Hi, Welcome to Session Six of the Advanced SCD ... - SCD Lifestyle

Session 6 Transcript:
Beyond SCD
Jordan Reasoner: Hi, Welcome to Session Six of the Advanced SCD Techniques
Course, Beyond SCD. I’m Jordan Reasoner and I’m here tonight with Steven Wright.
And on this webinar, we’re going to pull back the curtain and examine the
unquestionable and why breaking the rules might be the last step to feeling better than
you’ve ever felt. We’ll reveal all the illegal SCD healing tactics that we’ve tried and we’ll
let you know how they worked and which ones might work for you. And lastly, we’ll
cover specific steps to achieve that final 20 percent of health, how to know when you’re
ready for it, and the mistakes to avoid along the way.
So why do you need to learn this stuff? Because the SCD diet gets you 80 percent of the
way there, okay, but there’s a whole lot more to getting close to 100 percent. And
getting close to 100 percent allows you to fully give your gifts to the world because
you’ll finally be feeling your best. And honestly, because it feels damn good to feel
good. And you deserve to live a healthy life.
So, tonight it’s time to pull back the curtain and if you find yourself searching for that
final 20 percent of healing, this is going to be the first place to start.
Now, putting it altogether takes a couple of pieces. And diet and supplements, they can
get you 80 percent of the way there and we’ve talked about that in previous sessions.
But the final 20 percent, it’s much more of a mystery. What we’re getting into here is
the grey zone. We are entering the grey zone, the final 20 percent. It’s because there’s
a lot we don’t know and the science literature is pretty scarce and a lot of anecdotal
things are out there that are kind of misleading. It really takes having an open mind and
it’s almost a requirement for exploring this final 20 percent. And I’m going to be dead
honest with you, the final 20 percent, it’s tough. It is not easy. And the fact is that it is
so individual, yours is different from anyone else’s’. And it won’t be the same
experience as Steve and I had or even coaching clinics that we’ve had in the last year.
It’s actually going to be a lot longer than the first 80 percent. In fact, some people shoot
right to 80 percent when they start the diet, maybe in a few weeks. And others might
even take a few months or years. But the final 20 percent, that takes a lot longer for
some people because it’s the little things. It’s the minutia that you didn’t know was
there before. And you just have to know that there’s going to be ups and downs.

Consider what we talk about today to each be tools that are available to you to help you
heal your body. Right? Each on is a test for your own unique healing adventure. And
what that in mind, remember that you are N=1. It’s important to always remember
that. You are a unique model with unique variables and a unique solution. Each of
these tools that we’re going to talk about is going to be a test for you to try. And every
single one is different.
The final 20 percent is so individualized that no one person is likely going to have the
same path. You know, honestly, if this was cut and dry stuff, we’d all have a cure out
there and everyone would follow it, we wouldn’t be here talking about this right now.
So how do you know when you are ready? Well, first of all, if you’re enjoying a good
feel good zone, right, and you have like some rare or occasion C or D, but mostly fours is
pretty good. Say you have a really large food safe zone, expanded diet, and you’re
feeling good. Maybe you’re at 80 percent, but you have to use a lot of supplements to
get by, like digestive enzymes and Betaine HCL and lots of Probiotics and things like that.
Or if you’re finding yourself chasing small improvements here or there or say you’ve
tried the feel good zone blueprint and you’re maybe not seeing the result that you
would like to see, then the final 20 percent is probably there for you. Or if you’ve
generally just worked really hard to get to the 80 percent, you followed everything you
could and diet and supplementation, but you’re just not feeling that good, then this is
probably something that you can approach.
And what I want to point out with this graph is, specifically when I talk about myself and
I realized it was time to approach that final 20 percent, when I was ready for it. I was
doing pretty well, but you know, I would describe my health as a kind of a see‐saw. It
was like I operated within this band of feeling pretty good, but I still had a lot of
variation day to day and it just drove me nuts. It wasn’t a big deal compared to, you
know, when I was having diarrhea every day, but it was annoying as hell.
Like, one day my stools would be a little looser, maybe they’d be like a five on the Bristol
Stool Chart, and then the next day they’d be a little more backed up and I’d be having
maybe a little bit of a three and some gas and I was experiencing some hyperthyroid or
hypothyroid, excuse me… symptoms. And it really bothered me. So I was having like
consistent cold feeling and low body temperature. But the bottom line here is I needed
to get some of this stuff handled. And it was really nice to be in this little 80 percent
band for a few months, but in the moment, I felt like “man, I’m doing really good,” but
the bottom line here is, I needed to get this stuff taken care of.
So before we dive in, we have to pause for a second and say, you really have to have a
healing goal here. What does perfect health mean to you? Honestly, ask yourself, what
does 100 percent healthy mean for me? And this is very important, otherwise, why are
you doing this? And how do you know what works and what doesn’t or what are you
working towards? So really fast, before you answer that, I want to go through both
Steve and my 100 percent healthy definitions so you can see what those look like.

So what is 100 percent healthy Jordan? Well, this is what 100 percent means to me
right now. And I say right now because, and this may come as a surprise, but I’m not
100 percent healthy. And the funny thing about that is that my 100 percent healthy
goal changes all the time. In fact, I’ve hit it a couple of times, but every time I get there,
it’s like I just don’t stop. I get there and I look around and I think, man this is really nice,
but then I decide, well I’m actually really at only 95 percent. And I have a whole new
100 percent goal that takes over. Then I just keep going and try to squeeze out another
one or two percent here and there. And you’ll probably follow a similar path. But the
fact is, you have to start with the first one, just like I did, the first 100 percent definition,
which, if I look back to my first 100 percent healthy definition was, it was just having one
BM a day and having a number four on the Bristol Stool Chart was great.
But now my goals are much more advanced and much more focused on the little things,
the minutia. So here’s what 100 percent means to me right now. And this is something
that you have to make sure that you’re really clear on before you get started working on
this.
I want to have Bristol Stool Chart fours every day, no question. I want to have an ideal
shoulder to waist ratio from weight training. I want to be on a full 100 percent Paleo
Diet. I don’t really care about dairy right now; I just want to be able to have a full, 100
percent Paleo Diet that I know that I can eat and feel great or have zero fatigue. I want
to always be satiated. I want to be able to have occasional alcohol consumption with
zero issues. I want to have a balanced immune system. I don’t want to experience any
food or vitamin allergies any more. Zero chronic inflammation and zero supplements.
Now, one thing I want to say is that, a lot of these things I have nailed down just fine.
But there’s still a few things that I need to get handled that I’m working on and I’m still
not 100% healthy. And when I get here, I guarantee that that list is going to change
again.
Steven Wright: So, just like Jordan, my 100 percent healthy goal has continually
evolved as well. If you remember my story, in the beginning I was really just concerned
with not having any cramping or gas anymore and just being able to eat a meal and not
have problems for that meal. So, as I’ve gone through my healing journey, my goal list
has continually evolved as well. And I just want to point out one little thing, that as you
go through this evolving process, I think It’s completely natural that the more you try to
seek out of that, the more the one or two percent, the more you’re going to have to
work for it. It’s just line a law of diminishing returns. So that’s kind of what we want to
talk about here tonight.
But with that, I think you should always continue to strive for that higher, healthier goal
and we really want to encourage that and we want to bring that out tonight, and from
our experiences.

So what is my current 100 percent healthy goal? Right? So my current one is to have
daily Bristol Stool Chart fours and fives without straining when I go to the bathroom. I’d
love to have high daily energy. Another big one for me is good resiliency. So I know
stress is going to happen, I know life’s going to happen, but I want to be able to… I want
the ability to bounce back, not to have those down days. I never really want to have any
gas, especially not smelly stuff. No cramping or bloating ever. You know, low body fat,
in the eight to 10 percent range and I think that’s really important. Minimal
supplements, especially no digestive helpers, you know, I want to get off the stomach
acid pills. And lastly, I want to be able to save my own life. I want to have the… I think
there’s some things that roll into that, but there’s skill, strength and aerobic fitness that
contributes to that, but things like just being able to swim a mile or run five miles at any
point in time is important to me.
Okay, so let’s move on here and I just want to talk a little bit more about this idea. So,
you’re looking at an onion right there. And if you’ve every cleaned or chopped an
onion, you know, it’s made of many concentric circles that grow smaller and tighter the
closer you get to its core. It’s a great metaphor to think of the onion’s core as our 100
percent healthy goal at this time. In order to reach it, you’re going to peel back layer
after layer until you get right down to this tight small core that’s left over.
Now, this is really a great metaphor because it’s really the same way we overcome our
health problems. At first, all we wanted to do was probably stop pooping so much. And
we figured out, man, I wish I could just… after that happened it was, man, I just wish I
could have lots of energy every day. I wish this fatigue would go away. And then it
was… wow, man, I wish I could gain some weight back and look a little better. And then,
oh now I don’t want to take all these pills or it cost so much money every month, I want
to get rid of that.
And it’s really like you’re peeling layer after layer back. And the point is, the outer
layers of health are much like the onion, they’re larger and thicker and it takes a little bit
longer to bust through them, but you keep drawing down and you get smaller and
thinner, but what doesn’t change is that there continues to be more layers and more
layers. After you solve one problem, another problem suddenly surfaces. And it’s
usually a little bit smaller than the last, but it’s still something that’s right in front of you
though. So as you go, another one will be revealed and I think this is a really important
metaphor to keep in the forefront of your mind as you go through this process.
So now, we’re going to review the 10 key areas that are beyond SCD, right. So especially
these behind the scenes testing and treatments that we’ve been doing and messing
around with for the last two years. And now what we want to do is take what we’ve
learned and what we’re using with our coaching clients and really lay it out there for
you. And I want you to be thinking of which one of these really strikes you and which
one you would like to try, even in the next week, if you’re ready for it. They’re really in
no particular order of importance and some will definitely strike you as more a fit than

others. I just want you to remember that none of these are magic bullets and getting
that first eight percent right should be your priority.
So the first one on the list tonight is L‐Glutamine. And who really needs this? So this is
for anyone with a GI disorder, anyone with stomach problems, leaky gut, severe injury
or illness. So that’s basically everyone that’s probably listening to us right now. Now,
what is L‐Glutamine? L‐Glutamine is a naturally occurring amino acid, one of the 20
amino acids. It’s considered a non‐essential amino acid, but as you’re going to find out,
it may become conditionally essential in gastro‐intestinal disorders or in other states of
injury.
So what’s the background here? Okay, so in Japan Glutamine is the most common drug
to prevent gastritis when taking NSAIDS, it’s also widely used to heal stomach ulcers.
Glutamine is a primary nutrient for the cells that line the GI Track. It provides energy for
these cells to function as well as regulating their reproduction. It’s the most abundant
non‐essential amino acid in the body, and more specifically, the gut.
Glutamine becomes essentially required in the treatment of serious illness trauma and
burns. For example, if someone comes into the Burn Unit at most hospitals suffering
from severe burns, they will be treated with Glutamine to help repair and heal the body
in such a severe state of injury.
So, I got even some more studies. And there’s lots of studies surrounding Glutamine,
but here’s a specific on that I wanted to call up. It’s a 1998 study from the clinical trials
revealed that patients on a supplementation regimen containing Glutamine have
improved intestinal permeability in post‐operative patients in comparison, then those
with no Glutamine within their dietary regimen, and the most important thing, this all
happens without side effects. So when you compare that to drugs and other protocols,
always remember, what are the side effects? With Glutamine, there are none that we
know of.
The bottom line is, people with injury and disease show a huge deficiency of Glutamine.
And when it’s given to them in large doses, they heal faster. We are diseased and we
have an injury in our guts. So it only makes sense that its going to help us heal faster. It
can improve your immune system function and it can heal your leaky gut.
So let’s talk about a little bit more science because I know everyone’s a skeptic,
including myself. So, from the Department of Surgery at Harvard Medical School,
studies in stressed patients indicate considerably larger amounts a Glutamine, in the 20
to 40 gram a day, may be necessary to maintain Glutamine homeostasis. Thus, from a
nutritional standpoint, Glutamine may be thought of as a drug as well as a nutrient.
Now that’s really important because studies also show that, from an average day in our
diet, we might get around 10 grams a day. So if homeostasis without injury or without
disease is about 10 grams a day.

This is really interesting because look at the numbers there and just keep that at the
forefront of your mind. So also, from the book, The Ultimate Nutrient, Glutamine, by
Judy Shabert, British and Canadian investigators treated IBD patients with ulcer diets
and Glutamine powder. Their symptoms, including diarrhea were all improved.
Okay, so let’s get down to the nuts and bolts. What’s the L‐Glutamine protocol? Well I
want to share it with you and it comes with a little story. And it’s from Charles Polequin
who is a high‐end personal trainer for Olympic Athletes and body builders. He’s world
renowned. So he uses this protocol for clients of his who can’t seem to gain any lean
body mass. He calls it his “leaky gut fix.” He admits that he doesn’t have any peer
reviewed studies for it, but plenty of clients and students who have had success with it.
He also adds that, “Glutamine is a primary building block of the intestinal lining,” and
that many of his clients suffer unknowingly from leaky gut syndrome.
The Glutamine overload phase seals the lining, which diminishes food intolerances and
inflammation. Now what’s really interesting is that I’ve followed Charles Polequin for a
while now, and Tim Ferriss also recently picked up this protocol and put it in his book,
The Four‐Hour Body. Now, he’s a very well‐respected and “tweaker” of his own body, so
I think that’s another vote of confidence in this protocol.
So we looked it over and we made a few tweaks and we wanted to look at it from the
lens of having a digestive disease as neither one of these people were tweaking their
lives through the lens of digestive disease. So what is laid out in front of you is our
tweak on the Polequin method for digestive problems. And his specific portion was only
the days one through five, it says the first three to five, but it’s one through five there.
And that’s 80 grams a day. And you mix 10 grams of water and you take it every two
hours, so eight times a day. Once you wake up, you take your first dose and every two
hours. You’re going to need to take the Glutamine with you and have a water bottle
with you to take it every two hours
At the five day mark, you taper down to 30 or 40 grams a day. You want to mix those 20
grams of water and do it AM and PM. And then you’re going to taper down again. So
you’re going down 50 percent until you’re at 10 or 20 grams a day. And then after that,
if you want to stay on a maintenance dosage, you can, it’s totally up to you, but we’ve
seen that going an entire month like that or about five weeks is totally fine.
So that’s all great, right? But what do you need to get started? So first is, you’re gonna
want to go with Source Naturals Free‐Form L‐Glutamine Powder. This is the most
natural one we could find at the best price. Go with amazon.com or Vitamin World.
And you’re also going to need to order two of these 16 ounce containers to cover that
first five weeks.
But we want to really not just tell you about things, but share with you our experiences
with them. So I want to share with you my experience with this L‐Glutamine protocol. I
did the… pretty much the exact same protocol that was laid out there except I went like

eight weeks instead of four week or five weeks. And it’s really interesting the
observations I learned. The first thing was, I had a dairy intolerance. If you followed
along with me, dairy always caused me to get a stuffy nose, it caused phlegm in my
throat, within like 15 to 20 minutes of eating it every time. It just happened all the time.
Well, I started an L‐Glutamine protocol and accidentally about five weeks or six weeks, I
had some dairy and nothing happened. And so I kept testing it. And it turns out that I
literally do not have this dairy problem any more. I can eat all the cheese I want, I don’t
produce the phlegm, I don’t produce the usual reaction any more.
Now the other thing that’s really interesting is that when I went on it and I was using it,
my need for Betaine HCL also for my stomach acid was much less. So this is really
interesting. Now that off been off of it for a little while, my Betaine dosage has come
back up, but there’s definitely another cool interplay there that it was definitely trying
to heal something in my body.
So that’s what I noticed and I know Jordan noticed a lot of things when he it.
Jordan Reasoner: Yeah, and I just wanted to really quickly interject and remind you
that, you know, we’re not doctors here, but with these keys areas, they’re for you to
test at your own risk. But I do want to share with you the fact that my experience doing
the L‐Glutamine Protocol, the exact protocol we laid out here was fantastic. Before I
tried it, I was cruising along, I was feeling really great. I thought I was, you know, 90‐95
percent of my current health. But the fact was that I was that way as long as I have
avoided things like eggs, onions, tomatoes, peppers. As long as I didn’t eat those things,
I was okay. If I did eat them, I would get some food sensitivity reactions right away. I’d
have some post‐nasal drip; I’d maybe get a stomach ache, definitely some brain fog.
And it would usually cause loose stools.
But, and oh yes, I was very nervous about trying this protocol. I was happy with my little
homeostasis, I was happy with how I was doing. But Steve did it first, so I had to go
ahead and give it a shot.
But when I did the L‐Glutamine protocol and I was done, I noticed changes right away.
And by the end of the five weeks, you know, I started introducing and testing onions,
testing eggs, testing peppers with no problem at all. And in fact, after that, I actually
started introducing some stave starches, which we’re going to talk about later, but I’ve
been completely fine, no reaction to any of that stuff. And it was all after I had
completed the protocol. So it’s definitely something you’ll want to test if you think it’s
right for you.
Now the next key area that I want to get into is low dose Naltrexone. Low dose
Naltrexone, what it is is the lower dose, around 4.5 mg, of the drug Naltrexone. Now
the drug, Naltrexone, which is usually prescribed at 50 mg, that’s been used for years for
opiate withdrawal, like in heroine addicts and alcoholics, like say an heroine addict
comes into the hospital, they’re in shock or something, they’ll be using Naltrexone so

that don’t have withdrawal while they are in the hospital. And what it does is it blocks
the euphoric response that opiates have on opiate receptors in the brain. Now that’s
the full 50 mg dose.
Now, Bernard Behari, M.D., he was a New York physician studying the immune response
in AIDS patients, and he actually discovered that at a very low dose, actually one‐tenth
of a dose, it would boost the immune system in these people and help fight the disease
that was characterized by inadequate immune function.
Now, this is fascinating, and the way that LDN works, starts specifically in the brain and
patients that take the very low dosage, 4.5 mgs, it blockades the opiate receptors in the
brain, but here’s the key. The pill is actually taken right before bed and it does its work
between the hours of 2:00 and 4:00 a.m., when you brain is actually scanning the body
to find out how things went throughout the day. And at this point, the brain gets tricked
into thinking that the opiate levels are really low in the body because the receptors are
blocked. And it gets the idea that it needs to hurry up and produce more.
Now, the low dose Naltrexone leaves the body at that point and it doesn’t continue to
block the receptors long term, so there’s not any really permanent side effects in terms
of affecting that pathology, but it’s too late because the brain has already kicked in with
higher production of opiates, specifically endorphins. And those continue to play a huge
role in regulating the immune system.
So stick with me here because this is fascinating stuff. Now in autoimmune disease,
there’s usually an imbalance in the immune system. Now, I didn’t actually know this
until I looked into it, but there’s two sides, two arms to the immune system. The first of
which is you see on the left side of the four images, is the TH1 side, and that’s the cell
mediated immunity, that’s what happens inside your cells. That’s like your first line of
defense when your body decides that it’s going to take on a battle against something
like a virus, a bacteria, a parasite or even cancer and it actually produced T cells to
attack and kill.
Now, the TH2 side, or arm of the immune system, is antibody mediated and that’s what
happens outside the cells when you get exposed to something. The B cells produce
antibodies. So the next time that you get exposed, you’ll be able to fight off the
infection better. And this happens with normal bacteria’s or parasites or toxins or
specifically allergens.
Now the healthy immune system is dynamic. So it’s able to switch back and forth as
needed, so if you get exposed to a bacteria, you know, it can become TH1 dominant for
a second, fight it off, then TH2 will become dominant to create antibodies for the next
time it comes by, and then they’re balance back out. So it basically just eradicates one
threat and then it goes back to rest before it responds to the next threat.

Well with autoimmunity, one side usually becomes dominant, sometimes both become
dominant or both will be depressed, but… like an example of Hoshimoto’s disease, you
know, like 75 percent of the time that will be TH1 dominant. Now the way this works is
that normally there is a TH naught cell. And it’s just waiting there. It’s like waiting to be
told whether it should take action as a TH1 or if it should take action as a TH2 to go into
the battle.
In instances where one side is more dominant, such as like an autoimmunity, when TH2
is dominant, all those TH naught cells are being directed to go to the TH2, and they’re
being used to fight against… using antibodies. Now, that’s a situation where you end up
with multiple food allergies, environmental allergies because the TH2 side is dominant,
it’s at high alert and it’s overproducing, and that’s what you see in the picture in the
upper right‐hand corner.
Now, with all that said, how does LDN fit in? Well, LDN fits in because LDN stimulates
the production of TH3, which are T regulatory cells. And they provide a very specific
purpose and they help brings the two sides back in balance and they can actually help
moderate the production of out of control TH1 or TH2, depending on which one it might
be. And that’s what we want. We want the immune system to be back in balance. In
the upper left corner, you see that we want it to be back in balance and that will help
alleviate a lot of systems of auto‐immune disease.
Now, if you have auto‐immune issues, you know, anything from inflammatory diseases
like UC Crones or specific auto‐immune conditions like Celiac, or RA or MS. LDN can
help. But you’re going to have to approach your doctor because you need a
prescription. And you need to know that there are side effects. And two specific side
effects that I really suffered from when I took it was I had extreme difficulty sleeping
because you take it right before bed and it would result in me having this very awake
sense of sleep, very restless sense of sleep for months. And I learned later on that you
could actually lower the dosage down to 3 mg or even 1.5 and then work back up and
alleviate that. I didn’t know that at the time. Additionally, it can suppress levels of
testosterone in the body. It also doesn’t mix well with immunosuppressants because it
is going to counteract the effects. So you need to be aware of that as well.
So how do you get it? Well, low dose Naltrexone, it really isn’t going to come from your
local pharmacy. They probably don’t have a lot of experience compounding it because
it’s normally prescribed at a 50 mg dose. And that’s what’s actually FDA approved is the
50 mg dose. So you’re going to have to get it custom made with a prescription at a
compounding facility. My favorite is Hopewell Pharmacy at HopewellRX.com. And it’s
really interesting because all you have to do is get your doctor to write the prescription
and he can call it into Hopewell and Hopewell mails it to you, you give them your credit
card information and it will be here in a day or two. So, they’re great. You’ll get exactly
what you want and you can request that it’s grain, starch, dairy, sugar‐free, all that stuff
so it’s SCD legal.

Now, if you experience side effects when you try it, you can always back the dosage
down, talk to your doctor about backing the dosage down to 3 mgs or 1.5 mgs. Through
research I found that that actually helps alleviate a lot of the sleep problems that I was
having. The other thing is, enjoy its effects on cravings. And the reason is that it’s
blocking the opiate receptors during that time. It can help a lot alleviating cravings that
you might have for food, specifically cravings for sugar. It can really help; it’s a nice side
effect for staying true to the diet.
And my overall experience with LDN was very positive. You now, I did have some side
effects that I talked about, like the restless sleep, and that went on for months and
months and months. And I could have lowered my dosage if I would have found that
out earlier, but I’ll say that, I really feel that it was a leverage tool for me to help me heal
faster. Now, I was on it for six months and I did it the first six months, I was on SCD at
the same time. So it’s a little hard for me to compare, but I will say that I felt like I
dominated my Celiac disease with the help of low dose Naltrexone.
Steve Wright: So number three tonight is advanced probiotic supplementation. And
we’ve already covered probiotic supplementation a little bit in previous classes, so I just
want to do a quick review here. So remember that humans have 10 percent… or 10
times more bacteria than human cells. In fact, you could argue that we are more
bacteria than we are human when it comes down to a cell to cell ratio.
In a recent study published in March of this year by the Metahit team, which is a team
responsible for trying to categorize the bacteria in the human gut, they show that there
is about 1,200 species of bacteria that are possible for living in the human gut, basically
in people that they sampled. And that the average person would have about 160
species. Interestingly enough, they found that with people with IBD or digestive
problems have 25 percent less number of species of bacteria.
So let’s review the different types of bacteria. Number one is the essential or beneficial
flora, these are our friendly bacteria, Number two is opportunistic flora and these are
the ones that are controlled by the beneficial flora and for most of the time, they live in
symbiotic balance with everything else and everything’s fine. But when disposes
happens and other problems can happen, they will overgrow and they can cause
problems. Number three is the transitional flora and these can really take hold and
damage guts and cause more disease and for the most part, we want to keep those as
low as possible.
So Probiotics support the beneficial bacteria, they control the opportunistic bacteria,
and they protect from the transitional bacteria and pathogenic organisms during
healing. So the big question in everyone’s mind when they’re always talking about
Probiotics is pills or food. And this comes all the time when you talk about SCD. But
first, let’s talk about who needs them.

Well, if you’re on SCD, you know Elaine Gottchall is a big fan of the yogurt. So we would
argue that anybody with gut disposes should be taking Probiotics. And again, especially
if you have constipation or if, you got to remember that anywhere from 50 to 80
percent of the dry weight of your bowel movement is bacteria. So, you’ve got to really
remember that. Research shows that 25 percent lower numbers of bacteria on average
is what we’re dealing with for all of us with IBD concerns.
Now you can get more precise between food and pill if you’ve done some stool testing
and you know your different levels. So keep that in mind. But overall, naturally
fermented food has been used for tens of thousands of years; our ancestors have been
fermenting food for a long time. And I think it is wise to heed this point and make use of
this history and make every effort as possible to obtain Probiotics from naturally
fermented foods.
While I believe that near daily eating of fermented foods in the long term is the best
solution, in the short term this is not always the fastest or the best way to see results.
Especially if you know that you’re missing some specific bacteria from a stool test like
Bifidobacteria or something like that. Or if you’re currently extremely sensitive to all
different types of foods and you’re reacting too many at once. A lot of things, it could
be like dairy and nuts and eggs as well.
So, if you have those dairy problems, those multiple food allergies and you know there’s
some species of bacteria, you’re most likely going to see the best benefit, the fastest
from using the pill form. And so remember that supplemental Probiotics are only
transient, they don’t take hold and grow in the ecology of your gut flora. They do last
up to about two weeks in the body, or some species do. So just like natural foods, we
want to start slow and ramp up. Lactobacillus acidophilus is the best single strain to
start with as far as we are concerned, as far as the research we’ve seen. And we’ve
talked numerous times before about getting up to 30 or 40 billion cfu’s of this
Lactobacillus acidophilus.
So if you’re at that range and you are currently searching for the next level of your
health, that’s probably that if you’re looking to test, I would recommend to getting to
that level of first and sitting there for a while before you do this next step.
So, what is the advanced probiotic protocol? Well, first we want to test it by ramping up
one species. So we talked about the Lactobacillus acidophilus and you’ll see right there
that’s a custom Probiotics and that one gram scoop from that powder is 150 billion
cfu’s. So that’s quite a bit more than the 40 billion you might be taking today. And what
we would recommend starting with is doubling your dosage every three or four days, so
if you’re at 40, you can try 80 and then go up to 160 until you got up to about 300 billion
cfu’s a day. That would be on scoop in the morning, one scoop at night. So remember
you want to do that in the AM 30 minutes before breakfast and then a scoop two hours
after dinner.

And this is the safest way that we know possible as far as ramping up, so you want to
start with a single strain and then move on to the next strain, which is the
diversification. So, the reason why we say that is because if all goes well, it’s generally
known and accepted that we do… that we’re lacking in a species of bacteria because we
already have gut problems and we know that the most… a more diverse ecology that’s
in balance is a better functioning gut. So that’s the same thing as in fermented food,
there’s a lot of different strains in there. So if we can move up to a more concentrated
strain powder, it generally should be better for us.
So in Dr. Natasha Campbell‐McBride’s book, in Psychology Syndrome, she states, “A
good probiotic should have as many different species of beneficial bacteria as possible.
A human gut contains hundreds of different species of bacteria. We should try and get
as close to that as we can. And to make sure there are strains from different groups of
probiotic bacteria is more beneficial than just one group.”
So what you’ll see here is two different strain powders that we would recommend and
that we’ve tried. And I have experience with both of them, so I just want to take a
minute to tell my story and I guess the first caveat is you would approach these powders
the same way you would approach the other powders and you’d start by starting with
like 40 billion a day, you know, see how it works and then ramp up 80. And as you can
see, we recommend ramping two servings, again, a day, which for the 11‐strain powder
if 520 million cfo’s a day. For the four‐strain Lactobacilli, it’s 400 billion.
So based on all the logic and all the science that we read, I knew that… it all said that I
should be using the most diverse strain powder that I could find. So I was sitting at a
very decent level of health and I am still suffering from a little bit of acne and I wanted
to get rid of that acne. And I’ve run into some studies that show that Probiotics helps
with acne. So I searched out and I found the 11 strain and I started to use it and the
interesting thing about the 11 strain is that it does contain bifidobacterium. So this is
the point at which we are actually making the switch and recommending that you try
bifidobacterium.
Now, what I didn’t recognize or didn’t think through all the way and it should be heeded
as advice to you if you have the similar situation, is that I had already had a CDSA done
several months before, almost nine months before that indicated that my
bifidobacterium and several other bacteria were just fine. And the only thing that was
really lacking for me was lactobacillus acidophilus. And to go back even further in my
history, I had already had one overgrowth of Bifidobacteria that landed me in the
hospital.
So you know, I didn’t think it was a big deal, I already knew that Bifidobacteria were
thriving in my system and I figured 11 strains, not a big deal, it would be better for me.
It turns out it wasn’t. I got it, I ramped it up and immediately as I got through a decent
dosage, I started having constipation problems and I stayed on it for about a month I
went to the… I didn’t even get up to the two servings a day. I got up to one full serving a

day and I was having like pretty bad constipation and I started getting gassy again and I
cut it out right away after that first month.
And I think it really does have to go back to the bifidobacterium in it and the fact that I
had already had a decent you know… or I had already had a decent gut mix of flora in
there and that as I threw in this 11‐strain in there, it was kind of out of whack for what I
needed. So I took a couple of months off and then I went back at it with the four‐strain
lactobacilli, just because I figured this was all retrospective with the Bifidobacteria. And
I’ve done really well on the lactobacilli. And it’s been a really big help and I take it today
and you know, I’m back to having you know great stools and great things on the Bristol
Chart.
But that’s just word to the wise and that how all these advanced techniques that we’re
talking about, their not all going to make positive changes for you. So as we get into this
grey area, you’re going to have to, just like you accepted eating out at a restaurant was
going to be kind of grey area and that you might get sick. You have to expect the fact
that you could set yourself back and get sick when you try some of these ideas. So
that’s kind of what we talk about when we say we want our experiences between us
with you and tell you that we’re definitely not doctors and hopefully you can learn from
ours and pick the ones that seem to line up with you.
Jordan Reasoner: Now you know I’ll just jump in and say that, I actually had a
complete opposite experience as Steve where when I first did a CDSA, it was pointed out
that I had zero, no growth of Bifidobacteria and plenty of lactobacillus. So when I went
to step from taking 40 to 60 billion cfu’s of the GI Pro Lactobacillus, and I tested the 11‐
strain probiotic, and I worked up to the 520 billion a day, it took me leaps and bounds
above where I was before. I felt great once I started taking that. It really stabilized my
bowel movements, it got me off the fluctuation between C & D, and I’ve been taking it,
520 billion cfu’s a day for the past, I think nine months now. It been going really well. It
was one of the big leverage points for me in that final 20 percent healing.
So that just shows that, you know, everybody is going to be individualized. A lot of the
science says that we need to diversify and I my experience it was actually very
beneficial.
Okay, number four is fermented foods. And we just talked a lot about the beneficial
bacteria and another way to get it is through fermented foods. Now fermentation is a
process of letting healthy bacteria predigest foods outside the gut. And they include
foods like sauerkraut, 24‐hour yogurt, Kim Chi, and even pickles. Now, these specific
foods are packed with billions of cfu’s of beneficial bacteria per cup as well as a diverse
mix of species just like we just talked about.
This is not something new. You know, in the previous section on Probiotics, we talk
about the fact that our guts are very diverse and we know that supporting over 400
different bacterial species that can be found in there is very important. So for example,

the fermented 24‐hour SCD yogurt has somewhere between three billion… or around
three billion cfu’s per ml, of bacteria. And what that really means is 708 billion cfu’s per
one cup of yogurt. That’s a lot. That’s way more than what we just talked about in
terms of the powders. And it’s a well diverse species depending on the starter culture
they use. And some of the most healthy civilizations in the world have thrived on
fermented foods like sauerkraut and Kim Chi. And fermentation, it actually makes the
vitamins in the fruit and vegetables more readily available for digestion. It produces
antioxidants and it actually reduces a lot of the toxins that are available without
fermentation.
And our ancestors have been consuming fermented foods for thousands of years. Our
friend, Matt, over at Natural Digestive Healing, he reminded us that Julius Cesar was
known for traveling with barrels of fermented cabbage because at the time it was
known to prevent travelers diarrhea.
The bottom line is that fermented foods are natural ways for us to get a huge diversity
of Probiotics support in very large quantities and it’s cheap, easy, and tastes great. And
it’s really important for long‐term digestive well‐being.
So to get started fermenting foods, you can always start with the 24‐hour Yogurt. I
mean, that’s the fermentation process, when you ferment the yogurt between 24 and
28 hours, the starter bacteria consumes the lactose sugars and you end up with a very
sour yogurt that has lots of diverse and large quantities of bacteria.
Now if you feel like you’re not going to tolerate dairy and don’t want to test that yet,
test fermenting a vegetable. And one that’s really easy to start fermenting is cabbage.
And that will make you some really simple sauerkraut. And here’s what you need to do
to do it. This is actually generally more tolerated in people, especially if you struggle
with dairy, like I said, and in cases of low stomach acid. You can actually eat fermented
sauerkraut 15 minutes before your meals and it will help increase that HCL secretion
and improve your digestion. So that can be really key here in reducing some of those
supplementations.
Now to quickly get started to make it, just buy a head of cabbage, it can be green or red,
it doesn’t matter, they do taste different though, and then just shred it up finely, and
mix it all into a glass bowl or Mason jar and add some salt. And then you just want to let
it sit for a little while with the salt on it, maybe like a hour. And then come back and
you’ve got to squeeze it with your hands or you can pound it with like a meat hammer
and that will get all the juice to come out. It will just start coming out everywhere,
there’ll be lots of cabbage juice. And what you are looking for is you want the solids of
the cabbage to be completely, 100 percent submerged in the cabbage juice. And then
all you need to do is close up the jar or cover up whatever you’re putting it in and let it
sit for seven to 10 days with a towel on it, you know, to block out the light. And voila,
you have some great sauerkraut you just made.

You really can’t mess this up, okay. I mean, the point here is just to start slowly. So the
first day you want to try it, have a quarter cup or half cup and work your way up slowly.
You know, remember, this is a probiotic, so as with all Probiotics, you have to consider
that when you’re trying it out.
You can ferment most any vegetable, you can even ferment fruits. I definitely
recommend you try picking up the book, Wild Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz, he
goes over how to ferment pretty much everything. And it’s a pretty cool and fun
experiment.
Just keep messing with it until you get it right. It really is a process. For example, like I
had to make two to three batches of sauerkraut before I finally found one that I really
liked. And it was a blend of like… it ended having to be that I had to use one‐and‐a‐half
heads of cabbage in this specific jar that I had and leaving it for seven days wasn’t long
enough, but 10 days was too long for that batch. So ended up using like eight to nine
days and it was just awesome. And the best thing, my wife actually started eating it, so I
started trying to make double batches. And I actually found that, as far as green
cabbage versus red cabbage, there’s a huge taste difference. But I like it when I
combined them both. It seemed to taste best for me.
So, I found that at first it gave me a little bit of gas, so I had to scale back a little bit, but
eating it 15 minutes before each meal really helped my digestion and I was able to back
down a little bit on the Betaine HCL when I was doing that.
Steve Wright: And I give it a try as well, and I’ve also tried some other things, like I
made a lot of lacto‐fermented salsa, which is great and is super easy to do and tastes
amazing. My experience with sauerkraut is kind of the same as Jordan’s and it took me
much longer to figure out how to make it. And kind of like yogurt and sauerkraut and all
these fermented foods, the reason why we generally recommend people start right
away with supplements, supplementing probiotic powders, is because these learning
curves that we’re talking about here, where it took me four weeks to figure out how to
make a batch. Like the first batch I made, it like didn’t ferment at all and the second
batch I made, something went wrong and I didn’t clean the jars correctly and it was
gross.
And so there’s always random problems that can happen and the fermentation just
takes time because that’s what we’re working with here. So the reason why we really
advocate the Probiotics up front from supplements is that you’re going to get your best
bang for the food buck right away when you’re short on time and looking for, you now,
recuperation really fast.
But over the long‐term, we definitely think that switching over to fermented foods is the
way to go. And as we get farther and farther, we continue to mess with the
fermentation and get better and better at it. But I think it did help me as well, it just
took a little while for me to figure it out and it does take a little bit of time to get it right.

So, let’s move on to number five, inflaming fats. So what I’m talking about here is all
about this thing called Omega 3 and Omega 6 fatty acids. And it’s all about the ratio of
this Omega 3 and Omega 6’s. And the reason why it is that three’s are anti‐
inflammatory and 6’s are pro‐inflammatory. Now we’ve talked many times during this
class about how we want to do everything possible to get as much anti‐inflammatory
substances in our body. And remember, we talked about the fish oil protocol and the
reason why that’s so anti‐inflammatory and so great for people with digestive problems
is that you’re bombarding your system with a bunch of Omega 3’s that are all extremely
anti‐inflammatory. And why this really helps is that, the human body functions
optimally, based on a bunch of studies, and Omega 3 ratio of 1‐1 or 1‐2 and the of six.
So somewhere in between 1‐1 and 1.2 is the optimal range that scientists have found so
far.
Now previously, most of us were eating the standard American diet. We were way off.
We were considering somewhere around one Omega 3 to 20 Omega 6’s on a ratio side.
So this is extremely inflammatory and it can cause a lot of problems.
So what is the great not mistake, right? So many people think that the last 20 percent of
healing means that they’ll figure out a food intolerance and they’ll figure out how to get
rid and they’ll think of adding nut flours. The unfortunate thing is a caveat here that
adding nut flour can be really rewarding and allows you to add a little bit of diversity, it
allows you to mimic some standard American foods that can be really great on
occasions, but if you fall into the trap that I almost fell into and a lot of people fall into, it
can start to really hold you back and limit you from reaching our 100 percent.
So what do you mean? You know, how do nuts actually play into this problem? Well,
here’s the catch. Nuts are packed with Omega 6’s. They’re pro‐inflammatory. So for
example, if you eat 100 grams of blanched almonds per day, which is about 3.5 ounces,
that’s going to be approximately 270 grams of Omega 6 that you’d be getting daily, so
just for reference, that 3.5 ounces amount to one cup of flour. So if you’re eating a
2,000 calorie a day diet and you would need 4.5 grams per day to maintain the one to
two ratio of Omega 3. So based on that, you’d have to eat 34 pounds of Salmon, which
is filled with Omega 3’s per week, just to balance out your one cup of almond flour
every day. That’s quite a bit and I don’t think anybody would ever do that.
So, you know, to break that down even more. Four ounces, that’s a half a cup. A half of
cup of almond flour at four ounces, is like eating a couple of muffins, of the Breaking a
Vicious Cycle muffins, or maybe if you made a whole batch of pancakes, you’d get that
100 gms. for sure. So that’s just something to be aware of on a daily basis. You don’t
want to be hitting that number.
But even worse than nuts is seed oils, vegetable oils, and transfats. They’re the highest
source of Omega 6 pro‐inflammatory compounds of all of our diets. And the reason
why the SAD diet ratio is usually 1 to 20. So as you can see from the chart there, a lot of

these oils that are supposedly healthy, such as safflower oil, sunflower, or cotton seed,
canola, all these, you know, peanut, corn, all these ones. You see them billed as healthy
oils and substitutes for transfats, which turns out they’re totally not. They’re extremely
high in Omega 6’s, and they’re extremely damaging as far as high inflammation.
Even canola oil, it’s still high up there. So the biggest thing is you want to throw away
your oils and upgrade into oils that are… either don’t have either of them, such as
coconut oil or that are pre‐balanced, such as Macadamia Nut oil or Olive oil. The best
thing in the world is to really move into animal fat cooking, use butter and use Ghee,
which are going to be high in saturated fats and you neither one of these fats.
Okay, so I know that we’ve talked about this, so here’s what you need to do if you want
to attack this part of your diet. First off is, the number one thing is you want to limit the
amount of Omega 6’s in our diet. So we want to throw away the oils, upgrade the oils
and just eat a moderate amount of nuts. So nut flours, nut butters, you know, limit to a
couple of times per week, and don’t worry about it after that. It’s not that big of a deal
that you need to get crazy about it and totally throw it away in the trash, that’s not the
point here.
But the other point is, you want to try to balance that with higher Omega 3 foods, such
as salmon, sardines, anchovies, mackerels, grass fed beef is a good source and pasture
raised eggs, and or you can take the fish oil on a daily basis. But those are all going to
help keep that balance in check. And remember, we just want to aim for that 1 to 1 to 2
ratio, which is optimal and it’s going to get you closer that that 100 percent.
Now, what’s my experience with this? Well, my experience is, is that I can’t tell you that
I notice a 1 to 1 change right away when I dropped nut flours and nut butters. But what
I can tell you is that when I started to introducing them, I introduced them very slow
because I was very wary of them for other reason, just because whenever I ate them, I
saw them pass through me and I’d see them in the toilet later. And as I notice that it
didn’t really affect my stools, I started to eat them more and more and I started to use
more of the recipes from around the different cookbooks in SCD that advocate nut
flours and nut butters. And while it tasted really great, I just saw a steady decline in my
stool quality and at first it started being really grainy and really gritty and then it just
kind of got worse and I think I started going into some constipation, but I’m not really
sure.
But anyways, after cutting them all out, and then staying off of them for a long time, I
got much better. Now I have them one or two times per week, no problem at all. So
that’s just my experience, I’m sure everyone else’s will be different, but the big thing
here is to get rid of the oils. I use nothing but animal fats, butter, ghee and coconut oil
to cook with. I think that’s really big and you see a lot of research that’s starting to
come out that’s linking this ration, this inflammatory ratio to diseases such as cancer
and Alzheimer’s and some really nasty stuff.

Jordan Reasoner: Key area number six is safe starches. Now this is a very, very
taboo topic, but want to really get into it here. And before we talk about the details,
safe starches are like the roots and tubers. What we’re talking about here is sweet
potatoes, yams, leaks, taro and yucca. Now, the very grey areas is when you get into
white rice. And white rice is counter intuitive because most of us always hear that
brown rice is healthier. I know that I was hearing that for years growing up. But that’s
just not the case. In white rice, the bran is actually removed and the bran is what
actually contains a lot of toxins associated with grains. And in fact, all that’s left behind
when you just have white rice is the straight up starch which is just a glucose change. So
it’s very advanced to add in white rice and it’s a very grey area.
But what I’m going to talk about right now is starting with just roots and tubers and
testing that, maybe along the way later on. Now, the safe starches, these sweet
potatoes, they form these pure glucose molecules strung together in long chains. So
these are your long complex polysaccherides. These are the carbohydrates that are the
disaccharides that Elaine talks about in Breaking a Vicious Cycle.
Now the key here is, looking at this from the lens of soluble fiber. And Elaine did teach
us to eliminate all disaccharides and safe starches are disaccharides. But when we’re
talking about this last 20 percent, they can really help. And with safe starches we all
have enzymes called amylase, that’s actually secreted in the saliva. They can help
breakdown these disaccharides. But the key is, you have to have control over small
intestinal bacterial overgrowth and yeast and pathogens.
Before you considering starting something like this, you want to make sure that you
have good control of your small intestinal bacterial growth because if you have an
inability to break down these disaccharides when you test time, they will be consumed
by the bacteria and they will start to overgrow again.
Now in terms of the soluble fiber piece, there’s soluble fiber and insoluble fiber. And
insoluble fiber is the completely undigestable stuff that ends up passing right through us
in vegetables and fruits and in other foods that just go through the digestive process
and pass in our stools. Now, people like to think as insoluble fiber as like the mechanical
ram that pushes stuff out of your bowels. But that’s really not the best way to look at it
because as Steve talked about earlier, anywhere from 50 to 80 percent of a bowel
movement is actually bacteria. And where that can come from is from beneficial
bacteria like Bifidobacteria, which are primarily in the colon.
And Bifidobacteria, they need soluble fibers to thrive and they actually produce healthy
stuff for us like butyrate, which helps to heal our digestive lining and mucosal lining.
Now, the difference here is that soluble is primarily found in safe starches. And when
you start eating these safe starches, you’ll increase dramatically the amount of soluble
fibers you are eating. And you’ll support the natural Bifidobacteria in your colon, which
is actually going to produce much more consistent stool and bowel movements,

specifically for people that are struggling with constipation or struggling to have better
form so things are still a little loose or still having some little constipation issues.
Increasing the food that you are feeding the Bifidobacteria, the soluble fiber that you
are feeding the Bifidobacteria is going to do dramatic help to getting you to those
perfect number four stools.
So how to test safe starches? Well, first of all, like I said, if you’re having specific issues,
specifically if you’re having like thyroid issues or you want to start testing more carbs in
your diet, this is the place to start. Now you really have to be cautious about that small
intestinal bacterial overgrowth or if you’re having those blood sugar issues because you
are introducing giant chains of glucose. The way to do it is to start by testing like a half
cup of sweet potatoes and do it for four days and track how your react. Just like we
talked about. You can slowly introduce more safe starches at that point, but you’ll also
want to be on the safe side and keep taking digestive enzymes that have amylase just in
case you have some kind of deficiency in producing it on your own.
But really, you want to watch out for signs of small intestinal bacterial overgrowth
happening again. You want to look out for those original symptoms that you had before
you started SCD and make sure that you’re not creeping back in the wrong direction.
The bottom line is that, carbs tastes great. And you know, when we talk about energy,
glucose is the primary fuel source for our bodies and it provides easy to use energy so
we can have that all day zero fatigue energy that helps us bounce out of bed. And in
order to do that, you can consider testing carb levels around 100 to 150 grams per day.
And that’s going to come from those fruits and safe starches. But again, this is a very
advanced technique. This is a technique that you’re using, when you not struggling with
you know, not being able to eat more than a cup a day of fruit. This is something that is
much more advanced and you have all of your bacteria in check, or your pathogens like
Candida, yeast Candidas in check, you don’t have any H. Pylori or C. Diff going on. And
you really have to treat this carefully, just as any food and you definitely want to
continue your Probiotics just in case.
Now, my specific experience with sweet potato has been really positive. I started
introducing sweet potato after I did the L‐Glutamine protocol and I usually have like a
half a sweet potato, a couple of times a week. So if I have it maybe for dinner on
Tuesday, I might have it again for lunch on Thursday. But specifically I try to keep my
carbs up around 100 grams per day. And so far that’s really helped me feel better. I feel
like I have more energy at the gym. I feel like I’m more alert and awake during the day.
And specifically, it feels like I don’t get so much of a fatigue issue when I don’t get as
much sleep.
So it’s been a positive thing for me, it’s helped me check a few more things off of my
100 percent healthy list and it’s definitely something to consider testing.

Steve Wright: And now, I’ve done quite a bit of experimenting with it as well and I’ve
tried many of the safe starches, including the white rice, and I do perfectly fine with
them. They do not cause me any digestive problems at all. And I’m not really sure if
they’ve really helped me a whole lot. When you really think about 100 grams, that’s
only 400 calories and so it’s really not that big of a bump from a normal SCD diet, but I
think it really can be a next level starter for someone if they want to choose to go about
it this way. I think it helps me most, maybe after a super hard work out of something
like that, but overall, I do feel a higher level of energy even though we’re keeping at that
100 to 150 grams per day, which I’m sure if you ran that buy most experts, they would
still tell you that you’re eating low carbs. Of course, we know that’s not true, but to
them that’s low carb. So that’s just my take on it.
So, number seven is additional testing. And this area is really about what happens when
you get down to the last 20 percent of health and we’re not really sure what action to
take. You know, you’re having a lot of convoluted symptoms, you’re fluctuating a lot.
Advanced medical testing may offer the clues you need to figure out the next missing
piece of the puzzle. Together… it’s not like any one of these tests are going to be the
magic bullet, it could be, but usually it’s not. But together, many of these tests over a
time period can help paint a picture of exactly what’s happening to you. And this will be
very helpful for you and for your doctor.
So everything is interconnected. We’ve talked about this before, but especially when it
comes on to the lasts 20 percent. All of our body systems need to be evaluated and
that’s talking about digestive from hormones, thyroid, cardiovascular, energy systems,
adrenal, all this stuff is extremely interconnected, even the brain and all that stuff. So
when we were diseased, we may have caused other parts of our body to compensate or
down regulate for us to continue living. I mean, that’s just normal, right. If you’re
having a disease in one area of the body, the body’s going to have to shuttle a lot more
energy to fighting that and so other things in the body are going to get down regulated.
Sometimes those things don’t come back right away. So finding and correcting them is
very important.
One huge red flag here is that, actual tests only please. And when I say that, I mean that
there’s tons of advanced labs that seem to be rolling out test after new test these days.
But unless you’re rich, I don’t really recommend just really running out and getting
everything tested. It’s nice, it’s cool, you can have a lot of graphs on your table to look
at, but really, a lot of these tests that are coming out don’t really give you actionable
outcomes. The data really isn’t actionable. So you want to choose tests that are based
on what actions you can take after getting them done. So if the results come back high,
you know what you have to do. If your results come back low, you know what you have
to do. And if your results come back, in range, you know you can rule that idea out.
That’s the kind of tests we want to have here.

Now you can work with or without your doctor with this, but always think about the
outcome change or the outcome planning or current treatment planning that will
happen before you sign up for one of these tests.
So what are the areas of interest? Or what are the areas that you can get tested? Well
the first thing is you can look at the overall performance of the body. Look at the entire
body as a system and see how it’s doing. And then there’s lots of different tests for
individual components of this system, the stomach, intestines, thyroid hormones, etc. I
think it’s a really good idea to get both snapshots of the total performance in the
individual systems because again, they’re all interconnected and having a snapshot of all
of these things is going to give you a much better picture of what’s happening over time.
So what are some system performance tests, the whole body right? Well we’ve talked
about this many times, but the thing that we always want to keep our eye on is
inflammation. And some tests that you can get on a regular basis that will help you
track your inflammation is our C‐reactive protein and your CRP. We haven’t talked
about this until tonight, but you can get tested for your Omega 6/Omega 3 ratio. This is
going to help you figure out if the changes that you’ve been making in your diet, if
they’re actually taking effect. Like if you cut out your seed oils and you start eating fish
on a regular basis, you might see that ration come in line and when you get it tested, it
might be great. And so you know whatever you are doing, you’re going to keep doing
that.
Another inflammation marker is fasting insulin levels. If these are out of range, it could
indicate insulin resistance, it can indicate lepton resistance and these are all big parts of
inflammation and being overweight and those types of things. So that’s something to
always be checking as well.
Tonight we talked about the immune system, about having a regulated TH1 and a
regulated TH2 and how if the immune system is out of whack, which is usually is in all
immune conditions, that we want to keep our eye on this and we want to know as we
make these changes how it’s affecting us. So it’s something to get on a regular basis is
your CVC Panel, which is your Comprehensive Blood Panel. And specifically you want to
keep your eye on the white blood count, your WBC, because being out of range high or
being out of range low will indicate if you have high immune activity or low immune
activity.
Another panel to get on a regular basis, and both of these are blood draw panels, or
serum levels, is your immune differential panel. And in this panel, you will get
neutraphils, lymphocytes, monocytes and eosinophiles and basophiles. And these
markers are going to give you a picture of how the different parts of your immune
system are acting at the time. I think these are all very important as you look to try to
figure out the complex last 20 percent.

Lastly, and from a whole performance perspective, you can get micronutrient
intercellular testing done. And what this is going to tell you is, you’re talking a lot of
supplements or maybe you’re not taking a lot of supplements and you’re wondering if
you need to take them. Well, if you get intercellular micronutrient testing, you’re gonna
basically test for everything. You’re going to look at what’s actually getting into your
cells and that’s going to help confirm whether or not you should be taking that extra
supplement. You know, whether you should be taking more vitamin D, more vitamin A,
more B‐Complex, etc, etc, and it might reveal some deficiencies that you didn’t know
you needed, like selenium or you know, vitamin K or something like that.
So the cheapest and most comprehensive that we recommend is the Spectracell
Micronutrient Testing; however, there’s lots of other ones out there such as Metametrix
Ion Testing that are higher priced.
So what happens when we start breaking down the pieces and how do they fit in there.
So after you get a whole performance review, you’re going to break it down into pieces
that you’re actually having trouble with. So, with the stomach, if you’re still having
stomach acid issues or you’re still having stomach pain issues after you’ve done a lot of
work on the first 80 percent, the next two tests you might look at scheduling right away
is the Heidelberg test to check out your stomach acid and then maybe possibly upper GI
Endoscopy to check for ulcers, to check for any lesions or anything else that’s going on
in there. That’s going to help rule it out and it’s going to help you tailor your treatment
plans.
Next up is your intestines, as we move through, right. The number one thing to figure
out how digestion is working top to bottom is your stool test. Now, Metametrix’s DNA
and Genova CDSA are the top ones that we recommend and this is going to give you a
great picture of what are you digesting, what are your bacteria levels, how is everything
going through there. Then if you want to drill down deeper and you realize that you’re
not digesting everything, you’re having some malabsorption problems or you’re having
food intolerances, food allergies, you might want to get a gut permeability test. And
what this is going to check for is just how leaky is your gut. If you get a couple of these
over time, it might tell you whether or not some protocols might be working, such as
glutamine or SCD.
Lastly, you can get a SIBO test, which is a Small Intestinal Bacteria Overgrowth test. And
this is a way to maybe confirm or deny that you’ve taken care of your problem of having
small intestinal bacteria growth. The unfortunate part of this test is, it’s not going to tell
you what exactly what’s overgrown, it’s just going to tell you that it’s over.
So what are some other ideas, some other areas of the body that you might look to
test? Well we talked about this numerous times, but the thyroid is extremely connected
to your digestive, your ability to digest. And so I think it’s a very good idea to check on a
regular basis, your thyroid levels. And you want to be really monitoring those THC, Free

T‐4 and T‐3 over time this is going to give you a great picture of how your energy levels
are happening, your body levels, all that stuff.
If you think you’re dealing with some hormonal issues, especially like maybe stress and
sleepiness and that kind of thing, a great idea is to get a 24‐hour cortisol saliva test. And
this is going to really help you figure out if your circadian rhythms are messed up and it’s
a much better judge than just a serum blood test. Also if you’re having hormonal
problems, maybe you want to get a male hormone profile or a female hormone profile.
And these are going to check a broad range of hormones, not just our testosterone level
or your estrogen level. This is going to check all the different hormones that feed into
testosterone and they down regular or up regulate testosterone and free testosterone.
So that’s really going to help you get you and your doctor get a much better picture of
what is actually going wrong.
The last two on the list here is paristology testing. So if you’ve gone through a lot of
these different tweaks and tests and you’re really just ready to throw your hands up in
the air and you can’t figure out why your digestion is still out of whack, peristology
testing is probably where you want to look next. You might have an undetected
parasite that wasn’t part of the stool testing and you want to specifically get tested for
these.
Next up is if you’re having random problems even after you’ve testing and maybe
you’ve got permeability or some other things and you’re still having random allergies
and intolerances, random fatigue and other problems, you might want to look into
getting heavy metal tested. You might have some sort of environmental toxin that’s
been leaked into your body and you don’t know about it. Now this area is especially
grey and it’s especially hard to really know what you’re going to get, but where we’re
coming from here is, if you take one of these tests and it comes back extremely out of
range, that’s a pretty good indication there’s a problem there. If you take it and it
comes back kind of in range, you know there’s probably not a problem. So that’s kind of
where we’re coming from.
Lastly, if you’re really looking to get a better perspective, maybe you’re not looking for
tweakable data right now because you’re sitting still, but you’re wondering kind of what
happened to you and why it happened, and you’re just curious for more information,
you might want to look into genetic testing. It’s becoming cheaper and cheaper these
days and they’re starting to link it up with certain things like health, disease risks, your
ancestry and how that relates in health and disease. And so getting on the forefront of
this new… it’s really brand new genetic testing might be a great idea for you. Some
recommended companies might be like 23 and Me. There’s plenty of others; however,
23 and Me is one of the cheapest and best. But they do, do a limited range of testing
whereas you could pay several thousand dollars and get your entire genome tested.
But it’s just anecdotal evidence to maybe you’re predisposed to a certain disease and
within environmental problems, that’s how you got to where you got today and other

things like that. But if you’re curious about that, I highly recommend it; it will make you
grin and smile, that’s for sure.
Jordan Reasoner: Okay, so key area number eight is meditation. And I want to start
off by saying that this section could have been hours in and of itself. We could have
gotten into meditation or we could have gotten into deep into Yoga and how to make
sure you do those things every day. So this is more a high level overview, but some of
the things I want to start off with is that medication is practice, and yes, I say it’s a
practice meaning that we’re never going to master it or something, it’s just something
that we do every day. We practice it to stay relaxed, we want to reduce stress and feel
good. And it’s simply evoking a level of consciousness called mindfulness. And really,
the bottom line here is, this is relaxes breathing. It’s going to clear your mind and allow
you to learn to be present.
And this goes back to practicing. The key part of meditation is that there is no end goal.
You’re just going to sit there and do relaxed breathing for a while. If you’re arm starts
to feel weird and twitch, you just have to be okay with it and just keep hanging out
there. If you have weird thoughts, be okay with it and let it pass. The point here is that
it’s something that does amazing things for us in the long term and we have to practice
it whenever we can.
I’m going to through a little bit of the science behind it. The gut‐brain connection is very
strong. In fact, the gut commonly has been referred to as the second brain. And studies
just plain show it works. National Review of Gastroenterology Published, “IBS is thought
to be a disturbed neuro function along the gut‐brain axis”. In one study, scientists
induced brain injury in mice and the mice actually developed leaky gut and six hours due
to decreased activity in what’s called the Vagus Nerve. And interestingly, if they
stimulated the Vagus Nerve after the brain injury, which actually will mimic brain output
to the Vagus Nerve, that prevented the leaky gut from happening after the trauma.
Now, 90 percent of the output of the brain ends up in the Vagus Nerve. And a traumatic
brain injury like what happened to the mice will decrease the output to the Vagus nerve.
Now, Vagal stimulation is at play here. The Vagus Nerve travels from the brain, along
the esophagus, down and interconnects throughout the gut and you see it there in the
image as the two blue lines leaving the brain. And you’ll notice that it does travel right
along the esophagus.
The Vagus Nerve actually controls the relaxation response in the brain and body and
stimulating that nerve is like hitting the off switch to your stressor spots. So Vagal Nerve
stimulation therapy is a real thing and actually in some cases, they’ve implanted a
surgical device and it was approved in 1997, by the FDA, to control seizures in epileptic
patients, and now it’s actually approved, I think in 2007, I want to say, to treat severe
depression. And all it does is continually electrically stimulate the Vagus Nerve. And it’ll
actually decrease inflammation and increase GABA in the brain.

Now, it induces the release of oxytocin, which we talked about before and it is the same
thing that anti‐depressants do. And there are simple ways to do it yourself without
implanting a surgical device simply using meditation to deal with the stress. So the big
thing to start meditation is not to make it complicated. It’s not some weird esoteric
thing. Just pick a time every day, like right when you wake up, and sit down in a quiet
area, set a time for 10 to 15 minutes so you don’t have to worry about it, and you can
just hang out there until it goes off and focus on your breathing. Okay?
There’s a couple of key things here. Inhaling through the nose and out through the
mouth, it engages and relaxes both the right and left sides of the brain, so that’s key. In
through the nose and out through the mouth.
In terms of Vagal Nerve stimulation, there’s a pattern of timing that works really well,
which is inhale through the nose for six seconds, hold for six seconds and exhale
through the mouth for nine seconds. The exhale needs to be longer than the inhale to
fully empty the lungs because most of us never actually inhale and exhale enough. And
all you have to do is count. So when you are breathing in, you just say, one, two, three,
four, five, six. Hold, one, two, three, four, five, six, then exhale, one through nine.
Now the major stimulation of the Vagus Nerve that I’m talking about, that occurs during
the exhalation, okay because it travels along the esophagus there. And actually the
constriction of the voice box on the exhale, where you’re kind of making a little bit of a
noise like a “Haa,” that is going to produce a sound that causes even more stimulation
to that portion of the Vagus Nerve right there between the trachea and the esophagus.
So if you can almost make that “Haa” noise when you exhale, that’s going to even add
more Vagal stimulation to your meditation.
So what are the keys for success? Well, for starters, if you can’t make it a habit, it’s not
going to work because if you don’t meditate, you can’t get the benefits from it. Right?
For example, I know that it helps me dramatically, but I have struggled in the past to
make it a habit in my life. But what I can tell you is that when I’ve been in the habit of
doing it for months in a row, that my digestion and my health, they were the best that
they’ve been in a long time. And as soon as life gets in the way and my stress goes up
and I fall off the wagon, I plain and simple just do not feel as good.
The point is, is that you have to stay focused on your breathing and that’s the most
important part and it keeps you present in the moment. So if your mind starts to go
crazy and you thinking about what you have to do that day and you have a lot of stuff
going on, you have to take the garbage out or whatever, just get back to counting your
breathing and focusing on that six in, six hold, and then nine out.
You know, I encourage you to get out and explore some of the experts on meditation.
Jon Kabat‐Zinn is a great one with lots of clinical studies on his ability to reduce stress
through mindfulness. He has a book also, called, Wherever you go, there you Are.
That’s a great book you can pick up. But the point really is that you have to enjoy this.

Don’t make it something hard or weird or freaky that stresses you out and causes you
more problems. You know, my experience with meditation has been great, but it
doesn’t come easy to quiet my mind. My mind is always going. So the point isn’t to
specifically do that, just to practice limiting your reaction to what’s going on.
So, like said, if I have a thought about taking the garbage out, I’m just going to keep
sitting there and I’m not going to let it snowball and start thinking about all the things I
have to do that day. I’m just going to let that thought go until the next one comes to my
mind.
Steve Wright: So, number nine is doctor scripts. And it’s all about our doctor
relationships because, as we talked about before, there might be a lot of testing you
might want to get done or we might need to go and ask for scripts that normally our
doctor might not have brought up. And so as we look to achieve this final 20 percent,
you’re probably going to get closer and closer with your doctor than you have ever been
before. And one takeaway here is that no one cares as much about your health as you
do. Not your doctor, they’re busy… they have a busy day every day and they have a lot
going on. And especially not your insurance company, who some of them use some
insurance practices where they actually charge your doctor extra money for every test
that he performs on you.
So they give the doctors extra incentive to test less and write more prescriptions. So
that’s just something to keep in mind. The approach matters as you go about talking
with your doctor. And I would recommend that you take one of two approaches.
So the first is, you can start with a more direct approach and as for the particular tests
that you want, like right up front, or you could lead them through a story or a narrative
or with specific problems for the specific test that you want to get done. However, both
really start with that story. They start off with the “why” that describes your symptoms.
Because you can’t just walk in and start demanding things from your doctor. Not only is
that rude, but it’s also insulting to your doctor who’s gone through lots of schooling and
who has an ego surrounding his ability to help treat patients like yourself, and who’s
been dealing with helping people all day long.
So if you’re brash, you can easily put them on the defense, in which case you’ll almost
never get what you want. So how does a direct approach work? Well, first of all, this
works best when you have an open doctor or one that you have a mutual respect with.
So if it’s somebody who you have a long history and rapport with and you’ve been
seeing a long time or they respect your ability to research and help yourself.
The first thing you really want to do is you’re going to want to create a bulleted list of
the symptoms you have. And then underneath that list of symptoms you have, you
want to list out the specific tests that you think you want to better understand them.
Then make two copies of this and bring this to the appointment. You’ll keep one and
you’ll give one to him or her.

Now alternatively, you could just use verbally, the formula is pretty much the same. You
state your problems, then some validation that you know what you’re talking about and
then the test you want. So for example, you know, if I talk to my doctor, maybe this is a
conversation I could have had. So, you know, “Doctor, I’m feeling really tired lately,
especially when I wake up. You know, it just seems I can’t ever get going in the
morning. And then when I got to bed at night, I just have really, really hard time falling
to sleep. I don’t know if I have insomnia or what’s going on. But I know we’ve done
some blood work in the past and it’s showed that most all my levels are okay, but I was
reading about how cortisol levels can regulate your circadian hormones, and I’m
wondering if mine are all messed up? I looked into it and it turns out that we can do a
Metametrixs or a Genova 24‐hour saliva test that will give me a whole day’s worth of
info on exactly what my circadian rhythm looks like and if it’s correct. What do you
think about checking this?”
Now, he’s probably going to, you know, give his opinion and that’s exactly what you
want. Right? Because he is a health professional, so he will give you his opinion on
what he thinks about it. And then usually he’ll have no problem signing up for a test like
this or signing you up for a test like that.
So the other approach is leading to the answer. So this kind of the same deal, you’re
going to want to put up the documentation ahead of time, but this time there’s a small
change. This time you’re not going to list the actual results that you want, you’re just
going to make a list of the symptoms that you off, leave off the tests that you want, just
list the symptoms and bring those in one copy for and one copy for them.
Now an interesting caveat when you do this type of approach is that insurance will
usually pay for serum blood testing. The 24‐hour saliva test I just talked about, the
insurance is not usually going to pay for that. Several other tests that we talked about
tonight, insurance will not usually pay for. But if it’s usually paid for by insurance for
testing, you might follow a script something like this. “You know, I’ve been feeling
fatigued lately and I’ve been reading that IBD’s and stomach issues, they correlate with
B‐12 deficiencies, it’s pretty common. You know, doctor, do you think that could be
something that’s going on with me?” And he may respond, yes it could be, or he may
respond, no it can’t… no, I don’t think so. So if he responds, yes it could be, then my
response would be, “Okay great. Could we get a test just to rule that out because I’m
really curious?” If your response comes back negative and he’s like, no it’s not that
common, I’ve never heard of that. You might say, well could we explore more on that.
What else could be causing this? Is there another test that might be causing my
fatigue?
So sometimes when you use this way of getting to the answer, he might actually… this
allows him to use his expertise or her expertise and come up with an answer that you
might not have anticipated. This can be a good thing because you allow them to use
their own doctor powers and their amazingness of all their schooling that they went

through and they might come out with a test that you wouldn’t have come out with
before.
So what’s another strategy? Well another strategy is that, if it’s not covered by
insurance, you already this upfront, such as the Metometixs test, the Genova test. It
can pay better to be more direct. So for example, for the Spectracell micronutrient test,
you might just walk in there and say something like, you know, “Doctor, I’ve been
feeling really good lately and I’ve been taking really good care of my body and I’m taking
all these supplements. You know, it’s been going on a couple of months on them and
I’m feeling really good, do I still need to take all this stuff.” And you might be paying
$100 or $200 a month on supplements. It’s not unheard of. And you might say, “I’ve
been doing this for quite a while, things are going great. I still feel like I have a few
problems, X, Y, and Z, can we get this micronutrient test done to see if I have any
underlying deficiency that might be contributing to this disease?” Or you might just say,
“I’ve been taking all these supplements, I’ve been feeling great for a long time can we
get this micronutrient test done to make sure I don’t have any malnutrition? And
maybe I can try not taking some of the supplements and saving some money?”
Now he might reply, you now, I’m not seeing anything here that might suggest you need
this. And again, this is another situation where if you’re paying for it, then he’s not
usually not going to have to pay for, it’s not an insurance paid for test, you can be a little
bit more forceful and just say, well just for peace of mind doc, I’d like to get this one
done or you know, I would really appreciate it if you could write this for me because I
really feel like this is a problem for me
If it’s not coming out of his pocket, it’s not coming out of the insurance pocket and all
the paperwork that’s associated with it, it’s just coming out of your pocket, it’s usually
much easier to get these types of tests done.
So what are the key points here? As I wrap this up. Do your research ahead of time,
understand how symptoms might relate to at test that you want, don’t just read the first
article you come across linking B‐12 deficiency to you know, not feeling good or are
fatigued or something. Be able to talk about it when your doctor brings it up because
he needs to know that you’re not just like some other patient who just read a Yahoo
news article and thinks they want the latest and greatest magic bullet test.
Anticipate this conversation after you’ve done with research with your doctor
beforehand; visualize how it’s going to go. You know your doctor, is he confrontational?
Is he laid back? Are you going to have to press harder? Are you going to, you know,
does he have a big ego; do you have to lead him to the outcome? And then you know,
really, don’t be afraid to ever lay it out. You are the consumer here, you are paying the
price to see him, it’s your time, it’s your money, so really never be afraid to push harder
and tell them, I’m experiencing this symptom and I think it relates directly to this test
and I want this and prove me wrong that I don’t need this.

You need to get the treatment you want if it gets down to that. Don’t be afraid to stand
up for what you believe in the research that you’ve done. If you do get a little
confrontational or something or you get hard rejected, this doesn’t mean no, it just
means, not yet. Again, the doctor might recommend a didn’t test that you didn’t think
about or he might say that, well, the protocol that I’m going to put you on hasn’t run it’s
course yet, so I don’t think we need to waste our time or waste money checking you.
That doesn’t mean you can’t ask the exact… have the exact same talk about 15 days
later or something. Most likely he won’t even remember.
So I’ve used a lot of these exact scripts and this is a lot of the exact stuff that I’ve used to
get the testing that I want and it hasn’t always been like super easy, there has been
some push back, but I think what I’ve tried to give you here is some pretty workable
scripts that you could use. You do need to apply it to your situation with your doctor
and how their moods and how they do with their patients, but with that, you are the
consumer and it’s your right to get tested, whatever you want. If you run into a doctor
who is really going to stonewall you and tell you it’s his way or the highway and you
can’t get tested even though you’re having these symptoms, I think there’s a pretty
good indication it’s time to leave that doctor.
Jordan Reasoner: Okay, key area number 10, backing off meds. Now Chris Kresser
states that there’s no such thing as side effects for a drug, there’s only effects. And
what he’s talking about here is that when we take drugs, they have effects on our body
and while it might just affect one thing, like for example, LDN up regulates endorphin
levels, it has lots of other effects. They’re not side effects; they’re just not the same
affects that we were hoping for in the original intent of the drug. So for example, LDN
made it very difficult for me to sleep. I had a horrible time sleeping. And that was an
effect that really affected the rest of my life. The thing here is that if you want to
achieve a 100 percent healthy you, you can’t do it on meds. Straight up. And when you
take a drug, for example an immunosuppressant, it has affects on your body. And one
of those effects is that it can leave you with the symptoms of UC, but however, a few
other effects include the fact that it’s suppressing the ability of your immune system to
do its job.
It can also have huge effects like stomach acid or stomach ulcers, high blood pressure,
even more things like that. And if you want to approach that final 20 percent, one huge
piece of the puzzle is working on living life without the effect of any medication on your
body. And that’s because of feedback loops. The effects of medication impact the
feedback loops of your body. Now medicine has done some great things for our society,
but they’ve also done so many negative things. And the biggest distinction I want to
make right now is that they cloud the feedback loops that our body is giving us back.
So how do you know when you’re really feeling… how do you really know how you are
feeling when you have something altering that? So, remember, you’re an N = 1 and
your body has inputs and your body has outputs and you have feedback loops. So for
example, if you have chronic knee pain and you’re taking Tylenol 3 every day to stop

that pain and then you have some physical therapy done to fix it, but your still taking
the Tylenol 3 every day, how do you know if the procedure helped the knee pain? And
you know, why do you even need to keep taking it if you fixed the root cause of the
knee pain by doing physical therapy.
And that’s the same thing we are doing here. If you have ulcerative colitis, you’ve done
the diet, you’ve done some healing you’re reducing your chronic inflammation, maybe
you even had a colonoscopy that shows your inflammation is way down. Why do you
need to continue to take corticosteroid that suppresses your immune function? And
how does it… how do you know your really healing and how do you know that you’re
even getting any better? It’s blocking that feedback loop.
You know, we really recommend that you do not back off meds without your doctor’s
support. And it’s going to be a difficult conversation. But here’s a few tips. You’ll go in
making detailed notes on the affects that the medication has had on you, both good,
bad and indifferent. So for example, if you’ve been taking Asocal, but you feel like it
hasn’t helped you in any way, that’s an important thing to know. Or if you find that it’s
causing you fatigued and you lay awake at night, you now, those are bad things to write
about also.
The point here is to build your case by detailing the symptoms before and after. And do
this preferably before you started the healing protocol, like the diet and supplements.
And see if you can isolate the improvements you’ve made and the hard work you’ve
been doing. So for example, you see that while on meds before diet changes you were
having three or four bloody stools a day, but now after six months on the diet, you’re
having one to two movements per day with no blood or mucus and the meds never
changed.
You need to approach your doctor about reduction protocols and use our scripts that
Steve just talked about to approach your doctor, but the main goal here is to get their
blessing to test or run a trial on reducing one of the meds. Don’t forget that you are in
control because this is your health and ultimately, the thing is that your doctor is well‐
trained on these meds and the proper protocol to back off of them without having a
powerful reaction. So you might say, I’ve been working carefully to heal my gut with
diet and supplementation and I’m really seeing dramatic improvements in my health.
And I’m really curious to hear your thoughts on seeing how I do without medicine XYZ.
You know, for the most part they’re going to be supportive, but if not, it is time to find
somebody new.
So some key tips for backing down on meds. Fall back on your food safe zone. You
need to expect it’s going to have negative consequences in the beginning. Remember
that graph about homeostasis that we always show? Our bodies like to stay in one
state. And once we make a big change like removing a corticosteroid, which has been
suppressing immune function for however long you’ve been taking it, you may notice
negative consequences at first as your body kind of bounces and responds with an over

active immune system. Just know that that’s going to happen and just be okay with the
fact that it might take a few weeks to get back to homeostasis as you taper off, just like
this graph shows.
Another key thing is to don’t introduce any new variables while you’re backing off meds.
It’s just going to play to the fear that it might be the medicine and that you might have
been reliant on it, but really, it might just be this new variable of food that you tried.
Track your changes really specifically so you can understand what’s changing, both good
and bad.
And I want to give you an example from my life when I was taking LDN. Once I started
improving on the diet, I was convinced that LDN was like the only thing that was keeping
me from falling apart. I started LDN and the diet at the same time and I thought maybe
LDN was the real reason I was feeling better and I was just deathly afraid of stopping it.
And that thinking went on for months and months until I finally ran out of my
prescription and I didn’t have time to get into the doctor and get it filled. So I just
decided that it was time to test it. And I knew that backing off of LDN, by talking to my
doctor, I knew that backing off LDN wasn’t going to be something that I had to taper off,
it was something I could test cold turkey. And I made sure to stick to my food safe zone
and I knew what was safe for me.
But the first few days, you know, off LDN were just awesome because I finally got a full
night’s sleep. And I didn’t even realize how horrible I was sleeping for the last six
months because of it until I finally had a good night’s sleep without it.
Secondly though, I did experience a negative depression for like a week or so afterwards
as my endorphin levels in my body just tanked. And after a few weeks, they kind of
returned back to steady levels and I felt normal again. And in fact, later on, I found out
that my testosterone levels were really low while taking the drug, so I had some work to
do to raise them back up naturally. But you know, in this example, it’s was a very scary
and intimidating process for me to stop taking LDN, but in the end I’m really happy that I
did it because I would have been stuck at 80 percent forever and I never would have
known that I wasn’t getting any sleep and that I was having these suppressed
testosterone levels that was holding me back.
So we just went through 10 key areas on approaching the last 20 percent of healing and
getting to the 100 percent healthy. The take home here is that diets and supplements,
they can get you 80 percent of the way there, but the final 20 percent is just more of a
grey zone. It’s very individual. And only you can define what 100 percent healthy
means to you. Just remember that this is a long road, not a short cut and you really
need to understand and take away from this message that you need to find what that
100 percent healthy means to you and write it down.
So as we wrap this up, before you do anything, like I said, define what 100 percent of
healthy means to you, then decide if you’re in a feel good zone or not or whether you’re

even ready to try this 20 percent of healing. If you are, focus on that last 20 percent and
keep testing, but really enjoy the ride. Because you’re likely feeling a whole hell of a lot
better than you were before SCD. Just don’t end up like the guy in this picture here,
where he’s stuck chasing perfection on a hamster wheel.
So what to do next… as we close out this session, you need to pick one beyond SCD item
to test next week, if you think you’re ready. You owe it to yourself and your healing.
Okay? And test it and track your results. For example, if you’re going to try the L‐
Glutamine protocol, you need to test it and track the results for four weeks. You need
to really understand what changes are being made. And when you’re done, you need to
do things like test foods that you thought you couldn’t eat before the L‐Glutamine
protocol and see if it improved your leaky gut, see if it improved your food sensitivities.
You know, really, the bottom line is, either you get closer to your 100 percent healthy or
you don’t. The take away here is that just keep using the Session Six worksheet to test
and track.
And finally, you know, we only have one life, so enjoy the fact that you’re chasing the
small stuff and you’ve got that huge chunk handled and you’ve come so far.
So thanks for watching. This has been Session Six of the Advanced SCD Techniques
Course. I’m Jordan Reasoner here with Steve Wright.