut repair program.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
And there are a few around the world. I believe that mine is one of them because I see the results. So I created supplements and two- How long is the program? Two supports.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Not only that, but the suppression of symptoms sometimes comes with side effects that turn into other symptoms. So I knew all of this. But at that point, at that moment, I had the aha moment that I said, this is not what I want for me. And if I don't want this for me, this is not what I want for my patients. My dream was to help people heal.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
It's a 21-day program and it has- There is a seven-day program. There is a seven-day program. But biology has its times. I know we're all in a hurry in this society, but you can't produce a baby in six months. It takes nine months.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
You can't. You cut your skin. It's not going to heal in three days. It's going to take a week to 10 days for the scalp to come off.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
So the reason I have a seven-day program is to give people a taste. Because when people hear 21 days, they freak out. So what I did is I started going around the world trying to find out what else can I do to accelerate and potentiate so that seven-day program is even a little harder than the 21-day program. Oh, it is. Yeah, because the 21-day program has its schedule, which is very easy.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
It's a liquid meal for breakfast, solid meal for lunch, a liquid meal for dinner. And there's a way to take the supplements. And there's a list of foods that you can and you cannot eat.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Well, weight is a result of inflammation in many ways and of gut injuries. And this is a way of healing and weight comes off. It's a very common side effect of the clean program is people lose weight when they need to lose.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
So what I found out is that to make the first seven days of the 21-day program a little more, because when you do the 21-day program, it takes five days for some people to start feeling, sometimes you feel worse at the beginning and then, you know, because people that drink coffee every day, they have headaches and people that are,
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Right. I remember that. Damn it. And people that eat gluten. I mean, everybody is different, but you don't start feeling well until you're in your second week. And then on the third week, it's like, wow.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Yeah. Zero coffee. So the seven-day program, what I did is I added some Ayurvedic principles and intermittent fasting. Wow.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Well, yeah, maybe I can change your mind about that because that's really how nature designed things to be.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
There's a 24-hour period in the seven-day program that you don't eat. You only drink tea. And it's from lunch, you finish lunch one day, and to lunch the next day, you don't have any dinner, you don't have any breakfast.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
For people that work out like you, I tell them not to work out.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Well, and this is the problem. This is the problem with, you know, you want to be the best mother and the best wife and you want to be in the best shape. But if you want to fix your gut, you're going to have to make some changes. You know, if you break a bone, you're going to have to have a cast for some time until it... It gets better. Until it solds back together, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
And then you take the cast. So the clean program is like a cast for the gut. Yeah. And then you also have to understand that there is a whole energy distribution system, let's call it that way. There's the energy that we all know about and everybody's talking about, which is the energy that mitochondria produce, where the ATP is the result of the burning through the Krebs cycle of sugar, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
And what I ended up doing is a prescription writing machine. You know, you have five, 10 minutes to see a patient, you end up writing a prescription just in case. I don't know if you know this, but many times doctors put patients on medications to avoid a lawsuit. Yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Yeah. But there's another type of energy that we don't really understand in the Western world. That is the one that comes into your body when you sleep. Why can you be exhausted one day? You go and you have a good night's sleep and you wake up and you're full of energy. Is that why the mitochondria were not working when you were exhausted? Now they're working?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
It has nothing to do with mitochondria. It's a different type of energy. This is the energy that Chinese medicine understands way, way more, right? So these energies... the ATP that's produced by mitochondria and this other energy that we don't understand very well, right? This energy is used for all your functions during the day, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
And repair and defense, and it takes a lot of energy to use that. If you're going to spend that energy exercising and working out, It's the repairing... I understand. So you're diverting your cash flow into other things that are not what needs to be done.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
I sent you one.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
I'll send you another one.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
I can send you three if you want. Three, okay. You can do it with friends.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
There's a lot of things that are not good when the gut is broken that are completely fine when the gut is repaired.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
You can then reintroduce certain things. You cannot go just back to what you were doing before, but you can reintroduce certain things.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
So what's the problem with coffee? There's many problems with coffee. Okay, tell me.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Okay, so that's the first problem, that it's not organic. Most coffee is totally polluted and full of chemicals, right? So that's one problem. And so that's one of the reasons I tell people, but even if it's organic and really good coffee, Coffee is an exciting, it's a stimulant. A stimulant, yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
So it depletes, eventually depletes you of energy and then you become dependent on the stimulant effect. Some people can't function if they don't drink coffee in the morning. Or cannot go to the bathroom.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Yeah. Yeah, why? Now let's go back to the gut. So imagine there's a little nerve inside every microvilla. There's trillions, I mean, I don't know how many, but billions probably of microvilla in the one or two tennis court surface, right? And imagine this with a little nerve in a tennis court. One nerve next to the other next to the other. It's a huge nervous system.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
If something happened and you didn't put him on the medication, it's better to put him on a medication, even if it has side effects, but you can defend yourself. In our training, they used to tell us, imagine that when you write your progress notes, imagine you're in court and there's a jury and there's a judge.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
There's more nerve cells and neurons and dendrites and synapses in and around your gut than inside your brain.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Well, second in the chronology of how we've been talking about it. But in terms of importance for your life, I don't know if it's the second. They're all important, right? Because this one has to do with... with mentation, ideation, you know, speech, vision, right? But this one has to do with the intuition and other functions that are really important, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Other ones like... temperature regulation, mobility of the gut, you know, so it ends up being, because these muscles contract and they are the ones that, and these are muscles too, they are the ones that cause the peristaltic movement. So the food is pushed From one end to the other. So you need that in order to make good poops. Right.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
And if you don't have a good... So if the nervous system is busy doing other things, like adaptation and survival mechanisms, because there's a mess, there's a broken gut, there's a lot of antigens, there's a lot of surfaces coming in, undigested food, good bacteria, bad bacteria, it doesn't matter what... because we have good bacteria in the gut, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
But if those goes into the blood, it's not good. Even if it's good to have them in the gut, it's not good to have them in your blood. So when that happens, oh, there's a huge reaction and adaptation mechanism. The body's now in survival mechanism.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
It's survival mode.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
So there's certain fruits that are okay. There's certain fruits that are not. There's a whole, and in my book, it's explained really well. And each food that I take out from the 21-day program, there's a reason for, right? So there's some fruits that are not allowed during a gut repair program.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Like oranges, like citrus. Lemons are fine, but oranges are not fine.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Because a lot of people have some kind of negative reaction, adverse reaction. And it's not always the same. It's not an allergic reaction necessarily, but these are triggers. These are some of the nutrients that these plants have. that these vegetables have or these fruits have that may not allow the healing of the gut completely.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
For example, bananas. I don't allow bananas in the program because they actually constipate you a little bit.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
You know? And there's vegetables that are not allowed, like eggplants are not allowed. Why? The eggplants are not allowed because they have certain nutrients that are pro-inflammatory, right? Like solanine in eggplants and tomatoes have some lectins. So there are... So no tomatoes on this plant. So no tomatoes on this plant, no nightshades. No nightshades. Yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
And then obviously no gluten, obviously no processed foods. So everything has to be real food and not food-like products.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Completely fine if the chicken comes from running in the fields and eating worms and little bugs, as opposed to chickens that never see the light of the day and cannot even run because they're in this...
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Yeah, free range.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Yeah.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
The most similar to wild game possible. And wild game is even better. It means animals that are living the way that nature designed them to live. Same thing with cows.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
If you're going to eat cows, then be them grass-fed, free-roaming, happy cows, and not cows from feedlots fed with grains and given antibiotics and... So, you know, if it's fish from the sea or the rivers, not from fish farms where they give them all kinds of chemicals as well. Right.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
There is a 12-hour window. that you have to respect 12 hours between the last meal of one day and the first meal of the second day, of the next day.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
As a minimum, at minimum 12 hours. Why? Because it takes about eight hours to finish digestion and absorption. And then when digestion, because what happens is this, digestion takes a lot of energy. That's when you have a big meal, you kind of fall asleep, you know, get tired, right? So it takes a lot of energy for the body to digest, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
So when digestion is happening, other functions that require a lot of energy have to be slowed down because there's a lot of energy being directed to digestion because digestion is so important. In our history, we didn't have food available all the time. So when there was food, evolution took the- That makes total sense to me. Yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
So this was the world that I ended up in and that made me sick. And I said, nah, I'm going to find my own way. So this was three months before I graduated. I graduated as a cardiologist and I started looking for solutions for my problems. My biggest problem at the time was that I was severely depressed. I was actually thinking of... Killing myself.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Most people walking around in the modern world have some degree of gut injury. I'm convinced that there's really almost no one with a completely healthy gut.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Yeah. Yeah. Because it's inevitable. We live in this world. We do get stressed. We have a timetable. I saw you looking at your watch. We have things to do and we are exposed to chemicals.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
No, no, I took your... I know, you can talk for another five hours, right? So, you know, you have to rest your digestive system. So you take away the foods that are difficult to digest, you take away the foods that cause triggers in the body, and you reduce... the work of digestion. That's why we have a liquid meal for breakfast and a liquid meal for dinner in the 21-day program.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
And then the lunch is regular food, but only real food with no chemicals. And there's a list of foods that you can and you cannot eat. And it's basically the five big ones are no dairy, no sugar, no coffee, no alcohol, no gluten.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Yeah, there's so much life. You know, I'm now running retreats. I guide retreats. I know you said that. I take people to very natural environments and I take a bunch of other healers with me. Ayurvedic medicine doctors, a massage therapist, some biohackers that are really good. And I bring all of them with me and we gather about 30, 40 people in these places and we put them on the CLEAN program.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
And they also have all these other therapies. And that really accelerates healing. Because that's the other thing is we're busy. So yeah, maybe you're avoiding, maybe you're eating right. And you're avoiding the things that you need to avoid. And you're taking the right supplements. And it's still not going to work. Why? I'll tell you a story.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
In this last retreat in Argentina, there was this woman that, just like you, intelligent, has a good living, knows a lot of people, so she can see many specialists. She has money. Yeah, very smart woman. She comes to me. For years, she's been having digestive issues. And lately, like two weeks before she came to me, she was diagnosed with SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
So the story is that she gets bloated like crazy and she wakes up in the middle of the night and she's constipated. I mean, she has many, many other symptoms of SIBO, but they come and go and it's confusing. So when I sat down with her and I started talking with her, in functional medicine, we do our history taking in a different way. We start when they were born.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
You know, were you born by C-section or natural birth, which is already a difference? Were you breastfed or not? When you were little, did you miss school because of lung infections, ear infections, throat infections? Did you get antibiotics? And then at some point in life, there's a defining moment where things change.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
for some people it's an accident or surgery or their mother died or they had a traumatic event of some type and life changes, right? So when I got to that point, I realized there was a heavy history, a familiar thing with her father and who had died. And I could see, because I'm really focused when I'm talking to her, I could see that the moment we got to that point in the history taking,
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Even her way of expressing herself, confusion. So I looked at her, I said, listen, I see two huge problems here. I'm not sure about your diagnosis of SIBO. I see that you're constipated. She was pooping every five, six days, which is a big problem. So I have this, I buy here in LA and I smuggle them to Argentina.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
These bottles called implantoramas, which are like a little colonic machine that you can take with you, right? So I take them there and I give them to the people. So I gave her one and I instruct her to do a coffee colonic. It's a little bottle. At least she gets coffee. With a tube, you put it inside your butt and then you pump it up and the The thing goes, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
And the only reason I didn't even start thinking of the way to do it is because I knew that I would destroy my parents. And as a good Jewish boy, Jewish mama, you know.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Either water or water and coffee or coffee, right? So for her, we needed some coffee because, I mean, severe constipation. And I said, and maybe what you need to heal is a trauma. And it's like an intuitive thing because I just saw her get so disturbed after she was telling me about this family problem, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
It happened to be that the next activity in the retreat was family constellations. And I don't know if you know what that is. I was explaining to you before. Well, yeah, what is family constellation? So it's a therapy mode in which a therapist, in this case a psychologist, gets the whole group of people and says, who has a problem that they want to explore, right? So people come.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
They put them in the middle of the circle. And he starts asking in a very particular way about the problem the text presents. what the problem is. And then, so then let's say the problem is the father and the sister. So then they choose somebody to represent the father and somebody to represent the sister. And they go into this thing.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
And the way that they're guided into this conversation, they have to speak. Even the ones that are representing them, they have to say what they feel. Something happens. I don't know. She went into the family constellation. She had a huge breakthrough of something that happened with her father. I didn't go into it very, very deeply when we were talking because, you know. Yeah, yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
But so she went into that. She had a huge breakthrough, went to her room, had a coffee enema, had the best poop of her life. And the next day, fantastic. Flat as a board, zero symptoms. She was completely fine. For the next five days, zero symptoms. Something that hasn't happened to her in three years. Being four days in a row, five days in a row without symptoms.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
You can't do that to your mom and to my dad. I'm not going to do that. I'm going to find my way.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
I think it's a combination. I think it's a combination. That's why I'm saying that sometimes even the clean program, which is a great, or any gut repair program, I mean, I found a few that are really good around the world. There's ones that I really like. There's a guy in Argentina called Nestor Palmeti, and he has a center where people go out for retreats as well.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
He's way, way more strict and limiting than, you know, he's vegetarian.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
I wouldn't say that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
It's all relative. But I really respect this guy. He has great results. He's not even a doctor. He was a journalist who was very sick himself and then started studying. And then, you know, when detailed journalists go into something and they learn, they become amazing. Yeah. He has the information. Like, wow. Wow. So there are some out there, right? But a good gut repair program is many times...
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Good by itself, but many times you need other things. Yeah. So some people... I'm going to try your retreat.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You'll be my guest.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
The next one we're planning on March 30 in Uruguay.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
The retreats are seven days. And the flight from here is maybe, from LA you stop in Miami and then you go to Uruguay. So it's five hours Miami and then eight hours Uruguay.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Wow. It's far, but it's going to be one of the best experiences of your life.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
No, listen to what happened to me. And this is why I am an optimist. And I believe that Things can go no back to how they were. I'll tell you the story and then we define. I had a car accident that you know about. I remember. And I just told you about it. I had to fix my car.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
That was seven years ago.
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Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
And it broke one of my heart valves. I had to have open heart surgery to change one of my aortic valve, which is the most important valve. Anyways, it was a disaster. And one of the things that happened is there was compression of my L3, L4. Right? Lumbar. Yeah. Lumbar three and lumbar four. If I show you the MRI, you don't even need to be a doctor.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
You can see the L3 and L4 are kind of destroyed and inflamed and white on the MRI. And you can see the discs are barely even existing. The bone and bone are kind of touching. Right? So I try to avoid surgery since... I mean, I've been having bad back pain for five years. Lately, it was really bad. It really limited my life.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
So I get to Argentina and my sister had met this woman who is a neurosurgeon, radiologist, but she developed a way a functional way of dealing with the body, right? So it's called BAM Biomechanics. You can find it online. She's on Instagram. Her name is Teresa Salazar. When I met her, I kind of playfully said, oh, you're also a radiologist. Yeah, yeah. So I have a patient who's having back pain.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Well, I came too late to be on the show.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Check out the MRI. So I showed her my MRI. So she said, you know, There's two very obvious lesions. Here she pointed to the obvious lesions, which the surgeon at Mount Sinai in New York was going to operate and fuse those bones, right? Totally, yeah. This is obvious, but you know, the MRIs are very gossipy. They give you too much information, and sometimes...
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
From gossip, you know, from 30 gossips that you get, one may be really important. So look, these are all the problems. If I don't see the patient, I can't really tell. So I say, I am the patient. So she started examining me, making me move. And she said, you know what? I think I can help you.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
When the retreat ended, I went to see her and her mentor, who's an 84-year-old surgeon, Tato Beva, unbelievable guy, 84-year-old neurosurgeon who still plays competitive basketball. And when I met him, I felt like I was in an Indian monastery. He's like... this very present guy. And he saw me and he said, I think I can help you by injecting ozone in the disc space between the vertebrae, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
I was a taekwondo champion in Uruguay. I was competing. I was in school. I did really well in school. I had a full-on life without any problem. I mean, I had appendicitis when I was a kid, but that was it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
So I went there and they did the procedure and my pain is completely gone. Now that guy, He's old school. I said, how much do I owe you? He said, I don't charge colleagues. So what I'm saying is there are still people around the world that are in it for the right reason, and it's not a fortune to see them. And I see a lot of these people, and I see more and more people.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
I found you. Seek and you shall find. Sometimes it finds you. When I was at the retreat, I went there to help people, and I ended up being helped myself.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
So sometimes you seek and you find, and sometimes it finds you. But you have to be open, and you have to ask, and you have to question. You have to ask.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Instagram, dr.alejandrojunger, that's my Instagram handle. Also, Clean Program has an Instagram page.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Or cleanprogram.com, or you can read one of my books. I have three New York Times bestsellers and a fourth book that didn't make it, but Clean, Clean Gut, Clean Eats, and Clean Seven. Those are my books. You can start there.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
I've written four books, three of them are New York Times bestsellers.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
I don't know. I didn't put much attention on promoting it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
The thing is with the gut, it's very tricky because symptoms may appear far away from the gut that may seem unrelated to the gut, like depression. like allergies, like skin problems, rashes, allergic problems.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Repair your gut, repair your life.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
I was the happiest kid on the planet. I was deeply loved by my parents, my sisters. By your family. We had a big, beautiful community. It was like the perfect life.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Well, I'm writing something about the mind now. Oh. Clean mind.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Thank you for having me. Always a pleasure.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Well, that's your conclusion. I'm just telling you my story.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
I don't fully understand the question, but there is a problem with medicine these days and with the medical system and with the medical business, you know, because it is... It's a business.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Absolutely. Okay. Yeah. We are creatures of this planet, like all other creatures of this planet, right? And if you look at all other creatures of this planet, except the ones that we domesticated and make live with us, you look at that, you don't see creatures, animals in the wild, in their natural environment with depression or autoimmune diseases or diabetes.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
I don't know about better or bigger.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
There's no monkeys with cancer, right? There may be, but it's a rare thing, you know? Right. They live, they reproduce, they eat, when they find food, they fast when they don't, and then they die. Either an animal kills them and eats them, or they're old, or it's an accident of nature. But we have taken ourselves and put ourselves in this situation.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
This unnatural environment, right, that not only are loaded with chemicals in the air we breathe, the water we drink and shower with, the medications we consume, the cosmetics we use that are full of chemicals, the cleaning products that we use in our homes, the architecture of our homes.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
I don't know if you know, but a huge percentage of pollution in the world comes from architecture, from the making of cement, of clothes, of clothes. So we are surrounded ourselves with toxic chemicals, but that's not the only problem. We are also disconnected from our roots, from nature. And we live in this world in which our mind has taken over. We're not present anymore.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
And our mind is always imagining either future or past scenarios which make you either sad or anxious or fearful or whatever it is. And you're always on a flight or fight mode. All other animals are present. You see a deer and, you know, they're just present. And if there's danger, their ears go up and they look and... And the danger is just that moment.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Either they escape or, you know, the tiger kills it or not. But after that, they go back to being present. We are as if a tiger is chasing us, after us, all day long.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
The cortisol. I mean, that is the consequences. That is the... you know, the digital print of the chemical consequences of what's happening. But what's happening is really a disconnection from nature, a disconnection of mind, body, and spirit. And so I got really sick. I didn't want to take medications and I started looking for a different solution. My most
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
problematic symptom at that time was my depression. I couldn't get out of bed sometimes. I mean, I covered myself. I was on call. They were calling me, hey, are you coming or not coming? I had to force myself. It was really bad. So I decided not to take the medications and see if I can find something different. So I started going to therapy, psychologist, a
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
all kinds of things, until I found the concept and practices of meditation. Because the biggest problem was that I realized that my mind was always producing thoughts, thinking, thinking, thinking all day long. And some people even pride themselves, I can think of two or three things at the same time. But that's not something that I was actually choosing to do. It was just happening to me.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
At one point I was like, I think I'm going crazy. Why am I thinking of all these negative things? If I had the power to decide, I wouldn't be thinking about this. So who is thinking? Who is deciding these thoughts in my head? I thought I was going nuts. I didn't know that everybody's having the same problem.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Yeah, I was like, am I going crazy? I saw people in the subways in New York speaking out loud to themselves. I said, the only difference between him and me is that he's doing it out loud. And he's a little bit... I'm a little bit better dressed, but that's it. And you see them and you think, oh, crazy people. But we're all like this. So when I found the concept of meditation, it said...
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
that constant thinking, which is mostly negative and repetitive, that goes on and on, that you would actually shut up if you could. This is what meditation can slow down and maybe even stop. And I say, whoa, that's what I want.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
So I ended up, and this is a longer story, and one day maybe we talk about it, but I ended up in a monastery in India that my exchange was going there as a doctor, as a cardiologist. And in exchange, I learned how to meditate and do yoga. And I was running this huge ashram in Maharashtra in India. It's a place called Gurudev Siddha Peeth. And it's actually an ashram that has a life...
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
enlightened being as a guru there's a real a real thing a real guru a real guru and what does that mean a real enlightened being a person that's fully present in connection complete connection with nature all the time okay when you say a real one versus a fake one how can you tell the difference between a real enlightened being and a fake enlightened being
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
Well, that's a whole different conversation, right? Because the truth is that you can only see and understand up to the level that you are at. up to your level of presence, you can really see.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 413: Dr. Alejandro Junger: The Gut's Impact on Depression, Skin and Allergies + a Gut Repair Program
But when somebody is even more present than you are, and this is also a trick because you're comparing yourself with other beings, but for the sake of this conversation, if somebody is, you don't really realize, they can appear either stupid to you, because a lot of enlightened beings are very simple, and you know? There's nothing going on in their brain, they're fully present, right?