Optimal Aging

Cutting Through the Supplement Confusion After 50 with Nikki Raymond

• Jay Croft

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Feeling overwhelmed by supplement choices after 50? You're not alone. On today's episode, Nikki Raymond, holistic nutritionist and IFBB Pro Bodybuilder, joins Jay Croft to cut through the noise. Nikki shares her journey from personal trainer to functional nutrition expert, emphasizing the critical role personalized bloodwork and supplements play in healthy aging.

In this empowering conversation, you'll learn:

  • Why supplements are essential (and how to pick the right ones)
  • How understanding your personal bloodwork can dramatically improve health outcomes
  • Practical tips for integrating better nutrition into busy lifestyles

Whether you're optimizing your fitness or helping clients thrive as they age, Nikki provides clear, actionable insights for aging optimally.

Guest Bio: Nikki Raymond is the owner of Xperience Health, a holistic health clinic in Atlanta specializing in functional nutrition, hormone optimization, and body composition analysis. She uses personalized testing to create tailored nutrition and supplement plans, empowering individuals to take control of their health at any age.

🔗 Connect with Nikki:

  • Website: https://www.nikkifitfitness.com/
  • Website: https://www.xperience.health/
  • Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nikkifit_fitness

🔗 Connect with Jay Croft:

  • Email: jay@primefitcontent.com
  • Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/primefitcontent
  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/croftjay

👍 Enjoyed this episode? Rate us on Apple Podcasts and share it with a friend!

📥 Resources Mentioned:

  • Comprehensive Blood Panels
  • DEXA Scans
  • GLP-1 and Peptide Therapies

🌐 Podcast Website: https://primefitcontent.com

Speaker 1:

The cool thing is, like I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, is the body has an innate intelligence to heal itself. That's how it was designed right, so we can just clear the path and put in the right inputs and usually support a little bit of supplementation. Man, the body can do crazy, amazing things.

Speaker 2:

At any age. It's not you're not too old for it, because you're 60 or 70 or whatever you can adopt healthier habits.

Speaker 2:

If you want to go down a really confusing rabbit hole, start looking into supplements for people over 50 trying to stay fit and healthy. It's overwhelming. There's so much information and disinformation out there, so many scams. How can you figure out what's best for you or your clients, or at least prevent anyone from getting ripped off? Well, my guest today says it's best to keep nutritional advice simple, to remember that everyone is different and that supplements are like automobile insurance. You hope you never need it, but if you do, you're glad you have it.

Speaker 2:

Hi, I'm Jay Croft and welcome to Optimal Aging, the show for fitness, health and well-being professionals trying to grow their businesses with more people over 50. Nikki Raymond owns Experience Health, a holistic health clinic here in Atlanta. She's a trainer, nutritionist and pro bodybuilder who's now helping clients understand their individual nutrition needs and helping them come up with smart ways to meet those needs. I've learned a lot about my own body and blood work and biomarkers in the short time that I've known Nikki. It's been invaluable information and really interesting. In this whole fitness over 50 optimal aging conversation, I've learned a lot and I think you will too, so I hope you enjoy it, nikki.

Speaker 2:

It's great to see you again, thanks very much for joining me today. I'm really excited. It's a pleasure being here, jay. Okay, good, we have a lot of interesting stuff to dive into and talk about functional nutrition, holistic health, optimal aging no coincidence the name of the show and it's a big part of what you do Famous yeah. So before we get to all that cool stuff, tell us about yourself and you know you have such an interesting background. I don't want to risk leaving anything out, so tell everybody about how you got to be where you are right now.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so you know, my story begins like in my early 20s. Honestly, I worked at a law firm for a while as a receptionist and I did not like what I was doing. I was very miserable and I was 20, 21, and I went and got a personal training certification, right, and I did that. And I did that all in my early 20s and then I realized that the clients I was working with weren't getting as good of results. So I was like, okay, there's a food piece to this. It's nutrition, right, there's got to be more to this. So I went and got my first, you know, nutrition certification. There's been many since then, but you know, what I found was people that I worked with that we just focused on nutrition, versus the people that would pay me thousands of dollars to meet with them in person, were getting better results, right.

Speaker 1:

So you know, and then I was like you know, I feel like I'm wasting people's money and time because I need to be talking about food, and food is medicine, right, and food is the number one thing we put in our body every day. And then, every time we eat, two things happen, and I'm gonna make it really simple either makes us better or makes us worse. There's some kind of chemical reaction that goes on the body every time we eat. So, like I said, it's an opportunity to make yourself better or worse. So you know, I started there. So fitness has always been a thing. Then it morphed into just nutrition. Then I did that for many, many years, virtually in a person, some with some people, and I quickly realized that there was a lot more to people's health than we get into hormones, even to gut health, than we get into stress and cortisol, and there's just so many different things. So I went down the functional medicine path and, you know, started looking at holistic health care and how we can actually heal the body. And my little soundbite for people is you know, the body has an innate intelligence to heal itself. It was designed that way by the universe, god, whatever you want to say, but we clear the path and there's always a root cause.

Speaker 1:

So I did that for a long time and in lieu of all of that, probably in my early 30s, I started competing in bodybuilding. I was a bikini competitor. It's a very small, very feminine look. I did that for many, many years and then, after my fifth year, sixth year of competing, I finally got my pro card. So now I compete in the IFBB International Federation of Bodybuilding and use all of my holistic tools to optimize my body.

Speaker 1:

And one of the biggest things is testing and knowing your numbers when it comes to blood work, knowing your numbers, dexa scans, which is a bone, mineral body composition test machine I actually have one at my clinic, you know.

Speaker 1:

It's just being able to test and measure what you're doing, to make sure that the diet you're doing, the supplements you're taking, the peptides that you're doing are actually getting the result you want right. So it's been this whole like journey of realizing there was a gap, realizing people need to focus on food, then realizing that, ok, now we need to really take it to the next level to optimize. You know I deal with people who are the sickest of the sick and have symptoms and they've been told they're normal by their doctors. Or I deal with people like you, jay, who you're just you do the things you work out, you eat your good food, you take your supplements, but then it's like how can I optimize what I'm already doing? Kind of my story, you know. It actually led to me branching out into hormone replacement for people, peptide therapies, and I actually needed a physical location to be able to do that. So last year I decided to actually take my online business and put it into a brick and mortar in Atlanta, georgia.

Speaker 2:

So yeah, so it's been a journey for sure.

Speaker 1:

So I'm a big believer, like I said, in testing and in what we call functional nutrition and you said that at the beginning of the show. So what that is, it's a branch of functional medicine. So I'm not a doctor, I'm a holistic healthcare practitioner and nutritionist. So therefore we practice functional nutrition. It's doing blood work and understanding the body and what it's deficient in, and being able to really tailor someone's supplements and their food to help them lose weight, feel great, build muscle, heal the body, whatever it might be. So that's the whole premise of functional nutrition and really, jay, it's teaching people how to eat.

Speaker 1:

There's so much information. We're all overloaded with all this Try this diet, try this, do this pill, blah, blah. Or my friend Sally said this worked great, but it's slowing down to say, ok, I'm going to do blood work and I'm going to find out what I actually need to do from my own unique bio-individuality, and so that's kind of the premise of the clinic. It's testing, understanding and educating people on their numbers, what it means, and then coming up with a nutrition training protocol for them based on what their body needs versus what they've heard on a podcast or they've read on Instagram or so on and so forth.

Speaker 2:

Right, you know I love it because I think the path that you just described for yourself is something that we're kind of all going through as a culture. Perhaps I agree. I agree You're ahead of the curve, yeah, but I think it's still relevant for a lot of people you know who think, well, I need to get in shape, so I'll go to the gym, and they work out, and nothing changes on the scale. Then somehow someone tells them or they figure it out that they need to watch what they're eating. Oh, ok, I need to do that and things get a little bit better.

Speaker 2:

And then you're like yeah, I really like this. I feel good, I'm strong. I mean love it. What can I do now? What's better? And it's not an obsessive way, it's more like peeling the onion Does that make?

Speaker 1:

sense to you? It totally does. And it's a journey, right. And you're exactly right. Everybody starts somewhere in their journey, whether it's maybe they were overweight, or maybe they had some kind of health scare or whatever it is, or maybe there's just that light switch that kicked in that said, what am I doing? Right?

Speaker 1:

I have a lot of men that I work with that are like executives and things of that nature, that they worked so hard their whole entire life on their career but now their health's kind of gone to poo, and so now they're like, okay, I want to use this money that I've made to take care of myself, right. And so the whole premise is preventative healthcare because, unfortunately, the Western medicine you know that, that we all are traditionally exposed to it's sick care, right, they are there to medicate you when you are out of range on your labs, and until you're out of range, you're just good enough not to need medication and there's no malice at all. Right, if I need surgery, I'm super glad. There's anesthesia, right, super glad. And that's just not how they were taught, right?

Speaker 1:

So people like I exist to give someone a path, a guidance, when they're trying to optimize, like you said, peeling back the layer of the onion and you never end. There's no ending to this. Science is going to continue to emerge, right? Your body is going to heal. You're going to say, oh, let's optimize this, or let's optimize this right. Your body is going to heal. You're going to say, oh, let's optimize this, or let's optimize this, right. And so it's just really being somewhere where someone come and ask questions.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I want you to tell me, tell us what the path is. The journey is when someone comes to see you and they do this blood work and they do this test, and then I want to. I'm more than happy to give an example of my experiences regarding particularly my testosterone, which you revealed a lot of information to me, and I'm 61 years old and that's a big topic for a lot of men my age. Women my age have a lot of questions about hormones as well, and it really you opened my eyes a lot, so tell me what you know.

Speaker 2:

Johnson down the street comes to see you, and what do you do? What's the process?

Speaker 1:

So the ideal scenario is somebody comes in and does their DEXA scan, which, once again, it's the most accurate way. It's the gold standard in body composition testing. It'll let you know your bone mineral density and that's really important too. You don't think about it, but we need strong bones to be able to have autonomy later in life. You know I don't know about you, but when I'm 90 I want to be able to get in my car, go to the grocery store, buy my groceries, unload them and be strong and not worry about risking right. And if I do fall, my bones are strong enough to take it right. So, starting out, it's body composition testing and blood work right. So that would hopefully be like the first step of the of the um the process let me stop you.

Speaker 2:

When you say blood work are we talking about? I gotta go to the hospital for a month and you draw blood every day. Are you talking about you? Just take a few few, we take a few words like at the doctor, what's? What are we talking about?

Speaker 1:

yeah, so we start with just what we call a comprehensive blood panel, right, so we have our doctors will run some really basic stuff, some CBCs. They'll just run a lipid panel, a CMP, right. It's very basic right. But we go above and beyond with over 65 plus biomarkers and then also being able to test things, like I said, that the doctor's not normally going to test. And then also, too, our ranges in functional medicine and nutrition are very tight. So standard LabCorp, quest right, when you get tested you've got the sickest of the sick and the healthiest of the healthiest. The range is really big In functional medicine. We're looking at tight ranges. We want you optimal and you can actually detect if something is going awry far before it ever becomes a problem.

Speaker 1:

So that's the type of blood work that we start with and then having just a meeting with that person, the type blood work that we start with and then having a just a meeting with that person. There's usually an intake form they fill out and they sit down with me or one of my colleagues here and going over it and finding out who they are, where they've been and where they're trying to go right from there. It's reviewing their blood work, coming up with a supplement protocol, a nutrition protocol for them. Um, if any further testing is needed or wanted, we can. So that's super fun because then you get into gut microbiome mapping, you can get into cortisol testing, micronutrient testing, and then one of my personal favorites is food inflammation sensitivity testing. So food signals our body what to do and the food inflammation and the food sensitivity testing is going to tell this person exactly what they should eat for their makeup. Just because you can eat broccoli doesn't mean that I should. And a lot of times if we have sensitivities, it usually means that the gut is irritated and there usually needs to be some kind of healing protocol.

Speaker 1:

That comes into play. And it's not pharmaceutical, it's supplements, it's food right. So I think that, jay, that's kind of like the basis right. It's like coming in to get your body composition, coming in to do a comprehensive blood panel. We test this at tons of markers the doctors don't test Like, for instance, doctors test thyroid. They run TSH. We have six different markers for the thyroid that we run right. Hormone panels are usually like three things. We have about eight that we run for hormones right. So it's just taking a deep dive to get really granular and trying to find the root cause of what's going on with someone.

Speaker 2:

Now, when you say supplements, I think a lot of people automatically think of multivitamins at the Publix, you know, in Publix, with the vitamins and creatine and whatever else you can buy there. And I think the question that the general consumer often has is what am I? What is this? Is this any good? Is there any effect here? Or because I, you know, we don't really know if this stuff does anything. You're not talking about taking a men's multivitamin that I bought at Walgreens. You're talking about something that's much more sophisticated, right, Correct, yes.

Speaker 1:

So kind of some education on supplements. Right, they're not regulated by the FDA, right? And when you buy supplements you want to look for a GMP stamp and that means a third party has come in and tested that supplement to actually say what the company said is in the bottle is actually in it. Because there's not a lot of legality, right, that people can put stuff in it and sell it and you just don't really know what you're getting. Now, the other problem with supplements is some supplements are synthetic, so they are not bioavailable, so your body can't absorb them. A lot of the lines that we work with are bioavailable. They're made from food-based products, so your body recognizes it.

Speaker 1:

You know, I tell people if you come to my office, I have a giant bucket in my office I call it the supplement bucket of shame where people read it and we go through it and I'm like, do I throw it in the bucket or do I read it? Right, it's just educating now, right. Right, getting rid of the coloring in foods? Well, they're in supplements. So, like you know, I have clients that come in that are thinking they're doing a really good thing for themselves. They're taking their D and they're taking this, but you're putting little bits of poison in the body at the same time, right? So not all supplements are Supplements are created equal by far. Now there are some really great brands out there, but it's having the education, understanding what you're looking for.

Speaker 2:

Right, Okay, Good. It's not as simple as saying take all the supplements. And it's not as simple as saying supplements are bad. Don't take any supplements.

Speaker 1:

It's more like you really need to educate yourself, because the FDA doesn't do it.

Speaker 2:

I think they just approve whether or not it's going to kill you. Basically Is that correct.

Speaker 1:

There's something called GRAS, generally recognized as safe in the US. They don't have to actually prove that it doesn't cause cancer, they can just say it's generally recognized as safe, that's legal in Europe. They have to prove that this product is safe for human consumption. There's a lot higher up, you know, above our heads, stuff that's going on. I do think the pendulum is starting to swing the other way. I think that people are starting to be more in tune to like what they're actually putting in their body. Yeah, I think so.

Speaker 1:

Misconception, the misleading that's happened when it comes to supplements, and I want to say this to your viewers too. I have people that I meet that are like I don't need supplements and I'm like but you do. So let me tell you why and this doesn't come from me, this comes from I can pull, I guess, into a whole list of doctors and their quotes right, these are functional medicine doctors. They used to be cardiologists. These are educated people saying that you can absolutely not get what the body needs to perform optimally without supplementation. And my analogy is this Jay, you use your car insurance every day, but you don't think about it. But if you get in a car wreck, it's there, right? Yeah, so it's with supplements. We have some basic foundational supplements I always tell people to take and I'll tell you what those are in a minute, but it's having those input every day to make sure your bases are covered.

Speaker 1:

So, if your body needs to do some kind of chemical reaction or it needs to heal itself, or it needs to support some system in the body or fight off or elevate the immune system or fight off a bacteria or whatever it has, what it needs, so it's your insurance policy. So, unfortunately, the food that we have and the agricultural revolution and all the different things that have happened to our food over time just the quality of the nutrients is not there. So you know once again, uh, I believe that knowledge is power, right, if we know these things, you know, and it can be a rabbit hole for some people. It is. I like to think of it as a journey, right, just constantly like self-hacking and trying to feel how can I be better? How can I be better? Yeah, I just want to share that. It's like you know, I get so many people that always want to question well, why do I need supplements? Because it's car insurance. You need it in case.

Speaker 2:

And you mentioned in passing about the food industry. We don't really eat food anymore. You know, we eat crap out of boxes and bags and it's produced somewhere and maybe there might be some little itty bitty element of actual food in it, but a lot of it is not and so it's you know, the idea that I just get everything from what I eat, and what you eat is Hostess, Twinkies and Fritos. It's like yeah, no, that's not enough.

Speaker 1:

Well, even it even goes further than that too. So people who are, so I'm dubbed people optimizers, those Well, even it even goes further than that too. So people who are alive, so I'm done. People optimizers those are the people that are like into their health or trying to do the thing. Optimizers. Then you have the other genre that maybe you're symptomatic and they really need to heal their body Got something going on, Right, and their doctors told them they're fine, but I'm not fine, Right. So that's when we get in that root cause For the optimizers.

Speaker 1:

Even if you're eating vegetables and proteins and animal proteins and things of that nature, still they don't have the nutrients that they used to call it 40 years ago. But you're right. So we eat products as a nation, as a country. When I walk into a gas station, when I walk into Publix Crowe or wherever I see products, I see Nike shoes. You know what I mean. They're man-made, Our body doesn't recognize them and they inflame the body and create metabolic chaos. Yes, Body is just, it's all out of whack. But the cool thing is, like I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, is the body has an innate intelligence to heal itself. That's how it was designed right so we can just clear the path and put in the right inputs and usually support a little bit of supplementation and put in the right inputs and usually support a little bit of supplementation man, the body can do crazy amazing things At any age it's not, you're not too old for it because you're 60 or 70 or whatever.

Speaker 1:

No, not at all. Adopt healthier habits.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, it's really interesting the crap that we eat. It's really interesting the crap that we eat we as a culture now. So much junk food, so much ultra processed food, and we wonder why we're obese as a nation. It's not because we're, you know, necessarily lacking in any sort of self-discipline, although we might be, and that's a different conversation. The stuff that we put in our mouths from the grocery store is not food by and large, it's not.

Speaker 1:

It also causes a lot of blood sugar dysregulation. So a lot of people have a hard time controlling themselves around food. So, first off, there's food scientists that sit in a laboratory to try to figure out how we can make this super palatable. So they keep coming back for more, like that's their job. What was it pringles like. Once you pop, you can't stop right, like yeah, like that's like for real. That's what their job is.

Speaker 1:

And in nature there is no fat and sugar combined. Think about it. Where in nature do you get fat and sugar? Avocados don't have it. Animals don't have it, right, and so fat and it Right, and so fat and sugar combined. Think, hostess, twinkies, right, super palatable. And it just lights up the dopamine receptors in our brain. So we're like, yes, we want more. So even if somebody is trying to do the right thing and you know, control cravings they're having this dopamine hit, coming in right from these palatable foods and then then also too, because they're so processed, it's spiking our blood sugar. Our bodies bring it back down really quick. Now, when that happens and it goes below what we would just like a good baseline, then the body's like, hey, I need to eat. Blood sugar is too low, right, and that's that blood sugar roller coaster up, down, up down. So some people are fighting an uphill battle that they don't even realize and they're like well, why is this not working for me? It's because their physiology is out of balance.

Speaker 2:

And it's a struggle. What can we do people listening to this, who work in health and well-being and fitness, whose clients and whose prospects are not going to do what you're proposing, and maybe they don't have access or awareness or funds what have you to partake of someone like you in their community? But they can still do better than they're doing. So how can we communicate that to people without wagging our fingers and being scolds and telling them to put down the Pringles? You know the Diet, dr Pepper. That's bad for you. You know better, it doesn't work. Right's bad for you. You know better doesn't work Right. So what can a gym owner do? What can I do? What can you know anybody do to get their elderly mother to eat a little better? Or I don't know?

Speaker 1:

I think education is key, right? So let's say, I'm from a gym owner, right, I'm a gym owner, I could have educational seminars, meetings, right. And you can't just do one and two people show up, they're gone. That didn't work. You have to create the culture. You have to create the culture. We're gonna, we're gonna ride this till the camels come home. We're gonna help you with your food, right? Um, when I used to with clients and like, uh, personal training clients, uh, two decades ago, getting old jay, uh, tell me I was, I would tell people if it swam in the ocean, flew in the sky, grew out of the ground you can eat it, right.

Speaker 1:

Or the thing I hear a lot of times too is well, I'm just so bored with food. Well, no, there's no shame, there's no shame in that. But you are on this almost like drug addicted kind of back and forth with these processed foods and you have to just stop one and you'll go through a couple weeks of the detox. Right, we don't feel so great. That typically habit. Your energy is low, but as soon as that comes back, wow, like you feel like so good. But you know, I go back to the. I'm sorry I skipped around a little bit, but going back to, I get bored with my food.

Speaker 1:

So we are paleolithic beings. At one point in time we were running around with spheres and killing animals and foraging, right. And if we're paleolithic beings, think about that creature. There wasn't all of these options. We were super happy. We had some animals that we kill, maybe some nuts, some berries, some foliage, right.

Speaker 1:

And you know, I just think that people make it a really hard and they make it harder than it needs to be, and the social media and all the different things don't help. I would say we'll keep it super simple Eat real protein and every meal. Try to eat veggies at every meal. And if you're trying to lose weight, you minimize your carbohydrates. Right, and try to eat healthy fat. That is still an energy source. Right, and try to eat healthy fat. That is still an energy source. You can still. You can train the body by the inputs that you put in of what fuel you want it to metabolize and use. So if you keep putting in carbs, it's going to keep burning carbohydrates or utilizing carbohydrates, because anybody's like we are lazy, we are done, we're just going to keep giving, keep using what you give us, right. So it's harder for the body to break down fat in the beginning for fuel, but it can't, it absolutely can't. So you know, I think that it's.

Speaker 1:

The question is, how do we get people to? Maybe don't have the resources, or how do we get our client to? You know, jump on board with this. It's either hand-holding and making it really simple and trying to show them like, even on my social media. I'm trying to show some like, even on my social media and trying to show some of my meal, sometimes because it's like eggs, like eggs and avocado, like it's not fancy, it's not a recipe, it's just I need eggs, I need, I need protein, any healthy fat in this meal and we're done um one thing. That then there's no shame in this, but this is something that I've learned just in dealing with clients over the years is the biggest thing people tell me is they don't have time yeah that's me, but I give people grace upon grace.

Speaker 1:

I do, but you're always not going to have time. That's always going to be a thing. And being healthy is going to cost you one thing, and that is time, right. So can you grocery shop on a Friday, meal prep on a Saturday for four or five days, right, or whatever. So it's like you know, I give people grace, but in the same sense, we have to realize that most people's lives aren't going to get any slower, so we have to get a priority.

Speaker 2:

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Speaker 2:

It's our priorities and we don't even realize that we're making them priorities, because if we did, we would prioritize what we eat and we would prioritize our sleep and we would prioritize our health, and we do not do that. We say, oh, I'm too busy, and so I try to say for myself again, as just you know, I'm too busy to read a great work of literature this week, you know what? Because maybe I am, or I'm too busy to practice the piano this week, because I really wish I could play the piano. So gosh, if I just practiced every day I could do it. Right, what have you? I don't say I'm too busy to eat a decent lunch today, right, you know. And so I don't. I don't get it. I think we have to highlight, like you said, education, highlight to people. You're making a choice every, every time you put something in your mouth.

Speaker 1:

It's either going to make you better or it's going to make you worse.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and that's very, very simple. I'm simplifying that, right, but that's just kind of what I think about it that resonates with some people. So every bite, I'm like, okay, is this making me better, or is this going to make my cognitive function better? Is it going to help me with body fat? Is it going to help me achieve whatever goal? It doesn't always have to be aesthetics, but is it? Can what I'm eating get me closer to my goal? And you know the other. The other thing too, I think for people is you can't make it all or nothing. This is a journey, this is a marathon, not a sprint, a process, not an event. So it's baby steps.

Speaker 1:

Dr Mark Hyman, I love him. He's a great functional medicine ND. He wrote a book called the Sugar Detox, like a decade ago, 10-day Sugar Detox, and he starts out and I believe this and I use this with a lot of my patients is in with the good and out with the bad, right, so it's not totally revamping everything at first. But what good can I put on my plate? I mean spaghetti and meatballs. Can I add some broccoli to that? Cool, great, that's a great step Right. Then it's like what's next? Okay, well, I'm eating, you know my healthy grain cereal or grain free cereal with cow's milk. Can I put almond milk in there? Right, it's just, it's taking baby steps to kind of hash through and dig through because you're not going to change it all overnight.

Speaker 1:

I get some people that come in. They're like give me everything, right. But that usually doesn't work, you know. So it's just look at your life and figure out right off the top what do I, what do I know? For a fact I'm doing that's wrong, like no, there's no education to this. You probably know there's one life that you eat that was not that good, you know. You know, for me at one point this is silly, but when my kid was little it was graham crackers. I was like I would eat his graham crackers and I realized I was buying them for me and I'm buying them for him because he wasn't eating them, you know. So it's trying to identify little bits of things of what we can make, one small change at a time.

Speaker 2:

I'll tell you something. It's something that you brought up from my blood work when you did the panel on me. I believe you found correct me if I'm wrong that I was a little bit low in iron. Yes, which is interesting, because my partner had previously had his blood work done just a couple of weeks before and he was low on iron. Well, he's vegan. I'm not, but I guess I'm about two thirds vegan because he cooks most of the meals and I generally eat what he makes. So never occurred to me. I just said, oh, I'm eating all this food. It happens to come from plants instead of animals and it's affecting my you. You saw that, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was really interesting to me, and so there's all sorts of things that you can tell from from these numbers yeah, yeah, so interesting.

Speaker 2:

And then also I asked you oh, go ahead, I'm sorry, no, you go first. Well, I wanted to ask to talk about my testosterone a little bit, not because I have an issue with my testosterone, but because it illustrates a lot of these points. Okay, so I've had my testosterone checked with my annual in my annual physical every year since I turned whatever I'm 61 now. It's always been fine, I guess on the high end of acceptable. But, as you pointed out, the acceptable range is really broad. I don't know what it is, but let's say it's 200 to 800. And I was always around 650 or 700. So I didn't worry about it. And but as you get older, men start talking about these things. Testosterone is something that we talk about more than you know, you might imagine. And so you did a little bit deeper dive and found that, yeah, I'm acceptable, but I'm not optimal, right.

Speaker 2:

What is the difference for a man of my age? Not, I don't want to talk about me, I mean just me as an example of a fairly typical 61 year old person to be a little bit, you know, not optimal on something like testosterone.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so, first off, all men go through andropause, which is equivalent to our female menopause. Something happens. There's nothing you did to make it happen, right, it's just a natural way of life. Now, everybody's different.

Speaker 1:

I have a 36-year-old male in here with a testosterone of 167 is total, which is really low. So optimal range is going to be somewhere really between, holistically, 600 to 800. Really, if you're working with bio-dentical hormones and you're really trying to like push the marker, 800 to a thousand is where people usually feel like really good, you know. And so if you are a male and your testosterone is in the 400s, right, and you notice that your erection stiffness is not quite there, If you notice that the lack of libido is there, that dry, that ready to go and crush the day, energy levels drop, it's a good sign that you may need to get your hormones checked. And for you, Jay, you were in a good range like right, you weren't too too low. But I do think in the next few years you need to just watch it, because if you're getting lower into the 400s or something like that, then I think that it'd be a great idea to explore it. So biomedicine hormones are really protective for men and women. So for men, there's a decreased risk of cardiovascular events and strokes, right. And then also, too, it's a therapeutic dose. We're not doing bodybuilder doses, right. We're going to get you back to when you were in like your 20s and your 30s and you're like rocking and rolling right, Everything's great, and tell people. It's like we have the science to do it, right.

Speaker 1:

And for me, being a very holistic person, I don't like pharmaceuticals. This is probably the closest thing I do to a pharmaceutical, but it's something my body recognizes because it's bioidentical. And for females it's kind of the same thing. It's like you know the menopausal symptoms, hot flash and the weight gain and the mood and the skin dryness and the hair loss, all these things. It's like you don't have to suffer, you don't. We have the technology to balance them and replenish them and get you back into a place where you know you go live your life as society. We're living more and more years. We're going to have more Sagittarians people living to 100, than ever before in these next few decades. Right, and you can either just accept I'm getting old, which, I feel like, is what a lot of our parents did right. And there's well, I'm 40, I'm 50, I'm old, I'm like I am 40, and I feel like I'm 40, I'm 50, I'm old, I'm like I am 40 and I feel like I'm 20. It's just a number. Age is just a number.

Speaker 1:

So I think that it's very important to really check your hormones, and that's what we do too at the clinic, you know, is just really diving into that. And then the other piece, when it comes to hormones, that I think makes our practice a little bit unique is that we look at all four legs of the chair of the hormone cascade. So look at all four legs of the chair of the hormone cascade. So you have your sex hormones, your estrogen, your testosterone, your progesterone, Then you have thyroid hormones, Then you have cortisol and then you have insulin, right? So you've got to make sure all four legs of the chair are in balance. So your insulin making sure that you're not pre-diabetic, make sure that you're not constantly spiking your blood sugar, keeping it more even.

Speaker 1:

Your cortisol are you a stress ball at work, right?

Speaker 1:

Is there a way that you can mitigate some of that stress? Life's always going to be busy, but your perception is your reality. So can you reframe it to yourself? Can we take some ashwagandha? Can we try to like blunt that cortisol response? Can you not watch TV or work until you go to bed? Can you have a sleep hygiene routine where you know 90 minutes before it's bedtime you start winding down, you start turning lights off, you read a book, something of that nature, and then like the sex hormones right, Just knowing what your levels are and you know somebody could be at 600 and feel amazing for a male, for males, and feel amazing. Somebody else could be at 600 and just feel like crap, so, so different. And that's the thing that I think that I have to I would like to express to people is like we are unique. We are so unique and you can't base what you do with your help on what you heard or what you read. You have to have the data so that way you can actually measure it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, look, nikki I. I could keep asking you questions all day long, but I want to keep this respectful of your time and also the listeners' time and the people in Tandis.

Speaker 1:

I know that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, no, no, no. It's great, and I know we can't get into everything in one conversation, but tell people where they can go to learn more about this and to contact you if they're so interested.

Speaker 1:

Yes, absolutely so. We are building our website. It's going to go live in about a week. So we've been at the clinic now for almost three months. We're referral based only right now. But if you go to our website at wwwexperiencehealth so it's spelled with an X experiencehealth you can go on and scroll down to the bottom and just send me a message that says hey, what are you interested in learning more about? Right, give me your name, your email address, and then we can do a free consultation. Once the clinic is open and running to the general public, consultations will be paid. There'll be paid consultations, but for right now and for all your listeners. If somebody has questions, or they want to learn more about peptides we didn't even talk about peptides, it's a whole other caboodle of health or they want to learn more about the GLP-1 weight loss medication or hormones or nutrition or testing, just shoot me a message and then I will respond.

Speaker 2:

Both of those topics were on my list, nikki, peptides and GLP-1s.

Speaker 1:

But man We'll have to come back and do it again.

Speaker 2:

I have to do a part two, because it's too interesting, they go together.

Speaker 1:

They go together. The GLP-1s and the peptides go together because the GLP-1s are actually a peptide and, for your audience, your GLP-1s are your ozibank, your weight loss. It would go to your weight loss meds. They're not all created equal. Your body does make GLP-1s and there's a reason why most people are deficient and it makes sense that you know. If you're low in iron, right, jay, if you're low in iron, it doesn't make sense to supplement with iron. Or if you're low in vitamin D, it makes sense to supplement with vitamin D, right? If you have a gut that's disrupted and your GLP-1 acromantia bacteria is a little bit on the lower side, then you could supplement with it and bring your supplement to baseline. So there's that, and then peptides too. Like I said, it's a whole other kit kaboodle. It's getting the data, getting a solid foundation, and then it's optimization. So those are our three pillars here at Experience Health.

Speaker 2:

I love it and we will have to do this again because, like I said, I could ask you questions and I get the sense you could talk about it all day.

Speaker 1:

Call me crazy? No, not at all. Not at all.

Speaker 2:

Okay, well, nikki, thanks so much much.

Speaker 1:

it's been a pleasure, it's a pleasure. Yes, you can also follow me on instagram at nikki fit underscore fitnesscom. So nikki fit fitnesscom or at nikki fit underscore fitness. That's my instagram. You can see us there. We also have experiencehelp on instagram, but my website is probably gonna be the best way to get in touch with me.

Speaker 2:

Okay, ww experiencehelp and I will put all of those in the show notes so people can find them Wonderful, wonderful.

Speaker 1:

I appreciate you, Jay. You've got to come up and visit. You've got to come see me. You've got the DEXA scan on us. You've got to come to DEXA scan.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I want to get the DEXA scan. Okay, I'll be right up Okay.

Speaker 1:

See you.

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Jay Croft

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