Dr. Taz:

And I’ve met many family members and patients that are in this really destructive loop. “I was bad. I did wrong. I’m fat. I’m never going to look good. I’m not good enough.” And they live in kind of this lower vibration state. Well, that’s destructive and we want to get you out of that, and that’s where I even might consider one of those medications.

Hi everyone, and welcome to Super Woman Wellness, I’m Dr. Taz. I’ve made it my mission throughout my career in integrative medicine to support women in restoring their health using a blend of Eastern medical wisdom with modern science. In this show, I will guide you through different practices to find your power type and fully embody the healthiest and most passionate version of you.

I’m here for you and I can’t wait to get started. This is a Soulfire Production. Losing weight can be so challenging, but we’re going to talk a little bit today about different ways to lose weight and start with a conversation around one of the quickest little tricks that I’ve learned in my time as a holistic physician, that’s using apple cider vinegar.

Apple cider vinegar has so many benefits. And yes, it’s actually a part of the weight loss conversation. Apple cider vinegar is probably one of the oldest holistic remedies out there. I know if you think back, your grandmother, your great-grandmother probably talked about apple cider vinegar somewhere along the way.

There’s a really great reason for it. Apple cider vinegar has so many amazing qualities, so much so that I actually wrote about it in my 2014 book, seems like ages ago, called The 21 Day Belly Fix. Well, I want to break down what works, what doesn’t work when it comes to apple cider vinegar, and what you need to be looking for, because there’s a lot of talk and a lot of trends. Right?

But you want the facts and that’s what we’re going to deliver. First of all, what is apple cider vinegar? Yes, it does come from apples that have been fermented, formed into a form of vinegar. It contains some key ingredients, big word time, I know it’s your favorite, acetic acid, malic acid, trace minerals, including things like potassium, magnesium, even a little tiny, tiny bit of iron. Who knew?

Well, in addition to all of that, we know that apple cider vinegar, and there’s some different kinds, so this is what you want to watch out for when you’re headed to the store, there’s apple cider vinegar from the mother. So I don’t know if you guys

can tell on here or even here where we poured it, where this apple cider vinegar is very cloudy, very murky, whereas this one’s super clear.

What’s the difference? Well, when it’s from the mother, which is this one right here, it’s got a lot of beneficial bacteria and enzymes that, back over, here help the gut. Here’s what’s happening with apple cider vinegar. What we know is that it actually does help the digestive system. It helps improve blood sugar levels, keeping insulin levels down, which means that for you, you feel full faster.

Your digestion in your gut is able to do the work it needs to do, chopping through the food efficiently, and you’re not having some stuff lying around triggering inflammation. That in itself is such an amazing piece about the cider vinegar and the reason I included it in my 21 Day Belly Fix plan.

In addition to that, in addition to managing appetite, lowering blood sugar, managing insulin, it’s actually been shown to help lower cholesterol, help to also lower high blood pressure. So again, all of these sort of metabolic issues, are you seeing the link? I hope you are, because a lot of these metabolic conditions link right back to the Chinese medicine concept, Ayurvedic as well, of good gut health.

So when we clean the gut up using, apple cider vinegar is maybe one of those remedies, we are seeing an improvement in the metabolic markers that plague so many people today. So if you can’t do anything, this is an easy one to do. And what I usually like doing is taking a tablespoon, diluting it in about three tablespoons of water and having it maybe first thing in the morning or halfway throughout the day.

You don’t want to drink it straight. We’re worried it’s going to kind of burn kind of the back of the esophagus there. So I don’t like people to do that. I do like it diluted. Or you can mix it into a salad dressing, maybe mix it with some olive oil, add your favorite herbs to it and put it on your vegetables or your salad dressing. Works great that way. Also works great as a marinade.

I’ve made a ton of marinades where I’ll take maybe a couple tablespoons of apple cider vinegar, maybe a tablespoon of an olive oil and then add a lot of spices to it and let my meat sit in it for an hour or two and then go and roast them or grill them or whatever I’m going to do with it. But all of that to say a lot of great uses and benefits of apple cider vinegar and a lot of health benefits as well.

In addition to that, apple cider vinegar has been used topically to help skin rashes. So for acne, there are many people that will take apple cider vinegar and spot treat their acne. We don’t want it all over your face. It can burn your face. But if you’re

spot treating, that’s actually okay. And that same concept is actually used as a natural cleansing agent as well.

So for wood floors, for example, many of you may be mixing a little bit of apple cider vinegar with some water to clean your floors. A very natural disinfectant without the chemical junk and all the compounds in it that we worry about that ultimately impact the liver. There has also been studies that show apple cider vinegar has helped something like fatty liver.

Now, I know I’ve done videos on fatty liver, check those out right here. But remember, fatty liver is the result of insulin levels being too high. The body then storing fat specifically around the liver, and the liver not being able to break things down effectively. Apple cider vinegar to the rescue again, helps to reduce fatty liver and even his health, turn it around for some of my patients.

So at the end of the day, your gut help is everything. And while you may have a plan or a regimen, and I’m guilty of that. Sometimes we get out those plans that are complicated, they seem like they’re super hard to follow. If you’re getting lost in all the noise and all the confusion, this is one thing you can do. It’s probably in your kitchen cabinet.

Take it out, start using it on a regular basis and let me know what results you ultimately have. I think it’s going to work for you. All right, Super Woman, I know the drill, right? We all live the same lifestyle. We’re running around, we’re juggling. We don’t have time for 20 different products, 20 different bottles, trying to find information and put it all together.

We want solutions and we want answers. That’s why I developed the EastWest Way. It’s my product and lifestyle line full of formulas that I personally curated to really get us the answers we need. I couldn’t find anything on the market that adequately merged Eastern and Western medicine together and formulas that work and gave us the answers that we were all so desperate for.

I’m right there with you guys losing hair, having acne, hormones all over the place. I needed something that worked but also worked efficiently. I didn’t have time to take an herb over here and a supplement over there and a medication maybe somewhere else. The EastWest Way is the answer for all of us, and I couldn’t be prouder of the formulas that I’ve developed.

If you aren’t familiar with some of the products, I want to share some of them with you. I’ve been super excited about them and have taken a lot of time and energy to put them all together. Collaglow is one of the newer products, is CollaglowC. It has collagen, Amla and Goji berry.

So now we’re merging together Ayurvedic and Eastern medicine concepts there for beautiful skin and hair, getting that glow and that circulation we need, and also a massive antioxidant burst and maybe repairing the gut a little bit along the way with the collagen. The Defender was born out of my anger around the pandemic.

It’s a combination of Astragalus, Vitamin C and zinc. And I use that every single day, especially when I’m traveling or worried that I might be exposed to more germs. Boost is the hero, the hero product that started it all. The line started because I couldn’t find a methylated formula that really answered all our needs around hormones, mood, memory, and so much more.

Today, Boost continues to be the product that so many people say they can’t live without. Belly Fix, again, so much around gut health. I know my patients and even I, we were tired of having a bottle here, a bottle there, mixing things together, remembering to take four or five different things. Belly Fix is the gut kitchen sink, has collagen, Spirulina, prebiotics, probiotics, and so much more.

I love this formula. It has been a game changer for so many people. Hormone Helper, again, hits close to home. I’m someone who has PCOS, as many of you know. A combination of Maca, Inositol, Saw Palmetto and Choline supporting the liver, lowering androgens. It’s our answer for really balancing hormones. Sleep Savior, another favorite has magnesium, melatonin and magnolia bark because oftentimes falling asleep or staying asleep or both.

So we needed something to answer all of that. That combination is a triple punch, works beautifully. Lush Locks I take every day. Lush Locks has Ayurvedic and Chinese herbs that are known for regrowth and regeneration of hair and improving blood flow to the scalp along with micronutrients that research tells us we should be focused on.

This month I’m offering an exclusive discount for Super Woman Wellness listeners. Just go to theeastwestway.com and enter SWW30 to get 30% off at checkout. Don’t forget, if you rate and review any of my episodes, you’ll get a free bottle of Boost. Just email me. It’s hello@drtaz.com and I’ll make sure it gets to you. All right, I can’t wait for you guys to try these products.

Let me know which one’s your favorite and take advantage of the code SWW30 at theeastwestway.com.

All right, now that you understand all the great benefits of apple cider vinegar, let’s get back into some of the common weight loss trends. All right, what I’ve got sitting here in front of me, for those of you that can’t see me, I’ve got a couple of

different products. One is Hydroxycut. I’ve got SlimFast from the eighties, if you guys remember that one.

And then we’re going to talk a little bit about Wegovy, Ozempic, Mounjaro. And then we’ve got some products here from EastWest, Belly Fix and Hormone Helper. These all seem like things that don’t link together, but there is a link in different ways they’re approaching different aspects of the weight loss conversation.

Losing weight is something we talk about every single day in practice at CentreSpringMD, even here at home, it’s a conversation as one family member or another is always concerned about their weight. Now, weight does something weird to our brains. It almost creates a sense of desperation or panic, especially when we feel like we don’t look the way we want to.

And as our energy changes, our numbers change and shift and what we can and cannot do, shifts, that sense of desperation just goes haywire. And really people are willing to do just about anything. If I think back on all the history of all the weight loss trends, I’d be here for a really long time, and I certainly don’t want to bore you to death. But I picked a couple just for us to break down and talk about.

And yes, we are going to talk about Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro and the latest weight loss trend that everyone, including celebrities, seems to jump on to figure out how to lose weight fast. All right, what are these things? So here I’ve got Hydroxycut, Hydroxycut’s key ingredient guys is caffeine. It’s really just revving up your nervous system, right?

Trying to boost your metabolism honestly in an artificial way. We know caffeine’s going to wear off. It’s not going to do much for you. It may suppress your appetite possibly, but at some point it’s going to be dangerous to do something like this for an extended period of time because as we know, and we’ve talked about, there’s so many studies that connect caffeine and some of these artificial metabolism boosters to heart failure, heart health, cognitive health, ADD and ADHD, and even anxiety.

We’ve got to be careful with this stuff. All right? So you agree with me. You’re like, you’re not going to do the caffeine. Let’s take that one out of there, or any of the other sort of artificial boosters here. This actually, by the way, not only has the coffee extract in it, but it has some other herbs which initially seem harmless, right?

But when you pair it with the caffeine, you really have a dangerous combo if you’re going to use it for an extended period of time. All right, what about this?

This was huge when I was growing up. I don’t know about you guys. SlimFast, right? Carry around the SlimFast and you will be slim. What does this do for you? Well, here’s what it does that everybody has issues with. It manages your intake, right? It gives you a controlled amount of something to take in.

And this is what patients tell me all the time. They’re like, “I just wish someone would just literally feed me and give me the amount of food and the type of food that I’m supposed to eat, and all the weight would magically fall off.” That is partially true, and programs that do that and do it in a very clean way have an incredible amount of success with their clients.

Even programs that use something like this, which has, if you can look at the ingredient list when there’s that much fine print, not good for you, right? This ingredient list in particular, I can’t even count. I think it’s almost 30 different ingredients in here. Super processed dairy and whey is kind of the key protein source.

It does have protein. It meets our 20 grams of protein per day requirement, but the junk in here is going to be really success that is short-lived. It’s not going to be long-term success. Here’s what’s going to happen. This may help to shrink your appetite, just like the coffee over here. It may actually be okay to use longer than something like Hydroxycut, right?

But the load on your gut, and remember the gut is the foundation of health when we take this EastWest philosophy or this Chinese medicine, western medicine, eastern medicine, merging medicine philosophy, the root is gut liver health. When we’re dumping this much artificial stuff on your gut and asking your liver to process it, your results will be temporary and many times the weight will come back.

Not just that, a lot of weight and weight loss failure is the result of not being satiated, not feeling satisfied, full, emotionally fulfilled as you eat your food. So drinking one of these for a week or two weeks might get rid of some of the overeating you may be doing, and it may work as a temporary quick fix, but it’s not the secret to long-term success. All right?

We’re going to move on and talk about the medications, the weight loss medications. Now here’s the deal with the weight loss medications, right? Even in practice, I’m getting asked for prescriptions for these medications over and over again. Now we’re talking about Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro. These are the semi-glutide blocking medications that essentially are regulating your blood sugar and your insulin.

They have been a game changer for people with a significant amount of weight to lose. Because think about it, when you’re BMI or your body mass index, that’s your weight against your height in this fancy equation. When that is over 30, the body becomes very insulin resistant, meaning it doesn’t want to lose weight no matter what you do to it. It’s kind of in this comfortable set point.

So you have to be consistent day after day after day, maybe for six weeks, maybe for eight weeks before you see diet and lifestyle changes really pay off. Who’s got that patience and that amount of persistence? Very few people. Actually had a patient the other day and she was like, “You kind of have to be told you’re going to die, or your ex is dating a really hot model, or this is the end of your life, and if you don’t do this, you’re not going to get the job, the work, whatever it is that you want.”

And it takes sometimes that level of motivation to really be consistent for six weeks, eight weeks, 12 weeks to get this weight off. Since most people can’t do that, that is where a medication like Ozempic, Wegovy or Mounjaro seems to work. It blunts the appetite. It starts to decrease the amount we’re taking in. It brings insulin down and blood sugar down, and there is success with a catch.

When those medications go away, the weight’s coming right back because patients are not training themselves to eat in a cleaner way, to eat in a way that satisfies them and to enjoy food, which is one of the fundamental pleasures of life. So when do I use those medications? Those medications are appropriate for someone who’s struggled a really long time to lose weight, who can’t get the diet and exercise piece to pay off for them.

But we can’t do those medications without the foundation of good gut health and good liver health, which is exactly what we talk about when we talk about EastWest medicine. An alternative way to really approach weight loss is to think good gut health, good liver health, and general cleanup. How do you do this?

We’ll start small. Start by really removing the junk. Let’s really lower sugar, lower salt, get rid of processed foods, and start to eat in a consistent pattern. Now in addition to that, in the whole sort of allure of Chinese medicine and Ayurvedic medicine, the world of herbs and herbal medicine played a really big part in this gut health conversation.

For example, in my Belly Fix, I have included key things to help really improve digestive health. Everything from glutamine and collagen, spirulina to clean up the liver, pre and probiotics. So this is a great way to jumpstart it paired with ingredients like Inositol that actually helped to lower sugar and choline, which cleans up the liver. So when we step back for a second and we think, do we want a

quick fix like a Hydroxycut or a SlimFast or an Ozempic or a Wegovy, we have to deliberately think first, do I have a good foundation for health, specifically for weight loss?

And that begins with cleaning up the gut, cleaning up the liver, removing the junk. And as patients start to do that, it is literally magic. It’s just the motivation. It’s just the desire of doing that that’s often the first step. Sometimes it’s not the fancy diets. There’s so many diets out there, and everyone thinks that, “This is a diet plan that’s going to work for me.”

What I’m finding now after almost 14 years in practice is that it’s not so much the diet, it’s the cleanliness of the food, the rhythm of eating and the intervals of eating, and then not really feeling like you’re deprived, where you have to constantly go back and look for fulfillment in the sugar snack here or a salt snack there, and that you are managing your stress effectively.

So I prefer that approach to weight loss. But if you’re stuck, if you’re depressed, if you’re frustrated, if your BMI is over 30, your body fat is over 30% as well, that journey of seeing results can be longer. And either you have to be okay with it and have an image in your mind of what you’re going after and stare at it every single day and remind yourself that you can do it. You’ve got it within you to do it.

Think one day at a time, one decision at a time, and you’re going to get there. But if you’re instead in a loop, and I’ve met many family members and patients that are in this really destructive loop, and that loop is, “I was bad. I did wrong. I’m fat. I’m never going to look good. I’m not good enough.” And they live in kind of this lower vibration state. Well, that’s destructive, and we want to get you out of that.

And that’s where I even might consider one of those medications. So Ozempic, Wegovy they’re not trends. They’re real medications that we’ve got to take seriously and meet you as a patient where you are in the conversation around weight loss. But just remember, there’s another way to do things, and it begins with this fundamental EastWest philosophy of good gut health, good liver health, eating clean and taking care and nurturing your own body.