Serenity and Fire with Krista

Biohacking Basics: Cold Plunges, Clean Living + Healing from the Inside Out

• Krista

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I’ve been on a wellness journey for decades—and let me tell you, biohacking has been a total game changer.

In this episode of Serenity and Fire, I’m walking you through what biohacking really means, how I started experimenting with it during my infertility journey, and why I’ve built so many of these tools into the experience at Panacea Luxury Spa Boutique.

This isn’t about perfection or expensive gadgets—it’s about taking back control of your body, your energy, and your health… one small change at a time.

Here’s what we’re diving into:
 ✔️ What biohacking actually is (and what it’s not).
 ✔️ Why I think everyday toxins played a role in my infertility + thyroid struggles.
 ✔️ The wellness tools we use at Panacea—from cold plunges to hyperbaric oxygen.
 ✔️ Small clean living swaps that made a big difference.
✔️ How to start biohacking today—even if it’s just switching your ketchup!

If you're curious about optimizing your health, boosting your energy, or healing from the inside out—this episode is for you.

Let’s start feeling better—together. 💛

📲 Share your bio-hacking journey and tag us using #SerenityAndFir

✨ Use code Serenity10 to get 10% off your first hyperbaric oxygen or LED light therapy session at Panacea. You’ll also get 2 full hours of access to our spa amenities—including cold plunge, steam room, hydrotherapy pool, and more.

🧖‍♀️ Book your visit: https://www.panacealuxuryspa.com

Speaker 1:

Welcome to Serenity and Fire, the podcast where wellness meets grit. I'm your host, krista Guageni, founder of Panacea Luxury Spa Boutique. Join me as we dive into the intriguing world of biohacking, clean living, cutting-edge spa trends and the hustle, grind and grit of entrepreneurship. From my personal battles with weight management and infertility, through a 30-year struggle to create and launch my dream business, to building a sanctuary for those who have been touched by cancer, I'm here to share real talk, inspire big dreams and spark a passion for holistic living inside each and every one of you. So let's dive in. Today, we're tackling a topic that's been buzzing in the wellness world biohacking. If you've heard the term and wondered what exactly is biohacking, you're in the right place. By the end of this episode, you'll understand what biohacking is, how it can transform your health and how we're bringing it to life at Panacea Luxury Spa Boutique. Plus, I'll share some practical tips to get you started on your own biohacking journey. So let's break it down. First off, biohacking is all about taking control of your body and mind to optimize your health, performance and well-being. It's like giving your body a software update using science technology and well-being. It's like giving your body a software update using science technology and sometimes just good, old-fashioned lifestyle changes. First off, biohacking is all about taking control of your body and mind to optimize your health, performance and your well-being. It's like giving your body a software update, using science technology and sometimes just good, old-fashioned lifestyle tweaks. The term was popularized by folks like Dave Asprey, the guy behind Bulletproof Coffee, but it's grown into a movement that spans everyone from tech geeks to wellness warriors like us. At its core, biohacking is about experimenting with your biology to feel better, think sharper and live longer. It's not just for Silicon Valley types with fancy gadgets. It's for anyone who wants to feel their best and at Panacea. We're all about making biohacking accessible, especially for our clients, including those navigating significant health conditions and other health challenges like cancer.

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So what does biohacking look like in practice? It's a huge umbrella covering everything from diet and exercise to cutting edge tech. So let's start with the basics nutrition and lifestyle Things like intermittent fasting, where you cycle between eating and fasting to boost energy and metabolism, or just simple clean eating, like choosing organic, toxin-free foods. These are both forms of biohacking, and that is actually a topic that we'll talk about in another episode, because I could spend hours just talking about intermittent fasting. It's good for some people, not for others, good at different times for men than it is for females, so we'll get into that in another episode.

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Going back to biohacking, these things about nutrition and lifestyle are things that I've learned the hard way during my personal infertility journey, where cutting out toxins has definitely made a huge difference in the way that I feel. Unfortunately it didn't solve my infertility journey, but I do think for some people it definitely can. Then there's movement, so exercising that is literally biohacking 101, whether it's yoga for stress relief or high intensity interval training to supercharge your stamina. But biohacking takes it further with things like cold exposure, like doing cold plunges or ice baths, which can reduce inflammation, boost your immunity, boost your mood, help with things like joint pain. And at Panacea we're huge fans of contrast therapy, where we have clients alternate between our cold plunge pool and our hot hydrotherapy pool or some of our other hot amenities, like the eucalyptus steam room or the Himalayan salt saunas. When you do contrast therapy, it's like a reset button for your body and our clients, especially those recovering from illness, definitely swear by it, and I can tell you that I personally, whenever I do it, my body feels so invigorated and exhilarated. So, just like anything with biohacking, there are some people that cold plunging is good for and some people that it's not, and certain temperatures for some that isn't right for others. So in a later episode we'll definitely be diving deeper into cold plunges and who they're best for and why they're good for your body or why they may not be good for your body.

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But now let's really get into the fun stuff about biohacking, which is the high-tech side of things. This is where things like hyperbaric oxygen chambers and LED light bed whole body therapy can really come into play, both of which we offer at Panacea. Hyperbaric oxygen chambers flood your body with oxygen under pressure, which can speed up recovery, reduce inflammation and even help with brain fog. It's honestly truly a game changer for pretty much everyone, but especially for our oncology clients, who often need that extra support to feel their best. But also because in the hyperbaric oxygen therapy world there is now so much incredible, compelling data showing that hyperbaric oxygen therapy can stop progression of cancer cell development, in conjunction with their other treatments. And so another thing that we're going to dive into at another time LED light therapy is another one of our favorites. We use whole body LED red light therapy treatments to help stimulate collagen, reduce pain, improve skin health. It's really like giving yourselves a pep talk with light. The science totally backs it up. There's over 45 000 studies done on the benefits of red light therapy and it. They all show that red and near infrared light can boost cellular energy, which is why it's really a staple at our spa.

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But biohacking isn't just about fancy equipment. It's also about tracking and tweaking. Wearables like Fitbits and Oura Rings let you monitor your sleep, your heart rate, your exercise, even your stress levels, so you can make data-driven decisions about your health. For example, if your sleep score is low, you might try a biohack like blue light blocking glasses at night to improve melatonin production. Small changes in this regard can really make a big impact and at Panacea we really take a personalized approach when it comes to biohacking. We use tools like our Vizia skin analysis system, which can look deep into the surface of your skin to see what kind of damage that you have that you can't see on the surface level whether it's sun damage or telangiectasia, broken capillaries, aging, fine lines, wrinkles and really get to the root of what's causing those issues in your skin and help you put together a treatment plan to help clean out those toxins and other things that might be causing the damage. So, whether it's through the Vizia analysis or a tailored facial or hyperbaric therapy sessions, or we just simply recommend an at-home clean living regimen, we're all about helping you hack your way back to better health. Okay, so let's talk about why biohacking really matters, especially for our community.

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For me, biohacking became personal during my infertility journey and also because I've really struggled with weight management, I feel like my entire life. I've learned over the years how toxins and everyday products can really mess with your hormones. Switching to clean, non-toxic options was a biohack that really has changed my life. When I was going through my infertility journey, I was constantly frustrated with the doctors not having any answers for me, and you know we went through multiple losses. I did years of shots, and the emotional toil that that takes on your body is enormous, not to mention the hair loss and the changes in your skin and all the things that happen along the way, and I've been someone who has struggled with a thyroid disorder for the last 20, 25 years. My endocrinologist could not give me any answers. My infertility specialist could not give me any answers, and so I really just started digging into my health myself. I really truly believe that the toxins that I have inadvertently put into my body through products and foods and different things that I've used throughout my life are part of what kind of has destroyed my thyroid and has created a lot of these infertility issues that I experienced. We are really truly flooding our bodies with toxins on a daily basis and I really believe that it's not only contributing to infertility but also to mental health disease and our high cancer rates.

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Finally, eventually, after years and years of trying to figure all of this out, I connected with a functional medicine physician and also a functional nutritionist, and doing that really changed my life. I ended up doing an elimination diet and found that I had major sensitivities to gluten, soy, corn, dairy products, also to alcohol which is very sad and, of course course, to sugars. So I am basically completely gluten and dairy free now. I try to minimize soy wherever I possibly can and also corn products, and when you think about corn, it's not just like corn on the cob, it's corn flour and corn syrup and high fructose corn syrup and all the things. And if you look at like the analogy I always give is Heinz ketchup. If you go to the grocery store and you look at a Heinz ketchup bottle, they also have one that's called Simply Heinz ketchup. And if you look at the Simply Heinz ketchup ingredients, it has no high fructose corn syrup in it, but the regular one does. They taste exactly the the same and the simply one is so much cleaner and better for your body.

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So learning how to make small little changes like that, even if it's just one thing at a time, over time can make big impacts for you and for your body. My director at the spa actually did a really cool demonstration not too long ago about how our liver can process some toxins, but the enormous toxic overload that we place on our bodies overwhelms our liver and our metabolic system and our endocrine system. So what she did was she just took a coffee filter, put it over a glass and slowly poured water into the coffee filter. The coffee filter filtered it out. Nice, it stayed empty when she was doing it slowly. But if she dumped the water into the filter it overflowed and couldn't drain. And our liver and our bodies work very similarly.

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So we can process some toxins, but the amount of toxins that we put on our bodies every day can be overwhelming, which is why we're seeing all of these increased rates of metabolic disorders, autoimmune diseases, mental health, infertility, cancer rates and the significant health conditions that are plaguing us as a society. So that's why, at Panacea, we're obsessed with not only creating a safe, tranquil, relaxing space for everyone who comes through our doors, but also helping our clients figure out ways to clean up their lifestyles, one little thing at a time. So all of the products that we have, they're clean, all natural, organic wherever possible, and many of the things that we carry in our boutique are the same way. We have all natural laundry care cleaning kits, beautiful organic essential oils. We have a whole baby line of products that are clean and all natural.

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So I like to tell people that if you're going to go down this biohacking journey of going clean people that if you're going to go down this biohacking journey of going clean, it's not about doing everything all at once. It's finding one little thing at a time that you can manage, like the ketchup. So when we look at going clean and having, you know, eating cleaner foods and cleaning toxins out of our life, that's really, really important to us at Panacea, because we do have that specialty focus in oncology therapeutics and all of our therapists are trained in advanced oncology therapeutics. So every treatment, from massages to hyperbaric therapy, is designed to be clean, all natural and healing and comforting in every way possible, and comforting in every way possible. So biohacking ties into so many things, but especially my mission to help empower you to be your healthiest person that you can be.

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So, whether you're an entrepreneur hustling through long days or someone navigating health challenges like cancer or diabetes or mental health disease, biohacking gives you some tools that you can use to take charge of those situations in your life. It's about feeling strong and vibrant and ready to tackle whatever life throws at you. So how can you start biohacking today? Here's a few simple ideas to try. Going back to cold plunging you can try doing mini cold plunges at your house the next time you shower. Just end your shower with 30 seconds of cold water. It's a quick way to help boost circulation and wake up your system.

Speaker 1:

Another one is cleaning up your diet. So swapping out maybe one processed snack for something whole like an apple or almond butter. Or, like I said, with the ketchup, switching out the high fructose corn syrup ketchup for the non-high fructose corn syrup ketchup. Another way is really tracking your sleep, so use one of the free apps out there or just jot down how many hours you're getting and how you feel.

Speaker 1:

Awareness is, honestly, the first step to optimizing your health, and we really, honestly the first step to optimizing your health, and we really truly underestimate the power and the need for sleep. Some people need six hours, some people need eight hours. You have to figure out what is the ultimate best for you. But when your body doesn't get enough sleep, it doesn't have time to rest and recover, and if you can't rest and recover, your physiological systems can't keep up. And so it's really important to make sure that you're getting proper hydration, that you're eating clean foods and that you're getting plenty of rest. And if you really want to go deeper, just come visit us at panacea. Our amenity spaces and our led light treatments and our hyperbaric therapies are all perfect if you really want to just dip your toes into the world of biohacking. So let's wrap up on today's episode.

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Biohacking is all about unlocking your body's potential, and we're just getting started.

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If you love this episode, hit that subscribe button and leave us a review on Apple, spotify, youtube or wherever you get your podcasts.

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It helps us reach more people like you Want to try biohacking for yourself. For anyone who books a hyperbaric oxygen therapy or an LED light bed whole body therapy session, we're going to give you 10% off on your first visit. Plus, when you come in, you'll get to have two hours of access to all of our amenity spaces, which includes our beautiful locker rooms with our Himalayan salt saunas and our co-ed space, which has our cold plunge pool, as well as our hot hydrotherapy pool and our amazing eucalyptus steam room. You'll also have access to our beautiful relaxation lounge that has these really cool hanging loungers from Austria that overlook the beautiful parks and trails of the quarry trails, and you can just make it really kind of a whole day. So come in, book your service and use the code Serenity10 to get that 10% off, and then afterwards share your biohacking journey with us on Instagram using hashtag Serenity and Fire and let's keep this conversation going Until next time. Keep finding that balance between Serenity and Fire. I'm Krista Gojeni and I'll see you in the next episode.