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Are you exhausted from chasing endless supplements, protocols, and “root causes” without seeing real results? What if I told you that true healing doesn’t require thousands of dollars in lab tests or a complicated supplement regimen? In fact, the answer might be as simple as stepping outside to catch the morning sun to improve your wellness mindset.
In today’s episode, I’m diving into an honest and refreshing conversation about health and healing with Josh Rubin of EastWest Healing. We tackle why the wellness industry increasingly resembles the Western medicine system it often criticizes, and why so many people are stuck in cycles of endless supplements, detoxes, and protocols without seeing real improvement.
I have personally witnessed more and more students coming through Toxin Free in 3, overwhelmed, sick, taking so many supplements, dieting, exercising, detoxing, cleansing, literally doing all the things we are told we need to do to heal, but they’re not getting any better. Some are, but most are not. I see so many women who are stuck at best and at worst, they’re so stressed over trying to heal. Our modern lifestyle works against us.
Josh shares his direct, no-BS perspective on:
- Why disconnection from nature is profoundly impacting our health
- How even healing itself can become toxic
- The myth of root cause medicine
- How our modern lifestyle works against our biology
After following Josh and his wife Jeanne’s work for four years, I’ve witnessed their unique approach to healing that focuses on reconnecting with our bodies and living in alignment with our biology. While tools like red light therapy and Dutch testing can be helpful, we discuss why it’s more important to first look at your environment and how it makes you feel.
Don’t miss Josh’s powerful insights on why healing doesn’t have to be complicated, expensive, or stressful. This conversation might just change how you think about your health journey.
The Body’s Response to Stress
The body is like an orchestra and it plays beautiful music if we support it to do so. But when we don’t, things become chaotic. When we don’t start breaking down food the way we should, we start inhibiting the GI system and the liver and gallbladder are a piece of that. You start affecting detoxification, how you detoxify estrogen, how it’s eliminated from the body, and also what is kept. A lot of it recirculates. Stress is the catalyst for every issue.
Everything we see, feel, and touch is processed from the brain down. Sometimes it goes from the body up to the brain and back down, but it has to go through the brain. When Josh says stress, he means a physiological response. It’s all about our perception and our story that dictates what is stressful or not. Stress is really when demands are being placed on us to see what we can handle. Are we creating an environment for healing? Most people aren’t. There are a lot of factors that can create this physiological response.
When you’re stressed, the body sees it as a time of scarcity because there’s a disproportional relationship between cortisol and leptin. The body thinks it needs to preserve the energy it has so it won’t let go of any weight or any fat. No matter how much you work out, you won’t lose weight. But it will also think it needs to downregulate systems, like your thyroid or gut.
This is why people are getting worse. They’re showing up with worse thyroid problems more than ever. They’re showing up with gut problems younger than ever. They’re showing up with all these detoxification issues more than ever.
Wellness Mindset Shift
Josh always tells people the most important decision you make every single day when you wake up is the first thing that goes into your eyes, not what you eat. That will dictate your biology for the rest of the day.
What do most people do? They wake up, flip on their phone, turn on their lights, eat, go to work, put on sunglasses, go to the gym, then go home. They never get outside. Our biology relies on the light and the dark cycle to regulate our bodies. When you wake up and you get this blue light, which is found nowhere in nature, first thing in the morning, that’s information. That information goes into the eyes through two receptors, which communicate through the retinohypothalamic tract. They go to a nucleus right to the hypothalamus. You’re telling your body to go sympathetic. That communication goes to the adrenals, to every cell in the body, and you get sympathetic stress from the second you wake up.
What if you meditate? What if you eat within 30 minutes? It doesn’t matter. You’ve literally pushed your body into that state from the second you woke up so everything you’re doing the rest of the day is essentially working to put out that fire.
But what if we wake up and take time to not turn on the lights and light candles instead? That’s what Josh’s family does and his son loves it. They eat breakfast with the candles on.
The second the sun comes up, you’re outside, even for a minute. Get that sunlight on your face because that red infrared light goes to the hypothalamus but it now tells a different part of the hypothalamus to push you parasympathetic, to slowly dim up cortisol and get the body ready metabolically for the rest of the day.
This wellness mindset and habit have a very different effect. Now, you’re creating energy versus chasing it. You can’t heal in the same environment you got sick. If you’re doing labs, supplements, or trying to detox estrogen, but none of this has changed, it won’t because this is all the stuff that’s not allowing your body to detoxify estrogen. You’re in a chronically stressed state.
We love blaming our body but remember, health is taking responsibility for yourself. You control your hormones, you control your gut, you control everything in your body and those things control your metabolism. You are in control. You can’t blame your body. Look in the mirror and say, “I’m the problem. I need to change to create the change that I really want to feel and see.”
Commit to a Positive Wellness Mindset and Lifestyle
People want instant gratification and that is not a thing. I tell my teenagers all the time that instant gratification is fake. It takes years to get sick and into these habits and lifestyles. You’re not going to heal your body overnight just because you get back to the basics.
But if you commit to those things, do the work, and give yourself the patience and consistency, you’ll be so much happier and healthier. EastWest Healing teaches people how to know what they need to live again. Their students are on the road to healing and happiness with a positive wellness mindset. I’ve never done the full program with them before and I’m really excited to do it during their next round. Join me in the 90-day Nourished Nervous System Program! (GET 50% OFF THROUGH NOV 26TH!)
Connect with Josh:
Getting started with red light therapy with 40% off the LUMEBOX.
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Related Episodes:
Episode 47: What is a DUTCH Hormone Test and Why Do You Need One? With Dr. Erin
Episode 79: Creating a Toxin-Free Home: Practical Tips for Families Resistant to Change
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