Life's Curveballs: From Ultra Marathoner to Ultra Advocate

In this episode of InShock, Teresa sits down with Lisa Tamati—New Zealand’s best-known ultramarathon runner, certified genetics practitioner, founder of Aevum Labs, and one of the most relentless advocates you’ll ever hear from.

After completing 140 ultra marathons across some of the world’s harshest environments, including the Sahara, Gobi Desert, and Himalayas, Lisa’s life took an unexpected turn when her family’s genetic susceptibility to aneurysms forced her to redirect her extraordinary endurance away from racing and toward something even more personal—fighting for her family’s survival.

Lisa shares her incredible journey from surviving brutal desert expeditions and extreme endurance races to becoming a fierce medical advocate for her mother after catastrophic health crises, challenging medical systems, exploring cutting-edge health solutions, and dedicating her life to longevity, resilience, and health optimization.

This powerful conversation explores endurance, trauma, caregiving, genetics, advocacy, aging, and what it truly means to keep fighting when life demands everything you have.

If you’ve ever wondered how far determination can really take someone, this episode will leave you inspired.

Learn more about Lisa and her work:

•  Lisa Tamati: https://www.lisatamati.com/
•  Aevum Labs: https://aevumlabs.ca/
•  Understand Your Health Risks: https://yourhealthcompass.org/
• Podcast:  Pushing the Limits

Thank you for tuning in! I truly appreciate every one of you, whether you’re here for the first time or have been with me from the start.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:38

Hi everyone and welcome to the show. I am so excited for today's conversation. It's gonna blow your mind. This person is a force to be reckoned with. I have never met anybody like her in my life. And it was like having a conversation with a celebrity. You're gonna know why in just a couple of minutes. She has several documentaries out. She's done something that most of us could never even imagine. She trekked nearly 28 miles a day across 155 miles of brutal desert. Not only that, but she was carrying a 77-pound backpack and barely enough water to survive. That's exactly the kind of life that Lisa Tamati has lived. She's New Zealand's best known ultra-marathon runner, completing, check this out, 140 ultramarathons. Can you imagine? That's unbelievable. And these races spanned across some of the toughest deserts, the Gobi Desert, the Sahara Desert, and the Himalayas. Imagine just trying to do a hike through those areas. But here's the thing: you're gonna want to take notes during this conversation because it's packed with lessons, perspective, real insights, and what it truly means to push through some unimaginable moments in her life. Lisa is a certified genetics practitioner and founder of Avium Labs, a New Zealand biotech company focused on science-backed solutions for aging and immunity. So let's dive in. I didn't grow up and go, I'm gonna be an ultramarathon runner.

SPEAKER_01 2:30

That wasn't how it worked, sort of thing. As usual, there was a man involved. In my early late teens, early 20s, I met a young man who looked like Brad Pitt, and so I was highly motivated to follow him around the world and do lots of crazy things. And he was an extreme athlete and really amazing. Uh so that was the way I tumbled into this. I'd always been into sport. I I came from a very sporty family, and I had a father who expected a lot. So I'd he wanted us to represent our country no matter what, sort of thing, in a sport, and I'd failed him miserably because I'd failed at gymnastics. And so I always had this. I think I grew up in this like wanting to please dad, and then the boyfriend came along, wanting to please the boyfriend type of girl. And it wasn't the most illustrious start, really. It wasn't all about me, I'm a hard ass and I'm gonna go and do it, but it was more I felt fell into it. And as I was with this young man and we were together for five years, and he showed me the world, and we we did travel by bicycle through lots and lots of countries. And unfortunately, it wasn't the greatest of relationships, right? And we were young and stuff, and it was actually a very abusive relationship, and so that was it was tough. And what where it culminated in was that when I we'd been together for five years, and we were invited to do a crossing of the Libyan desert, which was an expedition. So this wasn't I wasn't into ultramarathons at this point, but we had done a couple of deserts, and we were invited to go and cross this desert with two other guys. One was a Yugoslavian survival expert by the name of Alvis, and that was his real name. And uh, he wanted to cross the uh the Libyan desert. Now, this is on the border of Libya, Egypt, and the most incredible desert, it's called the White Desert, and it's was at that time, this is quite a while ago, there was no maps of the area, nobody uh besides the local people had been in that place, sort of thing. There was no resources for us, but it was the most beautiful, incredible desert. And he'd been there 20 years earlier and he had seen some amazing stuff, and so he wanted to cross a 250 kilometre section of this desert. And so the four of us set off to do that, and it was a military bar zone, you weren't allowed in there, so we it was illegal, and we had to get out of in the middle of the night, and we had to be s fully self-sufficient, so we had to carry everything on our backs, which meant like 35 kilo backpack for me, even 40 kilos for the guys. We had 20 litres of water a day, and we were going to be out there for up to 10 days, so we only had two litres of water a day. So if you do the math, 45 odd kilometers a day is what we ended up doing, and we had only two litres of water a day and 40 odd degree temperatures at the highest point of the day, and so that math doesn't add up, to be quite honest. Like two litres is not enough water to survive because it's so hot, yeah. So you need like nine, ten litres a day at that sort of exertion, but we could not carry more than two liters a day because we could not carry it physically, and there was nothing en route that we knew of, so we had to be self-sufficient. So we naively ran off into this desert and did the incredible thing. And the dehydration was absolutely horrific. I really so when you're dehydrated, your temper is very short, you're struggling. Um, and the boyfriend and I, as I said, he ha wasn't the nicest of people really, and he was very abusive. And this was the first time we'd been in a the company of other people. And so the other guys were like, hang on a minute, you can't talk to her like this, this is not appropriate. And he was wanting me to help him with the photography because we were gonna do a book and to set up shots, and Elvis is like, you can do as much photography as you like, but we're going 45 kilometres a day because we need to, and you've got to keep up. So if you want to do that, fine. And he was like, Well, you need to run ahead and set up tripods and do things, and I'm like, I can't. Like, I'm at my limit. Um, I weighed about 59 kilos, and when you're putting a 35 kilo backpack on, I couldn't even get up without help, and I could only go forward and I couldn't do that. And so I had to keep up, and so he was yelling abuse at me and how useless I was because I couldn't do this, and the guys were like, hang on, that's not right. You can't do that, you can't talk to her like that. And so the whole thing in the group was really bad. The vibe in the group, and it got worse and worse as the dehydration got worse, as our fatigue got worse a couple of days, Tempest got even more afraid, and these two alpha males basically went at it, and verbally, not physically, but they were having a go. And on day four, in the middle of the heat, in the reverse time of the day, the boyfriend says to me, Look, the relationship's over, I'm out of here, I'm leaving you, you stay with them, I'm gone. And he packs up his bag and he disappears over the sand dunes, a five-year-long relationship, right? And I'm in the middle of a desert, in dire straits, emotionally broken because my relationship's falling apart. I'm also in a dire situation, I've got to survive. And that wasn't obvious at this point that we were gonna survive, right? And so I started to fall apart, and then I'm like, I've got to pull myself together because I can't worry about him, I can't worry about the relationship and where I'm gonna live and how I'm gonna survive when I get home. I've got to survive now. And so I really learned in that moment really to compartmentalize what I need to do for the next day or two or three and put aside the trauma, the problems that are gonna hit me when I get back for later. And you know, cut a long story short, I we did make it out and obviously I wouldn't be here otherwise. But it was a very severe, and I had massive health problems. I got to a point of dehydration where I was hallucinating, where I was passing out uh on day six, and it was really touch and go. And when we did get out, it took me two years to recover. I had massive damage to the nerves in the upper body from the weight of the backpack, a scoliosis in the spine. I had kidney damage, I was physically and and then emotionally, of course, as well, because the relationship was falling apart, and I was living in Austria with him at the time, so that was a big upheaval for me as well. So, yeah, that was the start of things. And so it took me two years to recover from that and get out of the relationship and put my life back together again. And then I'd lost the person, though, that I had done all these adventures with, and I wanted to carry on having adventures without the extremeness of what he was into. And so I heard about a race in Morocco called the Marathon de Sables, which is a famous ultra marathon. And this is a similar distance, 240-odd kilometres across the Sahara, but you had only 10 kgs in your backpack, and you had nine litres of water a day, and you had doctors and you had airplanes and you had helicopters, and it was but it was like safer. That never I never even run a marathon, but I decided to sign up for it because I compared it to the Libyan desert, and I thought, I think I can do this, and it was touted as the toughest race on earth, and I'm like, that's a piece of cake compared to the Libyan desert, so I think I can do this. So I signed up and managed to get down there, and I had an absolute ball, Theresa. I just loved it. And I did really well, and I was in the top five women for most of the race, and it did come out really well at the end. And that was the beginning of the end. I was hooked then because I was surrounded by all these positive, amazing people, which at that time I needed a lot of positivity in my life, and people telling me that I was doing really well and it was amazing, and oh wow. So because my ego had been crushed from the little nuts relationship, I needed a lot of that positivity and yeah, you're doing really well type of stuff. So that sort of really boot me up, and then I just did one marathon after the other or ultra marathon after the other after that. So yeah, that's how I got into it. I think there was a part of me that wanted to prove to him that I wasn't useless and that I could do stuff, and that I want to prove to myself, probably more or less, that I was capable of stuff. And it turned out I don't particularly have any talent for this type of thing. I remember years later I was preparing to do the Badwater Ultramarathon in America in the US Day which is a very famous race in the ultramarathon world, and I went to a bunch of scientists up in Auckland and they did some testing on me, and they said, if you're a young athlete coming to see whether you're suited to this, we'd tell you that not to give up your day job. You've got a very small lung capacity, you've got a very low VO2 max, you're not suited to this stuff. So, you know, you and I said, luckily nobody told me that earlier because I did get to number 10 in the world at one point. It wasn't about talent, I had none, but what I did have was determination and perseverance and experience by that point, but done so many that I got quite good at it. And I was very good at pacing myself and I was very good at fighting on, like just grinding it out. So what I would find in most races, if they were particularly long, then I'd do really well. If they were races, I wouldn't do that well because I was quite slow. But the longer the race went, the better I did because last one standing sort of thing. Yeah. Not last one, one of the few last ones standing. And so you do quite well. And so it was all about pacing and grinding it out and not going out too fast at the beginning and really timing things out. And I remember doing a race in Gobi Desert, and I did a big speech in China to a group of runners before we did this race, because I had done quite a lot at that point, and uh and one of the guys said to me on day two of the actual race, he said, I thought you'd be really good and really fast because you'd had so many experiences and just like you're just where I am. What's up with that? And I'm like, You wait, mate. Good for you. I love that. Just wait. Like, we're at the beginning. This race has not started. Right. And then on day four of this race in the Gobi Desert, you have this long stage. So everything prior to that long stage means nothing. Like it's short and shorter, and it's you you you haven't had the big day. The big day is the one that you want to reserve all your things for because that's when it can go south. So I knew that, of course. And that's exactly what happened. On day four, I was in the middle of the pack. By the end of day four, I was at the top of the pack because I knew that day was coming, and I knew how to work that day, and that day was particularly tough. And the other days weren't tough. We had people die on that race, die the day before, before the long day. So it was a really tough race. But that, and then afterwards he says to me, I get it now. I get it now. I I totally get it.

SPEAKER_00 14:29

Yeah, you're like, dude, slow and steady wins the round.

SPEAKER_01 14:32

Yeah, I'm turtle. I'm definitely the tortoise or the turtle. Yeah, I'm not I'm not the hat. So there was a period of time in my life where I just was as many as I could fit in to around my work and my daily life, sort of thing, and how many however many my body would take. And uh so there was a number of years, probably 12, 13 years, where it was just like as much as I could. And then as I got older it started to get more difficult and stuff, and then there were slightly less. And the last one that I did was when I was 48, and I haven't done one for the last few years, and there's a reason for that, which we'll get into a little bit later, what happened to my mum's. So that was the sort of the end of the career when I had a family member go down. But I'd also done so much, and when I look back over that time, by the end of the career, my body was starting to fail, and I was starting to have massive problems. It was no longer conducive to being healthy, and I was getting more and more into health and longevity and aging because when you're young, you're bulletproof, right? You don't think about aging, and then all of a sudden it hits you in the face. You're in your 40s and you're like, aging. Yeah, that thing happened. It's starting to happen. Okay. So it changed my focus. And now, yeah, I'm very much into health and longevity and anti-aging and slowing the clock down and health optimization. So yeah, there was a bit of a transition period there, which wasn't easy either. You you do get to a point where you have to move on from what you have always done. Doing more of the same doesn't bring you anything more, and you've got to recognise those times as well, I think. When I was 48, so a decade ago, my mum collapsed on the floor one night and uh was rushed to the hospital, and we got that horrible phone call that you all dread, right? We get up to the hospital, the ambulance driver thought she was having a stroke or an aneurysm or something of that nature. And the doctor at the hospital decided, no, she's just having a migraine and left us there. And uh it turns out we were waiting there for six hours and nothing was happening. And so I rang up a friend who was a paramedic because I knew something major was wrong. I knew that my mum was in screaming pain and nobody was helping us. And she came up and she went, she's having a neurological event, and she went to this doctor and ripped shreds off him and told him to get a CT scan, and she worked with him so she could do that. And he did the CT scan and it came back massive bleed in the brain, like huge, which they didn't think she was going to survive. Uh and we were in a regional part of the country, so we had to wait for an air ambulance, which took another 12 hours, longest day of my life, waiting to for them to get her down to Wellington where they could operate. And uh this was a first for me medical misadventure, and uh and it put me on high alert of that you can't just hand over the reins and you're the doctors and you know what you're doing. This was very much a bit of a slap in the face from that perspective as well, is the fact that Mum was in dire straits. And I remember bargaining with God in the universe that if I was given a second chance, I would do whatever it takes to get her back. Just don't take her, don't don't let her die. And uh so I started to study as much as I possibly could. And when I do something, I go full bore. And with mum, of course, it was highly motivated. And in the first couple of weeks I couldn't do much because she was in critical condition. And but we could watch, we could have a 24-hour vigil, which they didn't like in the hospital either. But we did, and we started to pick up things, or I started to pick up things that the doctors had missed, and there was a couple of situations there where I was able to point out something that then they could do something about because they had they're busy, they've got lots of patients. So you need to be on the ball when you can't just leave it up to them to do it all right. They the humans as well, they they're tired, they've got a million patients, they don't have the resources often, all of these constraints. They're also looking at whether you're a good bet, and at 74 with a massive aneurysm, you're not a good bet. So you've got to fight as a family for the resources that you need. Um eventually, after a few days, she went into a coma and they rushed her into the ICU and they had her in a normal neurological ward prior to that. And then I saw what they could actually do when you're in ICU. There was a lot more things that were available, and I'm like, why the hell was she not here from the get-go? And that again gave me that reinforce that you've got to really fight for the resources, you've got to know what you're doing, you've got to study hard. So yeah, I was just going hyper-vigilant and studying as much as I possibly could. I'd steal the nurses' books and read everything about every drug that they were giving her, and I was that person that you like, particularly in hospital, got in trouble a few times, didn't care. Um, they did manage to stabilize her, and after three weeks she came out of the coma, but she was, and they said, look, she's gonna survive, but she's massively brain damaged there, is basically like a baby. She's never gonna have any quality of life again. And we'll take her back through to New Plymouth, but we'll try and do some rehab, but she's pretty much buggered, basically. And they brought her back and they put her through uh what they called a rehab program, which was a complete and utter waste of time. And but in this time, I'm starting to study and get my feet around what my head around what's going on and learning. And I started to see in my mum something that I'd experienced. I'd done a lot of racing in altitude, I'd had altitude sickness before. Um, and I was noticing that there was a proliferation of bacteria in her body and that she was not getting enough oxygen. And I said, I think she's got a lack of oxygen, I think she's got sleep apnea, it was the connection that I made, and that she's not breathing. So I said to the doctors, I want a sleep apnea assessment, and they said, No, why would we do that? She hasn't got sleep apnea. And I said, She's got sleep apnea, I'm pretty damn sure, but I'm seeing all the same signs that when I had altitude sickness. So luckily I had a friend who was a consultant, and he was a sleep apnea consultant, a sleep physiologist, and I smuggled him into the hospital one night and we did a sleep assessment on her when they weren't watching. And the following morning we took the sleep reports back and he had looking at severe sleep apnea, and she was chainstoke breathing, which is what you do just before you die usually. And she was stopping breathing hundreds of times a night, and then she was not getting any oxygen, so there was no way she was going to recover anything when she wasn't getting enough oxygen. So that was my first win, because then they went, Oh, okay, she has got sleep apnea, and then we put a sleep apnea machine on her, and she started to have a little bit of a response slowly over the next few weeks and months, but nothing wild in the factor. But that was my first win. She would she didn't die for a status because she was heading that way. And then I had to fight the system to take her home. They wanted to put an institution into somebody else's budget. When you take her home, the hospital's still responsible for her home care as well, so you stay in their budget, and they didn't want that. They wanted her to go into another institution and be out of their budget, and so I was really battling for resources, and I wanted to take her home and I needed some support because she was 24-hour care, two people around the clock. And I had this horrible social worker who would not agree, and so I brought my brother with me to all the meetings, and my brother is looks like the rock, and he would just accompany me to all the meetings, and we eventually got what we needed to neck to doing mark, but just his presence because I was being pushed around as a female. I was being pushed around by this. Yeah, and so when I rocked up with my my I had two brothers, and sometimes I'd bring one, and sometimes I'd bring two, and sometimes I'd bring both of them and dad, and I eventually got what I wanted, which was to take her home and to have some support at home for a couple of hours a day with care at home to support us in that transition period. And I remember having a fight with the social worker, and he was like, You're gonna be back here begging for my help in two weeks. There's no way you're gonna cope with it. And I threw my two books at him because I'd written these two running books, and I said, This is who I am, and I'm not bloody giving up on my mother, and she's not going into an institution. And so, yeah, this was the battle that went on. The day I got her out of the hospital, I'd been researching something called hyperbaric oxygen therapy, which you may have heard of. And I read a book by an American doctor, Dr. Paul Harch, who had amazing, miraculous recoveries of people with brain injuries in similar situations with hyperbaric. And so I'm like, oh my god, this is something I could, this could be it. This could help. So then I had to find a hyperbaric chamber, and there was none in my town that I could find. There was no clinic. But I came across a commercial dive company that had one of these things for dive accidents because it's the same thing. Yeah. And so I went to this dive company and I said, Hey, look, this is my situation, and this is my mum, and this is my research on it, and how and the guy knew a lot of the research. These were hyperbaric guys, they knew how how powerful this was. And these incredible people said, Yes, you can, as long as we get legal waivers, you go to the lawyer, we'll sign the contracts, you know, your responsibility, and you can use chamber, which was absolutely amazing. So the day I got her out of the hospital, I didn't even go home. Well, she was in a wheelchair, and after three months, and we Took her straight down to the this factory, if you can imagine a factory, and then we had to work out how the hell do we get her in? She's paralyzed, she can't move, she doesn't. We've got to get her in this what looks like a big LPG cylinder, very difficult to get into. And so we got a forklift and we stuck her on a patient carry thing on a forklift and we maneuvered her into this hyperbaric chamber. And my dad and I were went in there with her and we had to have her on this big oxygen mask because this is a commercial setup. This is not a clinic setup. This is made for divers who are and we did the protocols. We were in there for an hour at a time. And after 33 treatments, we went there pretty much every day for 33 days. She started to respond. She's starting to have a flicker of intelligence. She's having words, she's starting to move her right heart because she was paralyzed on the right side when they'd done a an operation that caused the stroke as well. So she was completely paralyzed on the right side. She started to move her right hand, and she wasn't getting up and walking, but she was responding. And I'm like, oh my god, this is working. And then the guy said to me, Look, I'm sorry, we're gonna have to take the chamber off on a contract. Um, you're gonna lose access to it. So I'm I was devastated. I was just like, so then I started to research how do I buy one? And so I mortgaged my house and I bought a hyperbaric chamber and I installed it in the house. And this was a mild hyperbaric chamber, so the smaller ones. And then I'm like, How the hell do I get her in there? Because once again, she's still paralyzed, right? I can't get her to stand up and hop in. So we my brothers and I, we worked out a way to get a hoist and we'd get her in there, and then we would fight to do this every day, and she put through session after session in this hyperbaric chamber. And as she started to do that, she started to have she slowly started to come back little bit by little bit. And in this time, I'm also studying everything else. I studied functional neurology, the keto diet, she was on a massive amount of supplements, everything that I could possibly do. She couldn't move her body, so I moved it for her every day to keep her joints going and do doing all the things that I needed to do to keep her mobilized as I could. And then I had she had no vestibular system, so she was like a jellyfish. She had could not even sit without just flopping over. She couldn't find her mouth to put food in properly. So I had to teach her all of those things how to put food in your mouth, you know, how to chew, how to sit straight. Thousands and thousands of hours of rehabilitation training, retraining the whole brain from basically being a baby to like the the couldn't crawl, but she went through those phases that a baby would go through in learning to stand and walk again. And it took me it took me about 15 months to put to get her standing in between parallel bars, and she was able to stand, like she knew where she was in space. And then it took a few more months for her to be walking, and then it too just over two and a half years, I had her back to full capacity, full driver's license, full language, full mental capacity again, walking three to five Ks a day, going to the gym every day, back to her pretty much former self, a few deficits pretty much back. And I wrote a book about this called Relentless, and it was a miraculous story, but it wasn't a miracle, it was an absolute grind. If I hadn't been an ultra marathon runner that knew how to grind out training and grind out through thousands of hours of training, I don't think I would have had the perseverance to carry on because she would have an improvement and then she would plateau for two months, nothing happening, and then we'd go up a step and again. And that's what I've noticed with biology is that you have plateaus and then you have a step up. And as athletes, you and I know that happens with training, but it's the same thing with rehabilitation and illness that your body does like a catch-up phase, and you might see nothing happening on the surface, but underneath your body is doing things, it's catching up. Right. And you'd have another step up and another step up, but most people give up in those plateaus, they don't see any progress and they start to give up, and that's where most people come unstuck. But because I'm such a obsessive person, yeah, obsessive with oh my now we're a decade in, and unfortunately, that was only round one, Teresa. Unfortunately, I got it back, and five years, five years into after her original aneurysm, everything's really good, and then my dad goes down, and my dad who and I had my dad had been like the superman, like he was just like fit and strong, but he smoked and he ate bad, and he and I could never get dad to change, and I was so focused on mum, I didn't see dad going down, and unfortunately, he had a aortic aneurysm. So aneurysms run in our family really badly. So when I've studied genetics since, and now we I know that we all have this particular gene that means that we're very prone to aneurysms and strokes, and we have to really be aware, and that was one of the reasons why I quit ultramarathoning as well, because of this gene. So my dad collapsed, and I had a massive battle in the hospital to try to save his life. He survived this incredibly most people don't survive five minutes with an uh aortic aneurysm. He survived 16 days, and I had a massive battle in the hospital because I knew the research around sepsis, and my dad developed sepsis from the after the operation, and I knew that intravenous vitamin C in very high doses uh had been shown by Dr. Paul Maricks to drop the mortality rate in half, and I was fighting in the system to get him intravenous vitamin C, which you wouldn't think would be that hard, right? Why not? If someone's dying, why the frick can't you do what you need, you want to try? And I couldn't, I was up against the ethics committee for trying to battle these bastards. There's no other word for them, and they just going, no, we're not doing it. There'd been another case in New Zealand where a farmer had developed uh whiteout on the lungs, and he had his family had advocated for intravenous vitamin C and he'd got it and he'd survived. And this had caused a massive ruckus. There'd been a documentary, and so they didn't want another one of these cases. And I was fighting like cats and dogs to try to push them through to try to let me do this. Each day my dad's dying, and I'm standing at his bedside trying to fight for him, and these bastards are not letting me. It took me 14 days to get permission to do the vitamin C, by which time he was in multiple organ failure. And you know, it w it was really too late, but I still did it. I had a GP. We found a loophole in the law where my GP could come in and administer the the IV vitamin C. And after the first one, he started to turn a corner. And then they said, That's it, you've had your vitamin C. And I was like, No, we need this every six hours. This is the protocol. Right. And it turned his things around, like his he was off the noradrenaline, the things that were keeping him going. And then they she could only come up, the doctor could only come up twice a day because before and after clinic, so every 12 hours. And then they did tricks on me. She'd come up and they'd pull me out of the room and say that another doctor down the hall needs to see me. I'd go out and then she'd come in and that they'd tell her that there's no line available. And she said, What's that line? And she said, That one's for emergencies only. I was like, What the fuck? This this is an emergency, but they played these tricks because they wanted him dead and gone. Because they didn't believe he was going to and so I didn't trust them at all because I knew he was costing them a lot of money in the ICU and that that they didn't believe he he was savable at that point. But only when the GP said to me, Now I've seen the values and now he is beyond saving is when I I believed her. I believed her, I didn't believe the others at all. Yeah. And um no, and if I'd had that earlier, maybe would have we would have saved him, maybe we wouldn't have. But I was robbed of that chance, and then the anger from that to to go through that and to watch my dad die in my arms just makes me so angry. Yeah, so angry. Everything I've been through with my mum, and then of course, off the back of my the trauma of losing my dad, my mum developed brain cancer. Oh no. Then I was at the and they said this is terminal brain cancer, there is nothing you can do. She's going to die in a few weeks, and there is nothing you can do. Well, that was now coming on four and a half years ago. And I've written a book about cancer and she hasn't got any. And she's had since other problems, hip fractures and sepsis and pretty much everything COVID, everything else known to man, and she's got disabilities now, but she's still alive and she doesn't have cancer. The original time when this happened, my mum's face dropped on the right side, and I thought she was having another stroke. I raced her into the hospital, and they said, Oh no, she's fine. They did a CT scan, they couldn't see anything. They sent me home and I said, I want an MRI because she is definitely doing something, and and they would not give me an MRI. You you couldn't make this shit up, really. So for Stephen Habit, like they like this was obvious that her face was dropped. Like there was an obvious neurological thing going on, and they would not give me an MRI. So for three weeks I fought to get an MRI, and eventually I got through to a radiologist, and she just said, get up here and tomorrow morning at eight o'clock before we open, I'll put you through. And so she beat the rules and got me in and got mum through the MRI, and then it came back with brain tumours. Half of her brain was covered in tumours, one big one, the size of a grapefruit. And I chased the neurosurgeon that had operated on her previously around the country until I got him on the phone. And which is not easy to get a neurosurgeon on the phone. I did, and I said, Do you remember Isabel? Because I had sent him a copy of my book and stuff, and he goes, Of course I remember Isabel, what's wrong? And I said, She's got tumors in the brain, we don't know if the cancer, or he said, get down here on Tuesday, I'll operate. And so two, two, three days later, we were down in Wellington, they operated. He took out that one huge tumor, and we didn't know whether she'd survive that operation, but she did. I remember coming into the room after the operation and she's what's with dinner, and I'm like she could still talk and she was like with it. And uh, they did an incredible job, these surgeons. But their pathology came back in aggressive CNS lymphoma in the brain, and that there was then nothing you can do, no chemo, no nothing that would help. And so I did advanced genetic testing. So there's something called RGCC, which is a test that you can do that looks at what you'll be sensitive to, so from a supplement perspective, but also a chemo and immunotherapy perspective for your particular type of cancer. And so I did this advanced genetic testing. I put 15 doctors on her team. Luckily, I had the podcast, so I was able to reach out to the people that are in the cancer space that could advise me. I spent we sold a house, I spent a house on saving her.

SPEAKER_00 34:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:58

And it took us 12 weeks to get rid of the tumours on the MRI. They were all completely gone. And I did both sides of the at that point because she was so advanced with the cancer. I did do the I did a chemotherapy. They didn't offer me one, they said there was none that would help, but I did that testing and it told me exactly which one would help. So I decided to put that one in. I had to fight to get that, of course. I had to go all over the country to try to get that. Did and an immunotherapy called Rituximab, so I did that, and that was very damaging to her, and we still pay the consequences for that. But at that point, it was either you're dead in the next few weeks, so I had to debulk the cancer while I went down the natural path at the same time, if that makes sense. So doing I also did off-label drug combinations that block the the work of Jane McClellan type of stuff that can block the food to the cancer, as well as a very strict keto diet, all of the above. And the damage was done from the chemo that she has sustained. She's now got hydroscephalus, so water on the brain. And that's probably the aftermath of both the aneurysm and the cancer. But and so her balance is very poor now, so she needs to be supported when she's walking. She can't walk on her own anymore, unfortunately. So we're joined at the hip. We can't go in there. But we she still has a very good quality of life. We still go to the gym every day, we still go out to cafes and she meets her girlfriends and all of those things, hangs out with the grandchildren and all of that sort of beautiful stuff. She has got these impairments now because two years ago she also broke a hip, and that was another major setback. Right. Um but through all of this, it's 10 years, and she's now 84. That's 10 years longer that we've had together, and hopefully a lot more. Yes. And I'm still fighting every day. Now it is 24-7 care around the clock, and it's only me now, because my darling dad is gone. Um and it's hard, it's tough, it's really tough, especially when you're trying to run companies and yeah. Do all the stuff that you do and trying to stay fit and healthy yourself and not die as well. And that's why I focus so much on longevity now. Like after all the stuff that I learned in her journey for her, but also for myself, I've very much focused on the longevity sciences and what's happening in this space, and now that's my absolute passion is to try to help people. So I have a consultancy and I have a biotech company where we focus on immunosinescence, the aging of the immune system, have the podcast that's been going now for 11 years and write books and do speaking and that type of thing. But it's just like you, Teresa. You just you want to help people after you've been through something like this, right? You find purpose in those moments. Oh, thanks, Teresa. I'm no angel. Believe me, Elo, like I sound like that sound great, but I can be the shittiest, crumpiest person that you can possibly imagine that to say it it's totally you're you're battling not only the disease or the problem that your loved one's got, but you're you're battling on every medical front that you can possibly think. And then every after a period of time, pretty much everyone abandons you, like as far as help is concerned. Yeah and they have to go back to their lives and stuff, but you're left alone still trying to do it. And there are days when I break, like that because it's 24-7, like it's day and night, and day and night. And I live for these types of interactions because I get to be professionally still involved in the world through this beautiful technology that we have and connect with wonderful people like yourself and share the story, still have an impact on the world while I'm still here, hearing from my mum who's in the next room, you know what I mean? Right. And so that's really important to me because I have a drive to still be involved in the world, but I can't actually I can't travel, I can't leave her for more than an hour. So I can't hop on a plane and go over and see Teresa and meet you or go to a conference or or to go away for 24 hours. Occasionally I do, but it's uh it's like uh war planning to to manage it, get everybody together to try to yeah, and because I'm she has to be moved every hour of the day because she has to keep her ability to walk going, and her brain goes to sleep all the time if she doesn't. So it's as soon as I get off this podcast, we're off to the gym. So the way we work it is I put mum into a machine, like a leg machine or something, and we do one set and then I'm over there doing two sets, three sets, and then back to her one set, and then me three sets. Yeah. We're quite famous at the gym, I think. People think we're nuts, but uh and I think people often look at me training her and they're like, Oh my god, she's so nasty and mean and tough and to her. Why doesn't she just let it be? But if I do, the she won't die. There's no there is no it's a tough love situation where I have to be tough on her. I have to make her move. She doesn't want to move. She just wants to sit because she feels safer and all the things. But if she doesn't move, I know what happens to a body that doesn't move. When you go through the hip things and the brain things, I know that within days your break your skin breaks down, you start to get infections, you start to get pneumonia. I know that route. I know very, very well. And so I'm not going we're walking whether you like it or not. We're training whether you like it or not. And uh, she's a trooper, she's a real trooper. Totally, she's a fighter. She just doesn't doesn't even entertain the thought of not. Yeah. Doesn't no I don't I think me in her position, I wouldn't be as strong. I would not be as strong. Having lost the love of my life and going through what I would go through what she's been through, I don't think I would have that strength of character that she has. She's now I'm not going anywhere. You're an you can't people would often say to me, You've got to take care of yourself, and I do actually laugh because there is no way. All I can do is put in good inputs, good food, try to get enough sleep, which is not easy when you've got to get up three or four times a night. Yeah. And try to do the things, do the breathwork, do the whatever it takes, have the cries. I've got a wonderfully supportive husband, I'm very lucky. So in that aspect. So get out of nature every second that I possibly can. Um do the self-care things that I can do, but that's not very much. And when people say to you, you've got to take care of yourself first and foremost, no. I take care of my loved ones first. Like that for me, i if I leave if I prioritise myself, she wouldn't be here. There there is you have to, it's like a mother with a newborn baby. Mum can't leave the baby in the cot. They can't just walk off and I'm going, I'm gonna have a rest and go and get my hair done. It doesn't work. So you are on. You can hope that you get support from family and friends, but if you don't, and I don't particularly, um then you are it. And my heart I'm a husband. My husband is just freaking wonderful. Shout out to him. He's gold. He puts up with it a lot. Having your mother-in-law in the house for a start is tough, let alone one with high needs. Yeah, yeah. So uh all the blessings on him really is he's fabulous. Yeah, I'm very lucky. Yeah, I would say to people if you know someone who is a caregiver of a disabled person or their elderly parents or whatever the case, or a child, reach out to them, ask them what they can do, and if they say nothing, make them some nice food, do something, give them a break, I don't know, or whatever you can think of that they could do, even though they won't ask for it, probably, because they probably really need to know that there are people out there supporting. The other thing I think is that we can achieve far more than what the experts tell us we can achieve. Never ever, when I hear a doctor of times there is nothing you can do, and you have to accept this, and she's dying, and there's whatever mum just comes out and goes, Oh, whatever, they don't know you, and they don't know your friends and your people, and I'm not listening to that. And then no pressure, that there's no pressure. You've got to sort it out. But we will all die, and I've lost my dad, I've lost a baby as well. And like I've seen I've been through and I've seen I've lost. I've also seen miracles happen, I've also seen people beat the odds, like yourself or like mum, who have come out the other side who were not meant to be here ten times over. And so when an expert says that too in your head that we're in a time that is like never before, there are breakthroughs happening on the daily in the science world, in the medical world. There is probably someone out there with an answer to your problem. They just haven't been allowed to tell you about it, which is a lot of that things, or it's not yet well known, but you need to go dig and you need to believe and you need to fight. You also need to understand that natural supplements and natural foods and things like that have a massive healing power. And they're not given that much credit because we all think, oh, it's all if it's not a drug, it's not powerful. Rubbish. The natural supplements can be as powerful as the post-powerful drugs. They're just not allowed to be told and sold in that manner. And my website does battle every day with Google about what it's about to allow to say and can't do and whatever. Like even being banned for having my book out there because of the story. The censorship is real. Just know without going down a conspiracy hole or anything. Yeah, we could definitely go down. But why? Because we've actually lived it and we've actually seen it and we've actually seen the lies and the corruption and the deceit and the bullshit and the narratives and the so don't believe everything. Don't be gullible, don't hand over your health to anybody. Be the CEO of your health and believe that you can get there because that is half of the battle. When you have a mindset like mum's, then you've you're already on the winning side. And then if you've got a team member that's willing to fight with you, then you're lucky. And uh together, me and Mum have achieved miraculous things, and we squabble and we fight every day, but we just get on and we love each other to bits. So I'm very blessed to still have her, and she's been a wonderful mum. And there are times when I'm like rush and it's it's better than the alternative, isn't it, Teresa? Because it's not easy when you lose. And just paying attention to your own health with wearables, with tracking, like tracking things like your HRV, that can give you a really early warning sign that if your HRV is going down that there's something maybe off inside your body before it actually shows in the way of symptoms.

unknown 45:47

Um

SPEAKER_01 45:48

Um, so that's a really good one to to do. And then also just tracking your blood, like knowing what your blood trends are doing over time, putting them all into a spreadsheet, get the AI to help you. Watch that trend data because your blood sugars going up over time, but you're still in the normal range, but they're going up. That's already an indication that you're heading towards maybe pre-diabetes or diabetes or when you need to change a diet or whatever the case may be. So I like looking at trend data in blood. I've developed an app called yourhealthcompass.org, if anyone wants to check it out. It is just 14 questionnaires, scientifically validated questionnaires that are give you an early warning sign. So you take these two minutes each test, and for Parkinson's multiple sclerosis, prostate, breast cancer, asthma, lupus, autoimmune, these types of things, you take it, you do the questionnaire, and it will give you either a low, medium, or high risk score. And if you come back with a high risk score, all it means is that you need to go and do some further investigations and find out is there actually something going wrong? Because these are all based on symptomology and lifestyle factors. If you are showing that there is a high risk, then you need to go and look into that. So it's an early warning sign. So I developed this app to help people be preventative in their mindset. And it is a bit like selling insurance because people don't want to be in that prevention mindset, but I'm very much about that. Um and that so yeah, go and check out yourhealthcompass.org. And it's not a subscription and it's all your own data and it's privacy and everything. I didn't want it's a web-based app. You just go in there, it's$19. There's three, three of the tests are free. If you just want to free, do the free ones, do the free assessments. If you want the whole shebang, it's$19 and it's not going to break the bank. Just give you I wanted something that was cheap, accessible, quick for people to just assess their overall health from all the major diseases. It's not every disease, but it's yeah, I think it's really just good to do this quickly and just say, okay, oh, maybe I've got a bit of a higher risk for diabetes. Okay, what can I do about that? Go and get some more testing done. I can go and have a talk to my doctor or my naturopath or whoever about this. And what can I be thinking about? That's all it is. A diagnosis, it's not a medical diagnosis, but they these questionnaires in scientific research as early warning signs when something's going awry. Yeah. And yeah, I think that's really gold. Um to do this is don't have to get any bloods, don't have to do anything. It's it it's just uh 10 minutes of your time. Yeah, and you'll have a bit of an idea. So, yeah, I am very much into that whole prevention. And then very much I have a biotech company called Avum Labs, and we focus on immunosinescence with our flagship product that is actually in the States. It's in the States at OHP Health. Uh, Dr. Elizabeth Youth was the co-formulator. She's a fantastic longevity specialist out of Boulder, Colorado. Um, she's been my mum's physician for the last 10, you know, five years, and also a very good friend to me and one of my teachers, and just absolutely amazing person. And her and I worked on this formulation and another biochemist, Peter, and we made a formulation called Rejuvenate Pro in New Zealand, and it's called Cell Restore in the States because trademark stuff. It's going after supporting your immune system because your immune system is not just about colds and COVID. Your immune system is your surveillance for things like cancer, right? It's the autoimmune, all of these things that happen as we get older. It's the foundation of aging. So if you can look after your immune system and your gut health, because it helps with gut health, immune system transfer factors, growth factors, lowers all the inflammatory cytokines, so your interleukin sixes and TNF alphas, etc., and gives a real it's a real foundational health product. Yeah, we worked on that for the last two years, and it's the ingredients in this have got over 15 years worth of clinical research in it, so it's a really well put together formulation. So yeah, you might want to check that out as well. Yeah, you can just go to if you're in America, it's just ohphealth.com and put in sell restore and you'll see it there. And if you're in the rest of the world, it's rejuvenate pro is the name of it in the rest of the world. And my company is Avum Labs, A E V-U-M Labs. But you can just come to my website, lessatamony.com, and it's splashed all over there as well. So thanks.

unknown 50:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 50:15

Yeah. And I'd love to I'll send you a bottle over to Eza for you to try. But just yeah, it is a really powerful formulation that is really at the bottom of your stack. I interviewed Dr. David Furman from the 1000 Immunomes Project out of Stanford and Buck Institute, Stanford University and the Buck Institute, and they'd done this 1000 Immunomes Project, which is the world's largest human immunology study, it's been going for over 15 years, and they have come to the conclusion that the immune system is at the core of all of the hallmarks of aging. So instead of going after the single hallmarks of aging and putting in two dozen supplements, we went after that immunosinescence piece and the aging of the immune system as the foundational core piece. You can still work on the others, but that's going to have the biggest downstream effect across everything. Um, and that's very much related. Your immune system is very much related to your gut health. Like your 80% of your immune system is in and around your gut, and so it's very focused on gut health. And it has things like colostrum extract, like a very potent form of colostrum. And colostrum is the first food of mammals, and it is a wonderful elixir for so many things. It helped helps with leaky gut, helps with the microbiome, antimicrobial, antibacterial, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory. And then it's got something called IDP, which is a product out of New Zealand, also from the cow, and it's a whey extract. So not the whey protein part, but the bioactives in it that protect the cow from inflammation and infection, and it has the same effects in humans. Um, and then we have kawa kawa, which is a New Zealand herb that's only grown here in New Zealand. In my people, the Maori people have used this for centuries. Uh, that that lowers inflammation and helps as a powerful NRF2 activator, and then canossic acid, which does some of those similar things and lowers something called CXCL9, which is a chemokine that when elevated is a very bad thing to have in the body. That was again recognized by the Buck Institute in the 1000 Immunomes study, the CXCL9, and not many people know about that, but the rosemary extract, canossic extract, canossic acid, sorry, is one of the things that can lower CXCL9 as well as having a lot of neuroprotective effects and lots of other things as well. So, yeah, a really powerful formulation, like the IL6 and the TNF alpha, they go up, right? And at the same time, we're having a change in the architecture of our immune cells. So we're getting thymus involution, the thymus is the big gland and that shrinks as we are age, and by the age of 50, it's a fatty nub that's not doing very much. And that was the university of your T cells. So that teaches your, excuse me, your T cells how to fight the pathogens and create antibodies and do all of those sorts of things, and that starts to be involuted even from the age of puberty onwards. And by the time you're our age, it's pretty buggered. And that's why we have a change in the types of the amount of naive T cells versus memory cells. We start to get a lot more of the memory cell memory cells and not so much of the fresh recruits coming in. And so we get this change in the architecture of our immune system. And rejuvenate pro or cell restore in the states goes after that piece of the equation by helping you make your immune system more able to surveil these things. So things like natural killer cell levels drop, and natural killer cells can help you your surveillance for cancer, for example. You want that to be working. Okay. So your immune system, don't think of your immune system as just about colds and flu and COVID. It is very much a cancer surveillance, autoimmune issues come as your immune system starts to get out of whack and you get dominances in certain parts of the immune system that are overactive. I actually developed another app called My Immune Age, but it's still currently going through legal because it's worked out that it's a software as a medical device. So I don't know if I'm going to have enough funds to be able to get that one to market, which is a bit of a shame because that was a breakdown of all of the ratios of things like neutrophil lymphosite ratio and PIV and SIR, all these technical terms, but it helped from a basic CBC blood test. I could tell how well your immune system is doing. So I still use it with my clients, but uh yeah, currently I can't market it because GPDR it's not there yet. Yeah. Not there yet. I've got to have lawyers to get paid a lot of money to get me through. I've I've got the science, I don't necessarily have the marketing and business acumen that I would like to have or the relationships or the deep enough pockets for some of the stuff I want to do. I just go off and invent the thing and then go, oh. Now what? Yeah. Yeah. This is a very simple thing. Like it's in an app that just works out different ratios and gives you a breakdown based on those ratios for what part of your immune system is not doing well. Not your your in-range or you're not in range compared to what, to your age, the ratios of the things like the neutrophil to lymphocyte is a very important ratio. Actually, everything to lymphocytes is a very important ratio. Your earcinophils to lymphocytes or ear to lymphocytes, these all give us indications of how well your immune system is doing. And when we see that one is out but the other isn't, then we know that we've got a problem in this part of the immune system, if you like, and then we can do something about that in particular. And I hope I can get this out the door, but we'll see. Anyone with some meat, reach out. Exactly. Like I always joke, like I don't care what car I run around in, I don't care about having the flash house or a yacht or any of those stupid things that would count as success. Success for me is a healthy family and the freedom to get them what I need to get them. That's what I spend my money on. Not fancy clothes and not fancy cars and things like that. For me, it's about buying, being able to buy the things I need for my family when they need them counts. And unfortunately, it's not cheap, a lot of it. And you have to pay yourself, people. Like, do not rely just on your insurance or at least understand that you are not going to get the best if that's what you're relying on.

SPEAKER_00 56:43

Isn't that the truth? Lisa's story is such a powerful reminder to all of us that it's not just about physical endurance, it's about how we show up when life is asking more of us than we've ever imagined possible. If you think back to everything that she shared and what she's had to push through and overcome, her resilience and grit is unstoppable. From surviving some of the hardest races on earth to becoming a relentless advocate for her family's health. Lisa proves that the same mindset that helps us push through physical limits can also carry us through life's most devastating challenges. Her journey is about reinvention, advocacy, and refusing to accept impossible when the people you love are on the line. If there's one thing to take away from this conversation, it's this we are often capable of far more than we ever believe, than we ever imagine physically, mentally, and emotionally. I'm gonna drop Lisa's website links in my show notes so you can learn more about her work, explore her products, and check out the health assessment app she mentioned. It's a great way to better understand potential health risks that may be worth exploring further. Until next time.