Hey, guys, welcome to this week's episode, and I'm so thrilled for today's guest. She's the founder of the Academy of Integrative Medicine. She's an integrative medicine expert, a board certified functional medicine provider, a best selling author and a FedEx speaker. So welcome, Dr. Keisha Ewers. I'm so excited to talk with you. Thanks for having me. Well, so you know, personally that I struggle with autoimmune disease, and I know that you did, too, at one point, didn't you?
Yes, I had rheumatoid arthritis diagnosed when I was 30.
Wow. Well, can you walk us through your own health journey for a second and how it led you to create the Academy of Integrative Medicine?
Sure. Just for a little correction, it's the Academy for Integrative Medicine, because actually they both exist. And so they are the right one. And yeah, when I was I'm fifty four right now and when I was 30, I was in the intensive care unit as a nurse, working sort of as high intensity job I had done for about 11 years. Up to that point I had four children that I was raising and a life that I really loved and running marathons. And I always say this just like my patients know. They come in and they say all of a sudden, you know, I'm sick. And that's exactly how I experience it, too, when in fact, it's really not all of a sudden. But it was like one day I'm training for a marathon and the very next day I wake up and I've got 10 pounds of puffiness all over my body and my joints are red and inflamed. And it was just like overnight somebody had unplugged the Energizer Bunny, you know, and taking the batteries out. And I was just flattened. And I got myself into a doctor. And that was the rheumatologist said, oh, you've got rheumatoid arthritis. And I said, how can I have that? I make all my own food. I run marathons. I'm super healthy, you know? And she said, well, as she took my history, it came out that my grandfather had had rheumatoid arthritis and in fact, he was dead before I was born with that.
And I was just realizing in another interview that at the age of fifty four, I think I've outlived him already. He was in a wheelchair. And so she said basically you drew the short end of the genetic lottery, my dear. Close the book, put it on the shelf. There's there are two prescriptions, methotrexate and a nonsteroidal antiinflammatory. Drugs take them. And this is the thing that really kicked me was when you get worse, not if you get worse, come back and we'll up your medications or change the classification, etc.. And I said, well, hang on, is there not anything else I can do? And she said, no, you know, and I just remember on the way home in my car, going and talking to my husband and saying there has to be a different way. And here's where my paths just diverges completely diametrically opposed to how I was in medicine up to that point, because my model of medicine, just the complete Western model, had nothing right. And I thought there has to be something else out there. And I always tell people that if an Arab if an Arab a bit me in the butt, I wouldn't have known it. I just didn't know anything about Arabs. I didn't know anything about natural medicine. I knew nothing.
And so I went on the Internet and I started investigating anything else. And, you know, in those days it was with a dial up modem. And I had to Ask Jeeves. There was no Google.
And I asked, is there an alternative way to heal autoimmune disease? And I went into the place where we keep our scientific studies from medicine, PubMed or CBI. And I found a research article around yoga being really good for autoimmunity. So I went to a yoga class the next day.
And I always tell people this was really funny because I called up my running partners and they said a yoga class tomorrow. And they're like, really? And it was before there was a yoga studio on every corner next to a Starbucks. And I just always tell people this because I was so conservative. I said, yeah, I don't know if I can touch my own toes or I've never hung out with people that can't before. And I was really anxious about it, you know? And now I look back at that woman and I just go, oh, you poor thing, you know? And I started practicing yoga in that very first class. The teacher said the word Igher Veda, which is the sister science of yoga, the one that says we're not all the same person, which was revolutionary to me. He said enough in that class. I went home and I looked it up on the Internet and I went, oh, my gosh, this is what's missing. There is actually a way for us each individually to take care of ourselves. And I started practicing some of those precepts and diving deeper into it. And one of the things I learned in that search was that. Diabetic medicine says the autoimmune disease is undigested anger, and I remember that was life changing for me because I was like, I'm not an angry person. And it was true. I was a constant a people pleaser, and all my anger would not even go acknowledged it was in my body, like literally eating me up. And I started practicing what I was learning and changing up my diet and doing some trauma relief, because when I started learning how to meditate, I was asking myself this weird autoimmune with in front of my third eyes face.
And I started looking at it and I said, Hotto means I'm attacking my self harm. That means I'm killing myself literally in a societally acceptable manner. When's the first time I wanted to die and why? Because I certainly didn't want to in that moment, so I traced the timeline back, which is why I have my patients do now with what things happened in their life and make a timeline. And I found this 10 year old little girl version of myself who was being sexually abused by the vice principal of the elementary school. And I looked at her and she really wanted to die. She wanted out of this body, out of this world. She couldn't make anyone understand what was going on. I just looked at her and I went, oh, she really did want to die. And I'll bet this is connected to what's happening to me today. And sure enough, there's science that shows that now that we can talk about. But when I started really going in and feeling trauma and doing all of these, I was able to reverse my rheumatoid arthritis within six months and never had to take those medications. So it's very powerful, this this idea that there are many different reasons we get sick. It's not just one. And it's not because we're lacking a certain medication.
So I know you wrote a paleo cookbook. Do you stick to a strict paleo diet? And do you think paleo is the best choice for people with autoimmune disease? That's not a simple answer.
So one of the things I learned in Iowa that I've stuck to all these years twenty five years later, is that we're not all the same. And I always say the FBI knows that, you know, we can actually do fingerprints and tell who's who. And that's that's really our genetics are all different. So I wrote a book called The Quick and Easy Autoimmune Paleo Cookbook. And what I say in there, half of it is information and half of it is templates that are designed so that you can make a pancake or you can make a muffin or a cookie. A lot of things that people when I take them off of sugar, they're missing and then also all kinds of other foods. But what I've done is I've said, OK, in this template, this is how to build the recipe and here's how to swap things out in case your immune system. Because here's the thing. If if your mind is hyper vigilant, your immune system is hyper vigilant and it will start attacking the most bizarre things like blueberries can sometimes be problems for people or coconut oil. You know, some of the things that we consider superfoods won't work for some people. And there's a reason for that is because your immune system is yours and there is just no one autoimmune paleo diet either. That's a fallacy. And so the way that I do this is I do genetic testing on every single one of my patients. And I say, OK, what is your DNA say it is that you need to be eating? I drew the ire of those just typing. And I, I look at data from what your body is saying today, though. In other words, we look at what your DNA has been from birth and your doescher, which is your Ayurvedic constitution. Then we look at your exposure to toxins and how well all of the digestive system is working. Are you producing enough digestive enzymes? Do you have food sensitivities? Do you have enough stomach acid? Who's the microbiome that's living in your gut? We look at all of that and then I tailor a diet that matches you individually for that. And then we actually get really amazing autoimmune reversal by doing that. But it isn't just about diet. You know, that's the thing is sometimes people will come to me and they'll say, you know, I went off gluten for a couple of months and I didn't actually notice anything. So I'm not sensitive to gluten. And, you know, I always say it's because gluten is not the only thing like that's that's never going to be the whole solution because it's not the whole problem we can think of about it. As I live on an island, I have a house on San Juan Island. And when I commute back and forth from mainland every week and when I go to get on the ferry, the ferry is directing cars onto the ferry. Director is actually putting cars onto that ferry in a very specific way because they don't want all the cars over on one side to ferry over. That's actually the way that I think about myself for people if I'm guiding them. You know, let's take a look at the mass that has created your boat to cap and made it capsized. And let's start taking things off that side. And it's never going to be just one thing.
Well, I will tell you, I had Michele Norris, who is the paleo ex founder.
It's like I love Michelle. Yeah. So for those of you who don't know, it's a conference that really specializes in paleo diet and everyone who's into paleo diet kind of attends. And I love what she says because I had asked her that question. I said. Now, let me ask you, are you strict paleo or and she said the best response to me. She said, I don't think there's a person out there. Even if they tell you that they're strict, strict paleo, that they are 100 percent paleo, she's like, I'll be honest. Most of the people I know are 80 percent paleo. Some people are 90 percent. Some are ninety five percent. But I thought that was really interesting.
Her who is the founder of Paleo, she knows every person who's kind of an advocate for and she's saying, you know, because it's difficult to always be I'll tell you, I am I am strict, but it's and I am one hundred percent paleo because my genetics say so.
Yes, but my husband is not because he actually has a gene that's called the ability for Gene that puts him at a higher risk. He when I met him, he had a Hashimoto's and we reverse it within two months. I mean, it was just amazing how quickly we were able to turn it around. I did this genetic testing and I found out he had this gene. He actually has to be vegetarian, you know, and so paleo is not his diet. And so it really does depend. And mine is paleo. And so I wrote the autoimmune paleo, the quick and easy autoimmune paleo cookbook because of that. And I am strict because. I know what it looks like to have swollen puffy knuckles and fingers and to have no energy to be in pain, and I'm not really eager to go back there. But here's how it works. People will and I did this. Do I call it the in my book solving the autoimmune puzzle? I call it the detox retaught roller coaster. And that's exactly what will happen is if I call it your misery demotivation ratio, however miserable you are, is how motivated you are to make the changes that you need to make in your life. I was very miserable and very motivated right then when you start feeling a little bit better and this is exactly what I did, too, and that's what all my patients do, a hundred percent of them start feeling a bit better right now. The energy's back, misery's down, and then they start to add things back in and start playing. And I always tell them that's that's actually not a bad thing, because now it's not me telling you something. It's your own body. You're getting into a collaborative relationship with it. So one of the things about autoimmunity is you are at war with yourself. You're in a combative relationship. And so you've got to get into a collaborative relationship between your mind, your heart, your body and your spirit. And that will take some time. We don't call a truce between two countries at war and have it just instantly go into a peace, peaceful, harmonious state. There has to be a lot of work that's done. And that's exactly what happens on the microcosm of your body, too.
I love that misery demotivation ratio. That's exactly what I think I've done, is any time I eat something that makes me feel miserable, then you go, I'm never, ever eating that again and I'll feel like a million bucks.
And then I'll be like, Oh, well, maybe I'll just have a little and exactly. I love that. So talk to us about your husband and what he did. Did you have any problems yourself personally with Hashimoto's? A lot of our listeners do have Hashimoto's. Let's talk about him and what he did to kind of heal himself.
So when I met him, I did a post diagnosis on him and I discovered they got a bunch of imbalances. So I said, would you like me to do all the testing that I would normally do on a patient? And he said, yes, we did. And we uncovered he didn't even know he had Hashimoto's. It was completely undiagnosed.
And that's usually what happens is when people come to see me for fatigue and their hair is falling out and they're krabby with their kids and snapping at everybody and can't sleep, you know, gaining weight, dry skin, I find out that they're thyroids off, but B, that it's actually an autoimmune issue. It's just not about the thyroid. It's about the immune system. And so the way I treat things is I look at autoimmune diseases as Althing and one bucket. And in my book, Solving the Autoimmune Puzzle, I have a graphic that shows that it's like all the diseases are in one bucket and you label it autoimmune because we're going to tease it apart. In the exact same way I use the freedom framework is what I call it, and I call it solving your puzzle. Right. And there are four corner pieces to solving this puzzle. Any time we want to solve the puzzle, we dump all the pieces out and we instantly look for the corners. Right. And we turn them over the corners for any chronic illness. I don't care if it's autoimmune or cancer or depression or obesity, it's all going to be the same. And that is your genetics play a part. That's the first corner of your exposure to toxins. And your body's ability to get rid of those toxins. Is the second piece to your digestive health is going to be the third piece. Now, every single person with autoimmune disease has got so intestinal permeability is that we have to see how bad it is.
And then the fourth one is going to be past trauma and current day stress. So, again, I find that there are three P's present for everybody with autoimmunity. They're perfectionists, they're people pleasers and they're carrying around poison from past pain. And so those three things have to be dealt with. And I do it on this with this puzzle framework. So I did that with my husband. I looked at all of those. And so we started healing is looking good. We looked at his food sensitivities and took them off of those things. And it's not forever. It's just for a period of time. He'll let that gut see who's living in the microbiome, like who's in there. There's a bunch of bad guys. And you had a whole bunch of candidates. We had to take care of that. I looked at his genetics and I found, oh, my gosh, you have this gene that is a game changer. When we start really eating for that gene, put him on a vegetarian diet and no alcohol, alcohol's completely toxic for him.
He never has alcohol now, and this gene actually puts people at risk for Alzheimer's disease, too, so his mom has Alzheimer's, it puts them at risk for heart disease. A dad had had three heart attacks by the time he was fifty five. So he's Ajayan is sixty seven. And he's not had any of these issues. Right. Because for all these years he's been following what I've been doing with him and he's on no medications and no problems whatsoever with his health. So it's we we looked at also trauma. His dad was an alcoholic and he had to deal with that. And he did a lot of work around trauma healing. And so then we did a detox in the way that I think about detoxification. And it's not one that you go into the store and pick up off the shelf. It's actually individualized to your genetics first and then how healthy your organs of detoxification are.
You start detoxing in your liver. It's really backed up and your whole you're constipated and you're having trouble clearing your kidneys. And now you start releasing a bunch of stuff from your first pathway of your liver. You're going to be so sick, you know, you'll have all kinds of rashes. You'll actually probably instigate an autoimmune flare. It can be really dangerous.
And so we do it according to what what's going on with the person. So I did that with him. And like I said, very rapidly, his autoimmune disease was gone, not ever been back. Same with mine.
Well, now the question that I ask all my guests, walk me through a day in the life of Dr. Keesha. What did you eat yesterday? When did you eat it? And so forth.
I always start my day with a green juice. And so we juice. I eat ten to 12 cups of vegetables a day. So I'm I'm really rabid about that. So we have a big pile of vegetables that we consume every day. I cannot chew ten cups of vegetables a day. I just am not that hungry. There's no way I'm going to be able to do it if I take half of those, all the ones that are actually astringent and bitter, things like kale, things like chard and collard greens and cilantro and some ginger root and broccoli stems and cabbage and zucchini and I'll juice those. And so I have a great big quart of juice every morning. And then I put collagen in some tea and that's my protein. So I have that. And then at lunchtime yesterday, what I had was a lentil. This was like that. I had a lentil dish and that's my husband is vegetarian. So every once in a while I'll have like, what he's eating.
Right. And so I make that for both of us.
I actually lentils, lentils are paleo.
I know. But see, the thing is, is there are different things about this because can your paleo to me, they're going to be different definitions is non processed. Right. So you're not having sugar. You're not having there you're not having gluten in grains. But I actually have people, if they're genetic, say that they can do it and they don't have some election issues, then lentils are good. So we actually both of us do really well with lentils and have those periodically.
If I have those, let's let's talk about let's stay there for a second because I feel the same way. And the one thing for me is quinoa. So I, I do eat mostly a paleo diet. I'm not one hundred percent. I would say I'm probably more like ninety. But the, the, the thing is that I choose to eat, that I feel great on is like one of is quinoa. I feel fantastic. Quinoa actually is a green. What else besides the lentils would you say, hey, it's not a hundred percent paleo but when I eat this I feel like a million bucks. So in my new in my second edition of my book, I talk about red light, yellow light and green foods and everyone has to create their own list.
Like, I'm not going to tell you a list. You're not going to tell them the list. Right. But there's some foods for you that might be a yellow light and some foods for you. So for me, really, even though quinoa technically is not good for Melio, that's a green light food for me. I feel fantastic on quinoa. Now, if I eat a ton of it, I wouldn't feel great. So probably it might be more like a yellow light food because I if I had too much of it, I think I'd start off feeling good. So what are some of those items for you?
You're actually the same a type that I am.
And so lentils and quinoa are both ones that I will do, but in very small amounts and very rarely because we actually do do better on a more like bitter astringent vegetables. No dairy, no sugar like that.
Paleo is right for our type. We are. The same one, so. OK, so those are the two lentils and quinoa periodically, if I'm eating with my husband and that's what he's brought, then I'll eat it. And then fish last night. So I had beets, I had a cauliflower and tahini carrot dish for a vegetable, and I had zucchini pasta with the spiral of zucchini and trout. So that's what I ate yesterday.
Awesome. All right. Well, let's jump right into the listener questions.
This first one is from Jess in Gulfport, which I'm not sure where Gulfport is, but it's. Oh, it is OK. I, I love like I feel like I'm getting a geography lesson every time someone is like, where is this. But I've gotten it says I've gotten horrible migraines with or do you know what that means.
Yeah I do. Ampara is the pre meagerness. It kind of is a signal that it's coming on, but it's a change in like vision and how you can perceive and process your sensory input.
OK, I've never heard of that before. So this is from Jess in Gulfport. I've gotten horrible migraines with Aura since I was ten. They they make me terribly nauseated and knock me out for hours. I don't know if they're hormonal or diet related, but are there any foods I should try to avoid to help prevent my migraines?
So I get a lot and I'm so sorry that this is your experience just because that's miserable. I get a lot of questions about migraines. I get a lot of people coming in with them. And there are a couple of different pathways I go through. I'm actually I call myself a medical detective. I'm always trying to solve the puzzle. Right. And so the different pieces of the puzzle, but I will look out for migraines are hormones for sure. And I do salivary adrenal and hormone checks. You can look at the tests that I use on my website, on Dr. Keesha Dotcom. You can go over to the store and I have labs and it's the adrenal and hormone test. You just order that we can take a look at it. I look at food sensitivities. That's a huge one. And it can take this is where people don't understand the difference between a food allergy and a food sensitivity. A food sensitivity can take up to four days after the time that you put it in your mouth to actually cause a problem. So it's impossible to just do an elimination diet and really suss out food sensitivities because you've eaten twelve times, at least in that four day period. So it's hard to know what you ate three days ago that could have triggered you wear a food allergy is anywhere between twenty minutes and two hours after ingestion, you know, right away, like you can tell, oh, the strawberries made my lips go numb. The other thing that I look at is genetics.
And there's there's a one that I affectionately call the headache gene genetic Sneve single nucleotide polymorphisms, what that stands for. And it it's the place where something's not functioning very well. Now, there's a gene in there called the May. Oh, snap. And if you have that, then you don't process a compound that's built up in foods as they age called Terramin. And in my cookbook, I have a whole section on Terramin and I talk about this. You can look at that, the quick and easy autoimmune paleo cookbook, because it can be a game changer. I found that there's never going to be one thing. I've never seen that with headaches, that it's not it's never just one thing. So I take people off caffeine, I take them off of alcohol, I get them onto a really good Whole Foods diet, not processed, no sugar, clean up that diet. I look for food sensitivities. I check their hormones and their adrenal glands and their thyroid. I look for autoimmune markers and I look at whether or not they've got the gene and then some others. There are some other genes that can cause migraines, too, depending on if you have a mismatch between the way that your liver dumps toxins as you age. When I hear since childhood I've had this trouble, I usually think it's a genetic issue with probably some food sensitivities. And so that's where I would go with you.
All right. This next one is from Sharon in Wichita. About a month ago, I cut out all gluten to see if it would help my inflammation and anxiety, but I haven't really noticed any improvement. How long does it take for your body to fully eliminate itself of gluten and when should I expect to see a difference?
Well, Sharon, the thing of it is it never will just be about gluten if you. Sensitive to gluten, and I actually am in the camp that says that the way that we grow our food today and the level of toxic exposure we have out in the environment, in our water, air and soil, that there aren't really I don't think gluten has a place in anyone's diet. But I always say I was raised in the South, so my dad was in the Navy and I'm a I'm a Southern girl. And so in the south, I use this metaphor. If there's one cockroach, then there are many. Because I remember like if you saw a cockroach.
Oh, no reason zillion of these things.
And I always think about that. If there's one food sensitivity, then there are going to be. The problem is for most people, it is not going to show up in a digestive way, then they're going to be a whole bunch of other things, too. OK, so I get a lot of people that say that to me, it's a very common question. How long is it going to take me going off of gluten? Now, here's the other thing. If you're eating sugar and you're having gluten free processed baked goods. Right, gluten free processed crap, junk food, I mean, it's like in the in the seventies when everybody thought being a vegetarian was healthy, you could have Twinkies and drink Coke and you were a vegetarian. And so being gluten free doesn't necessarily mean a healthy diet. So if you're eating those commercial gluten free foods that are really not food, they're loaded with sugar. And so you won't feel better. And it doesn't mean go back to eating gluten. It means that you need to move. In fact, all the solving autoimmune puzzle book and the quick and easy autoimmune paleo cookbook do the dude what's in there and then see if you start to feel better because it's more than just one thing.
Awesome. I love that answer. All right. This next one is these are both questions on someone's period. I get horrible cramps with my period. It's so bad that I roll on the floor in pain and have to take four ibuprofen. Is there any natural way to help the pain? Lydia in Springfield.
Lydia, I'm really sorry to hear that.
The thing of it is, is when you're having menstrual disorders of any kind, whether it's too much or too little or cramping or mood changes and swings, then there's a problem. Your body is only giving you feedback and saying, I'm not balance. And here's how it's showing up. Right. So the way that we think about it in our western model of medicines, we match a pill to an ibuprofen with cramps. Right. But you're not actually deficient in ibuprofen. You have something going on as and that's why you're having all these symptoms your body's trying to tell you. So what I will do is kind of the same things I was telling Sharon. I, I want to look at. Are there foods that you're sensitive to? Are you? I usually will tell people no alcohol, no caffeine, no sugar. You're going to hear a theme here because our bodies, those are not foods. None of the things I just said are food.
And yet we ingest them a lot. And so to see the paleo community put down coffee like, oh, my gosh, you guys, I mean, they drink it by the gallon and caffeine causes inflammation. So it's one of the most inflammatory things that there is. It's aggravating and the aggravated way of thinking. So when you have inflammation, it means you have too much fire. And so you don't want to put caffeine on top of that. You want to take out sugar. You can take alcohol for the same reason I have a supplement called RPM's X on my website that people call a miracle for this. But I don't like matching supplements to some of them either. Instead, I like to look at your saliva testing of adrenals and hormones and see what's going on and why your body is reacting the way it is when your hormones, your estrogen will go up and then it will go down and then your progesterone will come up and start a period as those two are crossing like this. That's when a lot of PMS starts. And so if they're not doing it well and gracefully and handing off the baton to each other and more crashing into each other, then we have problems. It doesn't feel good in our bodies. And so looking at what's going on with that, we can actually pinpoint it and fix it.
Awesome. And this one's from Stephanie Louise in Farmington. I just had my period two weeks ago and just started my period again. I'm forty eight years old. This has never happened to me before. Do you think this is the onset of menopause? What could be some possible causes for this to happen?
Yeah, you're in that age category of what I call the spitting and sputtering of. Period. So I don't know if anyone. I do backcountry camping and we have these little camp stoves we take that are about this big right. And as we put the fuel underneath it, the little Sterno can it'll spit and splutter. That's the way I think about as you get to be forty seven or eight or nine fifty, you're starting to get that spitting and sputtering. And so you'll have like a big flame and then you won't have one at all. And that's exactly what happens with our periods as we're entering into perimenopause. Now there's an ICD 10 code in medical use, language that matches menopausal symptoms and PMS and perimenopause as if it's a disease. And actually this is not a disease. The reason that we don't go through this transition gracefully is women in our era is because for our entire lifetime, anyway, we've been had the culture hold up an image that expects us and it makes us expect ourselves to bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan and look hot at the same time. And we keep ourselves very over schedule and burdened in ways that our bodies are not designed to manage. So if you've ever ridden a motorcycle, there's a reserve gas tank. If one runs out, you can switch it over to the other one. That's what happens in the female body when our ovarian function starts to diminish and we no longer have a need for reproduction. Estrogen and progesterone production, particularly progesterone, actually will switch over to the reserve tank, which is your adrenal glands, your adrenal glands, or these two little glands that sit on top of your kidneys and they respond every time you perceive yourself as being stress. I want you I say this word perceive because it's important. Every time you have a perception that you have a lion on your tail and you're a zebra and you're about to get eaten. You send this fight or flight signal from your brain down to your adrenal glands to say, all right, release cortisol. We have to have oxygenated blood, we have to have muscle strength and we have to get away from this this lion or we have to be able to fight it. That means that Zebra knows it's not safe to go to the bathroom. So you're your start your digestive system will start to shut down. It also knows it's not safe to stop and have sex right now. And so all of your hormones responsible for reproduction go away because they get co-opted into survival, which will always win over reproduction. Survival always wins. So if you have been a person throughout the the first decades of your life, the first 40 who has been more of a high stress person has perceived themselves in a kind of over scheduled environment. Then when you're going to the finish line of your ovaries and you're supposed to gracefully flip over to the reserve tank, your adrenals are also empty. And so now you're going to have trouble. You now you're going to have brain fog and you're going to have periods that will either be really heavy or really light and really irregular. You're going to have hot flashes. You're going to have trouble sleeping. You're going to gain weight in your torso. All of those things are there because the reserve tank, when it got switched over, wasn't available. So that's why I'm always helping people get their adrenal glands functional and back online. So they quit raiding your progesterone stores that are supposed to be reserved for you to have cognitive function and a temperature that works properly and a body weight. That is exactly what you need to be. And a brain that works right and also good sleep at night. All the things progesterone is good for.
Awesome. All right. Well, this is the last question. Lance in Biloxi.
I don't know where that is either dippie be.
I'm interested in trying the paleo diet, but I have a family that has a history of heart disease. Won't eating that much red meat and fat increase my risk of having a heart attack?
Well, first of all, in paleo diet does not mean you have to eat meat. And that's a big misnomer. OK, so you do not have to eat red meat ever. And you also don't have to eat a bunch of saturated fat to be paleo. I don't myself. So I'm a Kofa Kofa like Chantel in the diabetic paradigm. So if I eat a ton of meat, I'm going to gain weight and my DNA says I should be paleo, which means that my protein comes from fish and it comes from sometimes chicken and it comes from collagen and then comes from plant based protein powders and that comes from egg whites and whole eggs too. So I do more of that. I do every once in, I'll have bison free range bison, so you don't have to be pounding down rib eye steak to be paleo. And in fact, I personally am of the belief system that it's not good for you because, as I say, people come to me who are sick. So I don't know how the people that are not sick, how what their numbers are looking like. But when I get people in my office and I start looking at nonalcoholic fatty liver disease is really high out there right now. And it's a lot of times people that are eating a lot of red meat. And so I take them off of that and their alcohol and then lo and behold, their numbers improve so you can be paleo and not be eating a bunch of red meat. So the history of family heart disease could mean that you have that is referencing earlier doing your genetics will answer this question definitively. I'm not a real big one for conjecture. I always say tests. Don't guess.
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being on our show today. And where can listeners go to follow you and your work?
Dr. Keyshia Dotcom, Keay, Dotcom.
Awesome. And I know that you have a new book out, The Quick and Easy Auto Immune Paleo Cookbook. And if you order your book from Amazon, they can you can enter their Amazon receipt number and get some bonuses. Tell us about that.
It's true. If you go to Dr. Keysha dot com forward slash QuickStart, we give you this twenty one day QuickStart guide and it puts you into our email list. And we actually when when you reach out and say on our website and say, I bought the book, then we say, get the bonuses and you can put that in and you'll get a free oh gosh. I can't remember how many weeks it was. It was seven weeks, I believe seven modules of free Zoome calls that I did with people as we went chapter by chapter through the cookbook. And we also did the same thing with solving the autoimmune puzzle book. So it's a book study group. And it's amazing because I really dove deeply into the content and take questions. And so you learn a lot more than you do just reading the book.
That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for being on our show today, and if you have a question that you want answered, go to questions at Chantel Ray Dotcom. We'll see you next time.
Bye bye, everybody.