In our modern world, it’s undeniable that we’re exposed to various toxins. Over recent decades, we’ve witnessed a surge in physical ailments like diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. But what about diseases of the mind? Are the diseases of the body and mind interconnected in ways we’re only beginning to understand?
In this episode, we’re joined by Dr. Pat Boulogne, a renowned consultant and coach specializing in health, wellness, and mindset. We delve into the essential 5 pillars of health, stressing the significance of accurate medical assessments. Dr. Pat explains how optimizing brain function and the role of boundaries contribute to the success of high achievers.
Tune in for expert insights to enhance your overall well-being and productivity.
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How Your Mind and Body Shape Your Total Wellness with Dr. Pat Boulogne
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. There’s no doubt that, today, we live in a toxic world. Instances of diseases of the body, such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease, have gone up in recent decades and so have instances of diseases of the mind, things such as ADHD as well as anxiety and depression. My guest today, Dr. Pat Boulogne, is one of the people out there trying to help people overcome some of these challenges that we have in our modern world to create a healthier existence, both physically and mentally.
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Dr. Pat, welcome to the program.
Thank you so much. I am so thrilled to be here with you and share time.
Thank you so much for taking your time out. And, first, I want to start out by talking a little bit about what it is that you do in your practice.
Well, I really don’t have a practice, per se. I am a consultant and I’m a coach and what I do is I help people in their health goals, in their wellness goals, in their mindset goals so that they can go from point A to point C in the quickest way possible that’s safer and also with simpler solutions that are not harmful. So, there’s ways to do that and understanding where somebody’s at to get them to that point, I do and I help people organize that thought process and like simplified steps so that they have the checklist. I love seeing people thrive and I bend over backwards to do it.
That’s part of the reason I started this podcast, hope to inspire people to look into what they can do to thrive. One of the questions I have is do you encounter more of the physical or more of the mental challenges or do you see them as going hand in hand?
Well, my premise for when I talk about what health is and what health isn’t, because it’s not merely the absence of disease and I agree with the World Health Organization on that part of the definition, the health part of it is much more integrated with our daily lives. How do you perform every day in order to go from point A to point C? And when you start lagging and you start going like, “Oh, I’d rather do something else,” or you’re like, “I gotta take a nap, I’m depleted by noontime, can’t even wait ’til five o’clock and you got to take a nap,” because you have to take a look at what kind of foods that you’re eating. So when you ask about mindset, I talk about five pillars of health and the first part of the health that I talk about is food, exercise, I talk about sleep, I talk about positive mindset and positive mental attitude, and I talk about structured function, which is basically proper posture, but the key component to make all those other four pieces successful is the mindset and the positive mental attitude because if you go in saying like, “I’m gonna try this diet,” you automatically are going to have an issue with it. There’s something that’s going to make you struggle and it clicks off this thing in your head that tells you that you’re like, “Oh, you’re not gonna be successful,” even though you don’t say it to yourself. But if you can find out where that mindset came, that paradigm shift came from, then you can go back to where that happened and you can ease how that information proceeds in your head. And I talk about that when I help my clients and when I’m consulting to understand how the three brains work and how you can function and make them work better for you.
So it’s safe to say that the mindset is where it all begins because I think the way most people approach something is along the lines of, “I’ll go on a diet and I’m going to stop eating sugar,” to reference something we were discussing before we started recording, but there has to be a mindset before someone’s actually going to stick to something such as, instead of — I used to drink a lot of Coca-Cola, which has a lot of sugar in it, and I oftentimes now replace it with tea, which I have in front of me right now, instead of just saying like, “I’m gonna replace this with that,” you have to do something to adjust your mindset first in order to make that behavior replacement successful.
Well, there’s two questions I ask and one is are you willing to do what it takes to be healthy?
Yeah.
And I don’t talk after that, I always wait for someone to answer that question because what it does is it really makes them check in with their subconscious and in their primitive brain. Am I willing to do what it takes to be healthy? And the second thing is I always ask them what their biggest health goal is and then they tell me, or top three, and then I ask them how bad you want another one to ten, so that’s how I select clients that I work with or not. And if I don’t get that ten or that nine or if they say eight, then I say what would make it a ten for you. If you know what the objection is, sometimes, those objections are mindset. A doctor told me years ago that I was always going to be fat. Every time you eat, you’re thinking that Whatever you’re eating, I’m going to be fat so why bother?
So it kind of covers your life holistically. I put eight categories myself and I know a lot of other people have different systems of four, six categories and they usually encompass the same general ideas that you have, your mental, physical, and spiritual health as well as your life’s purpose or alignment of some kind as well as your career, your community, your finance, and then possibly something else. I actually have a category in my life assessment that I call, I just simply call it spice, which is just those really interesting, off-the-beaten-path, crazy things such as even travel or coming up with a random game or just coming up with a new idea or having something witty to say but I know that’s not important to everyone. But what you’re saying is that, holistically, the mindset is kind of the base, the foundation for every single one of these components, the way we usually kind of compartmentalize our lives,
For people who compartmentalize, sometimes that’s good, and other times, that’s bad. And there’s kind of like not an in between part because when — there’s a healthy way to compartmentalize, because then you know what’s in your box. But what is unhealthy, when you keep on compartmentalizing and when the solution is outside your box. So it’s like Einstein’s definition of insanity that you keep on doing the same thing over and over and over again and you don’t get any better results. I’ll try this or I’ll try that, and sometimes in like the DIY thing, I had a client one time that called me up panicking and he goes, “Pat, Pat, what do you think this is?” and I got on a Zoom with him and his eye was like swollen like a football and I asked, I go, “What did you do?” and he did this DIY thing and he had an allergic reaction to it and he wanted to know, I said, “How long is that going on?” and I said, “Did it start small? Did it all of a sudden coming?” I asked him a lot of those medical questions to ascertain and funnel down to what my thought process was, I think it was a staph infection, and I said, “Go to your doctor,” and he goes, “You can do things for staph on your own, can’t you?” Yeah, but if it’s MRSA, you don’t want MRSA on your eye, you’re going to go blind, I said, I go, “You really wanna go to your physician and have them give you an assessment.” I can tell you kind of what I think on Zoom but I can’t — you don’t have — if you have a crappy camera, I can’t tell you what your eye, like that texture that I’m looking for. And there’s things that you can do by the time you get there, you can always put cloth, wet cloth and ice over the top of it to see if you can get some of the swelling down before you even go to see them but take a picture of it now and so you have it. So, two days later, he comes back, he goes, “Wow,” he goes, “Anytime I’ve ever asked you a question,” he goes, “You’re always on the market and you’re on target for that,” and I said, “Was it staph?” and he’s going like, “Well, my eyes are getting better. I have major astigmatism,” So I’m looking at something with my glasses, it’s a coin toss sometimes but I was really glad to see that he got it taken care of but he’s treated it before and each time that he treated it, it kept on getting worse. That interjection of Western medicine, traditional medicine has got to be handled in an appropriate way so that you stay on target, because when you do that — we all need coaches.
People who are coaches have coaches. Two heads are better than one. Click To TweetAnd when you got two heads that are better than one and they’re functioning the way they’re supposed to, then you can lead down a path of better communication, better health, better mental, and you think sometimes, you always ask the right person or the wrong person this question but when you ask the wrong person this question, it’s like, “Yeah, I had to add a while ago, it goes away,” and then two years later, you still got the same level of anxiety, you still have the same level of depression, nothing’s really changed because you haven’t addressed the core issue. When you get to the core issue, then you can open that Pandora’s Box very slowly and see what’s the pieces in there, it’s like finding a treasure chest that’s like been in the attic for like 80 years and going like, “Oh my God, what’s in here? I never knew this was here.” Because we forget. Our minds are set up so that we put things that aren’t great to happen to us in our life in some other place and we all know that. When we talk to our friends we haven’t talked to a long time and you’re reminiscing and they’re going, “Steven, I remember that time. Remember that time when you like blah, blah, blah?” and you’re thinking, wow, that is not even on my radar in my memory. And we do that because we always want to put your body and your psyche is always set up to go forward and it’s just like the things that we do that keep on pulling us back so if you can get the identification of that and deal with that, then you can have a much more exponential life.
So when you talk about reminiscing, I know a lot of people discuss the concept of nostalgia and there have been some past cultures that actually have viewed nostalgia as kind of a disease. Is there a healthy amount of nostalgia in people’s lives or is it something that we should, in general, be trying to pull away from because it’s going to inherently pull us backwards at a time when we’re trying to move forward?
Well, I think the best way to answer that question is the mammalian brain and when I talked about three brains before, to identify what they are, one’s the primitive brain which I call the lizard brain, the second is the mammalian brain, which stores all your emotions and anything that has ever happened to you and all the pieces of the puzzle for that, whether it’s good or bad, and then there’s your conscious brain, that’s the one we’re using right now. So the conscious brain talks to the mammalian brain and so when something happens, we choose to either make it positive or negative. And so even if something happens that’s not so great, you can handle how the mammalian brain thinks about that and utilizes it because the lizard brain is talking to it all the time because the lizard brain is all about survival, food, fornication, it’s just like that whole piece, it’s like when a saber-toothed tiger comes out and jumps in front of you and you’re thinking, “Oh, my God, I gotta get the hell out of here.” I mean, we all know that feeling. Sometimes, we just don’t pay attention to it. But the mammalian brain stores all our emotions. It’s the holy grail of marketing and business. What they do is they focus on the bad thing that happened to you and they want to take you from pain to pleasure. And so if you can yourself go in and you’re saying, okay, so what did I learn about that? When something bad happens, what did I learn about that? What three things I could have done to handle that better next time? Write it out. Keep a journal for a while because that will make you more conscious of what the mammalian brain really does and then you can change the messaging that comes out so it could be much more positive so that if something triggers you to set you off in depression, you’ll just understand what that trigger is, go like, “Oh, that’s just a trigger for depression, I don’t have to buy into that,” because your brain, your mind is stronger than the emotion if you let it be. And so it’s that self-talk that you need to have in order to move forward.
So it’s not about avoiding looking back into the past and it’s not about never telling that story about something you did a quarter century ago or never hearing that story, it’s more about how your brain responds to it, how your brain thinks about it, and if you remember it or not, but if you do remember it, just saying, “Oh, yeah, that was an interesting learning experience,” as opposed to just saying, “Yeah, it’s another example of society trying to bring me down,” or any other kind of self-talk that ends up being sometimes both negative and disempowering.
When somebody’s got something going on, they just can’t shake it and they can’t shake it and it keeps on coming back to haunt them again and again and again. Or it might not be in the exact same form but it has the same feeling of something that happened to you when you’re eight years old. If you can take that event so you don’t have that reaction, because your body stores everything that happens to you emotionally someplace in your body, and if it keeps on storing the same emotion in the same place where those things go, which could be different for every person, then what happens is that’s where you start looking at like why you have gut problems. That has to do with self-esteem.
Interesting.
And so in the intestinal tract, it’s just like that part of it and your liver has to do with anger, and your heart part has to do with joy. People can die from overjoy-ness, if that’s a word, like their body just can’t take the emotion. A woman who I know that was a coach of mine had a sister with the same name as me, she was talking about resiliency and she was telling me, “You’re so resilient, because I had a series of things that were not great happen to me,” and she said, “What you did is that you sat there,” and when I was talking to her about them, she said, “Well, how did you handle that?” and I said, “I moved on.” Well, what happened? And I tell my clients all the time, “What happened? Tell me what happened. We’ll work through it together.” I go like, “Okay, so what could you have done better? Blah, blah, blah.” And so you want to take the charge off of that so it never bothers you again? Do you want to have a different outcome? Because stuff happens to you repetitiously and your body keeps on going, “How many times do I have to do this before you learn?”
Yeah.
And I love to prevent that experience for people. You have to understand what that self-talk really does for you and learn how to say better things to yourself and love yourself. I mean, I have one tip for everybody who’s listening to this right now —
Oh, good for it.
One of those crazy things like that, “Dr. Pat, she’s crazy, but we love her,” I always say when you’re getting ready to go to bed or when you first get up in the morning, take a deep look into your eyes because the heart houses the mind, the mind houses the soul, and your windows of the soul are your eyes so you look at yourself and look in yourself and tell yourself that you love you. And mean it. So it’s like, “I love you,” it’s like, “Nothing today can destroy my peace of mind.” Do not let anybody have a piece of it who doesn’t — if they want to park their car there, get rid of them. It’s just like you could push them aside. I mean, most of those people sometimes are your family. So sometimes you just kind of look at them and go, “Thanks for sharing it with me,” and just kind of push that energy away from you.
What is the general amount of time it would take someone who’s really committed to making these types of changes to go from the person who experiences the same thing over and over again, say the same job scenario, the same social setting, the same family setting, blah, blah, blah, and it always brings them down to gain the strength to where they can become a person that, as you said, “Thank you for sharing that but I feel this way and I’m gonna continue living my life”?
So I would just say thanks for sharing that with me. I wouldn’t add anything into it. I was like, “Oh, that was interesting. Thanks for sharing that with me,” end of story, move on. The time span, it depends upon the quality and the quantity of the issues that a person has chosen to bury. So if I’m opening that proverbial Pandora’s box, I’m looking in there to see like, okay, so what happened? It’s like going through an iceberg, right?
Yeah.
And it’s just like some people have little, and some people when they get that, I love the look on your face when they get that like, “Oh, my God, you mean like I don’t have to do that again?” It’s like, no, you’re not obliged to beat yourself up. I’ll give you an example. When I had my practice and I learned this technique, I decided I wanted to do it on everybody. Big mistake. Never ever, ever say something that you just love — because I loved it and I did it on kids who were autistic, who had better function, they had better functionality in society after working, doing this specific technique with them, but I had a woman who, when I did this technique, I had a waiting room full of people and I’m in the room with her and there’s a dog barking out my back window and there’s a bakery right behind that you could smell food every morning so it’s just like you gained weight just smelling it and so if you thought that you’re going, I eat bread and things like that and I gain weight, you’ll gain weight, because it stimulates like us eating it. I have my hands on this woman, the dog’s barking and I had my hands in a certain position because I wanted to do a release point so she could relax and she bolted in a New York nanosecond off the table, standing up and going, “Let’s not touch my neck. Okay? Let’s just not touch my neck,” and I adjusted her so many times, and I’ve touched her neck but this specific instance with the dog barking triggered a memory of hers that she buried and put in a box and never wanted to think about again because she was molested. That dog, my hands on her neck made that memory come up and I said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I go, “Let’s have a seat. Let’s start all over and let me first go out and clear out my waiting room,” because I knew this was going to take longer than five minutes and I went out in the waiting room, I said, “If anybody needs to go, go,” blah, blah, blah, and being Cape Cod that everyone’s really nosy and they wanted to find out who it was that was in the room that was getting my attention. I just went back in, I expected to see nobody but I did let her out the back door so she didn’t see anybody. But what it was is that she relived this moment and we went through the cycle that I teach clients to do so that they relive that moment and it goes from being so reactive because her reaction was extreme, so, so reactive so that when she had that process again, it’s now a memory that has a positive note of it. Well, it took about a half hour only. I was surprised. I thought was going to be in there for two hours. And doing that with her and then she was able to get, I was able to do that point that helped her relax even more, the dog barking didn’t bother her anymore and then she just sat up at one point in time, I said, “Tell me when you’re done doing what we were doing,” I said, “Let me know. Go back check in with the story. This is a memory now, are you still reactive?” and every time she said she was reactive, I go, “Start all over again,” and it was the cycle because you had to train the body to do something that it normally did something else with. And so when she got done, my staff came in, because I was divorced at the time, and said, “Your new boyfriend just brought in flowers for you,” and I went, “I don’t have a boyfriend,” at that time, and I said, “What are you talking about?” “Dr. Pat, this guy, he wants to see you. Maybe he’s gonna ask you to marry him.” I said, “Yeah, I have to know him first,” so I go out there and I looked at the guy, I said, “Hi, I don’t know you,” and he said, “I know you don’t know me.” I said, “They decided that you’re gonna ask me to marry you because I’m already married.” He goes, “You adjusted my wife and you helped her with a specific problem that she had,” and when he told me the name, that was her, and he said, “Thank you for giving me my wife back.” And it was just such a great feeling of going like, oh, my God, you make that impact in people’s life to have that transformation. It’s really special.
When it takes some time, in some of these instances where the trauma is really kind of deep inside your brain, it’s going to take a little while, do you ever recommend to clients that they remove themselves from the situations? I know it’s hard to remove yourself from any time a dog’s going to bark because dogs are everywhere, but there might be certain, I don’t know, people in your life or even kind of the old adage about, well, if you put a lot of snacks in your cupboard in your house, you’re going to eat a lot of snacks and sometimes the best thing to do is just never buy snacks, so how often do you recommend that people just remove themselves from the situations that are making them feel that way, at least temporarily, while they gain that strength back?
Well, I would say to anybody who’s in a toxic environment, they should remove themselves from that toxic environment. Let’s take a simple example kind of thing. I want to lose weight, I want to lose 10 pounds, and I know that intermittent fasting is one of the best ways in order for me to get rid of toxins, burn fat, and be healthy, and have your body get down to its appropriate size because you got to give your body a rest and it can’t burn fat if you don’t give it an opportunity to go into that cycle so that’s why intermittent fasting is so important because the way they particularly do it. So, if I say I want to lose weight but I’m not willing to intermittent fast and I’m going to eat sweeteners, which will make you gain weight, by the way, that’s a tip, and drink enough water get and enough fluids in my body so my body can say saturated, then it’s always going to be a struggle. So, how do you do that is you go out and you don’t shop in the middle of a grocery store, another tip, you shop —
Oh, yeah, shop around the edges.
Shop around the edges and make sure that your grocery basket looks like it has more vegetables than anything else. And lean protein because I’m really a big proponent of a Mediterranean diet. And also really asking yourself when you want another chip, when you’re hungry, ask yourself, “Am I really hungry or am I reacting to something?” And if you’re reacting to something, it’s better for you to get water, put lemon in it and drink that and if you’re still hungry 30 minutes later then you should probably eat food. Another tip.
Just kind of setting up your lives and so like when it comes to like what food are you around, even what’s in front of your face, what people are you around, what people are saying what to you, what content are you consuming, what shows are you watching, because I think when people talk about our current world being toxic, I think a lot of those things also come up. There are a lot of toxic messages, a lot of toxic types of content or even types of words, phrases, common talking points that you’re going to hear everywhere. Is there an effective way to remove yourself from all that temptation? You can’t go to the grocery store, obviously, and not see that middle section, you can’t go to the restaurant and not see the eight different artificial sweeteners next to the coffee or tea that they bring you, you’d have to find a way to get rid of it, but are there other ways, are there other things that people can do to avoid any of these forms of toxins in the world today?
People who are successful have boundaries and so if your boundary is I’m not going to eat sugar, then you don’t buy it. And when you go to put your hand on it, I came back from a large event and I was absolutely exhausted and I went shopping hungry. Always eat before you go to grocery store. And I’m going down it and I was in a Publix where they have BOGOs, like two for one, and, occasionally, I like really good pizza, very thin crust, every once in a while. I don’t need a bunch of stuff on it, that kind of thing, and then I went like, “Oh, the ice cream.” And as a kid, we always had ice cream and it was like it was good then, didn’t have a lot of toxic chemicals on it, so I go, “God, two for seven bucks —
That’s a good deal.
And so that’s a great deal, it’s just like my favorite Italian ice cream, and so I put two in my basket, I took five steps and my conscious brain said, “What the hell are you doing?” and I stopped and I did the same thing I tell my clients to, take a deep breath and say, “Do I really need the ice cream?” and the answer was no. I took it out and put it back in their freezer. Sometimes, it’s okay to sin, occasionally, not every day of the week or even once a week. Sometimes, it’s okay to sin but if you’re gonna sin, make that sinning, do it great, do it well.
Yeah.
And so it’s something that you’re going like, it will stay with you, like, “I can celebrate my life today because of blah, blah, blah,” because you will have a tendency if someone will go, “Well, you deserve that,” and when someone brings you out with your friends and someone gets dessert, it’s like they always bring a spoon for everybody and then you get home, you don’t feel good. You could just put the spoon back where you found it at when they go to give it to you, put it back in the middle of the table and don’t touch it. And if somebody says to you, “Why don’t you have a piece of it?” and just say, “I’m on, right now, I’m doing a special program that’s gonna make my skin glow and look more healthy and plump it up so I don’t have that many lines and wrinkles on my face. I can do it in three days. I have a specific diet for that and a 20-day diet plan so that you can learn how to eat much more better so you can think better, feel better, and move better and that’s something that’s part of the bigger program that I have,” but that piece of that is that it’s all about the mindset and it’s all about boundaries.
Boundaries is my secret sauce of how I get people to be more successful. Click To Tweet
If someone’s worried about disappointing people, what can people do in their mindset to get over that particular concern?
My father used to have this phrase, if you don’t nurture yourself first, you can’t nurture somebody else, and you have to ask yourself do I really need this and is this good for me, and if you listen to your inner voice, it’s going to say yes or no, because we all know that if we’re trying to lose weight, for instance, and you have that spoon or you’re diabetic and you have that spoonful of stuff, your sugar’s going to spike and when your sugar spikes, you get more insulin resistant and you can’t get out of insulin resistance unless you really start moving towards that intermittent fasting cycle. So, I think the thing to ask yourself is just like — because you know, you know that you know that you know that you shouldn’t have that food. And if you know that you know that you do that and you say, “Is this food gonna make me more healthy?” because you’re either feeding the disease or you’re feeding your health and so it’s not in between and so if you know that you know that you know that what you’re eating can be harmful to you, because it isn’t like one time that you have it, it’s all the times that you’ve had it that accumulate over a period of time, because cancer and heart disease and diabetes and Alzheimer’s don’t just happen one day and you got them. It’s just like trauma does, when you have a trauma or you fall off a bike or you fell out of a tree when you’re a kid, that trauma happened then but it has nothing to do with you now. But the emotional component is what you really get a handle on that, because it’s the third leading reason why people get sick in the world, your thoughts and not having control of them, and the other one is toxicity like from the things that you eat, the air that you breathe, the water you drink. When you’re looking at a food label, if you can’t pronounce something, (a), you shouldn’t eat it, (b), you should also — the other thing is, that’s a great rule of go by, I have no clue what the hell is this thing here and if you look it up, don’t worry about trying to know how to say it, worry about what the side effects are of it and it isn’t like one short-term dose of something like methyl stearate that is an inert ingredient that holds something allegedly together for supplementation or a pill of some sort, it’s the long-term use of it, and if you really look at so many drugs, like Western medicine drugs, it’s like if you look at what they’re supposed to prevent, if you take them for a long period of time, and especially if you’re looking at tertiary side effects of it because there’s a first, a secondary, and tertiary side effects, if you look in there, it actually causes what you’re trying to avoid.
Oh, really?
So a lot of drugs do that so it’s just like Lipitor, for instance. Who wants to lose their mind? That is directly tied into muscle dysfunction. The heart’s a muscle. When the liver is not functioning properly, it can’t handle cholesterol. And your body needs cholesterol because it’s an antioxidant. Your medication gives you a side effect and your doctor gives you another pill for that side effect. You got to ask yourself does that make sense.
It goes on and on.
And it goes on and on and on. At one point in time, the statistic was, and I don’t know if the statistic is accurate anymore because I’m assuming it would be more, is that by the age of 50, many people are on five medications already.
Well, yeah. I mean, I see that, what’s that like plastic pill container that has like the seven days of the week?
Right. Well, you can use that for your supplementation.
Well, yeah —
But sometimes I’ve had, I had relatives that I’ve been at their house and I’m looking for something and then I’ll just see like this shelf of pills and I said, “You should take all those pills and take them to your pharmacist and make sure that none of those pills interact with each other in a negative way, that they’re all synergistic.” Because a lot of times, the doctor will forget that he gave you something and you’re still taking something that you might not need to take. You have to look at what happens in your gut, because a lot of meds that people take for anxiety and for depression affect how your gut functions.
Oh, yeah, for sure.
And the gut-brain connection is so huge. All your immune system starts in your gut. And so if your gut’s not functioning very well, you have to go back and go like, “What’s going on in my gut? Let’s stick to the gut and change my life —
And that’s why people get sick a lot.
I’m interested in igniting my life and living on fire, let’s go, so you can have that engagement with your children, with your grandchildren, instead of watching them grow up, you participate in their growth. I had a patient who was incredibly depressed, wouldn’t get off the couch. The only time she got off the couch is to come to see me. And her husband just said, “I just tell her your name, her face brightens up.” And so I said, “Why don’t you just come here once a day and you can sit in the waiting room for 30 minutes and then you can read your favorite book and I’ll send your husband out.” Because, sometimes, our relationship people are people that trigger us.
Yeah, that can definitely happen.
Right? And so she did that for a month and then she started exercising, then she started walking around her block once a week, twice a week. She just told me she started moving and she started doing more and more and more and more as she went along. And then I said to her, “And stop eating sugar,” and her husband goes, “But she likes it.” I don’t care if she likes it or not, throw it out. For 30 days, throw it out, and then you see how you feel. And then when you want to have something like sugar, here’s another great tip, eat a protein.
And when it can’t do that anymore, then what it does is it stores all those toxins in blood, brain, bone, and fat, and we all know that you need your brain, you need your blood, and you need your bones, and we saw during the pandemic, especially people who got really sick, and some of them, a lot of people died because they already had these things that were an iceberg, that were underneath the surface and they were brewing so when they came in contact with the virus, your body is going like, “Oh my god, I’m already doing this other work and I’m struggling with that, now I’ve got this to deal with,” and it’s going to go which is the worst of the two evils that it had to deal with? It went to the virus. And so people got even sicker. I mean, that’s a very simplistic way of thinking about that so it’s so important to have your health because it’s the second mindset component. You have the mindset, then you have your health, and then you have the pieces of the health portion that you talk about in your eight, and I talked about, the basic five, just like with the mindset and then you have your health then you have the other pieces of the puzzle that you can do so that you could have better wellbeing, an even more better wellbeing than you ever could have imagined.
So before we wrap up, I just want to ask, you talked about changing our mindset but you also talked about eating the right food, looking at the labels, being mindful of how each food makes us feel, like, for example, last night, I ate a Poke bowl because I know that that’s a type of food item that usually makes me feel better, but also kind of looking around like the edge of the store instead of the middle. Which one comes first or do you recommend if someone’s like really right now looking to change their lives, it’s a little bit of both, be like, “Okay, I’m gonna work on my mindset with these things I say to myself, maybe like repeat, look in my eyes every morning, repeat a certain phrase, ‘I am worthy —
I love myself.
Yeah, those things. ‘I love myself, but then also start eating better food? Do they go hand in hand or does one have to come first, is one more primal than the other?
So what I want for your listeners to get is that if you try to do too many things at once, you’re going to overwhelm yourself.
For sure, yeah.
And I don’t want you to overwhelm yourself. So, start with one week and you just say, “I’m gonna have — I weigh 150 pounds, so this week, by the end of the week, I’m going to be drinking 75 ounces of water consistently and I’m going to drink 75 ounces of water for the rest of my life,” as long as I weigh 150, because it’s 50% of your body weight in ounces. And if you don’t like the taste of water, drink it with a straw, because then you won’t be sucking down air, which will make your stomach upset. And also just get a bottle, get a Yeti, fill it up, and then make it a goal, like, “Oh, that’s 32 ounces. If I have to drink 75 ounces, then I have to have two and a half those.” The amazing thing is that when I do that, I mean myself because I drink 16 ounces, I have bottles that are 16 ounces, I’ll pour that in there and I always put things in it that I want to support my health and so my morning shake has beet juice in it and so it’s not really a shake, it’s more like a drink, and it has spirulina, it has hemp seed, ground up flaxseed, has the tendency to decrease testosterone in men so I would just say be really mindful of how much of that you’re consuming and get your testosterone levels and your hormone levels checked. And if you’re eating that and your hormone levels are low, stop eating it. Figure out something else that flaxseed gives you in order to — flaxseed is excellent for your gut. I purposely focus what I put in my drink to support my immediate needs for my body. First thing, hydration, and the other thing is I want good blood flow and I made it 69 times around the sun this last summer, just a couple of weeks ago and I’m thrilled that I’ve done that because nobody, (a), guesses my age. Also, something else to practice just as a positive thing, it’s like when you look in the mirror and you’re saying, “I love you,” smile. Smile frequently and keep a chipper, happy attitude about things. And when somebody does something or someone looks good or they have something on that you like, it’s so easy, even if you’re passing them in the grocery store, “I just love that.” I go, “I love your outfit. It’s such a happy outfit.” What that does, when you spread that kind of energy around you, you attract more of that energy to you. We have enough issues with people understanding or not understanding things and that level of animosity, that’s like undertow, my front desk person had a sign in front of her telephone that said smile, because that smile projects. Smiles have tons and tons of energy and it has all this positive energy that you can just like sprinkle what I call that stardust around your environment and other people will smile back at you. I’m French, my gene pool, and, naturally, before I go outside, I always put lipstick on and I do crazy things like wear sunglasses because I’m worried, I don’t want to squint because I don’t want more lines around my face and I wear a hat if I have this really — I’m in Florida and the sun’s brutal here so I’ll make sure that my face is protected.
Yeah, the one thing I was gonna say about water and the taste of water is that I like to ride my bike a lot and you take a warm day, ride your bike 50 miles, and you’re going to enjoy the taste of that water regardless.
For sure.
But we’re all trying to kind of develop better habits and develop a better mindset and develop a more positive energy. Dr. Pat Boulogne, I like to thank you so much for joining us in Action’s Antidotes today, giving us some tips about how we can do that and I want to also thank my audience out there for listening and I also want to remind my audience out there that what really matters is that you’re trying, because we all have our own struggles, I have my struggles, for sure, and the things that we’re kind of really dealing with and, sometimes, that doesn’t always present the way we exactly want it to and I don’t want anyone to feel intimidated by the idea that there are people out there who are presenting everything positive and exactly great every minute of every day.
I have my last tip for everybody.
Okay.
When you’re having that long a day and you’re struggling, just as you just mentioned?
Yeah.
What I tell people to do and they tell me it works is take your time, just take five minutes of your time, get that thought in your head and just verbally say, “Cancel, cancel,” cancel that thought and just visualize it going down in a safe place. Think about hugging a tree or go out and actually hug a tree, touch nature, and breathe in that goodness from nature and breathe out the negativity. Because you can change your thought process on a nanosecond, a New York nanosecond, and just start talking to yourself, “I am healthy, I am vital, I am active, I’m a successful human being,” that you deserve greatness and wonderfulness and love every moment of your life. I’ve seen people have like, “Oh my God, when I first did that, I felt so stupid doing it because what are people gonna think?” Who cares? It’s just like — some of those people you’re probably never going to see again so you just go do it anyway.
You can stand and you can lean against the tree, you don’t have to go out there and actually hug. Getting your feet in nature, getting your hands on nature is very stabilizing. Click To TweetAnd that’s something you can do if you have, say, an unpleasant interaction with someone that might be leading you down a horrible thought process or something, one of those triggering moments that might not make sense, like your patient with the dog story, the dog barking that reminds us, okay, well, I don’t want to be a jerk to everyone around me but my brain is going haywire, you could kind of just step away for a couple minutes, say some things, breathe in, and get in nature.
Right. And find the expert, find the person who has your back. They’re your cheerleader 24/7, and they only want the best for you. And you’re not just the number going in to see somebody, there’s the actual heartfelt connection. And if you have a hard time finding it, I’m sure there’ll be show notes down here, you can text me, email me, reach out and I’ll be more than happy to like — in your area, this is what I found, I’ll help you research that out. so you get to the right person faster.
And if someone isn’t going to be looking at the show notes, just what would be like the one quickest mechanism to contact you that for someone listening can have whether, it be a phone number, an email address or anything like that?
The best way to contact me is on my website is healthteamnetwork.com. There’s tons of interactive places where you can reach out, contact me, ask me a question. There’s a microphone, opening page, if you scroll down, you’ll see it and click on it, you can ask a question and then I will get that in the email. Make sure if you do that, leave your phone number if you want me to call you back, that type of thing, so we can set up communication in regards to that.
Healthteamnetwork.com.
Yep, and then we found each other on LinkedIn. I have a pretty significant presence on LinkedIn as Dr. Pat Boulogne and that’s usually the way. You can find me on Facebook and also on Instagram.
Sounds good. Well, thank you very much. I hope everyone out here has a great rest of your day and I hope that we all take a little bit of time to think about what it is out there that we can do to start moving from point A to point C, as you put it today.
Great. There’s always something you can do.
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About Dr. Pat Boulogne
Dr. Pat Bolougne is a High-Performance Mastery Mentor/Coach, Functional Medicine Doctor, and Lifestyle Strategist. She is an international bestselling author. Her books have been promoted on FOX, NBC, ABC, CBS, International Business times, and more. She is a highly sought-after guest, leader, and influencer on radio, podcasts, and summits around the world. She is the CEO and founder of Health Team Network-> a company that’s dedicated to skyrocketing health, lifestyle, and mindset- with superior science-based solutions and programs, and where results matter.
She’s a Midwesterner through and through-> born, raised, and schooled. Her other educational and experience spans over 38+ years of clinical science – as a Doctor of Chiropractic & Acupuncture Physician while holding multiple certifications: Chiropractic Sports Physician, Functional Medicine Practitioner & Lifestyle Medicine Coach, as well as additional training in Chinese Sports Medicine @ the National Olympic Training Center, Beijing, China. Her medical services includes: Special Olympics, Boston Marathons, Men’s and Woman’s Provolley ball games, International Windsurfing Championships, the LPGA, and more.
She is passionate about sharing knowledge, solutions & making sense of challenges that results in even better outcomes that keep you on top of your game at work, home, or play-> everything you need to have better health and mindset mastery. Her programs are personalized reflecting the unique bio-individual needs and goals of her clients. No stone is left unturned-> mind, body, and soul. She is a team player who thrives on strategic solutions that are driven by faster, simpler, safer evidence based programs that keep you moving forward – realizing your goals in less time.