Written by Christopher Kelly
March 12, 2015
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Christopher: Hello and welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive podcast. My name is Christopher Kelly and today I'm joined by my business partner, food scientist, and least of all, wife -- just kidding -- Julie Kelly.
Julie: Hello.
Christopher: I wanted to do this podcast to talk about how far we've come because it's been about a year since I quit my job as a computer programmer at a quantitative hedge fund to launch a diet and lifestyle coaching business which sounds like a terrible idea and it may still turn out to be a terrible idea. We're not really sure yet.
So I just wanted to explain how I got into this, my motivations, and say something about the challenges that we faced trying to start a new business and talk about where we might be going.
How did I start in this? The answer is this was a project that was born out of my own needs and I think that's really important for any idea that's going to become a business. If you don't want it, nobody else does. It has to be something you really, really want and I really, really wanted what we are selling now. So I wanted solutions for my own health problems.
I don't really know when my problems began -- probably when I was kid. I know I'm at least certainly sensitive if not Coeliac, so sensitive to gluten. So I made some really food poor choices as a child. But the wheels only really came off the wagon once I started mountain biking, getting competitive, started a training program, doing a ton of exercise. That was really when the wheels came off the wagon.
And so what I mean by that is my digestion fell apart, I had all kinds of bloating, and brain fog, and terrible fatigue especially during the day but at night I couldn't sleep -- the most horrible insomnia -- just sweating during the night, it was just awful. It got to a point where I did not actually bother going to bed, it was that bad. So clearly there was something really wrong. Of course I did what anyone did and I went to my primary care physician. The primary care physician was not very useful at all, like he just didn't really have any answers. He just had prescriptions I think is what he offered.
So okay, "You've got low testosterone, maybe you should think about doing some testosterone supplementation." Or "If you got low libido, then here's a prescription for Viagra. You've got allergies so here's some Ambien. You can't sleep so here's some Lunesta." So he was never really asking why this is happening and like what has changed. This way of thinking is like fundamental to me as a computer scientist trying to debug a program, like something changed right? Something changed. So you need to figure out what that is, you can't just like put band aids on everything and hope that it's going to be okay because something else is just going to go wrong and you'll be chasing these problems forever.
Now one of the other things that the doctor did was he sent me to a gastroenterologist and by that time I discovered the Paleo diet. It was just by chance. I think I had somebody talk about it or maybe I had a podcast -- I don't really remember actually. But I read the book by Joe Friel and Loren Cordain. And I thought it was a really good idea so I started eating that way. I cut out all the bread, the pasta, all that stuff, and I felt much better as you might expect. The gastroenterologist was saying "No, no. It has nothing to do with anything you're eating, your diet is fine. It's something specific to you. What we can do is we can do a colonoscopy and if what you're saying is true and there is damage and inflammation inside your gut..." So I think that's the important point. They didn't really diagnose anything; they just wanted to confirm that I wasn't a liar. "And then we can prescribe some anti-inflammatory steroid drugs and if that doesn't work, then we can do surgery."
So this sounded like not a good option and by that time I'd met Julie. Julie is a food scientist as I previously mentioned and she'd not long finished her degree so all pretty fresh in her mind. And she spent a lot of time in the lab and a lot of time looking at food allergies and understood a lot of the biochemistry behind food. She was really, really interested in the Paleo diet and thought it made a lot of sense and adapted it immediately herself. And then did some research and discovered this autoimmune version of the Paleo diet.
So before I go any further why don't you tell me, what was it that appealed to you about the Autoimmune Protocol when you first saw it?
Julie: Well, mostly because it wasn't a colonoscopy. Some people might say that it's as challenging as colonoscopy.
Christopher: We get that all the time now. It's like people are like "You want me to do this diet? This is like so restrictive. How can you ask anyone to do this?" Well, compared to what?
Julie: So I think what happened was when you came home and said that they wanted you to do a colonoscopy, we had just recently heard a podcast about colonoscopies and about the dangers of colonoscopies and we knew that they're actually more dangerous and can kill more people yearly than colon cancer itself which --
Christopher: Right. It is dangerous and risky.
Julie: It is because it can perforate your colon and intestine and then you have some major serious damage more than you had to begin with.
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So knowing that we wanted to avoid that and more than anything, just really kind of mind-boggled by the fact that the gastroenterologist just completely ignored the fact that you hadn't eaten gluten in probably six months by the time you'd been to see her was really frightening to me. So I just kind of got online and started digging and had recently at that time just discovered The Paleo Mom who's turned out to be kind of hugely instrumental in your path to health and recovery. And most of the people we work with, we recommend reading up on The Paleo Mom site.
But anyways, I found The Autoimmune Protocol and that was definitely worth a shot and we took all of these things out. And I'd say you got what probably another 40% better.
Christopher: It was a good portion, yeah, definitely. It's so hard and it's continued to be hard over time is like to assess how well you're doing based on your symptoms because you get to the point where you just what am I comparing it to now? Like I don't know how the next person feels and the next person doesn't know how I feel.
And so the symptoms, they're not completely useless, they can help guide you. In some respects, they are useless like you just don't know. But the blood work certainly improved so I sought markers like C-reactive protein which is a measure of inflammation. And then I had occult blood, that's hidden blood inside a stool sample and that's not good. The gastroenterologist is probably thinking cancer at that point. She was stunned when I changed something in my diet and reversed the occult blood. That was kind of…
Julie: Yeah. The other thing that we were kind of chasing at the time was you were extremely anemic. So more than anything, more than the gluten sensitivity, more than the gas, more than the bloating, more than anything, that was something we were really trying to address because as an athlete, like an endurance athlete who's trying to improve performance, being anemic is not something that you want to be.
So that's where we were really going for. And then reducing inflammation was the main reason I thought the AIP diet would be useful and important for you. And then trying to reverse the anemia, well, we wanted to address that with diet as well as much as possible. So you had been a vegetarian previously to meeting me --
Christopher: That's not a good idea, by the way. Don't do that.
Julie: Don't do that. That's another thing that we've done a lot of this year is turning vegetarians back to meat-eaters.
So reincorporating red meat was really important, all the dark leafy vegetables is really important, introducing organ meats. So the AIP diet is also extremely useful in its nutrient density so that as kind of where…
Christopher: Explain what you mean by nutrient density. That's a phrase that we hear a lot but I'm not sure it's well defined.
Julie: I really like to talk about it in terms of… you know everybody says "Oh, I have to take out all these things, there's nothing I can eat. I said "Yeah, you're taking things out but I really like to focus on what you're adding in."
So when you take out the things that are not nutrient dense meaning they're not adding in any nutrients to your diet. So if you're eating whole grains or if you're eating pasta and cereals and things like that, they're not adding any real nutrition to your diet. They're kind of just taking up space. So when you take those things out or you take out lots and lots of starchy carbohydrates for example, you make room for things like really good fats, you make room for more vegetables that are full of micronutrients and a lot of the minerals that you need, when you make more room for the really good sources of protein.
So when you can increase each of those categories then you've got this ability to create this diet that all of a sudden has all of these macro and micronutrients that you were probably really starving for because before you had included in your diet a bunch of things that were just taking up space and acting as like blocking factors for nutrients. So not only are they kind of devoid of a lot of nutrients or micronutrients, actually some of them contain anti-nutrients so you're kind of like working against this negative tide.
Christopher: I'd like to think that here's a good analogy for you -- you being the kids on the playground picking a team for some team sports like basketball or something. All the kids line up and each team captain takes turns to pick a kid. This is what the Autoimmune Protocol is. The team that you create using that algorithm is exactly the same.
So first of all you pick the kids with the best power-to-weight ratio, with the best skills so those are the organ meats and the dark leafy greens. Let's have all of those. And when they're gone, okay, so now we need some carbohydrates that may be not so nutrient dense but I still want to eat some carbs so yes, sweet potatoes or the starchy root vegetables or something which they're maybe the power-to-weight ratio is not quite as good as organ meat but I'm not just going to eat organ meat. That would be kind of not great either. And then all the fat kids that can't run, that have no skills and poor communicators, everything that's left over after you've picked your teams, that's everything that's excluded.
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So it doesn't mean that those --
Julie: Kind of a sad analogy.
Christopher: It's a sad analogy but you're being elitist with your food. And if you're an athlete, I'm not sure you can afford to do anything else. So you're asking something extraordinary of your body and you need to take extraordinary measures in order to fully nourish that body so that it can perform as well as you like. For that reason, I still love the Autoimmune Protocol and still go back to it every time. If there's a race or hard training workout then there's no way I'm eating green beans of nuts or something like that whereas other times I might be up for that.
Julie: Yeah. I think it's also important for people that when you're sick and you know you have healing to do, so some of the people that come to us they have a lot of work to do. They've already gotten active autoimmune condition or they just have a lot of gut damage or dysbiosis or something like that so they've got kind of a long road of healing ahead of them. that's a really good time to embrace Autoimmune Protocol because it's so nutrient dense and it's so focused on healing foods that it's kind of your quick ticket to fixing a lot of those problems.
Christopher: There's something I should have said. If you're not an athlete or you don't care so much about performance or you just don't want to be so restricted, like everybody's got their own considerations that they're trying to balance. I should probably make clear that the Autoimmune Protocol was designed to be a healing device a bit like the way you put a splint on your ankle. Just because it was what you needed in the beginning in order to let your ankle heal doesn't mean you should walk around the rest of your life with a splint on. It's a device that has a purpose and when that purpose has ended then you should probably remove it.
But for me I keep doing the same stupid things that sprains my ankle in the first place and so the Autoimmune Protocol I think for me has been something that stayed around in our lives and we don't even really think about it now. It's this food, it's like what we have up in the fridge and there's the set of things that are available to make dinner and it's never really a problem. We don't really feel we're being deprived of anything either.
But yes, to get back to this path, this journey -- which is this annoying that everybody uses but it's true, it's a journey -- eventually I figured out what was going on inside my body by using three types of tests that I think is still quite novel in that most doctors have no idea what you're talking about. This happened to me. I walked into his office and said "Hey, can you order me a saliva cortisol test? I think my hormones might be messed up." The doctor just looked at me funny and he said "Well, I can order you a blood test that has total testosterone and free testosterone if that will help."
But that's not the same test. We're trying to measure circadian rhythm and that was a huge problem for me. My circadian rhythm was completely broken and so I was awake at night and asleep during the day. And you can see that on one of these saliva tests. Cortisol is this hormone that is involved in energy homeostasis but it also defines circadian rhythm so it should be highest first thing in the morning and then lowest lasting at night. And frequently I see results and I mean hundreds of times where that's not the case, like there's some deviation from what we know is optimal. It's not just about being within the lab reference range, this is about being optimal.
And so the diet and lifestyle coaching, understanding photo period and when you should be exposed to light has been just absolutely huge. So the cortisol thing and most people call it adrenal fatigue and I think that's an oversimplification to the point where it's probably wrong. And what I mean by that is I don't think the actual adrenal glands themselves are at fault here. What's really going on is there's something in the gut that's causing inflammation that's suppressing of the part of the brain that's asking for the cortisol in the first place. So the feedback mechanism is broken by poor digestive health.
I went on to do more testing, again, totally novel. The doctor did not know anything about it. The first type of test was a urine organic acids test. This is amazing test and I still run it on myself all the time now. Because as an athlete, fixing this stuff is like so much easier than going out and doing another hard workout. I mean yes, it's expensive but you get this incredible information about what's going on inside your body, cellular metabolism and biochemistry and you can get hints about things that you can do in order to improve that biochemistry.
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So it's a bit like when you take your car into the garage and they roll on onto the rolling road and the mechanic sticks the probe into the tailpipe and he analyzes the exhaust gases and the computer comes back and says "Oh, you need more carnitine and you don't have enough B-6 and this physiology here looks like you're under stress right now and you're near [0:15:31] [Indiscernible]". So it's all like really technical diagnostic information but to me it was like another computer program. It was just like another puzzle to solve. And I really immersed myself in it and got some help, a lot of training, a lot of reading and amazing things happen when I fixed the problems that I found on the urine organic acids.
But the last type of test I did was a stool test which wasn't as much fun to do as the urine test. Peeing in a cup's quite fun but collecting poopies not that much fun at all but it can all be done at home which I think is a really nice thing. So the stool testing -- do you want to say something about how that works? So what happens you collect some stool at home and then you send it into the lab, what do the lab do?
Julie: They actually have a team of microbiologists that culture samples from your stool. So there are actual people looking at your stool under a microscope to try to detect presence of pathogens and parasites and things like occult blood. The stool test that we run specifically are screening for things like H. pylori, Blastocystis hominis, and Enterobacter and all kinds of nasty types of bugs. And some of them aren't necessarily inherently bad but if you have an overgrowth of them or you have a dysbiosis in which you're kind of lacking a lot of good bacteria then these ones take over, they can lead to lots of problems.
So in conjunction with the other two tests mainly that we run, it's really useful information because they all work together really nicely to look for kind of an overall picture of your current health that has to do with gut function, inflammation, liver function, brain function and energy production. So you get this nice kind of holistic big picture view of the project that will become kind of your health protocol to work on for probably about six months.
Christopher: Right. So it's useful to break this problem down into three body systems, like I still find this device useful.
So first of all, you've got this hormonal system. You've got hormones like cortisol and testosterone that is so important for many different physiological reasons inside your body and energy is the main thing that most people are acutely aware of. So when you got low cortisol you normally feel tired at weird times of the day especially in the afternoon is very characteristic. The cortisol and then the DHEA is another anabolic hormone. It's on the saliva test and testosterone and then for the women estrogen, progesterone are more important. But really you're looking for this balance here.
So this hormonal system, this first body system is really a good place to start when you're trying to either restore your health or optimize your athletic performance. Like bad things will always happen if the hormones are not balanced.
Now beyond the hormones, if you know that your hormones are out of whack if you've done an adrenal stress profile, saliva test or you know for some other reason that your hormones are out of whack, then there's a reason and you need to figure it out. And it's not good enough to say "Oh, my testosterone is low" or "Oh, my progesterone is low" because there's a reason and it's either inflammation or something else. That's where the other tests come in.
The second major body system in this model is the gut and so we've already talked about this and this is where the stool testing really comes into its own because there's things that we know are pathogens that is not good to have in your gut. And some of them, it becomes nuanced and subtle because some of them are opportunistic pathogens. So a really good example of that is the bacteria E. coli. Pretty much everybody has, in fact, I think it's safe to say that everybody has E. coli in their gut and it's on the BioHealth 401H stool test that we run. People often look at that and say "Oh, E. coli -- that doesn't sound good" and they Google it and they find lots of bad things about E. coli.
And it's true. It is a pathogen. Nobody really wants it; it doesn't do anything useful for us. But it only becomes a problem when it's overgrown so it's an opportunistic pathogen. And this actually happened to my mom, like last year. She nearly died of an E. coli infection --
Julie: And it happened to you, too.
Christopher: -- and it happened to me, yeah.
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So you think you're going to find something weird and wonderful and actually no -- it's just E. coli. It's just that it's overgrown and you are immuno compromised and are no longer able to sufficiently deal with that threat, that invader and then it becomes a problem. So that's the stool testing.
And then the third body system is the liver and the ability to metabolize all the things that we're exposed to every day.
Julie: And hormones.
Christopher: And hormones. So there's perfectly natural endogenous things inside our body, molecules inside our bod, like steroid hormones is a good example there, that need to be torn down and gotten rid of. When that doesn't happen, then you can see bad things go on so that's what's going on with the liver.
But then you see people like me who have an infection and all kinds of problems in their gut, their liver is just overworked. I think nearly everybody with an autoimmune condition probably needs to be also supporting their liver because the two things go hand in hand.
So you've got these three body systems -- you've got the hormonal, the gut, and detox. When you get all of those things working in harmony, then really good things happen. It's not taken me long to describe all these stuff and I'm not going into an awful lot of detail but all of this was really years in the making like understanding this, doing training courses and my own reading. And I got to the point where I thought I wonder who else is affected by this? I didn't really have to look very far outside of my office at work, like see people -- I don't want to single any names out, it would be rude or anything -- but it's true. You just walk down the street and all you see are people that look tired and fat and inflamed. I can look at some of these faces now --
Julie: They're sick all the time.
Christopher: Yeah, they're sick all the time. They're always calling in sick and they can't lose weight no matter what they do or they're developing diabetes or something like that. So it got the wheels turning inside my head, how many other people are affected by this? I don't know.
So that's when we started running some of the tests that I had done on other people and hey, guess what? We found all of the same things. If the person -- I mean the symptoms are not completely, you can't ignore those, right? So for example your dad is pretty much bulletproof so we didn't really find much in him. He was fine. Yeah, he's a pretty strong guy and he's a great guy and --
Julie: Some people are just really, really resilient.
Christopher: Yeah, yeah. So there's definitely some individuality going on here. You couldn't just have everybody do the same thing and expect to get the same great results because that's not true. I think that type of approach, that's what really muddies the water with some of the scientific clinical trials.
So the obvious one that jumps at me right now is the multivitamin that we took 300,000 people and we put 150, 000 of them on a multivitamin. We saw absolutely no change or cause mortality and that's because you just threw spare parts of broken helicopter. You don't know what it really needed. It's like some of them will stick and you needed them and others you won't and the end result is going to be different from when you do the lab testing and you get very specific and targeted.
So we got great results with those few beta testers. Thanks to those guys if they're listening now, my bike team and stuff like that. I guess it just grew kind of slowly from there didn't it but I think the one, the catalyst, the thing that really changed everything was the podcast. I can't even remember how we got started. Maybe I was just sort of emailing and ended up being invited on to a couple podcasts -- Robb Wolf, Ben Greenfield -- and by that time, we partnered with one of my cycling buddies who happened to be a medical doctor, Jamie, who's been on the podcast just a week or so ago.
And she wasn't happy with her work either so it kind of made a really good partnership. She's a real pro like I'm a hobby pro mountain biker meaning I do it for fun but I race at the highest level whereas she was really racing UCI World Cups and really trying to make a goal of it as a career and only working as a doctor part time. So she understood, she was always after the performance benefits herself, she spent a lot of time looking at the literature and we made a great partnership.
And so we launched this business, Nourish Balance Thrive, and we went on to a couple of podcasts to tell that story just to see if we were right and there were a lot of people that were affected. And those people would be willing to invest in their health in the short term for investment that might not come long term. I see that now as a critical part of every single person I work with. This is not the guy that's taking seven different prescription medicines and doesn't know what any of them are and only goes to the doctor when he's got pain in his chest or his dick doesn't work. These are the people that listen to the Robb Wolf podcast that are willing to invest in anything in order to get that last little bit of health, performance, whatever it takes.
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So they're a special sort of person but enough of them came to us where I thought, hey, this is the startup idea I was looking for since I was 15. We should do this thing. And yeah, that's what we did a year ago. So that brings us up to a year ago. And it quickly became obvious that there was no way I was going to be able to do this and do a full time job at the hedge fund. I quit that job and maybe I should have done it sooner. It's a very difficult decision as anyone that's done this will know like to say, "Okay, I'm going solo here." Like there's the health insurance and…
Julie: We just had a baby.
Christopher: We just had the baby and there's the 401K. Is it 401?
Julie: It's 401K.
Christopher: I always get confused with the 401H which is the stool test that we run.
So that's what I did. I quit my job and the role I took was mostly doing diet and lifestyle coaching. So I realized at this point the bad decisions and the misinformation that had been handed down to me mostly from the general media, so the newspapers in the UK that just give you all this misinformation about saturate fat -- the list is endless.
So I realized that what I really needed to do was educate people, like persuade them that maybe gluten and sugar are not the best choices even if you're an athlete and sleep was something that needed to be nurtured and prioritized and that photoperiod was important. And so that's what I spent the bulk of my time doing in the beginning.
In the beginning I guess I was doing a lot of the nutrition coaching as well but it became clear that Julie, although she's not licensed or anything as a practitioner, definitely had a talent for helping people. And I realized with hindsight that it was part of the reason why I had been so successful is it's one to pick up a book and say "Oh, this is the Autoimmune Protocol. This is how you eat from now on" and then it's another thing to have someone there for you to explain everything and to tell you when you're doing something wrong. It turns out that it was possible to do that for somebody else for our telephone connection and Skype and Google Docs shared spreadsheets.
Why don't I ask you, Julie, just tell us a little bit about the way you work when someone first comes to you? Say my main complaints are I'm a cyclist or I'm a runner. At the moment I'm eating a fairly high carbohydrate diet probably 60% or 70% of my calories are coming from carbohydrate, I'm probably making some poor food choices. So I know about bread at this point but maybe some other things which I think like a better choice is like quinoa or whole rice or some of these whole grains. I've got gas, I've got bloating, my insomnia is really getting on my nerves, and I'm really tired in the afternoon. So how would you even start for me?
Julie: Well, I think the best thing for most people to do and this is where I pretty much start with everyone is the first and foremost most important thing is making sure that your blood glucose is stable.
The reason I start with this is not only because it's important but because it's a really useful tool for people to start to understand and can reconnect with the food choices they're making. So a lot of times people are kind of on autopilot with the choices they're making because, like you said, it's become common knowledge in their communities or in their sport or whatever they're doing that "Oh, you're an athlete. You need to eat quinoa; you need to eat this amount of carbs" or "You need to carb load or backload" or whatever.
And so when people come to me, they have this kind of preconceived notion of what their macronutrient ratios should be and so I kind of challenge them to first we need to make sure that your blood sugar is stable so we get everybody to check their blood glucose. And then I have the conversation about nutrient density and the importance, if they've got sleep problems we need to prioritize sleep so what's going to help us sleep? First the blood sugar regulation is going to help us sleep if we can get that stable. Secondly, sometimes the carb back loading and increasing protein and fat toward -- first of all, just increasing those macronutrients in general. And then also moving the protein and the fat towards the front of the day and whatever carbs you're eating towards the end of the day and trying to situate your carbs around your highest level of activity is really important.
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So we have a conversation about macronutrients and where the best sources for those carbohydrates are. Removing all of the grains, removing any of the gluten-free products, the sugary sports products trying to fuel with this whole real food.
Christopher: So this is not necessarily… I've made it quite public that I'm in ketosis and having great results on that but that's not for everyone. And even though you just told me to remove a whole bunch of carbs, that's not what you're saying either.
Julie: No, and it's not the point. The point isn't to remove the carbs just because they're carbohydrates. Most of the time, people need to remove the carbohydrates in order to stabilize their blood sugar. The reason we remove them and the reason we do it in conjunction with the blood glucose meter is because the blood glucose meter is going to tell you which carbohydrates are best for you.
So if you want to, say, eat white rice, I don't really have a problem with that unless the blood glucose meter tells you that we have a problem with it. So it's not me that's going to tell you what carbohydrates you eat -- it's the blood glucose meter that's going to tell you which carbohydrates to eat. And also that's important because you have to start to understand what you need to be choosing to refuel. And refueling so that you can recover means that you're not spiking your blood glucose -- you're going to crash an hour after you eat. That's not going to help your recovery.
So really assessing your goals first and foremost is really important because say this person is a runner and an athlete but they're going into their off-season and all they want to do is recover and they want to sleep really well because next season they have really big goals, really lofty goals. So we kind of kick it even in to more hyper drive. I may then suggest the Autoimmune Protocol so let's really get your inflammation way, way down. Let's work on adding healing foods to make sure you don't have any inflammation in your gut or we can kind of try to reverse leaky gut.
So really it's a conversation about simple things like blood sugar control because everybody needs that. But then it's a conversation about goals and how we best address those with food. And sometimes it's about taking things out because they've got some overt and really obvious food sensitivities or we need to figure out what their food sensitivities are and sometimes it's about adding things in because we've got lots of people that come to us who are under eating. Or athletes are so focused on performance, often times they're so regimented about what they eat they're not eating enough variety so --
Christopher: That's a recipe for a disaster, by the way.
Quite often the female runner, to single out a demographic, is the classic. They come to you and "Oh, I'm gaining weight even though I'm running. I can't understand it, what's going on? Take a look at my fitness panel. I'm only eating 800 calories a day yet I'm still gaining weight." I'm like "Oh, don't do that" because the literature is really clear on this that you'll see a slowing of thyroid or hormone or a reduction in metabolism as a direct result of this type of restricting food and doing endurance exercise. In fact, endurance exercise on its own might be enough just to slow down the thyroid. So yeah, this is a huge problem and it's a real nasty track that a lot of endurance athletes get into when they're not eating enough food. So persuading people they need to eat sounds stupid but it can actually be quite difficult.
Julie: Yeah. I think the best thing to describe what I do and how I work people is I kind of just act like a little bit of a detective. I ask hard questions and I push people to be honest with themselves about what it is that they're trying to achieve right now and in the next few months. Also just trying to identify what really should be a priority especially when it's in contention with health. So we work with a lot of athletes so that can be really difficult sometimes because people really, really want to be healthy. Or especially women, sometimes they want to have a baby or they just want to have a normal period or a normal cycle and that can be in contention with being an endurance athlete.
So it's really trying to figure out what exactly are the goals and what exactly is the motivation at the moment and then making simple changes in the diet and then also using lab work that we do to kind of corroborate and to back up and support other suggestions with the diet. You specifically need more choline or whatever we find on the organic acids test, the B micronutrient deficiency, how can we support that with the diet specifically.
Yeah. So I just kind of do some detective work. Sometimes I use a food diary if people find that useful and just kind of keep track of what they're eating for a few days with their blood glucose and can make some really pointed feedback suggestions based on what I find in there and we kind of go from there. So it's a nice collaboration. It's not like you've got somebody looking over your shoulder 24/7 making you feel guilty about what you're eating. It's more about having somebody that can be there to support you and help you make some changes.
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Christopher: Solve problems. Like "I'm going on a business trip next week and I have no idea what I'm going to eat and there's going to be a conference room full of crap food I know I shouldn't be eating." So yeah, it's useful to have someone to help solve those problems.
And I realize, looking who I got the fastest and the best results with, they were all the people that had worked with Julie. I've got to the point now where I've got things set up where I almost insist on people work with Julie. Partly those are selfish reasons. The initial conversations with people or actually really difficult like telling someone "Yeah, I know you can't sleep right now but you at least need to make those eight hours available so that you can sleep." That's a difficult conversation often times and I don't really enjoy having it especially for the 15,000th time.
So I don't actually do a lot of those initial conversations but I do still do the follow ups and I love doing the follow ups. Because by the time I do the follow up, the person who's done the tests or the lab results are back and we're looking at all results so I'm not selling anything, I'm not persuading anyone to do anything really at that point, and Julie has already done some really good work with the person in their diet and guess what? They're feeling fantastic. And having a conversation with someone that's already lost ten pounds and is feeling fantastic is a pleasure. I love doing it.
And that's one of the things about running a small business is you get to pick and choose things. So if something is like monotonous and you don't really enjoy doing it, then it's possible to pay someone else to do it. Sorry, Amelia, she might be listening to this. Amelia does a really great job with that stuff. Amelia was a Registered Nurse; she's been on the podcast before. She has a very similar story as mine, has been trained by the same doctors and she's really patient and caregiving. That shows because she's a Registered Nurse, it's what she does all night long and so she just has infinite patience for people and has all the right knowledge and I think we make her a really great team.
But just because we make a really great team and we're getting really great results with everyone doesn't necessarily mean that it's a really successful business. So that's been the rude awakening. I think one of the biggest challenges has been transitioning from the guy that gets me UCAN at wholesale prices that can answer my questions about what I should eat on race day --
Julie: So being someone's buddy.
Christopher: So being someone's buddy to someone that's being a professional, that's being paid for their time because that's what I am now. I don't have any other work. If I spend all day on email just answering my buddy's questions then I'm going to go broke pretty quick. So that's been hard -- saying to people "I need to charge you for this because I need to eat, I need to pay my rent." We live in Northern California and my rent costs $2600 a month and I don't pay for that by just answering people's emails. Like I could totally do that, I could spend all day just answering people's questions on email. No problem at all and that would earn us exactly zero.
So the other big mistake that we made was not making it as clear as we should that the lab tests are really expensive. So most of the money that you pay when you order tests, it goes to the lab; only a tiny amount of that goes to me. It's certainly not enough to live on. So at the moment or for the last year --
Julie: It's really just a processing fee. You're not really allowed to make money on labs in California.
Christopher: No. so I charge like a trivial fee like a handling fee or an interpretation fee, whatever you want to call it, but it's certainly not paying for my time. You can verify this for yourself. Just go to directlabs.com and find some of the tests that are on our website and you'll see they're the same price. DirectLabs are not giving you an interpretation or giving you anything other than just the test result for that money. That's definitely not where our income is.
But I've run into problems more than once with people saying to me "Hey, I spent $1000 with you and you should be there for me if I wake up at 3:00 AM and have questions. What's your phone number, I'll call you." I'm like "No. Actually you spent $1000 on tests and it gave us a ton of useful information but you have to pay for my time." And that was my biggest mistake as a small business owner was like not really thinking this through, like seeing where this was headed. As a result of that, we didn't make any money last year.
Julie: We didn't lose any money.
Christopher: We didn't lose any money, let's be fair about this but we made $17,000 each last year. That was my gross income so I need to pay tax on that. Yeah, that's basically you didn't lose anything but you certainly didn't make any money either.
[0:40:24]
I want to be transparent about that because I'm sure a lot of people listening, they're either coaches or they're thinking about getting into this business. I would encourage those people because so many folks out there that need your help and it's incredibly fulfilling work but just because it's incredibly fulfilling doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be profitable. But I'm still motivated to try and make this work as a business because I believe, especially in the US, that the best way to reach lots of people is to make money doing something.
Dave Asprey I think is a really great example of this. People always bitch and moan that he's all about marketing and he's always trying to make money and I applaud that. The more money he makes, the more attention The Bulletproof Diet is going to get and the more people that eat The Bulletproof Diet in this country, the better the state of health in this country is going to be. So when you look at the multibillion dollar cost of just one disease, diabetes, then that would buy an awful lot of Dave Asprey's MCT oil, and I wouldn't care if Dave got rich if he cured diabetes. That would be a really great outcome for everyone. So yeah, I want to make money doing this and I want to keep doing it and I want other people to do the same and to be successful.
The other way in which we can make this money is through supplement sales and that's been a bit of a crap sheet as well. It's hard. You don't realize that when you buy stuff from Amazon, there's a lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes that you don't know about. I've tried to replicate that which was possibly a mistake. I probably should have just got someone professional to do my fulfillment from the beginning. So what still happens now when you place an order on my website. So let's say you run a bunch of labs and you figure out, we have absolute confidence that you really need some particular supplements that's kind of unique to you and yeah, you could get those in many ways. You can get them from Amazon, you could the NOW Foods brand, carnitine say, or you can buy it from me. I don't really care but I do make more money if you buy it from me.
And then it's not like some other company, it's not separate, I'm not on commission from anyone. I'm sitting next to a big pile of supplements -- it's not strictly true. It's all beautifully organized by Julie on shelves now and it's a cool dark place and I carry very small inventory. The most I ever buy of any one thing is 24 so like two small boxes, so I'm constantly managing that inventory. I don't want to be sitting on a big pile of fish oil for a long period of time. I want it to be as fresh as it possibly can be. And I get it directly from the manufacturer and that's different from what you get from Amazon.
To get back to that fish oil example, the warehouse, the main fulfillment center for Amazon is in Reno. I can feel the hot sun on my back already and I'm in California and it's only February. It's going to get really hot in that warehouse in Reno and somebody somewhere has sent in half-a-ton of Nordic Naturals - Arctic Omega Fish Oil and it sat down there in a pallet somewhere waiting for you to buy it on Amazon. And when you do, who knows how long it's been there.
I've actually sold some stuff on Amazon recently just to fully understand how that process works and the margins on supplements are pretty crappy honestly and then Amazon takes all of it. Say you bought some Master Amino Acid Pattern. I was looking at this earlier today; it came up on a webinar. Master Amino Acid Pattern, the retail price is $49.99 or something and it's a great product, I love it. I think that's really good value, I would pay $50 for that thing. And you look at it on Amazon and the cost is like $32.95 or something. So basically the wholesale price is a little bit more than half so the margin is less than 50%, it's around about 40%. And then Amazon is going to charge probably $5 or $6 on that.
So the vendor, the actual seller on Amazon is making pennies on the dollar -- they really are. So the only way in which they can possibly make that a profitable business is to turn over a huge volume and the only way they can turn over a huge volume is to send a big pallet of it to the fulfillment center in Amazon in Reno.
[0:45:03]
So yeah, it's a tricky situation and mistakes have been made but not by me, I have to say. Some people that listen to this will know that the boxes turned up and "Oh, you sent me Enzyme CoQ10 and I wanted Oregano Oil" and I'm like "Oh!" And I've really had very limited success trying to get somebody else to help me with this stuff. It's like it's not the most exciting work and I don't mind it. It's like a kind of really good break for me to move away from my desk and just stop looking at the screen for a minute and think about something else. But to anyone else it's a really boring job like putting Oregano Oil in a box and then sticking a label on it. It's really not that much fun.
And so it's been extremely challenging to get someone to do that for me and not make a ton of mistakes. Right now as we speak, I'm back doing it myself. I know that like if you had gotten something out of this podcast or you've gotten something out of working with me or something else, I don't know, but when you buy supplements from me, there's a chance I'll be making some money so I really appreciate that business and everything is hand packed by me.
Julie: You also do a ton of research and spend a lot of time finding the facts --
Christopher: So that's the difference. Everything that's available -- if I find something better then I take down the old thing. It's not just an accumulation of crap on my website although there's a lot of stuff there. So for example in the beginning I was using Allergy Research Group Oregano Oil and it was mixed with Rice Bran Oil. Rice Bran Oil, it's so highly refined the chances of it being any of the allergenic proteins left there in oil are basically zero. But after doing some research I found that Designs for Health, they have another Oregano Oil that doesn't have and it's not cut with anything. It's just pure oregano oil.
And so I switched. And it caused me some headaches and people said "I ordered this and you sent me that" and I had to update my website and all that kind of stuff. But what I'm trying to say is I'm always there for you doing the research and doing the homework because it's a freaking circus out there with supplements that are unregulated, only certain companies are really doing a really great job. And Jamie has actually been really, really useful for this stuff too. Jamie spends a lot of time looking who are the best brands and because she's a medical doctor, we have access to all the best brands so this is consistent amongst Thorne Research, Designs for Health, Douglas Labs.
We're not really interested in selling to some Joe Smoe that wants to sell that crap on Amazon. They want just practitioners, just licensed people that know what the heck they're doing selling these stuff. You have to go to someone a little bit special in order to get the quality of supplements that we sell.
I posted to the list a few weeks ago about that story that was in The New York Times. I don't know if you saw this, maybe I'll link to this in the show notes. Basically some independent lab just grabs a bunch of supplements, they're all botanical herbs -- I think they were from Walmart and Target and some other cheap places -- and did an analysis of the contents. And in most cases they found none what it said on the label. In fact, in some cases, there was no trace of what was on the label inside the bottle. And not only that, there was a whole bunch of things like soy and rice bran and all kinds of crappy plants -- there's like ground up house plants. Jamie and I --Jamie sent me the story originally --we were just shocked. I knew that some supplements were better than others but I had no idea that that was the scale of the problem.
This whole process has been kind of like the penny drops, like another piece of the puzzle falls into place. That's why these protocols work is because we're not selling junk. We go into the very best companies that make the best products. In some cases, just because of the type of companies, like Designs for Health is a brand that I use frequently because they're the last big supplement company that is not sold out. Douglas Labs, Thorne, a number of others, fantastic companies -- the very best supplements you can buy -- but they sold out. The original guy that started that company, he handed it down to the kids and the kids sold out. And you can't really blame them for that or you can't really blame them from retiring.
But I think it's nice with Designs for Health that it's still a small company that's privately held by the people that are really passionate about what they do. And so I use them whenever possible. It shows in their products like for example, Alpha-Lipoic Acid is a supplement I recommend to nearly everybody for a number of reasons. And the very best Alpha-Lipoic Acid I can find is expensive and it's made for Designs for Health. That's frequently the case so that's been an interesting part.
[0:50:22]
The other thing I wanted to talk about finally -- sorry, I know this is probably dragging on a bit monotone which is me giving this diatribe about -- is the website is all me. People all say to me "Where do I get this WordPress plugin?" Other people say "Can you show me what plugin you use so that I can do podcasts on the same page as the rest of my website?"
I can't do that for them because the website is entirely my creation. As I mentioned earlier, I'm a computer programmer and the whole website is built with a programming language called Python and I use a toolkit called Django. Yeah, the website is the end result of that and it's kind of a pet project. It's like a little living breathing thing that I work on a lot and I love adding new features to it. It's really fun. I've automated a lot of the parts of our business that were previously taking a lot of time and that frees me up to do things which are more productive.
So I'll give you an example. When somebody orders a test on my website now, then it automatically sends the notification to BioHealth or Genova Diagnostics or whoever offers the test and that just saves me that step of having to order the test for them. So that kind of one less thing, I don't know if you listen to Ari Meisel's Less Doing podcast -- if you don't, I highly recommend it. So it's kind of less doing , more living, more getting things done. So that part's been really fun as well.
What about the future? What are your hopes for Nourish Balance Thrive for the future?
Julie: Well, I hope there is a Nourish Balance Thrive in the future.
Christopher: Oh, yeah! I had some money in the bank when I left the hedge fund but if we get to this time next year and we made $17,000 again, we're going to be done a lot sooner before then. I guess that's probably our greatest hope for both of us is we can keep doing this and make some extra money.
Julie: I think it's looking for ways to scale and looking for other projects that we can do, other ways of bringing in money because obviously we only have so much time. So seeing patients and clients is only a small fraction of what we do. We do the podcast as well, we do the Paleo Baby and Nourish Balance Thrive podcast that we're doing. Neither one of those make any money but maybe they will in the future.
Christopher: Maybe. Maybe there's a review on iTunes so more people might find it.
Julie: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then trying to branch out and do other things. I mean specifically like working on other book projects and content projects and figuring out what people are in need of in terms of information. There's so much out there and I think we're just trying to figure out the best place for Nourish Balance Thrive and all of it and what we can contribute in a really meaningful way without just kind of reiterating the same stuff that everybody else is saying and trying to be unique and helpful to athletes and families and parents and the Paleo community, the low-carb community and all the communities.
Christopher: Yeah. One thing that's really nice is whatever happens in the future, we can always walk away from this knowing that we helped a lot of people. We've got over, I think it's probably about 350 -- I haven't counted recently -- people who have actually run labs with us and taken supplements. I've got some fantastic stories and there's nothing more uplifting than doing that follow up call or receiving that email from someone that says "Hey, I'm back to my high school weight and my insomnia's gone." That's like an amazing experience and you couple that with excitement of launching a new business and you've got something, there's never a dull moment.
So if you are listening to this and wondering whether you should go into it, then that part of it is truly wonderful.
Julie: Yeah. the other thing I think we're always looking forward to and trying to find ways to incorporate other practitioners and try to not necessarily affiliate in the way of like an affiliate program but affiliate in the way of how do we add people or how do we--- we've already created this business platform so how can we work with other practitioners who are maybe coaches or gym owners or things like that. How do we work with them or connect with them so that we can help them help their people? So that's something else that we're trying to figure out how to do.
[0:54:54]
Christopher: That's actually my greatest fear is to create a Functional Medicine practice which is closed to new patients and has been for three years. As I'm sure some of you listening to this will have had that experience -- it sucks. Like you find someone you really want to work with and you can't because they don't have time for you. And I know that there are a lot of Amelia's out there. Amelia is amazing. She can do every bit as good a job, if not better, than I can with everything that I do. There are other people out there like there but she's not a computer scientist, she's not an entrepreneur, it's not what she does and I don't think she should be doing that stuff. If you're not good at it or you don't enjoy it, then don't torture yourself by spending a lot of time doing something you don't enjoy.
So what I'd really like to do is to seek out and vet those Amelias out there and add those people to this business as and when necessary as we grow and so we can keep the quality of the experience and maintain the quality of the protocol to keep getting the same results but not get stuck in this trap where we'd been close to new patients for however long.
If you're listening to this and you're a practitioner then I would say to you that this has got advantages for you. I know it's attractive, the idea of running your own business and being your own boss and all that kind of stuff but do you really want to spend $7000 on legal fees to set up a nice corporation? Do you even want to have that six-hour conversation with the legal adviser to set that up? Like I spent three hours sat in the office with my accountant last week to discuss what I was going to do with the $17,000 I made. It's just utterly ludicrous and then I haven't even done my tax return yet. He's just going to hand me a piece of paper that shows me how much money I didn't make and now I have to still do my tax returns.
And the website is another huge piece and the podcast and everything… there is so much junk that surrounds the process of helping people and I think it's a lot more efficient to just add people to this same framework, like it's not going to add any more work if another 200 people came to me tomorrow and said "I want to run labs", I could do that. I could find, I'm connected to networks both through several of the doctors I've been trained by where they are like-minded practitioners who just can't reach people. They just don't have the clients because they can't reach them.
So I can use my own personal experience and knowledge to vet those people and add them as necessary and then we can scale this thing and help more people. That was my overarching goal when I quit my job was to help as many people as possible and if I can make money doing that, then great.
So I think that's about it. I kind of wanted to let people know and this is a really efficient way of letting people know what's going on and why things are the way they are. I get lots of questions like "Hey, I did some tests with you on July and the price was $1000 for all three tests and you said you'd interpret them all and design me a protocol and do six hours of lifestyle coaching. Now I look at the website again and it's $2000 to do all the tests. What's this other test, I've never heard of…"
So it's more efficient for me to talk like this on the podcast and speak to a whole bunch of people at once rather than to answer all those questions by email. Hopefully this has been useful.
If you're listening to this and you've never worked with me or you've never spoken to me, then head over to the website. It's nourishbalancethrive.com. You'll see there's a link at the top of the page. You can book an appointment, it's 15 minutes. You don't need to talk to anyone to make that appointment, it's all done online. You can get that in your calendar right away. And if you're wondering about testing, what it maybe could offer you or you got some specific questions you'd like answered, then you can talk to me personally or you can talk to Amelia through that route. It won't cost you anything. Yeah, I love doing this. So I look forward to hearing from you.
Julie: Yeah. You can email us too, chris@nourishbalancethrive.com or julie@nourishbalancethrive.com. If you've got suggestions or ideas or comments, praise would be awesome, anything you want specific topics addressed on either of the podcasts, definitely always feel free to reach out and let us know as well.
Christopher: Excellent. Well, thanks very much and I'll speak to you soon.
Julie: Bye.
[0:59:34] End of Audio
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