#85 T.C. Hale – Healing Reflux – Chat the Fat

T.C. Hale is a natural health and nutrition author who teaches health professionals how to see amazing results with their clients.  He also works with celebrity clients, like Jane Lynch, writes books, like Kick Your Fat in the Nuts, and produces documentaries, like the upcoming, Why Am I So Fat?

ABOUT TC

• Like most natural health experts, I started my career touring professionally as a stand-up comic
• I did that for about 9 years, and what happened was, I lost my voice and it did not come back
• When you are a comic without a voice, you are more like a mime and nobody wants to be a mime
• So, I started going to the doctors to get things figured out and 23 different doctors could not help me – nobody could figure it out
• I decided to just figure it out myself because each doctor, each medication, everything they told me to do was just making me worse
• The medication they put me on was trashing my body, trashing my ability to create energy and of course, I did not understand what was going on at that time, but now I do
• I just started going to every nutrition workshop, seminar and reading every single book I could get my hands on just to learn anything I could on how the body works
• It took me years to get my voice back
• I could just talk a little bit and it was very painful
• I had a hereditary iron overload issue called, Hemochromatosis where the body kind of holds on to too much iron and then, it can create a lot of inflammation
• And then, I had a Hiatal Hernia that was causing reflux issue. So, the acid will come back up and burn my vocal chords
• A lot of doctors thought that it was reflux. So they put me on a PPI that turns the stomach acid off altogether. But they don’t understand that your stomach still makes digestive enzymes and the digestive enzymes are made to breakdown protein and our esophagus is made of protein
• So, even when a person takes those medications to turn off the symptoms, so that they don’t feel reflux, or the heart burn kind of feeling, they can still be creating damage from the digestive enzymes in their stomach
• Doctors do not know how to fix acid reflux, they only know how to turn off the symptoms
• It is confusing to a lot of people because there is this valve at the bottom of the esophagus to connect to your stomach and it is in charge of opening so that food can come in, but then it is supposed to close once the food is in there so it doesn’t come back up and that valve is triggered by stomach acid
• When your food goes in there and your stomach makes acid and it starts to break down the food, it triggers that valve to close
• So, when someone doesn’t have enough acid in their stomach to trigger that valve, the food will come back up and there is a little bit of acid in there, so it burns and they’ll get reflux
• And they turn off the whole digestive system, the ability to breakdown food and the ability to pull the nutrients out of that food
• Hence, you have no resources and no energy
• The Hiatal Hernia pulls your stomach up to your diaphragm a little bit and it can alter how that valve sits, so it won’t close correctly and that could be a problem
• Doctors aren’t trained really about Hiatal Hernias and it took me going to a chiropractor to figure it out
• And so, I started doing exercises to correct it. I also learned how to correct my digestive issues so that I could turn off my reflux and still digest my food
• There’s a lot of reasons why a person might not make enough HCL because the body requires minerals and nutrients to make it. When you have enough HCL, you can breakdown the food to pull minerals and nutrients out of the food that you eat. But if you don’t, you can’t get the minerals that you need to make HCL, so your body is not making it and you can’t breakdown the food
• So, we teach people how to use HCL capsules and figure out what is the right dose for you
• Once you can stimulate proper digestion, and your body can start breaking down and pulling out the nutrients that it needs, it starts making its own HCL, and you can start reducing the amount of HCL that you use
• When you are having issues in your body, your body is telling you that there’s things that aren’t working right and you might have a genetic disposition to gear you towards those problems like I do, but that doesn’t mean I am stuck like that
• No matter what the issue is, you can always take steps to correct it once you understand what you are really looking at
• It really is about knowledge and we are all learning, but most people when it comes to how the body works, don’t know much
• When a person can understand their underlying issues, all of a sudden, they have a place to start 
• We have to become responsible for our own health and we have to put the effort of learning or educating ourselves into our own hands because someone else is not going to do it for us
• Learn what you can to put things into your own hands
• It was very hard for my family and friends to listen to me when I start learning things, but when you lead by example, and you fix your own issues, then all of a sudden, they want to learn about it too
• Pretty much every issue out there can have 3 or 4 possible underlying causes to it
• It really is about understanding how to look at your unique body chemistry and understand how we are operating because the reality is, as awesome as keto is, there really is no diet that’s right for every person because we all process foods differently
• The title of the book that I am almost done right now is called, “Bio-Individuality”
• But, I teach about that in all my books

HOW DID YOU FIND KETO

• How I found keto was really by accident because I was trying to fix these issues
• I was never really over weight, I was doing personal training as a career, when I wasn’t touring as a comic
• So, I was having the reflux issues and I have learned that when you do not have enough acid, the bacteria will thrive because the stomach acid will keep the bad guys out
• When you eat carbs, those carbs will activate the bacteria to create more gasses and you will get more reflux that way
• So, I started cutting out carbs and it helped me then I decided to have no carbs at all
• Then, I started these methods to help my clients lose weight
• What I was doing was eating pretty much no carbs and I would just eat low-starch vegetables
• I wasn’t attempting to increase my fat because when I was doing this, keto was not yet a thing
• I would make this little coconut treat that I call “coconut yummies “ and it is what we pretty much call “fat bombs” today
• And I saw how it started leaning me out, so I helped some of my clients lose some weight
• I had a client that came to me with a weight of 435 pounds and he lost 235 pounds in 12 months
• My coconut yummy was just coconut oil, and I would put some Pau D’Arco which is a little anti-microbial herb and a little bit of stevia herb
• That’s was all I use back then and that Pau D’Arco kind of made it taste chocolatey
• I do different things now and I do not use a lot of artificial sweeteners, but I am fine with clients using it to kind of help them transition
• I started to learn a little bit more about the ketogenic state and how that can accelerate fat burning and I started using that with more clients, but not all
• The one thing people need to work on before they try keto is their digestion
• It is really about digestion because you will hear a lot of people getting keto rash or they get really get nauseous when they start eating all the fats
• The other side of digestion beyond the stomach acids, is our bile flow and basically, the liver takes the filth in the body, it will put it into the bile and then it sends it to our gallbladder where we can store it
• What happens is that, when the acids leave the stomach, the bile then drops down to the acids to neutralize it
• If it doesn’t get neutralized, the acids will keep on moving to our intestines and it will breakdown our intestines
• So, it has to be neutralized
• But the way that we eat now can cause that bile to thicken up where it doesn’t flow, it will get stuck and it forms stones and we will get gall stones
• We need that bile flow to truly digest our food
• If you are not breaking down your food, it is kind of just going through you and not giving you any benefits like you think it is
• The bile is what also helps us emulsify or break apart the fats that we consume
• And if you can’t break those fats down to the levels that you can utilize them, they will just rot and become toxic in the body and since the bile is not flowing correctly to remove the toxins in the body, the body will start looking for some exit strategies and one of those strategies is our skin
• So, it starts to push junk out of our skin then, the fat clogs the pores and we start to get a rash, breakout or acne
• The reality is, there is nothing wrong with keto it is just that some people are not processing the foods that they are starting to predominantly eat
• It is interesting because there are number of things that can make the bile thick
• One of them seems to be grains
• Sometimes, by increasing the fat, you are kind of telling your body that you need more bile and you kind of get it to flow better that way, but most people need more help
• We do two things, we use Beet Flow and that helps to thin the bile so it can flow correctly
• And we also use, coffee suppositories or coffee enemas because it helps to open up the biliary pathway a little bit so that it can flow a little easier
• It really depends on how severe the issue is for you
• I am really fine with just about any HCL supplement as long as they don’t include ingredients that reverse the effects of HCL
• There’s a lot of people who use ox bile and ox bile is alkaline and it will neutralize the HCL and the acids

HEALTH BENEFITS

• I got my voice back by implementing all these things
• By fixing my iron overload and increasing my stomach acids
• Some people view keto as magic and it fixes everything
• I don’t really view it that way, but there are so many health issues where high insulin levels or excessive carbohydrates are either causing the problems, contributing to the problem or reducing the ability for the body to focus on healing that issue
• So, when you remove carbs, it makes it easier to fix a lot of problems
• If you can process the food correctly, now your body can run on fats and it doesn’t need the carbs
• I don’t view keto as magic, I view it as amazing at helping a person remove their need for carbs and remove that burden of the insulin levels being always high
• It becomes magic on how it is so easy to eat the right way
• I go to the gym fasted because I train very early
• So, I will sometimes do it fasted and that’s not always going to work for everybody, but it works for people more that I think it would
• Digestion takes more resources than pretty much anything we do in our entire day
• So, if a person doesn’t have enough resources or minerals to make their digestion work correctly, then it would make your workout much worse because your body is pulling all of it’s resources towards digestion
• When you are really fat-adapted and you are succeeding with the keto diet, then your body is operating a little bit differently and a person will do a little bit better in that case
• What I found is that, some issues usually have an underlying cause and the underlying cause is often they do not have enough minerals in their system for the body to work correctly
• When the minerals go too low, a person can have a seizure and when blood sugar goes very low, a person can have seizure
• And when both goes low, it really magnifies the possibility of  having a seizure
• So, when one of those gets very low, it will cause cravings – craving for junk food
• And it can create all of these emotional issues, or energy production issues and the person will feel better when eating the junk food and that will make them gain weight, but they get to function as a human
• The doctor will them to stop eating junk or else they will die in a few years, but to them, if they will stop they will feel like they are going to die today
• When they fix their digestion and change their nutrition, the cravings will stop
• So, it is very true that people use these things as a crutch, but I don’t blame them in doing it. It made sense to me

WHERE CAN PEOPLE FIND YOU

• Website: kickitnaturally.com
• Podcast: kickitnaturally.com/category/podcast/
• Read my books for free: kickitnaturally.com/books/
• TRAILER: whyamisofatmovie