Mike Ciaradina here with CrossFit Health at the Symposium for Metabolic Health in San Diego, California. I'm here with my guest today, Dr. Tony Hampton, who is a doctor practicing in obesity and family medicine. Is that correct? Absolutely.
Absolutely. Just happy to be here. We're having a good conference, so I'm loving it.
And you're actually talking today? Actually, I'll be talking right after this recording. And I chair the society's outreach committee, so part of the outreach. is to let people know metabolic health is the key to healing.
So my goal is, when I talk today, I'm going to talk a little bit about how you can overcome the struggles that have been barriers to keep us from healing. A lot of people think it's their willpower, and it's not that at all. It's let's figure out what the problem is and problem solve, and then we can help people heal. So it's actually quite necessary, not just for clinicians like myself, but for family members and other people who are supporting patients. And without that knowledge, you can't heal.
Coaches, CrossFit coaches? Coaches. That's right. Absolutely.
So let's talk a little bit about those barriers. When you are seeing there are barriers to metabolic health, what type of barriers are these people, these patients having to overcome to improve their metabolic health? That's a good question.
So I kind of start first, like I have a nest in a rope. them and when you think about those letters, they have the purpose is to remind me as a clinician what do I need to think about when people struggle. So we start with nutrition and the only struggle with nutrition is, I want to say this out loud, there are very ways to achieve metabolic health. Do you have to be low-carb keto carnivore? No.
You can be plant-based and achieve metabolic health. The key is to eat real food, avoid, you know, highly processed grains and sugars and refined, you know, oils that are, you know, seed oils, things like that. Exactly. So the first thing is to be okay with that and that's why we are Metabolic Health Conference now, I think, because we're trying to be open to both approaches.
That's key. Now, beyond that... The E in the nest is about exercise.
So if you're trying to be metabolically healthy, it is clear that a sedentary lifestyle is not your friend. So a lot of times in our community we talk about exercise as a weight loss maintenance tool. It's not a weight loss tool. But I would argue that is it helpful and can you get started sooner?
Probably so. You can take somebody who doesn't exercise and just have them put their back against the wall. And until they feel those muscles. fatigue, that's a form of exercise. So there's things they can do, although I think starting with diet is probably not that bad.
Now, obviously, you got to get enough sleep. I have patients who come see me who literally got four hours of sleep and they're surprised their blood pressure is high or they're surprised that their blood sugar is high. And obviously, when you think about metabolic health, you want to have a good blood pressure and a blood sugar.
So if you don't get enough sleep, then you're not likely to have a path to metabolic health. So when people are struggling, let's find out if they're getting enough sleep. And if they don't get enough sleep, let's give them tools to be successful. Now, lack of sleep means your body is stressed. So the next thing about this acronym is the other S is for stress.
So many of my patients come to the office and they're watching the news every day. And I'm like, why are you watching the news every day? They're watching it because they think they need to be informed.
But I said, but think about all the negative that that puts on your soul. So I try to convince them, let's find ways. to reduce stress and if you have too much stress you're gonna have the stress hormones you're gonna have cortisol and adrenaline and then that's going to tell your liver release some sugar because we're running from the lion and and we don't want to release glucose if you're not really needing it so we got to reduce stress now the tea is interesting because it's two purposes one is how we think and recovering from trauma so self limiting beliefs are not going to help you be successful if I had self limiting beliefs I wouldn't be able to talk to you right now I wouldn't be able to go on this stage in a few minutes you would be nervous and freaking out but positive beliefs which you have to train yourself to do that's the secret now trauma is different I haven't had much trauma to recover from but a lot of my patients have so they have not recovered from trauma and sometimes being an African American in America that's like micro trauma all day because how people perceive you so we have to be aware that people in front of us may have trauma and so if we don't ask about traumas or if we don't tease that out of them they may struggle so that's another area I think is very vital.
So now we've gotten our nest taken care of, and now we have to climb up to the nest with a rope. And the rope is about relationships. So when you think about your relationships, first of all, you got to have people around you. So if I'm isolated, just like what happened with the pandemic, that social isolation can harm me and it may actually make me less metabolically healthy.
Because it's stressful and it doesn't make me feel like, you know, I have a purpose on the planet. So social isolation is not good and the people you hang with matter. And when I was in my obesity training, it was clear that your friends had the biggest impact on who you become.
If you hang with folks that are not, like when my kids were little, we had this little thing they had to remember, and it said, if we can't grow together, we can't chill together. So that was my way of saying to them, listen, think about who your friends are, and if it's not the right friends, they can negatively. impact you.
So your relationships matter, your support system, all those things are important. Now the O is interesting, it's about organisms. And so the organisms, you can look at that in many ways, but I'll start with the basics, you know, bacteroides versus firmicutes.
So if you have too much firmicutes bacteria in your gut, you're gonna take more energy from the food than the person who doesn't. So you can have a person who's thin, or a person who's not at their ideal body weight, and a person who is thin with the right right bacteria, which is bacteroides, may actually eat it and not have a problem, but a person who has Firmicutes will actually end up holding on to that energy. We've done some research with a lot of that, with fecal transplants and those types of things.
Yeah, isn't that amazing? When I was in obesity school and I learned about fecal, now I'm not interested in the fecal transplant, but I would be if I was in a situation where I needed it. And I'm really looking forward to the day where we will be able to use probiotics. I mean, you can use probiotics for things like autism.
So we need to learn about bacteria so that we'll know how to help people in ways that we haven't even thought about. Well, it seems like with probiotics right now, we're casting a large net. Yes.
It's very hard to be very specific. That's right. And that's maybe the next phase of probiotics. We need research.
We'll start with observational. We'll do case studies and anecdotal. But then we need to do the real research. I actually interviewed for my YouTube channel Dr. Natasha Trinette.
And she is the mother of probiotics. And she's going to be doing. doing research on autism and other types of probiotics related and of course obesity, etc. So I'm really happy the research is coming. So we're still dealing with our rope.
The P is for avoiding pollutants and that could be what's happening at the grocery store. If it's got a label you need to really be careful. Or on the south side of Chicago where I live, it's the atmosphere, it's the pollutants. So if a person comes to me with asthma and is not in control and I'm not aware of that and thinking about that, the medicine may not work.
until we deal with the environment. They may have to control the house. Maybe they have an ionizing filter in their home.
But we need to think about that so we understand the pollutants that can harm them. Now the E is for life experiences and your emotions. So if you're not emotionally stable, you're going to probably struggle to achieve your health-related goals.
If you have life experiences that don't serve you, you know, I only eat this with this, I only, you know, this is how we do things, and sometimes your life experiences don't serve you. So what I tell my patients... Think about what life experiences are harming you. Start to phase those out and start to add life experiences, like coming to a great conference, that will add value to your life. And so that's the kind of approach I take with my patients.
I see them, I've got the acronym in my mind. If they're successful with a handout, eat this, not that, we're done. If they're not successful, I get them support.
It may be Dr. Joan Iflin's Processed Food Addiction. Yeah, she's awesome. The art community. Or it may be Dr. something like just walking through those different acronym letters to figure out where people struggle. And that way they feel like they've been heard, you've built rapport with them, and then they know that you're going to kind of walk with them as they kind of take this journey.
So it's been a great tool to help me get to the root cause of why people get sick. Yeah, that's amazing. One of the things that we've been trying to do with CrossFit Health, we've kind of labeled it as bridging the gap between fitness and health care.
And one major... part of that is understanding what doctors like yourself are doing in their practice and then being able to have a level of communication between hey here's what we're doing in the affiliate here's what we're doing in the gym how can we support what you're doing in you know your clinic or your practice and vice versa but i think the real way to improve health and have such a major impact is creating these teams yeah instead of working in silos right well you and you don't want to try try to figure it out on your own, right? We have to understand our scope.
That's right. Even if you think, like Dr. Joan Iflin, right, if she only, like, took it from her PhD perspective, never talked to clinicians, that may not work. The key is let's talk to each other, and then that way, whatever we are doing, how do we integrate CrossFit in a way that's seamless for the clinician?
Right. And you have to be thoughtful because only the frontline folk really understand what they experience. Yeah.
And if you put those two things together... But doctors need your support. Like there's no way I don't expect doctors to be board certified in obesity medicine.
I have a master's in nutrition and functional medicine. I mean they don't have time for that stuff. So they need to have something they can refer to and but they also have to understand if you don't achieve metabolic health and deal with social determinants of health you will not be able to help a percentage of your patients and they so they we need to partner you know i i actually love that we were able to do this yeah because i'd love to stay in contact with you and figure out ways that we can work together.
Absolutely. The whole way that you're structuring this with the acronyms that you're using and how you're putting all the or you know labeling the barriers and working to overcome those barriers. I think there's a way that CrossFit and CrossFit Health can help you know knock down a few of those.
You know work as a team to knock down a few of those. I think that's what it's all it's going to be a partnership and collaboration. We partner with churches in our health system which is Advocate of Our Health.
We literally have a subdivision called Advocate Aurora Enterprises. So we have Food Smart, which is an app that helps us to have a coach on the hand with some nutrition experience. So in other words, we need partnerships to make this work. So I'm excited about this.
And if we really do a good job, we will heal a lot of people. Absolutely. That's amazing. Absolutely.
That's what it's all about. That's what it's all about. For sure. I appreciate that. Thank you so much.
Oh, yeah. Appreciate you, man. And let's keep doing this great work.
Absolutely. All right.