My Practitioner On The Supplements & Lab Tests You Need, How To Fight Mold & Parasites, Root Causes of Acne, and How To Study Blood Work
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The following podcast is a Dear Media production. Mari has grown her to fitness and nutrition brand. Co-founder of Bloom Nutrition. Forbes 30 under 30 list. A successful entrepreneur. Someone who has lost 90 pounds. Today's guest is Mari Llewellyn. Mari Llewellyn. My friend Mari. Welcome to the pursuit of wellness.

Hello guys, welcome back to the show. Today we have a highly anticipated guest. You guys have been begging me to have her on the show. Today we have Emily Morrow who is my doctor and the person who healed my hormonal acne and imbalances in a matter of months. You guys have seen my before and after skin photo. If not, go on my Instagram at Maury Llewellyn. It's pretty insane. I

I have had acne for like over 10 years at this point and I never really knew why. I always used band-aids like spironolactone, antibiotics, various things to kind of help deal with it. And I finally have found the root cause of all my acne and healed it and that is really thanks to Emily.

She is an integrative health practitioner and nutritional therapy practitioner. She's coming on the show today to share her wisdom, insights, and candid tales of her own health backstories.

battles. She has really taught me to dig deeper and look beyond the surface level symptoms to the root cause of all my health concerns. I always kind of felt like having a hormonal issue was just something I was born with, just something that happened, but I really found the true reason why. And now I can't wait to share this information with you guys because I think it's going to help you unlock your own health struggles too.

We talk about misunderstood topics like cholesterol, hormones and diets. We talk about gut and liver health and the connection to acne. She shares tips on how to use dietary switches for improved wellness and clearing the skin. Here are a few of the things we're going to cover today. My personal skin journey and how I met Emily. The importance of finding the root cause of your health issues. Mold toxicity and how it shows itself.

Common issues Emily sees in lab work, especially with acne, whether kids can take the same supplements as adults, what the difference is between normal and optimal when it comes to lab work, cholesterol myths, PCOS, how can you find and build your health team and what tests you should be asking for. The most common things Emily sees in acne patients' lab work, what is spironolactane and accutane doing to our bodies?

taking a look at my personal blood work and the steps I took to heal my acne, dairy and skin health, the reasons we shouldn't be heating olive oil and what we should use instead, why we should be avoiding coffee from coffee shops and what to buy in replacement, foods that fight mold and parasites, why potatoes are so great for acne, the supplements that Emily had me take to heal my acne and what she had me avoid,

cassava flour and why some people should avoid it, food sensitivity tests and are they worth it, plus a rapid fire Q&A about acne safe makeup, fragrance, candles, deodorant, red light therapy, body acne and eczema. So

So we are covering a lot today. It's a lot of information. I would really view this as your free appointment with Emily. She is completely booked out with clients. I don't think she takes clients anymore, but she does post really good information on her Instagram. And she tells us so, so much in this episode. So make sure you listen the whole way through. This is so informational. And it's like a free appointment with a naturopath.

So guys, without further ado, let's hop into the conversation. I really hope you enjoy it. And don't forget to subscribe, follow, leave a review. Love you all. Okay.

Emily, I feel like you need no introduction because I've talked about you so many times on this podcast, but welcome to the Pursuit of Wellness. Thank you. So glad to be here. For anyone who doesn't know, Emily is, I mean, I call you my doctor, my naturopath, my guardian angel. What would you refer to yourself as? Everyone calls me their doctor, but I'm not a doctor. I went through the dietitian program, thought I wanted to become a doctor, but did not love

the curriculum and the

agenda that often gets pushed in that. So I went through two continuing education programs. So technically my title is integrative health practitioner and nutritional therapy practitioner. Perfect. And for anyone who doesn't know, Emily is the person who saved me when it comes to my acne and also my lab work. She is a wealth of knowledge when it comes to blood chemistry. I'm going to ask you how many labs you've seen because I know it's a lot. And I

I was at the lowest point with my skin, truly felt like I couldn't even leave the house, crying on a daily basis. It was running my life. And I felt like I talked to so many people at this point.

And this was when Danielle from ClearStem said, "Okay, I have one more person. Let me call in a favor." And she introduced me to Emily and I was just telling Emily, "This is the first time we've met in person because we've only done remote calls." And when I first got on the call, I fully expected Emily to be 70 years old, grandmother, like I... And then up popped this like pretty young girl my age and I was like, "What?"

truly one of the smartest people I've ever spoken to. I felt like I finally got answers about the underlying issues. I think so many of us think I have high testosterone and that's it. Like it's an isolated issue. We don't have a full understanding of what's happening underneath that and why. And I felt like you gave me the answers I needed.

I needed. And now for the first time in 10 years, my skin is the clearest it's ever been. I'm not on spironolactone. I'm not on Accutane. I'm not on any skin medication or hormonal medication. I'm not going to go into too much detail because I want Emily to break it down for us. But no one has ever taken me under their wing the way Emily has. So I'm so grateful for you.

and let's hop in because I've got a million and one questions as per usual, as does the community. They are so excited to have you here. So let's start with your journey to finding health and wellness. What brought you to where you are today? It's a very long story that I'm not going to go into in depth. We'd be here for a long time, but I had my own health challenges. I was a

You think back to even growing up and you and I had this conversation, console one, what was your childhood upbringing like? What were some of the things that were said to be normal, but they're not normal? I had strep throat growing up. I ultimately ended up getting my tonsils out. That's something that's

in our society, just a normal thing. Same thing with gallbladder. People just get their gallbladder out and it's normal, but there's a reason that I needed those tonsils out. I had underlying strep bacteria, ongoing strep throat, ongoing antibiotics, and your tonsils are the garbage disposal of the body. And if that gets backed up, it impacts then the appendix.

Therefore, I had this overgrowth of bacteria that could have stemmed from being passed down from my parents because toxicity does get passed down. Heavy metals do get passed down. If you ever see a baby with eczema, they didn't just develop that right away at birth or shortly after. Unfortunately, things get passed down from the parents. Yes.

And I ended up getting those tonsils removed. Well, that bacterial infection has to go somewhere. It has to colonize somewhere. So it'll go and colonize in other areas of the body, like the gut, like the appendix. It's not uncommon for people who get their tonsils removed for 5, 10, 15 years later to all of a sudden have appendicitis and get their appendix removed. Have you had appendicitis? No. I'm really grateful that the body communicates and gives us symptoms. Acne is just a picture of what's going on internally.

So with these ongoing health issues, bloating, digestive distress, I had debilitating migraines. They kind of just lingered and I put band-aids on them. My doll for extreme period cramps. I got put on birth control, which is the story for so many women to fix, quote, fix some of these underlying issues. But my health fully tanked after college soccer. I think it finally felt safe because sometimes our symptoms won't surface until they feel safe as a survival mechanism.

and no doctor could help me. And so the very short part of the long story is I had some of the top liver specialists in the country look me in the eyes and tell me I needed a liver transplant.

I need to be on medication for the rest of my life and get hepatitis vaccines. At the time, I had started turning yellow. My palms were yellow. My eyes were yellow. I gained a ton of weight. And that was their answer. Top doctors in the country. I started diving into what are my other options. It did not sit well with me at all. And even going to a lot of integrative and functional medicine doctors, it was still Band-Aid.

It was here's turmeric for your inflammation. Here's dandelion for your liver. But no one was really getting to the root of, well, what is overwhelming your system? And I very fortunately came across one doctor who sat me down and ran a blood work panel

And he was my sort of guardian angel. And you get emotional thinking about it because when you've seen so many people and you've been told there's nothing else you can do and someone can point to, no, there's a reason. It's life transformative. And he quickly glanced at a basic CBC and CMP that a past doctor had run and said, I think you have CBC.

underlying infections. I think that heavy metals is a problem. I think mold is a problem. Have you ever lived in a moldy building? Well, of course, college dorms, they're filled with them. Homes growing up, water damage, filled with them. Even once you move out, fungus can colonize in the nasal passages and then it creates a whole body systemic issue.

And he gave me that information and I ran with it. I started researching, diving into PubMed, attending conferences and seminars, immersing myself in education to really not only understand how do you fix those issues, but how do you establish health in the body as a whole to where it prevents those things from taking over. So building the shields and guards from a foundational health standpoint, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, so that when you do have a bacteria or a food with heavy metals, your body can handle it.

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I feel like so many of us probably have toxic overloads in our system, myself included, which we'll get into, from living in dorm rooms, from growing up in houses with mold, don't

Does mold toxicity show up differently in everybody or does it kind of show up the same way? So mold can impact people in different ways. Mycotoxins, endotoxins, biotoxins, they're produced from mold. So it depends on the type. Even when we ran mold tests, urinary mold tests, there's a variety of mycotoxins that can possibly show up. Some are more intense than others and

But then you can see patterns in labs and blood work. One of the most common things we see is the antidiuretic hormone gets impacted. If people are dealing with mold issues, they tend to wake up in the middle of the night to pee. Kids will wet the bed. Oh my gosh. Me.

So me, I wake up like four times in the night, but it's gotten better. It's funny you say that. Mold will impact a lot of hormones in the system. And that's one of the key ones. And then we begin to see on a urinalysis of a blood work, the specific gravity marker start to creep lower and lower and lower, which is dehydration. You're drinking all of this water, but the diuretic hormones and mineral compounds

shuttling system is impacted and then we have dehydration going on. And the brain needs hydration, our body needs oxygen and water, and therefore one of the biggest side effects of mold toxicity or fungal overgrowth is brain fog. And not being able to find their words and not being able to focus and sort of feeling out of their body. And then another really common one is almost electrical shocks.

where they'll go to touch something and experience an electrical shock. So symptoms paired with blood work can communicate this really great picture that something's going on. And we saw that in your blood work too, where we see the neutrophils, which is this first response white blood cell to foreign invaders, specifically bacteria and fungus. And they'll begin to increase in the bloodstream in response to some of these dysfunctions like mold. How many labs would you say you've looked at at this point?

Probably well over 2,000. After looking at so many labs, what would you say are some of the most common issues you see in everyone's lab work? Almost everyone has some sort of underlying infection load or toxin load. And it's just because our culture, society, the way the world is, it doesn't accommodate for optimal health. So you've got heavy metals that are added to baby foods and packaged foods. There are chemicals and chemicals

Toxins that are added to protein powders. And you also have glyphosate that's sprayed on a bunch of crops and gluten, and that's added to the protein.

Food supply, you've got a lot of kids growing up drinking milk from cows that are injected with antibiotics and steroid hormones to make them grow big and fat. And all of that is contributing to the overall toxic load. And since things can be passed down from parents, some babies are born with a bucket that's already a bit higher. With that, we tend to see those white blood cells dip below 5.5 and that long-standing chronic load

infection toxin problem and it'll increase above 7.5 in more acute cases. So I'd say overall one of the biggest things we see is we're just dealing with a big toxicity issue, especially since most buildings have water damage. If you're in water damaged buildings, working in them, living in them, that's going to create mold and mycotoxin issues with fungal overgrowth. That's one of the biggest things. I'd say secondary to that is gut and liver problems.

I had that. Yeah, that's a big common thing we see. And it tends to present itself in kids when they get to that puberty age and their hormones are raging and the liver cannot accommodate and keep up. And that's when a lot of them start experiencing painful period cramps and explosive acne and they go to OBs or dermatologists and the solution is spironolactone, Accutane, birth control.

So can you put kids on the same supplements that let's say I take from my liver elevated enzymes? Yes. It's just the dosing is a little bit different. So a lot of the herbs that we even used for you can be dosed at one capsule per 50 grams of body weight. And then some are even better for younger kids, such as black walnut that tends to be really well tolerated in tincture form if it's from a high quality source.

I've heard you say normal isn't optimal, and I love that quote. Tell us what you mean by that. When you look at blood work or a lot of the intake forms with questions, it's based upon a statistical analysis of 95% of the population. With those reference ranges, even on labs and blood work that are off to the far right-hand side, that is what's normal. But as chronic disease is increasing and people are...

Diabetic, having heart disease, COPD, asthma, they are establishing those reference ranges based on a statistical analysis of that population. As the population gets sicker, those ranges get more skewed, where now they're not optimal, they're normal.

And that's changed a lot over the past even 40 years where 40 years ago, an optimal white blood cell range was 5 to 8. Now, some labs have it listed as 2.9 to 11. If someone's sitting around a 3 or 4, that's normal on labs, but it's far from optimal. So when someone goes to a regular doctor,

they are being judged based on a normal, typical range for most Americans, which in reality is a pretty unhealthy range. Yes, given that most are on medication and are on pharmaceutical drugs. And they're not even running full complete panels to get the full picture.

And it's really sad because you'll have people come to you saying, but my doctor said everything is normal because they're the doctor. They have the white coat. Now I respect and honor and appreciate doctors. I just think that some of the information that they're taught and not taught like nutrition and labs plays a big role in this where I'll look at those same labs that a doctor said everything was normal, nothing was flagged and there's 45 markers out of optimal range.

insanity. I feel like I'm the perfect example for this because I lead, I mean, health is so important to me. And I was living a, what I consider to be a super healthy lifestyle before meeting you. And I'm sure doctors would say I had great ranges. I mean, I think I was told that everything looked fine. And then when I sat with you and we actually went through it, I was shocked. I

at how much improvement there was to make and how much improvement we have made in a matter of months. Just by some small tweaks, really. Small tweaks. And probably no one ever said, hey, your cholesterol is a little bit too low. I mean, most people would think that that would be a good thing, right? I definitely want to talk about cholesterol. What are the myths around cholesterol? Let's just get into it now. Currently, the medical system, if they see cholesterol high, they tend to immediately go the statin route.

They will tell you to stop eating red meat, eggs, foods high in cholesterol. But when cholesterol goes high or low, it's an internally driven imbalance that often has very little to do with our actual food. It is more so an issue with fat digestion, liver and gallbladder health. If we tend to see that total cholesterol and LDL start to creep up, they are responding to an underlying load.

It's not uncommon to even see those spike when people start to work on their health. Another really common reason you'll see total cholesterol and LDL go high is underlying hypothyroidism before the thyroid markers ever go out of range because it takes about a 25% dip in overall thyroid function for the thyroid markers to begin to shift out of balance. So it's almost giving you this clue that there's a thyroid problem before you can actually see it on labs.

But they're not even running a full thyroid panel. They're seeing this elevated cholesterol LDL and they're telling people to remove these foods that are actually very important for our overall health. That's a big myth that high cholesterol is an underlying route to cardiovascular disease, which is absolutely not the case. You need the particle size. You need to look at

other specific lab markers in order to make that determination. And then no one talks about low cholesterol. They think let's just lower it as low as we can to reduce the cardiovascular and heart attack and stroke risk. But it's a backbone to all your sex steroid hormones. When you talk about fertility and feeling good and balanced hormones, if you don't have enough cholesterol, you're not going to synthesize those really important hormones. Why do you think I had low cholesterol if I do eat red meat frequently and things like that?

Metals and mold will tank the cholesterol levels. Bacteria will tank the cholesterol levels in chronic cases. The initial stages, it will increase them. But when that's been going on for a very long time, those toxins, bacteria, infections, they overwhelm the organ systems in the body, like the liver, and the cholesterol will tank. I think the biggest thing I've learned from you is how interconnected the body is because

I, even at the beginning of this whole skin, you know, coming off my spironolactone, going the natural route, I was someone that thought, okay, I have high testosterone. I'll take DIM. I will drink spearmint tea, kind of like surface level, like

tip of the iceberg type treatment and then when i sat with you and you went through everything with me i realized that not one issue that i had was like isolated if that makes sense yes is that the case for anyone listening who maybe has pcos acne any hormonal issue what would you tell them it's all connected let's take pcos for example

PCOS is polycystic ovarian syndrome, multiple cysts on the ovaries. There is a reason that the body will create cysts. As females, we don't have testosterone factories like men do. That's why our levels are going to be significantly less. When it comes to testosterone, it is very blood sugar balancing.

That's why a lot of PCOS women tend to have high fasting insulin levels. It's a blood sugar imbalance that's increasing their testosterone. And when the body as a female doesn't naturally make enough testosterone, it will grow cysts on the ovaries that are capable of making testosterone.

You have all these cysts that then build and grow on the ovaries to offset the blood sugar imbalance. Another really common reason for cysts is underlying bacterial infections. Lyme disease, these spirochetes will wedge themselves into organs and systems and create these barriers over them that are cysts in the body for protective reasons to hide from antibiotics, to hide from antimicrobials.

you go back to why do we have PCOS? Well, let's dig for the deeper imbalances and reasons and usually comes back to inflammation, toxins, infection, blood sugar dysregulation. So this might be controversial for me to say, but isn't PCOS just a cluster of symptoms then? Like why do we even need, I mean, technically I probably have PCOS, but why does it even matter to have the diagnosis when really

the cure would just to be going to the symptoms or the problem underneath. I think that they throw that blanket diagnosis because they don't know how to fix it. They'll say, you're stuck with this forever. There's nothing you can do. But I have several clients who did ultrasounds and had 40 cysts. They redid ultrasounds a few years later, and there's one or two. These things can be reversed when you address the reason that those cysts form to begin with.

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That's D-E-L-A-V-I-E sciences.com and use code POW for 20% off your purchase. What do you recommend for someone listening who is maybe seeing a regular doctor but isn't having their hormonal issues really addressed and maybe they're on medication or whatever it may be and they want to get lab work done?

What do you recommend for them finding their Emily, their guardian angel? I train and teach others how to read blood work from a functional optimal lens.

And there's a referral list that I can give you and we can link of people who've been through it, who are certified, who are able to order those labs for individuals. And the reason I prefer that route versus taking a bunch of codes to their doctor is a doctor is going to raise their eyebrow and either give you a really hard time or they're not going to run it because insurance doesn't cover a lot of these markers. You'll end up with a super bill in the mail for $800 upwards to $2,500.

because insurance is only going to cover the bare basics. And even if you tell them, please run a full thyroid panel, please run a full thyroid panel, you come back with TSH and T4. Okay. So what tests should they be getting right off the bat?

CBC and CMP, complete blood count and complete metabolic panel, that's typically run from a doctor. And even if they have their labs now, that can be extremely insightful. If they look at that and see that their white blood cells are outside of that 5.5 to 7.5 range, that should be an alarm system for there is something throwing your body off. Your soldiers are overwhelmed. Raise the flags. We need to figure it out. If you even then look down at the, I call them,

your army of soldiers and they each have a special title that can communicate okay what neutrophils are at the very top and that was something that yours was off on in your initial blood work neutrophils will tend to increase with fungus yeast candida bacterial overgrowth and it will tend to decrease with severe immune dysfunction because those infections and toxins have been going on for way too long

and it tends to see-saw with the lymphocytes, the lymphs. If someone's lymph is outside of that range of 24 to 42 or it's see-sawing, it's decreasing or increasing as the neutrophils are increasing or decreasing, same thing, bacteria, fungus, yeast, virus, immune dysfunction. Just those three markers can communicate so much information. And then monocytes, if they are above seven,

there is an active infection. There is something going on that is triggering immune dysfunction. And then the next two markers we talked about because they were normal in your initial blood work, the eosinophils and the basophils. And those respond to mast cells, allergies, and parasites. And they were normal. We did your follow-up blood work three months later and they increased. Okay. Tell us why this is a good thing though. This is a good thing. Yeah. This is a good thing. It sounds like a bad thing, but it's a good thing that I have parasites. If these...

worms, parasites, whatever they are, as gross as it seems, are not detectable in the bloodstream. They're creative creatures. They've formed a protective barrier called a biofilm around themselves. You run the blood work, it's not showing up. A lot of these herbs and supplements that we use actually go in and pop that bubble, disrupt the barrier, destroy the house like a tornado, and now they're detectable by the bloodstream. You can actually go after them. It's why you'll hear the term antibiotic-reducing.

resistant because people will take these antibiotics and it won't work. So they were there the whole time. We've just cleared the rubble, as you told me, and now they are present and now we're killing them. You've heard the term health is like an onion. You peel back the layers. You can't see the center of the onion at the very top. And a lot of people give up too soon. When I really look at the clients I've worked with, the ones who've stuck it out and been committed to the process are

And from the beginning, understand it's going to be an uphill battle sometimes. Your skin, your body, your symptoms may feel like a roller coaster. But if you're willing to stick it out and keep peeling away those layers of the onion, things will reveal themselves and you can address them. Oh my gosh. I want to write that down because I think that was the biggest piece of the puzzle for me working with you. The amount of times I texted you, called you crying, I want to get back on spironolactone, I'm done, it's getting worse and worse.

just stick it out because I think what three months later I was already seeing amazing progress not just in my skin but even my eyes you pointed out how much whiter the whites of my eyes were working on that liver now that you're looking at I know you're looking at a lot of acne lab work through clear stem which I think is so cool that clear stem added that feature by the way I think I've spoken about it on the podcast before what a very common thing

things that you see in acne patients lab work that you feel like everyone should know? We have, we just launched a month ago and we have over a hundred panels that have come through that I've been able to look at. And every single one of the ClearStim acne panels has painted a picture of why acne is there. There hasn't been one where we've looked at it and it hasn't told a story. And in doing this for now about five years, acne tends to fall within four acne pillars.

You have the infection and inflammation pillar, which is sort of what we just talked about with the CBC, the white blood cells and those infection markers. You then have the pillar of stress and blood sugar. Stress increases cortisol, stress increases blood sugar. You'll tend to see the glucose high, the hemoglobin A1C high, the fasting insulin high, the red blood cells high.

the electrolytes off, that can drive acne. We see that a lot of times. The next pillar is what I call the four Ds, deficiencies, digestion, dehydration, and drainage, because they all influence one another. If you're dehydrated, you're going to be constipated. If you're constipated, you're going to have digestion problems. You're not going to drain properly. Your liver is not going to secrete bile. You're not going to absorb your food. And now you have deficiencies. Doesn't that also affect estrogen? Yes.

A backed up liver means you're not going to metabolize estrogen properly. And a common pattern we're seeing in these acne panels is the sex hormone binding globulin marker increasing, which increases in response to estrogen stimulating it.

Which could also maybe appear like PCOS or another hormonal imbalance. Absolutely. We also look at testosterone, free testosterone. And this is where Bloodwork's great if you know how to read it because there are women who have high testosterone levels symptoms, the black hair that grows on their face and the really oily skin and the weight loss resistance, but their testosterone and free testosterone on Bloodwork looks low. And their doctor will say, "You actually don't have a testosterone problem." But that's not the case.

It's getting converted into the more potent testosterone called DHT, which is a massive driver for cystic acne. Okay, let's talk about testosterone because I'm seeing, especially on TikTok, this topic pop up all the time. And people are referring to spironolactone as this like magic drug.

drug I mean I don't know if you follow along with Alex Earl but she's the most popular influencer out right now and I feel bad for her she's been on three rounds of Accutane she's now on spironolactone and it like hurts my heart to watch because I've been through it too and I know how difficult it can be what is spironolactone doing to our bodies short-term and long-term

It is a steroid. Why do people get cortisone shots for inflammation? If you lower inflammation in the body, it's going to respond positively. But unfortunately, with a lot of these systems, they're not a cure-all. They're not fixing the underlying root, and they come with a host of side effects, which you probably did experience a little bit. And you also, if you want to start a family, can't use these when you are trying to get pregnant, pregnant breastfeeding, and they're still Band-Aids.

And adding a band-aid to an underlying issue can cause problems down the road knowing disease and illness stem from these underlying root inflammatory responses. What is cancer? A bunch of bad cells from inflammation. How about Accutane? Accutane is similar where there are so many long-term repercussions of it and that's what's been super heartbreaking in working with several clients where it's actually triggered autoimmune disease in several individuals and they've never been the same since.

But I also tell people you have to give yourself grace. I didn't know about birth control when I went on it. I didn't know about the negative side effects. I didn't know that it would throw a bunch of synthetic estrogen at my body and overwhelm my liver and deplete a lot of nutrients that are needed for your body to just function normally. It led to, for me, I would say a lot of anxiety and depression in college being on it.

So for those individuals, the biggest message is those are working, but not without side effects. But is it really working or is it just masking the deeper issue at play? Right. And I think for a lot of people, the acne just keeps coming back and you keep putting your body through the hell that happens when you go on Accutane. I mean, I personally haven't been on it, thank goodness, but I know a lot of people turn to Accutane.

So let's talk about, I know we've touched on it, but I think it's good that we discuss the issues we saw with my lab work because I live a pretty healthy lifestyle and we found a lot of issues in my lab work that I think would be interesting to people. So let's go through and kind of explain what each one was. I know we have the notes here.

Obviously, I had a lot of underlying infection. What did we see? Your initial labs that you uploaded from your past naturopathic and functional doctors showed that there was elevated mycotoxins, which is produced from mold. It showed elevated candida, which can stem from mold. Is candida mold? It's a yeast and fungus. It falls in that family. Okay.

And then we also saw that your heavy metals were high. And both of those will deplete glutathione and the other cofactors needed for glutathione recycling, which is absolutely essential for detox, absolutely essential for phase two liver detoxification. And so we added in some glutathione support to help with that. But even if someone's low on glutathione, you have to ask why. Mycotoxins, fungus, candida, metals. And then it also showed that you were high in some of the PCBs, pesticides,

and other underlying toxins and infections. That was the functional labs. And then when you told me in our health history questionnaire, I was on birth control. That's a bunch of synthetic hormones that overwhelms the liver, and then you have a backup in drainage. Antibiotics. A lot of us were on a lot of antibiotics growing up as kids, and that will cause SIBO.

Because if you deplete all of the bacteria in your gut, then the bad ones are going to grow and you don't have enough good bacteria to offset it. What is SIBO? An overgrowth of bacteria in the small intestine. Small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. Yep. Got it. So these are all different issues. Yep. I think that's what confuses people because I think people are like, I have mold. Right. But then what is candida? So they're all separate issues. And I think it's good that we are

are transparent about this because for anyone who listens to me or watches me, you know I've been eating healthy now for six years. I treat myself well. But these issues could have been from childhood. They could have been from college when I wasn't treating myself well. So it's important to do the lab work and really expose these problems in order to get to the root cause. Yep. So what was my first step with all these problems?

Well, because we also saw that bacteria was super high, I love acne face mapping and looking at photos. And I had you take initial photos and take progress photos because the subtle changes matter, even if it's the change in your whites of your eyes. And you may notice that some of the previous breakouts are there, but they're not as red. They're not as inflamed. And we started to see that along the jawline, which is where the stomach is and a lot of

Strep and staph bacteria, fungus, candida yeast will grow and colonize in excess and you start to see acne along the jawline, along the cheeks, along the smile lines, which is the large intestine. And so seeing that picture helps me understand where these underlying infections are, which helps us better go after them.

And so where we started was your diet. We pulled out some of the foods that you were eating. I know that there's a lot of information about fermented foods and how that's good for the gut. But if there is, and this is simply what I've seen in my practice and with women, already an overgrowth of bacteria, fungus, candida yeast,

You really don't want to add in more fermented foods. They're very high in histamine, and that's just going to sort of add gasoline to the fire. So we pulled all those out, which you were like, wait a second, I thought sauerkraut and some of these fermented foods are good. They are, but not when you're trying to balance out an overgrowth of candida yeast and fungus and bacteria.

There's a time and a place. There's a time and a place. And I've been able to add in a few more things now that I wasn't at the beginning. Yes. Sorry, continue. We took out eggs. Eggs, yeah. The egg whites have albumin, which can overwhelm the kidneys if the kidneys are already overwhelmed. Your kidneys are like an air filter for your home.

So if someone does eggs and they're not dealing with heavy metals, bacteria, fungus, candida, yeast, and they're not having to filter a bunch of stuff, then the egg whites probably aren't gonna cause a problem. And I use the alcohol analogy 'cause it's so easy for people to understand. A few sips of alcohol is not gonna make you drunk. But if your body is susceptible because your liver is so overwhelmed, one glass of wine is gonna cause histamine problems and make you a little loopy.

The body's no different. None of these things are bad, but they have a time and place and can't be used if there's underlying pathogens, infections, and toxins. Eggs were a big trigger for me. Every time I had them, I feel like the breakouts were back. And I'm now at the point where I could maybe have them once a week, but I have to be pretty cautious. Yep. And everyone's different. Some people can tolerate eggs once a week, even if they're farm raised from the chickens in your backyard. It's just the

structure of them when there's viruses and bacteria can throw those further out of balance. Some people may tolerate it once a week, some may tolerate it four times a week. But often if we're dealing with acne, it's good to just pull them out or you're better off making, which people don't love to do, scrambled eggs with just the yolks because it's usually the whites that are a problem. They're pretty good. I mean, they're a little bit gummy, I would say, but like the yolk is kind of the best part. So I like that method. It's an option. How about dairy?

I will go to my grave with this topic because it's almost a cult in the holistic space of drinking A2/A2 high quality raw milk.

And again, it's not for everybody. There are still people who address these underlying imbalances and that's still going to impact their hormones because dairy is going to impact your IGF-1 and your growth hormones, which will create acne. There's also the problem where it's raw. And when you run enough lab tests and you see the bacteria that can come from raw milk elevated in people's labs, you raise red flags.

Certain aspects of dairy are better than others. Butter, grass-fed butter is great. Ghee is great. They have very little lactose and protein in them. But when you start getting into the milk and even excess of the cheese, yogurts, sour creams, not great if you're dealing with acne. I avoid...

Cal dairy, like it's the plague except for grass-fed butter ghee and cheese randomly as a treat. I use goats and sheep more because there's less protein in it. Because even though my labs look great and everything's good, I have dairy, I'm breaking out. Yeah, I think one thing I've realized through this is I am just an acne-prone gal and I always will be. And there's just certain lifestyle things I need to do.

One of the biggest switches I feel like you had me make was the olive oil avocado to ghee tallow or butter. Explain that for us because I think a lot of people were upset. I know, I know. And again, you could make a case for either side, but I pull all my clients off cooking oils. There's a reason that they come in amber glass bottles so that they're not exposed to oxygen and to heat and to light.

Why would we want to heat delicate oils? Break it down to just that simple question. And people will bring it back to a smoke point. Well, why would you ever even want to get close to a smoke point?

When you heat these oils, they're going to produce free radicals in the body, which breaks down the cell membrane structure. I'm a huge fan of these oils. The oleic acid and unheated high quality olive oil is super important for the body and cell membrane, but in its unheated pure form. Can you get away with cooking with a tiny bit of olive oil at a very low heat temperature?

potentially, but that's not what most people are doing. They are roasting and frying and sauteing at these really high temperatures with oils, which breaks down their lipid structure, which then breaks down your fatty acid membranes. Cooking with fat stable options like tallow, like butter, like ghee is going to be so much better internally and it's not going to drive these lipid oxidized problems that the other oils heated.

will cause and then you look at labels think about how a lot of these manufacturers are making their chip products and their food products they are frying them and roasting them and heating them at very high high high temperatures even the avocado oil even the coconut oil and that's not great for us to be consuming in excess

Thank you for explaining that better than I ever could. Because everyone's like, why did you make the switch? And I'm like, I don't know. Emily told me to. But also, guys, it tastes really freaking good. Ghee is amazing. Grass-fed butter is obviously amazing. Tallow tastes really good. I make all my food. Like, without fail, I travel with this stuff because I won't eat anything else. And I feel much better. My skin has told the story and it tastes good.

How do you feel in terms of caffeine? Go off about coffee for a second. Most people have normal, typical, acidic, caffeine-riddled coffee in the morning, which is going to throw off blood sugar. It's going to throw off your cortisol levels, shoot it through the roof, and it's going to throw off the gut. I removed and have all my clients remove normal coffee. I removed it almost six years ago and only drink our

our favorite mushroom coffee because the caffeine is mitigated by the reishi mushroom and they have patent protected processes on the infusion of the reishi spore powder into it as well as removing the acidity from it. So it's not impacting gut in a negative way. It's not throwing off your cortisol levels and the caffeine is better managed and balanced where you're probably only absorbing around 9 to 15%

of caffeine versus the typical 100 to 180 for a cup. What I love about this stuff is first of all, it tastes so good and you can drink it all day long. It gives you the coffee fix, but you can really get away with having like three, four cups. I mean, I know you maybe have six, but I have

And I can't even do decaf. I'm the same way. I can't. I can only do decaf if I take the same sport powder that's put in the King coffee and I add three to four capsules to it. And then I feel just that steadiness. Otherwise I'm shaky. I'm jittery. I'll take my glucose monitor, prick my finger and my glucose is shooting through the roof. Yeah.

And guys, just so you know, this brand is Organo and it's called King Coffee. You can find it on Amazon. It's like a red gold box. It looks a little like when I first ordered it, I was slightly confused. It was giving royal vibes. I wasn't really sure what to expect, but now I have it in the office and everyone's obsessed.

The other thing, you correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like all of us are getting coffees out at coffee shops and they're pouring hot liquid into plastic, which is getting microplastics in our systems, which I saw in mine. I'm sure...

for everyone running around who's getting coffees every day, they probably have tons of microplastics in their system, right? Styrofoam, the plastic they put on the top that people are sipping through. But just don't get coffee at coffee shops because it's probably filled with mycotoxins. Mold. Yeah. Because beans encourage mold, right? What are some of the most common foods that have mold, parasites, toxins?

Mold, the most common ones are going to be, coffee's a big one, grains, a lot of grains, as well as peanuts. Those can be really high in mycotoxins. People usually need to tend to avoid those. With some of the other common triggers for parasites, for example, raw fish, all my sushi lovers out there, make sure you're taking HCL and digestive enzymes when you're having sushi. Pork,

Oh yeah. Good old pork. And even some fish if it's not cooked all the way, but they can even come from fruits and vegetables that aren't properly washed. I am notorious about ozonating all my produce before I ever use it. What does that mean? I have a ozone bubbler. I put all my produce in water. I turn on the ozone machine and it disinfects

and removes all the possible things that are sprayed. Nowadays, even with this appeal label. Oh, I avoid that. But even organic produce is still sprayed. It's the amount that it's sprayed. Can you send me the link for that ozone bubbler? And I'll put it in the description. I ordered something like that and it came, but it had a weird blue light on it and I got freaked out. So I didn't use it.

I was scared. I was like, is this more chemicals? I don't need this. Mine doesn't have a blue light. Okay. I ordered the wrong thing. So can you send me the link for that? Yes. How about foods that we should consider adding?

to fight mold, parasites. I want to say the raw garlic and pumpkin seeds. Yes. That helped me a lot. I've put that on so many of the Clear Stem Acne Panel Results Summary Reports for people. When you start to see those eosinophil markers increase or bacterial patterns, raw garlic has so many beneficial properties to it and bugs hate it.

There's a few key things with using it though. It has to be raw. You have to crush it and mince it and let it sit for 10 minutes so that the allicin in it can increase and it has to be consumed raw. You don't have to just... Did you take it by the spoonful? Yeah. Is that what you did? Okay. That's an option. Some people chase it with honey. I'm intense and I like that kind of thing. I don't do that. I feel like it's very potent and intense. What I do is I have people make my...

salad dressing or guacamole where they're adding that raw garlic to it. They're using a blender or a VOD mix with olive oil, a little bit of apple cider vinegar and lemon juice and the garlic, some basil, cilantro. Those are great for parsley, cilantro, great for heavy metals and use it as a daily salad dressing. It's a really easy way to get that raw garlic in. Another way is to add that raw garlic minced to guacamole alongside some pumpkin seeds, which are also great for bugs, pathogens, parasites.

and hormone balance, really great for estrogen metabolism, cilantro for heavy metals. There are a lot of food things you can do. I'd say lemon juice, cilantro, parsley, garlic, olive oil, even in ways it's very therapeutic and healing.

super good for underlying bugs and bacteria. Doing that even for 30 days can be helpful. I think I did it for 30 days straight. And I also did the salad dressing. The cool thing with the salad dressing is you can actually put both in there. I did the pumpkin seeds ground up in there and the raw garlic. And I also did the guacamole method. I also did the raw spoonful because I feel like I wanted to feel like it was working. And I was like, oh, it's potent. The bugs are going to hate it, whatever. That worked really well for me. Now you have me taking black cumin seed oil.

What's the other oil I'm taking? PCPS. You know, the one that's like fortifying for the mitochondria. PC? PC. We're doing PC. What's that good for? PC is four of the key phospholipids. Okay. And when it comes to the cell, simplifying this, your cells are like a castle. And every castle to protect the mitochondria, which is the princess inside the cell, needs a cell wall.

It needs protection. And when we cook with oils, when our body is inundated with metals, parasites, viruses, bacteria, they go in and they destroy that cell wall. Great Wall of China, gone. Invaders, attacking. And...

You have to support that cell wall. And one of the key components is cholesterol, which is why having those at sufficient levels is important. And phospholipids, which PC is a combination of phospholipids that are truly liposomal. That paired with, and this is where a lot of people

contradict the idea of seed oils and say you should avoid all of them. I disagree. Unheated, high quality seed oils are instrumental for the health of that cell walled membrane. You can have the bricks, which is the PC, but how are those bricks going to stay together? The sealant, which is a lot of these seed oils, sunflower, safflower, flax, pumpkin seed, black cumin, in their unheated purified form.

I love that you're saying this because I have been Little Miss anti-seed oil on this podcast so many times, but you proved me wrong. And I actually just realized I'm taking seed oil every day. You are. Unheated black cumin, which is for parasites. Black cumin is for so many things. If people even research what are the benefits of black cumin seed oil, there are studies for it in Hashimoto's. So many different studies with black cumin seed oil in chronic disease and illness. Yeah.

Just the immune support in general, but bugs also hate black cumin seed oil. It's great for blood sugar when taken with meals. Love, love, love black cumin seed oil. And you're not wrong in saying seed oils are bad because most of what's out there is industrialized. It's your canola oil. It's the highly heated seed oils and PUFAs.

but PUFAs in general have gotten such a bad rep. And I always ask them, do you know what a PUFA is? I don't know what a PUFA is. Polyunsaturated fatty acids. Okay. And when you're cooking with them or they're industrialized, which they typically are at restaurants and on food packages, that's a problem. But vegetable oils are not all bad. Sunflower and safflower oil are not bad in their pure form. Even the skin is.

to repair the skin barrier, you actually need things like sunflower and safflower. In skincare? Yes. Wow. Okay. So there is a purpose for seed oil, but we don't want to heat it up. Yep. And we don't want the canola oil. Yep. I want to hear this from a purely scientific perspective because there's a lot of debate about the carnivore diet, the keto diet, the vegan diet. What's your take on those? Let's start with carnivore.

Any diet can serve a time and place if it's from a whole foods approach. And it can change. I think that bouncing around from different ways of eating, I don't love the word diet, but we'll use it just for simplicity, can actually be really good for the body. Even when you look at the Gerson therapy method, they'll have people juice vegetables and go fully plant-based. And they do have data-driven results of curing cancer.

there's a time and place. I'm a huge fan of having carnivore or the carnivore diet is good in a sense because it's removing a lot of the processed foods and the large and vast amounts of triggers like excess vegetables that are often sprayed and not great like kale and

Killer kale is like the name that it gets and there's for good reason for that. I think that it has good aspects to it. But when you're also running GI maps and fatty analysis tests and people's butyrate levels are super low from the carnivore diet, which is common, that's a problem. And that's where potatoes and you know how much I love potatoes that help increase that butyric acid in the gut. That creates the right...

that creates the right support for the leakiness of the gut to repair itself. Yeah. Potatoes are something Emily has been encouraging me to introduce to my diet because I think

Anyone with acne listening will know you kind of get terrified of certain foods, certain products, whatever it may be. Anything that I felt like was triggering my acne sugar, I was terrified. So I kind of stuck to what I felt like was working. But we could see in my lab work, I was really needing some more variety, I think. What do you love about potatoes? And can you tell everyone the tip that you told me in terms of the smashing in the fridge and the whole thing? Yes.

I love the Fingerling organic potatoes. They're real small. You can cook them really fast, boil them. And when you cook them and put them in the refrigerator overnight and then you reheat them, they're very high in butyric acid. And also it serves as a prebiotic. So it's gonna help feed your good gut bacteria versus throwing a probiotic that could actually throw you further out of balance. It's also going to help

with the blood sugar response. Rice is similar. If you let it sit in the refrigerator overnight and then reheat it, you're going to have less of a glucose response with that. So I just smash them after cooking them, put them in the refrigerator, reheat them the next day. It's amazing.

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How do you go about eating rice without exposing yourself to the mold? Like, is there a particular kind of rice that you like? I love Jasmine and Basmati and I love the brand Lundberg. And theirs have been shown to not be as high in arsenic. And I also speak to these things because I eat so much of them and I run routine functional labs on myself every six months.

So when people are saying, well, what about this coffee or what about these potatoes or what about this food? When you're seeing a full write-up of everything and you're consuming it a ton and you have clients consuming it a ton and it's not throwing the labs out of balance, that's real clinical data that's going to overshadow and speak greater volumes than someone just saying, this is how things should be.

And again, I'm a testament for this because I, if there's anything I'm good at, it's following instruction. And I feel like Emily gave me a breakdown of everything she wanted me to do from food to supplements. And I followed it to a T and it worked. I mean, my skin in July was horrible. And now I'm here and I feel like maybe one or two zits. Now I got to think about scarring and other things, but it really has been incredible for me.

Let's talk supplements for a second. What are some of your favorite supplements that I've been taking that you recommend to other acne hormonal patients? Going back to some of the imbalances from your labs with testosterone and androgens being high, I do like spearmint tea. That is a good option. I also like reishi mushroom because it proliferates.

prevents that testosterone from getting converted into the more potent DHT, which is a big trigger for cystic acne. Reishi mushroom is great. And I love anositol because it helps balance blood sugar, which helps naturally keep those testosterone levels in check. Those would probably be my top three for that imbalance. With estrogen, I really love artichoke. Mmm.

And rosemary, those are awesome in herb supplemental form, tea form. That's going to help the liver detox and metabolize the estrogen properly, push it down the right pathway. Glutathione is similar. And then you were also low in progesterone.

So one of the reasons we use pumpkin seeds is it's a rich source of zinc. I don't like taking zinc supplements or copper supplements because it can throw your minerals out of balance. Zinc is not only anti-parasitic, but it helps increase progesterone levels. And a big trigger for acne is low progesterone relative to your testosterone and estrogen. Those levels may not be high, but they're higher when you're comparing them to the progesterone levels.

We did CamuCamu, vitamin C, great for the immune system. It helps with iron regulation, getting your red blood cells where they need to be, which is what carries oxygen to tissues. And if you look at your...

one month progress photo, I said, "Look at the color in your face. Look at the oxygen that's being delivered to your face to give you that complexion." And that's a huge part of that. And these are just basic nutrients, camu camu, pumpkin seed oil. You are also low in your dopamine, epinephrine markers on your Dutch, your HVA and VMA, which is often where people will say, "You're just stressed. You need to manage your stress levels."

Where I don't agree with that is if you were exposed to strep bacteria, heavy metals at a young age, that is a stressor. And so addressing those individually with supplements and herbs is helpful. So we used Elysium, we used Schisandra, we used Artemisia, we use these herbs that target broad spectrum supports. Even vitamin C helps with heavy metals, helps with underlying viral loads. So we use those. And then we used Golden Thread for parasites and bacteria.

and digestive enzymes. A lot of times people will break out or have stomach problems because they don't make enough protease or hydrochloric acid. And that can show up as acne on the skin with the stomach, which is on the cheeks or the jawline. And I still take that with every meal. Which is good. I recommend that most people take digestive enzymes because most people are not in this perfectly zenful state every day where their entire parasympathetic nervous system is capable of digesting food.

Yeah. And I think something that surprised me with the system you put me on was the cycles of it all. Like, it's not that I was taking these all at once. You first had me on Elysium and I want to say Golden Thread and then we cycled to the

-Astragalus. -Astragalus, Artemisia. Because you made the point that we're working on kind of one thing at a time. -One thing. -We can't target it all at once. Yeah. You'll overwhelm the system. You'll overwhelm your liver and kidneys. You take these herbs and it's putting trash in the trash can. You support your drainage systems and your diet and your elimination pathways and move that trash can outside the house.

But if you're doing too many and you have five garbage disposals outside your house and the garbage man's only picking up one, that's going to rot. That's a great metaphor. And if it's rotting, it's going to come through body odor, it's going to come through sugar cravings, and it's going to come through his acne. So you can't kill or eradicate or go after all this toxicity at once if the foundation isn't strong and you have to do it at the right pace. You can't just take 10 antimicrobials at once. Not a good idea.

So Greg has been so inspired by my progress with you that he has begun stealing my camu camu. And I have a big problem with that. He's like taking over my whole supplement cabinet.

Was that all the main ones you feel like? Those were the biggest herbs that targeted some of the toxins. And then we did other minute things like warm lemon water in the morning with sea salt. That's going to help nourish those adrenals, cleanse the digestive tract, cleanse the liver. We did mangoes because those are super helpful for the adrenals. We did Brazil nuts for selenium and your thyroid. We took out cassava flour. Yes.

Yeah, because a lot of these health products, guys, whether it be tortillas, crackers, healthy cookies, they all have these like flours, cassava and nuts. I think nuts were also a big thing for me. I was eating too many. Yep. Nuts in excess are going to cause digestive distress. And a lot of them, nuts and seeds can be sprayed or be high in caffeine.

mycotoxins produced from mold yeah so being conscious of the ingredients in the health products or protein bars you're eating every day i feel like it's huge yep and cassava flour is just a big trigger for people and screws up their digestive system what is cassava flour in most of the time tortillas that are gluten-free yeah chips a lot of the siete chips not everyone will have problems but if you're struggling with digestive issues and you're having

Simple Mills almond crackers or cassava chips and tortillas, it's usually that it's in excess. We're seeing that a lot where, okay, let me remove the dairy, but now I've got almond flour in this and cashew flour in this and the milk here and it's too much for the body to handle. Yeah. Let's talk about some of the lifestyle tips you gave me to implement. Okay.

First one, sauna. I mean, I know not everyone may have access to a sauna, but nowadays there's sauna blankets and things you can do. What do you love about saunas? You're sweating. It's an elimination pathway. And they've even done urine tests from a sauna and people will pass mercury and other heavy metals just by doing a sauna.

If someone doesn't have access to a sauna, they can do foot baths. A lot of centers have ionic foot baths or even a really hot bath drinking ginger tea, which will increase that body temperature to help sweat. Pooping, peeing, breathing, and sweating are some of our key elimination pathways. Sweating is a really easy way to take the burden off the body by supporting it. And then deep breathing is another. Really, really, really deep restorative belly breaths are

Sometimes with clients, they want to go right to the supplements or right to the really intense therapies. And I always pose the question, what can you not go very long without? Oxygen. You can't go very long without sleep. Your body will literally shut down. You can go 30 days without supplements. You can only go three days without water. You can only go about two minutes, less for some, without oxygen. And your body will break down if you don't sleep. Those have to be the priority for people.

I love that. Those three things. I think so often now people want the quick fix, the pill, because that's what we're fed through marketing and pharmaceutical companies. It's really easy to want that quick fix. Myself included, when I first started, I was like, give me anything and I'll do it. But really, it was about slowing down and implementing some of these lifestyle changes. I did the glutathione shots every week, which really helped. And

The direct sunlight was another tip you gave me. Yes. First thing in the morning, what do you like about that? It's going to balance your circadian rhythm. Melatonin production actually starts the morning before that evening. When you expose your eyes to natural light in the morning, you're going to have proper cortisol rhythm and circadian balance. Everybody should have this natural rhythm where melatonin is lowest in the morning and highest in the evening and most are swapped. This is the tired and wired individuals who wake up extremely exhausted

slow energy all day relying on caffeine and then it gets to be nighttime and they're wired and they're insomniac and they're waking up multiple times in the middle of the night. And the simple act of not looking at your phone first thing in the morning or turning on artificial lights and exposing your eyes to natural light, even if it's not fully sunshine outside, just that natural light will balance that circadian rhythm. Which can in turn help with acne ultimately. Yes, because it helps with stress. Yeah. Melatonin offsets cortisol.

How about castor oil packs? Castor oil packs are awesome. Castor oil is kind of a trendy thing right now. People are putting it in their belly buttons. People are putting it on their foreheads for wrinkles. Hold on, what's the belly button thing? What is that? I just heard this trend recently. But apparently it goes back to that's how you're connected to your mom through the umbilical cord. And so apparently the belly button, if you put it in there, things transdermally go through the skin.

it's helping yeah it's super cool i need to read up more up on it but that's why a castor oil pack works it's going and lowering inflammation through the skin over the liver or the thyroid or the kidneys wherever you put it the castor oil pack is looks strange when i first posted everyone was like what are you doing but it's quite easy to implement because you can just order from amazon make sure you get it in a glass bottle and it's organic

and then you put it on the right side of your body, you can either strap it there and sleep with it overnight, or you told me we could just rub it on before the sauna and get similar effects. Doesn't it help with digestion? Yes. Huge for digestion. Anytime you support the liver, you're going to support the body as a whole. And that's the key organ with acne that's often impacted the most. Castor oil packs either need pressure or heat. Sometimes people will do both. In a sauna, you have the heat

That's one way or you have the pressure from a pack, which is another way. And guys, all these things make your skin better. I know it's really hard to wrap your head around the fact that a liver castor oil pack might help your skin, but it truly does. These things all are connected.

Switching to mental health just for one second. How much does stress and mental health play a role in acne? Huge, huge, huge role. And we talked about this very early on. I had you start doing my I feel exercise and it's hard, sometimes hard to navigate these emotions. And, you know, if you go there, it almost feels like a dam's going to break. If I go there, how is my body going to respond? And it may not be the right time and place.

But from a very young age, our brain creates neural pathways. And I learned this in going through therapy and counseling, how even at a young age, if your parents work all the time and aren't paying attention to you, you begin to adopt these mindsets and beliefs that I'm not important. And what I have to say isn't important. And I need to just be quiet all the time and not be a problem. And then you get to older ages and that

comes with you. And so when you're in settings and environments where I have acne, well, I'm not going to bring this up. I'm just going to stuff it down. I'm not going to talk about it due to these neural pathways that were created at a young age. And so it's really important that you begin to work on the mental health side of things as well. And not only that, but a lot of people will adopt a mentality of I'm, they'll say I am or I feel like

Insert phrase there. I feel fat. I feel ugly. I hate my skin. And it's really hard to heal a body you hate. And expressing, I'm actually grateful that my skin is breaking out. I'm grateful that my skin is breaking out because it's showing me that there's something going on. I'm thankful for this symptom, this response, this story, because now I get to begin to address it.

And that's a really powerful thing too, because if it wasn't there, what happens if 30, 40 years from now that that teenager who has acne, all of a sudden there's a cancer diagnosis because there was no symptoms. There was no signs. There was no patterns. Even with labs, I use them as prayer maps. Okay, we have this information. What do we do about it? So using the I feel exercise of I feel overwhelmed right now. Well, why?

Let's break that down. I feel overwhelmed because my skin is breaking out. Okay, why? Because I care what other people will think about me. Okay, why?

And you go down this rabbit hole until you get to the root. And a lot of times it comes back to worthiness and identity and the feeling of needing to perform or the feeling of needing to gain other people's attention or the feeling of I need to be perfect. And that's why I think a lot of women fall into the trap of overexercising and under eating. And almost every female I work with has had some disordered view of their body or food at some point in their life. And it can start at a young age. It could be

You and your mom without her realizing it saying that's what you're wearing to go see the grandparents Aren't you gonna put makeup on and then it flips and you go the opposite direction where women almost become tomboys And go the opposite effect because they don't want to feel that pain anymore So using that exercise if I feel and being grateful for I'm grateful my skin's breaking out I'm looking forward to when I don't have Acne on my face and I get to celebrate that but

Also, some of the greatest stories and testimonies come from when it's the worst. Like your testimony is now impacting millions of people based on the work you did and they may be struggling and had you not gone through it, they would have never known that there's reasons it's there. But I think you learn a lot about yourself in this process. When I was significantly overweight and yellow, I had to look myself in the mirror and say, I am worthy.

and it's gonna be okay. And there's a reason I'm going through this and there's gonna be a generational impact from it. And I'm gonna pray that I see myself in the lens that God does. Like I wanna see myself through his eyes. And that changed a lot for me. I think that changes a lot for people because you're not being hard on yourself anymore. You're grateful for the symptoms or the story that your body's communicating because it's telling you, hey, we can do something about this.

And then when your skin is good, just like with food, you don't appreciate food till you've experienced true hunger. You don't experience clear skin or being mostly symptom free until you've gone through the muck. It's, I mean, you just said it so, so well. It is a blessing to have your body tell you something's wrong here. I mean, I would have had no idea because I felt fine.

but clearly something was wrong. And I remember that first call I got on with you, I was so insecure. And so honestly, just like I had this self-hatred. And even when you extended help to me and said, hey, like, let's get another call next week. Like, let's do X, Y, and Z. I literally asked you why you were helping me. And I remember you said, I think a big part of this process for you is going to be accepting help.

And that was such a light bulb moment for me because I realized for years I didn't accept help, really. I didn't accept support and love, really. And I didn't understand why someone would want to help me in that way. So I think the mental element of acne and any underlying issues is huge. A lot of people have a hard time accepting help and learning how to receive. And

That was me for a long time. When you are forced to become a parent at a really young age and fend for yourself, I came from a broken family. It was very dysfunctional. You put all of these backpacks on and you carry them and you stop asking for help. And I got to a place in my life where someone said, that's a form of pride. The inability to receive is a form of pride. And if you keep carrying the weight of all of this, your body will break down. Your skin will erupt because you're never meant to carry that.

my gosh and i remember back in the day when my acne was bad and people would say that to me i didn't want to hear it because that is almost the hardest part of the whole process i can take the supplements i can do the diet i can do all the things but

addressing that trauma and learning to take the backpack off is really the hardest part. It is. But there's so much transformation that comes from it. And that's where I come back to, this is going to create a generational impact. The way you parent, the way you serve others, the type of friend you are, taking off that backpack, even if it's just opening it up and glancing inside and looking at what's in here. What am I carrying with me that I've yet to address?

Where is my journal in here of people that I have not forgiven yet, that I've carried this bitterness with me my entire life? All that's doing is hindering you. So much freedom comes from this still hurts, but I'm going to choose to forgive this person or this setting or this situation, even doctors. I had to forgive the doctors who told me there's nothing you can do. Thank you for lighting a fire under me to realize there is something I can do.

Because they could have fulfilled exactly the role that they were supposed to play. And it just changes the way your brain works in a way because you learn to look at the goodness of every single thing you've been through and will go through. I have the chills. This is so good. You're going to help so many people and you are helping so many people. I think it just shows that we all go through whatever we go through to help serve others. With that said, I do have a fan Q&A. I know we've been talking for a long time, but the girls have questions. Okay. Let's treat this as like a rapid fire. Okay.

Are food sensitivity tests legit or a waste of time? Waste of time. Really? Waste of time. Why? Because some foods, you won't see the response from a food sensitivity perspective until days or weeks later. And a food sensitivity test is not going to pick that up.

Okay. The second reason is most food sensitivities stem back to an underlying imbalance. If you see all these foods come up, your gut is leaky. Your body is creating this response and saying you have a sensitivity to this food, but it's just because the immune system is dysfunctional. Now, anaphylactic allergic responses, that's different, but it's typically an underlying issue. I actually like the cocoa pulse test for if a food's a problem. You take your pulse rate

You put the food in your mouth for 30 seconds under your tongue. If your pulse goes up six to eight beats per minute or more, it's a current food sensitivity that needs to be avoided. But usually after you fix your gut and fix the underlying issues, it's not a food sensitivity anymore. Slay. I feel like that's just a business play, these food sensitivity tests. Anyway, advice for coming off spironolactone. What supplements should someone take if they're coming off? Support your liver. Castor oil packs, dandelion tea, taurine, tudka,

There's even things called liver sauce. A lot of just liver supportive herbs is going to be the first thing and get blood work done from someone who knows how to read it because it'll still tell you what's going on and you can support your body individually from that result.

Thoughts on tretinoin and prescription products for skincare? Time and place. Some people swear by tretinoin, but they are using it in the right way. I find most people can't tolerate it. And even the women on YouTube and TikTok who are using it, when they take their makeup off, their skin looks raw. Eek. If you really go pay attention, it looks raw and red because with tretinoin, you increase your risk of UV damage. If you are not religious enough,

religious about your SPF and sunscreen reapplying often, you will have sun damage over time. I know that there's crazy testimonials with Tretinoin. Again, time and place, but you can't use actives with it. You can't do a lot of the treatments like microneedling and nanoneedling, which I find are incredible for the skin. So for me, I used Tretinoin a few years ago and I've better results now not using it because it does increase the sensitivity and some people will use it and it never helps them and their skin's flaky and it's super red.

So that's my take on it. Favorite skincare brands for acne? Clear Stem Skincare is my favorite all-in-one brand. And I've talked about this recently on social, but if the skin barrier is compromised because they've been using harsh products or treatments for a long time, there's a good chance that they're going to be sensitive to some of the products at first, the vitamin Cs and the acids. So you really have to simplify for

for a while and repair the skin barrier. And it's so cheap and it's a drugstore brand, but Vanicream, it's like $8 for the cleanser and $8 for the moisturizer. Just those two to start out to repair the barrier is instrumental alongside the HydraBerry and HydraGlo from ClearStem to really give yourself the squalene, the Bacuchiol, which is a retinol alternative. Love, love, love their brand.

You've been really into the non-pore clogging makeup lately. Yes. Give us some brands or certain products that you recommend. Priya is an all-in-one acne safe makeup line. And again, why is Priya currently a brand? Because she struggled with intense cystic acne using these non-comedogenic, won't clog your pores, oil-free brands. And it was not helping. It was her own story that launched this acne safe makeup line. And it was her own story that launched this acne safe makeup line.

Other than that, you have to pick and choose from brands, which is why I created that pore clogger list so people can go and check things individually. I'm not acne prone. But what was so wild is back 11 months ago, I started researching what makes wrinkles worse. We did family photos over December and I was so tempted to do Botox even though I know I shouldn't be doing it.

And it was clogged pores. And it blew my mind. It was a whole new world because I have all these natural, organic, clean brands and makeup lines. But all it was doing was clogging my pores and creating dryness and pronounced fine lines and wrinkles. And that put me down the rabbit hole of researching this for months and just started sharing about it a month and a half, two months ago.

And there's very few brands that actually have ingredients that do not clog your pores. So true. I went through every single one of my products on this journey and I had to eliminate a lot. If you guys want to learn about this, go to Emily's Instagram page. I will link it in the description box. She has a whole highlight and many posts about non-pore clogging makeup products you can use. Do fragrance candles affect skin and cause acne? Most of them can, not directly, but the reason why is...

The synthetic fragrances will overwhelm the liver. It goes back to the liver. If people get easily hungover, liver. If they get seasick, liver. A lot of morning sickness, liver. So you add extra gasoline to the fire, you're going to overwhelm your liver and that can break the skin out. I've tried to ban them in this office, but I've been told that I'm a tyrant and I need to stop. I'll send you good brands. Please. Best deodorant.

I just did a deodorant boast. And the reason why is even the clean and natural deodorants still have coconut oil in them, which can clog the pores. Fit Glow has a spray deodorant. There is also an option to just use ozonated olive oil, which is what I use. Just simple ozonated olive oil. And it has some essential oils in there. The brand's Ella.com.

And so that you also have the tea tree and some of these essential oils that inhibit fungal issues. And then sometimes good old fashioned arrowroot flower. It'll absorb the sweat without clogging the pores. So you kind of make it yourself. You can. Interesting. Thoughts on light masks, red light, blue light. I recently did a live call on the clear stem membership because I've never personally used them. And these women have tried everything.

Literally everything. And I asked them, because someone asked me, and she said that the blue light can be great once you've healed your acne for some of the scarring, but it can actually make cystic acne worse. Interesting. Okay, and what about red light? Red light's great for lowering inflammation. It's not going to necessarily fix the acne, but it's great for lowering inflammation and cell renewal. Tips for body acne.

Haircare products, shampoo, conditioner that's going to go down your back, back acne, chest acne, butt acne, changing out your shampoo and conditioner is one. Another thing, depending on where the acne is on the body, it can be a clue for what's going on internally. So the butt is the bladder and then the shoulders can be the stomach. The back and chest can be bacterial as well.

and then removing body lotions that have pore cloggers as well. Do you have a website you use to check everything? No, because none of them are fully accurate and a lot of the checkers don't work. That's why I went down rabbit holes of creating my own list. Hopefully I can figure out a media person who can create a clicker checker for me so people can do that.

Because it all comes down to the fatty acid structure of each ingredient. Is it high in oleic acid, linoleic, linoleic? All of that matters when it comes to the skin and potential to clogged pores. You guys need to follow Emily because she's been popping off about this lately. Is eczema treatable internally? Yes. Eczema is often a byproduct of heavy metals, fungus yeast, or parasites. So we see a lot of babies who have eczema...

And it's usually a heavy metal or yeast derived issue, especially if they're being breastfed or they were born with a bucket that's overflowing.

Can you work on healing mold and heavy metals while trying to conceive or while you're pregnant? While trying to conceive, yes. If you find out you're pregnant, you'd want to stop. But that actually helps a lot of women who are struggling with infertility conceive because they lower those toxic loads. Hormones increase and they're able to capitalize on that. Breastfeeding, you can. You just need breastfeeding specific supplements.

supports. I love the brand Supreme Nutrition in breastfeeding cases. I often use Vital Guard Supreme and Scutellaria Supreme that cover a wide variety of infections, but I really don't like for moms to do anything while they're pregnant. Okay. That's what I love about working with you. I feel like all the things I'm working on are just helping my health in general. It doesn't feel like it's isolated. It's all encompassing.

Now it's time for the question we ask every guest. I started this podcast because I believe everyone's pursuit of wellness looks different. What does wellness mean to you? Wellness is a choice. And I love that quote because someone can be given a life-altering diagnosis of autoimmune disease, alopecia, for example, type 1 diabetes. And someone might look at them and say, you're not healthy. Or they got their arms and legs blown off.

You're not healthy, but they get to wake up every day and pursue wellness, balance their blood sugar, eat good foods, live in life-giving community, sleep, walk, work out,

All of those is a choice and you get to choose wellness. We don't always get to choose health. I may be diagnosed with something in autoimmune disease, which I still carry with me. That's a thorn in the side of my stomach for the rest of my life, but it doesn't mean I can't pursue wellness alongside that. That's beautiful. Thank you, Emily. Where can everyone find you online? Where can they order lab work? Plug it up. Instagram is the main spot I'm at. I do not have the capacity to be on multiple channels online.

People are like, "Get on TikTok." I can't handle that right now. My butt plate is way too big. And I've heard the comments is wild, wild west. You got to have some thick skin for that. We're growing in that area. Instagram, my name, Ellie Morrow. And I also am overseeing the entire Clear Stem Acne panel, creating results summaries. We have several girls we've brought on who are going to help me with that, doing live calls in the membership.

Those are probably the top two spots. Incredible. Thank you so much, Emily. We really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. The content of this show is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for individual medical and mental health advice and does not constitute a provider-patient relationship. As always, talk to your doctor or health team. Thank you for listening to today's episode. Go comment on my last Instagram at Mari Llewellyn with the guest you want to see next.

I'll be picking one person from the comments to send our Bloom Greens to. Make sure you hit follow so you never miss my weekly episodes. If you enjoyed the conversation, be sure to share and leave a review. See you next week. Please note that this episode may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products and services. Individuals on the show may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to in this episode.