Ozone Machine:

https://www.learntruehealth.com/ozone

Listen to episode 484 for more info on why and how to use ozonated water made in your home for energy and mitochondrial function:

https://www.learntruehealth.com/at-home-ozone-therapy-for-immune-mitochondrial-health-eileen-durfee

High-Quality NAD Brain Supplement:

Use coupon code LTH at

https://www.learntruehealth.com/nad

Listen to episode 460 about the benefits of high-quality NAD on cellular function, energy production, and mitochondrial health:

https://www.learntruehealth.com/nicotinamide-adenine-dinucliotide-supplement-nadovim-nad-the-missing-link-to-energy-brain-function-and-longevity

Sunlighten Sauna - the sauna Ashley uses, loves, and recommends:

Be sure to ask for the listener special!

https://www.learntruehealth.com/sunlightensauna

Listen to episode 245 to learn from the founder of Sunlighten Sauna as to why this sauna is the best tool for your health journey:

https://www.learntruehealth.com/sunlighten-saunas

The world's most effective Magnesium Soak:

Use coupon code LTH at livingthegoodlifenaturally.com

Listen to episode 294 to hear Kristen Bowen share her story of recovery and discovering the world's most absorbable form of magnesium:

https://www.learntruehealth.com/magnesium-foot-soak

Ashley's Favorite Spirulina and Chlorella:

Use coupon code LTH at EnergyBits.com

Listen to episode 487 and hear the latest science behind healing algie

https://www.learntruehealth.com/mitochondrial-self-healing-superfoods-high-potency-chlorella-spirulina

Dr. Oz's book, After Covid: Optimize Your Health in a Changing World

https://amzn.to/3BbfglU

www.ozgarcia.com

"Our clinic is on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. We provide detailed lab work, IV therapy, peptide therapy, and nutritional protocols, including supplements."

493: How To Recover From Long Covid, Dr. Oz Garcia

When you experience long-haul COVID, it's important to be proactive in recovery, and it's also helpful to know how to plan for this kind of huge transition. In this episode, Dr. Oz Garcia talks exactly about that, which involves reducing toxins in your life, boosting nutrient density (as well as nutrient diversity), improving sleep quality, enhancing focus and concentration, and getting into the best shape of your life.

Ashley James and Dr. Oz Garcia

Highlights:

The novelty of the COVID virus
How Dr. Oz Garcia became his own patient zero
Supplements Dr. Garcia recommends
Oura Ring
Tracking heart rate variability
How long-haul COVID damages mitochondria and healing from it
NormaTec compression boots

Intro:

Hello, true health seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Boy, are you in for such a treat. We have an amazing guest on the show today, Dr. Oz Garcia, who used to be a marathon runner, incredibly healthy his entire life. He’s a holistic doctor, works in New York State, and he has a great clinic. I believe it’s in New York City where he does functional medicine and believes in nutraceuticals and really healthy eating. And he got hit with COVID, he almost died. And he tells a story of recovery of experiencing first-hand the worst of long-haul COVID, the long-haul symptoms that have lasted him months, that left him crawling on the floor only months before he was running marathons. This is something now we’re discovering so many people have to a certain extent. I myself have been healing from long-haul COVID. And we’re seeing it is a different animal, it’s a different creature that we’re facing similar to Epstein-Barr virus or mono. The body has been affected on multiple levels. Some have seen even the brain shrink. There’s been studies showing that the brain shrinkage is almost like brain damage and recovering from that, healing from that. Healing is possible. We need to recognize that the body has an innate God-given ability to heal itself. It’s this amazing, beautiful machine.

We are so intricate that cellular biologists say when they look at the cell, they still don’t fully understand the cell, but when you look at just one cell, now you are comprised of over 37.2 trillion cells in your body and yet, one single cell is more complex than everything going on in New York City. It is so complex. It is so beautiful, the dance that happens in your body. And we can heal ourselves. Now, modern medicine really has us duped. It says we have to wait to get sick, go to the doctor, get put on some drugs to force the body to do something and then there's all these spill-over side effects. And they don’t really focus on healing and completely restoring the body from any kind of chronic illness. That's not their wheelhouse and that's frankly not where their money is made. That's why you are listening to this podcast because we’re holistic, meaning we look to the whole body and the whole life of that person knowing that your mental, emotional, spiritual and physical health all affect each other, knowing that what you ate affects you. Even what you ate yesterday is affecting you now, of course it does. What you eat, how you sleep, even when you eat, how much you eat, whether it was organic or not, all of that plays into the cell’s health, how much joy you experience, how much support, connection and love you have in your life, whether you feel like you have a purpose in your life. All these things matter.

So, wonderful episode today because Dr. Oz Garcia goes into his journey where he was left for the first time in his life needing to rebuild his health. And he’s 70, I think he’s 71 now but, you know, at 70-71, he looks amazing by the way because he’s taken such great care of himself all his life, but here he is rebuilding his life, just learning how to walk again, let alone run a marathon again. So he shares what he did throughout his journey in the last year to recover his health and, of course, then go on to help his patients do the same. He does mention some things that I want to make sure you know about. We talk about ozone. I have a fantastic episode. These are resources for you if you have long-haul, if you're looking to heal, especially mitochondrial issues. We see that a lot of people after COVID experience. It’s almost like their mitochondria has been damaged. And this also can happen when people take antibiotics and take other drugs. Those other drugs that disrupt the mitochondria. Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. It is the part of your body throughout all your body that makes cellular energy ATP. The majority of our mitochondria, although it’s in all our cells is in the nervous system, in the brain. We really need mitochondria to function to have these other cells function. It is what makes the energy for our body. So whatever damages mitochondria damages the body and leaves us exhausted. So, we want to do everything we can to support the body in having healthy mitochondrial function and the entire Krebs cycle, everything that has to do with making energy for the body is really important. We need to get the good stuff in, get the bad stuff out and get out of the way. Let the body do what it needs to do, support the body in doing it, what it needs to do.

So, there's a fantastic ozone machine that you can get at home. Quite affordable. I thought ozone machines were thousands of dollars and they’ve really come down in price and it’s a little machine, smaller than a shoebox and it will make ozonated water and it’s safe to make in the home. Other machines are not safe. You had to leave the room because it’s not safe to inhale ozone. But this one degases it so it only goes into the water. And I have a whole episode on that. It’s episode 484. The links to everything I’m talking about now is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at Learntruehealth.com or in the notes, wherever you're listening from. If you're listening from iTunes or Spotify, you're going to just go into the notes there in this episode and you’ll see it. So, check that one out. Of course, everything that I share, for the most part, I get a coupon code from these people, Learn True Health, the LTH coupon code. So always type in LTH and just see if they give us a discount because for the most part, I do get a discount for you guys.

So, the ozone machine, you can just go straight if you want to check it out. It’s Learntruehealth.com/ozone. That's Learntruehealth.com/ozone. That's the ozonated water that you can make in your home. You can use it as a very safe disinfectant and you can also drink it and it only disrupts or kills the bad bacteria that is talked about in episode 484, but also, ozone hyperoxygenates the body and the cells in the body and it also has been known to help the mitochondria function better. And I had a personal experience with ozone that rocked my world. It took away the muscle weakness that I was experiencing post COVID and I thought that was really amazing.

The next one is NAD. You can go to Learntruehealth.com/NAD, just the letter N, A and D. Learntruehealth.com/NAD. Listen to episode 460. We talk about NAD and how it helps energy production, cellular function, and especially mitochondrial health. It’s a really interesting interview. Today, that's one of the things that Dr. Oz Garcia talks about, ozone and NAD for his health journey. So go to Learntruehealth.com/NAD and use coupon code LTH as well.

Sunlighten Sauna, we do talk about sauna therapy using heat and light therapy. Amazing. I love Sunglighten Sauna. It is part of my detox routine. It has been part of my detox routine for 4 years now. It has really helped me recover from heavy metal toxicity and also, it’s fantastic for the cardiovascular system, for the immune system. The benefits go on and on. There are so many studies about sauna therapy. What I like about Sunlighten Sauna, it’s actually low heat. You can get started sweating at about 130 degrees, so it’s very easy to breathe in there. You're not really feeling overly hot. It just feels nice and warm like a day at the beach and yet you're doing your best detoxing at that temperature and it also helps with the immune system hugely. We talk a bit about that in this interview that you're about to hear. You can go back and listen to episode 245 to hear the founder of Sunlighten Sauna and some of the benefits as to why Sunlighten is better than the other sauna companies out there because I did do my research when I was choosing my saunsa, and I am so glad that I chose Sunlighten over the other ones because it’s full spectrum, it’s ultra low EMF and nontoxic.

And of course, if you decide you want to buy a Sunlighten Sauna, you can go to Learntruehealth.com/sunlightensauna and there's a list of the benefits and the machines and all that. But if you end up calling them, make sure you mention that you heard it from my podcast because listeners get a huge discount. This month and the month of December, there’s an even bigger sale going on right now. I believe it’s up to $700 off plus free shipping, and they usually throw in a few other goodies. So, just say that I sent you and that you better get a good deal because I said, you know, and of course, you can always message me and let me know, or come join the Learn True Health Facebook group and let me know because I’ve had nothing but good experiences from them and I personally am friends with one of the managers there, so if you ever need any help with that, you just let me know. I’ll make sure you get the hookup.

Then, of course, my favorite magnesium soak. Go to episode 294 to hear Kristen Bowen’s story where she was having 30 seizures a day, unable to talk in a wheelchair. Her life had totally disintegrated after a surgery where they put some stuff in her that they said she wouldn’t be allergic to, and of course, now we know so much more but it caused her to become so unhealthy, she was on death store, eventually got surgeons to finally agree to take this stuff out of her, but there she was, she was left still very weak, very sick and she stumbled upon this particular type of magnesium from the Zechstein sea that allowed her… it was the biggest tool she used to recover her health and so she dedicated her life to making this I don’t want to say little anymore because her company has grown so much since I started talking about it. But it’s a family-run company and it’s very high quality. She has incredibly high standards like I do when it comes to what you put in your body. So you can go to Livingthegoodlifenaturally.com, use coupon code LTH, get the magnesium soak. And my favorite thing to do is soak my feet in magnesium while in the sauna. Bada bing bada boom, you got 2 for 1. It’s great. We have several more episodes on the magnesium soak. The first one is 294 so you can go back and listen to that one. Make sure you use coupon code LTH anytime that you're at Livingthegoodlifenaturally.com because she does give the listeners a great discount.

Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing these episodes with those you care about. My mission is to help as many people as possible to no longer suffer. The needless suffering needs to stop. Man, I can tell you that long-haul COVID is no joke. It is suffering and it’s psychologically suffering as well because so many doctors, they don’t know what to do. They throw their hands up, they say maybe it’s all in your head. You don’t really feel like you're being taken seriously and a lot of them just don’t have the tools. They don’t have the tools because they don’t have the training and some of them have the hubris because, I don’t know, there's ego or they feel threatened because they don’t know the answer. They end up making us feel like it’s our fault. It’s so frustrating. But really, there's a whole world of holistic medicine and it’s completely separate from the mainstream medical system. And the mainstream medical system doesn’t want to acknowledge that there's all these amazing things that we can be doing outside of drugs and surgery. If you're suffering or you have a friend who’s suffering, please get them to listen to these episodes, tell them that there's hope. Tell them the body can heal itself. The body is amazing at healing itself. I was sick with so many different conditions. I had polycystic ovarian syndrome, I no longer have it. And I was told by so many doctors that you can’t get rid of it, you have it for the rest of your life. I had type 2 diabetes. I was told that that’s just it. You just have to be on these drugs for the rest of your life. I said no, I took the natural medicine route, I no longer have type 2 diabetes. That was actually the easiest thing to reverse out of all the issues I ever had. And I had it for years. I had out of control blood sugar for years. I had infertility. I was told I’d never have kids. And we have an amazing son. So, you can’t put these doctors on a pedestal and accept their truth as your truth. You need to fight for what you want in your life and if you want really good health, stop believing the limitations that other people put on you. Their belief system is their own and I believe you have an amazing ability to heal yourself, your body wants to heal itself.

As one of my mentors once told me, your body has this blueprint of perfect health and healing. It’s somewhere deep inside you in the higher self, in your soul. But it is in there. You have inside you this blueprint of perfect health and healing. If you’re spiritual, then God has that instilled in you and your body wants to come back to that. Homeostasis is the body always trying to get back to that perfect point of balance. What throws the body off balance can be stress. It can be emotional, physical, mental stress – physical stress being drugs, alcohol, the over 80,000 manmade chemicals in our air, food, water, soil. Right? There are so many factors now that are putting stressors on the body and so, with one thing at a time, with one episode at a time, with one meal at a time, with one day at a time, you can make these beautiful little changes to supporting your body’s ability to heal itself. That's what I want you to focus on. Don’t focus on what the doctor told you that you're going to be sick the rest of your life. Or you have this because your parents had it or you had this because you're old or you have this because you're a man or a woman, or whatever. Whatever excuse they said. You have this issue because… That’s their belief system. You don’t need to buy into their belief system. If you want perfect health and healing, then that's what we’re going to focus on. Because your body can heal. Just like you got a paper cut, you get a little cut, you don’t even think about it. The body just does the healing for you, right?

Now, if you have a lack of nutrients in your body, it takes longer to do wound healing. I have some clients who got their nutrition totally under control, got rid of all their nutrient deficiencies. Their body was super nutrified and then they went in for some kind of surgery and the doctors couldn’t believe how fast they healed. They were amazed. They had to take stitches out weeks before. I had a friend heal a bone faster than was expected. I’ve had clients that the incisions heal incredibly fast. I even had a friend who’s a fellow coach who was working with a client who had a stage IV bed sore and the doctors were like this person is going to die from this, there’s nothing we can do. The bed sores were all the way from the skin into the bone. We changed his diet. Diet. That’s all we could do because they were in a hospital but we changed his diet. And I said okay, here’s the foods I know that are super healing, here’s the foods that I know are super nutrifying, and here’s a list of the foods that are definitely going to hinder his wound healing. Guess what? He was able to get out of that hospital completely having healed that stage IV bed sore.

And the doctors, within days of changing his diet, the doctors were like, “Hey, something’s working.” We’re like, yeah, we stopped feeding him the hospital food and started bringing in our own. There are foods that help the body heal. Everything you put into your body matters. Right? And that's why I love the magnesium soak because it absorbs straight into your body, bypasses the digestive system, straight into your lymph system. I love the NAD supplements. I really feel a difference when I take it. Especially the ozone therapy is amazing.

ENERGYbits is one I haven’t mentioned here but you can go to ENERGYbits.com and use coupon code LTH. Like yesterday for breakfast, I just had chlorella and spirulina. ENERGYbits to me tastes delicious. Other companies’ chlorella and spirulina, I don’t like. The ENERGYbits are so clean and so pure. It’s pure amino acids. The body just immediately absorbs the nutrients and the vitamins from the ENERGYbits and I feel so good. All I did was eat 30 of these little pellets of chlorella and 30 little pellets of spirulina. That’s all I had for breakfast yesterday and I was full until about 1 PM. How cool is that? I fully nutrified my body with it. So, it’s a food. It’s little capsules you chew, not capsules, it’s like little pressed tablets that you chew. We call them green crackers in our home because our son loves them. But they're actually not a supplement; they're a crop. They're a crop the sun dehydrated and for ease of use pressed into these little things that you can chew. So, I love the ENERGYbits. Of course, you can go back. You can use the search function on my website Learntruehealth.com, search ENERGYbits and find the interview, several of them with Catherine Arnston where we go through the science and the studies. It’s the most studied food in the world. There's over 100,000 studies between chlorella and spirulina. It’s the safest food in the world to eat. It’s the most studied food in the world. And it’s actually the most nutritious food in the world.

My most recent episode with Catherine Arnston, episode 487, is fantastic to listen to. She goes through, even though like I said I’ve had her on the show several times, that one is fantastic. We go through the latest science of chlorella and spirulina and how it actually acts as an antimicrobial in the body and it helps to establish a better microbiome. It is so cool, the science. If you geek out like me on the science of holistic medicine, you're going to love that episode.

So without further ado, I’ll let you get to this episode with Dr. Garcia. I know you're going to love it. I just really felt like I had to do you a service by making sure that you knew that there's all these resources. When you come to listen to this episode, I want to arm you with all these other things that you can do and now you have a bunch of things to listen to after you listen to this one. I’ve given you a list of other ones to go through. Of course, like I said, it’s in the notes of this episode. So, go through all those episodes when you’ve done this one and know that your body will heal itself. Sometimes it’s as simple as little bit of changes in lifestyle, going to bed at a different time, making sure and walking in sunlight in the morning, especially drinking enough water, drinking lemon water in the morning. These changes seem almost because they're so simple, they seem like “Oh that's too simple. My symptoms are so great. These are such small changes. How can they possibly help?” I think that some people go, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Drink lemon water in the morning, whatever. That just doesn’t sound like it could help me.” First of all, huge benefits from hydrating the body, and then the lemon water, once it gets inside your cells, it actually acts as an antioxidant. Even though it’s acidic in your stomach, it’s actually alkaline once it’s absorbed up inside your body. So, yes, simple cheap things that you can do, like drinking a lot of lemon water in the morning, going for walks first thing in the morning, making sure you get to bed at 10:00 PM, that actually makes a huge difference. Making this shift in your diet. I have so many episodes on the wonderful healing benefits of eating organic and removing gluten grains, removing oil from your diet and increasing antioxidants with all kinds of wonderful, colorful vegetables and berries, mushrooms, onions. You can listen to my episode with Dr. Joel Fuhrman, like a nutritarian diet. Doing these changes, within 24 hours, there’s a shift in your body. Even just one meal. Eating a nutritarian meal actually is seen. You can see it in bloodwork. It begins to affect you right away. Don’t discredit diet changes, little tiny changes. Don’t discredit them. They are the key to your better health. I’m so excited for you on this healing journey because no matter where you are, if you're suffering like I did, please know that you don’t have to suffer. It is optional. And we’re going to help you to get to a point where you’re no longer suffering. I believe in your body’s ability to heal itself.

Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day, and enjoy today’s episode.

[00:21:06] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 493.

I am so excited for today’s interview. We have an amazing guest, Dr. Oz Garcia, on the show today who specializes in helping people to heal and overcome from long-haul syndrome. We’re seeing the masses having huge issues recovering even months later after having COVID. And you’ve written an amazing book called After COVID. It’s on Amazon. Of course, the links to everything that Dr. Garcia does is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at Learntruehealth.com.

As the pandemic began in 2020, when did you start to see people suffering from long-haul syndrome? Much like mono where even a year later, people are just exhausted, mentally exhausted. They’ve got brain fog; it’s affecting people mentally and emotionally. Some people even have digestive problems months and months later. When did you start to see it as a problem?

[00:22:11] Dr. Oz Garcia: Great question, Ashley. I would say the summer of 2020 already, even though that was the beginning, in many ways of the pandemic, that March is when it really took off. But people were already being deeply affected. They have been exposed to the virus. Months later, I started to read about people that have gotten it right at the beginning and by August-September, I was reading about people that were somewhat incapacitated. In other words, they got sick. They had gone through all that was available to actually get through the illness itself yet there was the post-illness hangover, so to say, and information was already coming out at that point and I thought to myself, this is really peculiar. Kind of like what you said about mono and Epstein-Barr where you took a bad hit but it would debilitate you for indefinite periods of time and for the effects of COVID, nobody knew what this was, why were people still experiencing symptoms three months, four months, six months later. And now we know that people are experiencing it one year, two years, going into three years for some people.

[00:23:42] Ashley James: This is very scary because a lot of doctors are ignoring it. A lot of doctors don’t know what to do. They are sending people, just go to a counselor, maybe this is just a mental or emotional issue. But they don’t have this toolset and the drug companies haven’t developed a drug yet, so they're just like, “Well, just wait and be sick until we figure out a drug we can give you.”

But really, none of those things are the answer. Is this similar to other viruses that cause a syndrome? Is this similar? Or are you seeing it that it’s even worse? Is it different?

[00:24:19] Dr. Oz Garcia: The nature of this virus is its novelty in terms of what’s happening that is completely radically different than anything that’s come before it. So, when people get exposed to it, they could get a kind of like COVID which is in something that I would say is all that good. We don’t know if you get exposed to COVID one, two, or three times with a new variant that there may not be long-term repercussions even though the hit may be initially somewhat light. Now, we know that because of the novelty of this particular virus, in fact, it mutates—in fact, it mutates so rapidly. The fact that there are many points along the protein spikes on the virus itself that can cause depending on the person, depending on their current state of health, depending on preexisting conditions, genetics, whether you're going to go down or not and whether you're going to go down really bad, and whether you're going to have a good recovery or not, and you're going to find yourself with post COVID or long-haul syndrome.

So, doctors are not all that well-equipped to actually deal with this problem because we’ve never seen it before. So, if you do go to a doctor, they’re going to look at you as they did with me when I was first diagnosed with long-haul as a mystery, what do I do about my lungs that were ravaged by COVID pneumonia. What do I do about these joint aches that were back breaking? What do I do about the severe exhaustion and apathy that had me sleeping up to 18 hours a day? What do I do about my moods? The fact that there was this no sense of happiness whatsoever, just morose, blue, anxious. And then the terrible problems with insomnia.

So, I had the full package. Everything that anybody could have had post COVID, I had. I went from weighing about 140 pounds to about 100, maybe 99, 98 pounds by the time I got home from the hospital. So, I was a walking wreckage. Like that, there are people in the millions that got this virus. It’s kind of like termites in a house. They come in, they do the damage that they do. You get the exterminator, they put the canvas over your house, they come in and they spread the house and fumigate it, kill all the termites, take the tent down, but you wouldn’t dare go into the house afterwards. God only knows what condition the floor is in, the staircase. So, kind of like that. COVID does tremendous biological infrastructural damage for many people. Certainly those that are long-haulers and symptomology that's unexpected.

So, you can’t reduce it to a pill, a solution. There are too many moving parts when you’re talking about long-haul COVID or post-COVID syndrome. Some people can’t recover their smell for a while or their taste for a while or they’ve got chronic headaches. It may be just something like that. It can be just deep disturbances with your sleep. So, you can have mild long-term symptomology which is also nerve-wracking or the full package in the way that I had it where when I was speaking to some doctors that are dear friends of mine, some of the most brilliant cardiologists, pulmonologists and so on that couldn’t come up with any way to explain what was going on and any way to explain what would be the best path out or best paths out.

So, doctors themselves are baffled. There are doctors themselves that have wound up with long COVID, and they're suffering and they understand that this isn’t a mental problem. That there are severe problems with your body that they can’t put a finger on. There are programs at different institutions at Cornell Weill, at Mount Sinai, programs for long-haulers I think at NYU also. I find that the counsel and advice that’s being given by the faculty of doctors in these different institutions leaves a lot to be desired.

[00:29:01] Ashley James: What did you do? So you were patient zero for yourself. Or patient one. You were like ground zero. You're treating yourself first and having to figure out what is going on. Then also, you were seeing amazing experts and they were all scratching their heads too. So you had to really build your protocol from the ground up.

[00:29:20] Dr. Oz Garcia: Let’s backtrack a little bit. I’ve been in my field for about 40 years. I’ve been a long-distance runner. I’ve been a marathoner. I’ve been an ultramarathoner. And I’ve been accustomed to having great control over my body. Certainly when it came to my breathing capacity, the fact that I could in the weeks before I got COVID get up, do 150 push-ups, work out in the ways that I was accustomed to working out and generally feel really well to getting home several weeks after being hospitalized with COVID where I tried to do one push-up and fell and banged my head and just made things worse. Being accustomed to having been a runner and having full lung capacity to where now I was attached to an oxygen compressor 24 hours a day for about two months, this was mentally debilitating and when I would talk to the doctors that had treated me in the hospital, you could almost feel them shrugging their shoulders over the phone. They didn’t know what to say. Bit by bit, they disconnected from being in communication with me.

So yeah, I had to be my own patient zero, so to say. The fact that I knew so much about caring for my body in terms of nutrition, in terms of mindfulness practices, the supplements that I used, the way that I would work out, the fitness protocols, the use of contrast between extreme heat and extreme cold, whether it was sauna and cold plunges. All of these plus a multitude of other practices, protocols, and products that I never thought about, I had to think about. Now, I knew that if I wanted to get my breathing back into control, that I had to rely on myself. And what was out there that was available to actually rehabilitate lungs that have been ravaged by viral pneumonia, by COVID pneumonia, whereas the doctors couldn’t tell me what to do really.

I kind of literally, in my bed, laid out a spreadsheet. Okay, so my mood sucked. What do I do about that? My anxiety is through the roof. I don’t have energy. I need to crawl to the bathroom. My breathing is suffering tremendously. My lungs have sustained a certain amount of damage. My appearance, at 98 pounds, I looked like I had survived coming out of Somalia. I could count the bones on my chest. My face is completely sunken in. So, what could I do to rebuild my muscle mass? What could I do to gain my weight back? So, this became an inquiry in terms of all my prior knowledge and could I bring it to bear so that I could save my life.

[00:32:28] Ashley James: How long did it take you before you started to start feeling better again?

[00:32:33] Dr. Oz Garcia: I would say it was a good 8 months. Good 8 months. So, the first several months was falling into routines that I would follow every day religiously and repeat them every single day over and over and over. Then, what I would do is add another routine. It’s kind of like becoming a juggler. You start out by juggling two balls and then at a certain point, you find that you can keep on pulling up in the air and add a third one. Then all of a sudden, I was juggling three balls. Then bit by bit, as I had my confidence increased, I could add a fourth and a fifth and so on.

So, it was a lengthy process and it’s still going on. I’m still rebuilding my body almost few years later. But I’m far and away from where I was when I couldn’t stand up hardly. Like I said, I had to crawl to just about any part of my apartment. My breathing was terribly labored. By following the counsel I’d say of thinkers that were better than I am, certainly in how to do things incrementally like James Clear, and James’ book, Atomic Habits. So by listening to Atomic Habits, again, while I was in the hospital, audiobooks, and then kind of listening to it again when I was home, I knew that I could do a little tiny bit every day. If I could do 0.25% percent better than I did the day before and keep building up so that it was a percentage increase in a week, then 0.50%, then could I do 1% better today than I did yesterday? With my breathing exercises, my ability to do some kind of strengthening exercises, crafting my eating so that it was to make me gain back muscle mass, and then by category, all the different things that I knew I needed to do, within a matter of several months, I was off the breathing device that I had at home. Then beyond that, I saw that my appearance is improving. That encouraged me tremendously.

I lost a lot of my hair as you saw before. I now have a full head of hair. But it was coming out in patches. Same thing. You all of a sudden go from thinking of yourself in a certain way in the world, you take great pride in terms of your upkeep, your appearance, and here I was I looked completely unrecognizable to myself.

There were other problems also that arise in the hospital. I developed clots in my body. Now, this is an effect of the virus itself. So there were medications that I was put on to actually break the clots up. They did save my life. Once I got out of the hospital, I found alternative protocols, alternative treatments to actually break clots up because the medications themselves that I was taking were producing terrible side effects.

So, bit by bit, I found the appropriate parallel protocol for just about everything that I was suffering from and how could I continue to expand on that. Okay, so if I use certain kinds of nutrients to improve on my sleep, then could I eliminate what they gave me in the hospital? Could I eliminate my insomnia? By category, same thing there, I worked up a complete protocol for supplementation. That is, the vitamins, the minerals, the amino acids, the essential fatty acids, the peptides, the nootropics, the herbal products. All the products that I felt besides the basics, things like vitamin D and probiotics, but much more I would say precise use of certain nutrients that could build my brain back, that could build my energy back, that could put me into very deep sleep for hours at a time, that could help me recover my energy from the damage that was done to my muscles, the mitochondria, the engines within the cells of my body. Bit by bit, I started to feel that I was going to actually get my life back. But it was bit by bit. It was a James Clear inspired process to getting my life back.

[00:37:26] Ashley James: At what point did you start to share this with patients or clients or people you’re working with? At what point did you start to then help others?

[00:37:35] Dr. Oz Garcia: I would say it took me months. Probably I got sick at the end of the January of 2021 and by October-November 2021, I was back to journaling, writing essays, posting on media, and it occurred to me that I wanted to write a book about my experience and put in that book what it was that I did to save my ass, so to say. The book itself winds up being in two parts. It’s a history of the events that many people go through when they wind up with severe COVID, my own personal experience. Then the second part, Ashley, is pretty much a workbook like these are the things that I did for sleep, these are the things that I did to improve my appetite. These are things that I did to get my muscle mass back up. These are things that I did to improve my brain, my memory (short-term and long-term). And these are things and these are the products that I used to improve my focus, my recall. These are the things that I used to get my motivation back on track.

So I had to earn it all back. I’d say a lot of it was the discipline prior to COVID. I had to draw on that and use certain thinkers that, again, I would listen to, to get the inspiration, to motivate myself when there was no motivation at all. There was nothing in my body that I would say felt like you got to get up, you got to do breathing exercises. None of that. I had to literally use my brain power to move me through just about every exercise, every practice, every protocol to get back to where I thought I should be. And that, like I said before, was incremental over a matter of many, many months. But I’d say by October-November, I was healthy enough, fit enough that I could start writing out everything about my misadventure and how to get your life back at least from my perspective from long-haul COVID.

[00:40:04] Ashley James: I definitely want to get into things that you felt were really impactful. But I’d like to know, have you ever had chronic illness in your past or is this the first time you’ve really suffered?

[00:40:18] Dr. Oz Garcia: I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve never ever experienced anything of this magnitude at all. Nothing that I could recall. Nothing that prevented me from being able to get out of my bed. Literally, Ashley, I couldn’t lift my arms at a certain point. The fact that there was no muscle there to lift it, it should tell you something in that regard. So no, I was completely unprepared for this.

[00:40:52] Ashley James: Now you're in your 70’s and we got to see each other, I got to see you on video and you look incredibly handsome and you don’t look anywhere, I mean, if someone said you're in your 50’s, I’d be like, “Okay,” Like you are very handsome. When I say handsome, I mean very healthy. You look very healthy. So, I know that the work that you’ve done, like you said, you’ve built all these habits, all these routines to getting yourself back and you still are getting yourself back. But I just think about the amount of empathy now you have for those who are in chronically ill states and especially those who are also going through long-haul like you have so much empathy now having been incredibly healthy before, having not really ever experienced chronic illness and you were a marathon runner, your peak performance, top health, and then it was all taken away from you, just very quickly taken away from you and now you're building your body back from being emaciated. So your compassion and your drive, even though you didn’t have any because I know when you have long-haul syndrome, you don’t have motivation. There's no motivation. Like you had to really pull up some motivation that wasn’t even there from like you said mental willpower. I like that you turned back to Atomic Habits. What a great audiobook. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to that with my husband. We really got a lot out of it. I couldn’t believe when I saw an Audible that it was a 5-star and it had so many ratings. I’m like, what has 5 stars? And now, that has 5 stars. That's a great one to tell everyone to listen to.

The fact that you suffered so greatly and you have come so far and you can turn around and then help those who are also suffering. That’s why I know that your book is going to be so helpful for so many people, the book After COVID. I’m so happy that you're here today sharing so that we can help those no longer suffer.

[00:43:00] Dr. Oz Garcia: It’s true. Also, being in the hospital, being told that I may never be able to work out again, run again, may as well forget, I was literally told that many of the things that I had in my life, I think I had my iPhone me, I was just constantly doing Google searches on what was known at that time. But I came very close to dying in the hospital. As my weight kept dropping rapidly, as I would go in and out of conscience often during the day, the fact that there was no real understanding about the value of sleep, so you would be woken up several times a night. I know this is well-intended to take your blood pressure, make sure that your oxygen saturation was what it should be, draw your blood, but I went through three weeks where I essentially would sleep totally maybe 2, 3, 4 hours maximum per night. You got to know at that point, Ashley, there were no hospital rooms available. They are all taken. So we were being wielded into a converted storage room. So, no windows, temperature control didn’t exist. The rooms would either get too hot, too cold, extremely humid. And that would add to the terror that you were going through emotionally, right? Again, we’re talking about a pandemic. Nobody was prepared. Nobody understood how bad this was and how bad it was about to get still. And how to make sure that you could be as comfortable as possible. The medical system was horrifically overwhelmed. While I was in there, I would say that there was a revolution within my value system. So, all the things that I thought were meaningful before, bit by bit as I went through my recovery, started to lose meaning. How important was it to accumulate great wealth, how important was it to accumulate notoriety, being well known, how important was it to have substantial material goods, how important was it to fly off to exotic destinations and think that this was what was important in life.

So, that whole system kind of collapsed and it was, I’d say, one of the gifts out of all of this and I got to be careful because I wish I could have come to these points of view, the ones that I hold now, in terms of yes, having greater empathy, greater compassion, intense gratitude, humility, the value systems that when you stack them all together allow you to have a sense of integrity and a sense of self that wasn’t there before. And I thought that it was there before. I thought that was I pursuing authenticity and sincerity, but at the same time, you wind up in a hedonic treadmill where if you live in New York City, or any big city in America, you’re driven to achieve and achieve to the point where your value systems do get bent out of shape and corrupted. And you can’t see it when you're in it. It’s kind of like a fish in the water. You're just operating that way. What’s everybody in New York up to? Looking good, scoring big, making sure that you're recognized for being somewhat special. All the things that you can’t really say in totality add up to being a happy human being. Whatever they add up to, the whole notion of what it means to be happy wasn’t on my mind. It was kind of like okay, this is what you do and this is what your work is producing for you.

I think these days, my concern is certainly for people around me, and the kind of value system that does allow me to be a lot more forgiving for how I was and where things go wrong these days. Just forgiving overall. And we know through neuroscience that to the extent that you practice gratitude, you can get a gratitude journal, you can get a gratitude app. You can get a 5-minute journal app, download it, and do five minutes of gratitude every morning, five minutes of gratitude before you go to bed every night. And we know that after a month to three, it has a profound effect on your thinking. How it is that you view the world, how you view yourself and how you view people around you. So, all of those things took on greater meaning for me and continue to grow, expand, push out as more time has elapsed, Ashley, since I became sick and I started to look at the world this way.

[00:48:40] Ashley James: So, you're sharing with us things that you got out of it. It’s like taking a very horrible and tragic experience and you're starting to find the growth there.

[00:48:52] Dr. Oz Garcia: That's correct. But like I pointed out before, did I have to go that far down to come this far in terms of how I now live my life and the way that we’re shaping our practice, our office, and my interactions with most people. So, maybe in my case that’s what it took and thank God I survived. There were plenty of people that I knew that didn’t survive, that didn’t make it. I shared a room with one gentleman who passed away the second week that I was in the hospital and another room with another gentleman that passed away.

So, I remember, I do recall many people kind of telling me, “Well, what lessons did you learn out of this?” Frankly, I don’t think I learned anything. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy. It’s not an experience that people need to go through. Now, I think because of my character, I kind of got enough out of this experience that I knew that since I lived and I made it through, that I didn’t want to embody the values that I had before. They somehow seemed meaningless to me. Like the texture of rice paper, like looking good, does that really matter? Or does like you mentioned before, being empathetic and compassionate, does that matter? And should I put my attention there?

In totality, you find that you're accumulating greater amounts of peace of mind whereas I don’t think I had all that much before. I was just driven.

[00:50:43] Ashley James: Wow, it really did completely reset your whole life and you've built yourself back up and then you turned around and you want to help others. I love the work that you're doing because we can end the suffering of so many. There's people out there who went through what you went through.

[00:51:05] Dr. Oz Garcia: Very true. Well, to give you a quick example, let’s talk about breathing for a minute. So, with my COVID, I had a severe pneumonia. When I was in the hospital and I was CAT scanned, they told me that I had about half of my lungs filled with, to quote the doctor, millions of micro clots. And I had one substantial clot headed for my heart. So, I couldn’t breathe. They wanted to put me on a mechanical ventilator, I refused. Statistically, many of us already know that if you go on a mechanical ventilator, your chances, at least back then, were 2 out of 10 that you’d come back. The other 8 just wouldn’t survive the experience of a mechanical ventilator. They put this tube down your throat into your lungs, you're sedated, you could be sedated for a day, a week, a month, and the mechanical ventilator breathes for you. Now, I knew based on the stats that I just told you and what I reckon, that this would be highly destructive. I took my chances. So consequentially, I was put on what’s called a high-flow cannula. That's kind of like a little breathing device that's attached to this machine that would push 65 liters of oxygen into my nose per minute at 100% oxygen. I went with that and thank God that I survived to be here and tell you the story.

Now, when I got home, I couldn’t breathe without still using auxiliary oxygen, and bit by bit, I started to investigate different devices to help me breathe better. Now, one of the things that they give you in the hospital, they gave me what’s called a spirometer and it’s kind of like a little plastic device that you blow into and then you suck the air in, you suck and you breathe in and you make a little ball go up. To the extent that you breathe better, you can make the little ball go up further and further. And I thought to myself, is this going to really save my life when I get home. You can get it on Amazon for $8. With the severe pneumonia that I had, how do I get back to breathing the way that it did before?

A dear friend of mine who’s a very well-known athlete turned me onto a particular breathing device that you get with an app and started using it. It was like sitting still in a chair using the breathing device, this actually gave me a workout. I could only start at the beginning by doing 1 minute at the beginner level which would knock me out. I’d have to go lie down in my bed. I could hardly make the needle move on the breathing device. My ability to hold oxygen, breathe out and breathe in, you got a measure of all those three metrics, was horrific. Over months doing it every day, sometimes twice a day and working it was the way that I got to breathe again in the way that I do now so that I can go walk, I can go walk for 2 to 3 hours several times a week and bit by bit will consider if I want to run. There were reasons why I’m not running yet. But I can work out the way that I worked out before and go to the gym, do my upper body workouts. And this is what’s missing in the conversation with many specialists that are trying to teach long haulers how to recover their breathing capacity. If you can’t recover your breathing capacity, fully oxygenate yourself, it’s going to be difficult to actually get many other aspects of your health post COVID working as well as you want to.

I was listening to NPR radio a few days ago. On NPR, they were interviewing a gentleman who’s had long COVID now for almost two years and he was talking about how he uses the spirometer still every day and I thought to myself, “oh my God.” Two years later into his suffering still having great difficulty getting up, can only work a couple of hours per week, and doesn’t know that there may be other ways of strengthening his lung capacity, expanding his lungs, getting more oxygen throughout his body and to his brain. So there isn’t a single morning that I don’t do about 40 minutes worth of breathing exercises. That's part of the morning routine. And I can run up the four flights of stairs in my building. Whereas when I first got home, it could take me about half an hour to get up the first 2 flights.

[00:56:33] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. Do you not have an elevator?

[00:56:35] Dr. Oz Garcia: Well, I live in a beautiful townhouse. That was very difficult.

[00:56:40] Ashley James: Got it. So half an hour to crawl up two flights of stairs in your townhome whereas now you can run up and down the stairs.

[00:56:48] Dr. Oz Garcia: That's correct.

[00:56:49] Ashley James: Nice.

[00:56:51] Dr. Oz Garcia: Also too, as I rehabilitated my breathing, so did my energy start to come back. Instead of having to be in bed at 3:00, I could enjoy normal life. 6:00, 8:00. I remember the first time that I made it till 9:00 PM and I was in sheer ecstasy. It was like yes, you know, everything that you’ve done, you didn’t need to get in bed and crawl and do a 2 to 3-hour nap. You're getting better.

[00:57:18] Ashley James: I love it. I want those who are suffering to see the light at the end of the tunnel and I think your story is sharing that and showing that there’s definitely light at the end of the tunnel for them.

[00:57:32] Dr. Oz Garcia: That's correct.

[00:57:32] Ashley James: So, breathing exercise is important. Of course, you outlined this in greater detail in your book. Are there supplements or like IV protocols or like ozone IV? What else is there that helped you with your lungs beyond daily breathing exercises?

[00:57:48] Dr. Oz Garcia: We have a clinic and we do have an IV clinic. So, there were two bags of IVs that I would do per week. At the beginning of the week, I would have my clinician come over and I would do a bag with a multitude of minerals, vitamins, antioxidants, amino acids. These would have a tremendous impact on how I felt. The second IV was using a very unique and novel form of vitamin B3 called NAD+. NAD is a nutrient that has a massive impact on life extension. So, it will do a great deal of repair within our own DNA sequences so that you produce less mutations as you get older. Now, NAD, we know gets depleted as a consequence of COVID. Certainly, severe COVID. Those particular IVs with extremely high amounts of vitamin C, glutathione, N-acetylcysteine, acetylcarnitine, licorice, all of these were compounded for me, B complex, minerals, amino acids. That was critical to getting me back to normal. Then the second IV which was the NAD one.

So, those are still very important. I do maybe twice a month now instead of twice a week. They’re not something that most people can find unless they go out and search for a good functional MD so that they have access to the intravenous treatment protocols that I believe had a measurable impact to my recovery. Now, separate from that, there were all the supplements that I would use. There were supplements that helped you sleep better. Gaba, magnesium threonate, L-Serine. There’s a plant called Zembrin which is now part of a product that you can get that actually calms your mind and you sleep better. The different forms of plants that I like, herbal products, holy basil. That has a remarkable effect too. So, I would stack these – Ashwaganda, gaba, vitamin B6, 5HTP. Kind of like a little hand grenade in my hand of all these nutrients that would allow me to go into a really good deep sleep. These are laid out in the workbook part of After COVID. They work very well for me and I continue to use them and I sleep a good 8 to 9 hours most days, I make a point of that.

Sleep winds up being a superpower for recovery. If you're not sleeping well and you're trying to get better, just about everything else is going to kind of break down. Your diet, your exercise, getting out and getting sun every day, trying to meditate. Your anxiety won’t alleviate unless you're getting adequate sleep on a regular basis.

I use a tool called an Oura Ring. Now the Oura Ring just like certain kinds of Fitbits, but I would say with much better accuracy, measures a great deal of your activity during the daytime if you want to, certainly when you go to sleep at night. So, by using the Oura Ring and looking at my app in the morning, I could tell how much sleep I got, my body temperature during the night, how many times I woke up, how long was I in deep sleep which allows your immune system to recover, your brain to detox, how long was in REM sleep (that’s where you're doing a lot of dreaming and a lot of memory consolidation is occurring), how much light sleep. And so, I could see my improvement over many months and now, I get almost a perfect score every night.

There's also a measure called heart rate variability (HRV) which you want to make sure is in the high levels. Your HRV can be measured while you're sleeping. HRV levels tend to drop when you're really ill, when you're stressed out. I would say a good HRV is about 40+. My HRV when I got out of the hospital was about 8, 9, 10. I knew that I was in jeopardy at that time.

[01:02:46] Ashley James: Wow. I love the idea of doing the tracking with, like you said, the Fitbit or Apple Watch or Oura Ring and being able to attract heart rate variability is so key. I’ve actually had a few episodes where clinicians have shared about it. We’ve had naturopaths share about it and nutritionists share about it, that they see it’s how we can measure the body’s base stress levels or like you can measure base metabolic rate. You can measure what your body is doing, just the burning calories, and we can understand the metabolism. But now we can look at it and see like how many RPMs are we revving. Are we like always revving at 1200 RPMs or are we revving at 9000 RPMs, is our body revving at high stress. Because I once had a client, she’d do all of my homework except she wouldn’t do any of the homework I gave her to lower stress or to manage stress. I brought it up after a few weeks of noticing. She’d do everything else. She would eat healthy, she’d track what she ate, but she refused to do any of the things that brought more happiness and less stress into her life.

So I approached it with her and she goes, “Well, I don’t feel stress. I don’t need to do this because I don’t feel stress.” I’m like, “Oh, stress isn’t an emotion.” But especially, coming from the perspective of a woman, I just see a lot of moms do this where they ignore stress levels because it’s not an emotion, so it’s not right in our forefront. But we’ll push ourselves and push ourselves. I even had a nutritionist on the show who she pushed herself to the point where she fainted. Her body was so stressed out physically and emotionally that her body said “I’m done.” The circuit breaker blew and she just fainted. That's when she had to go “Okay,” and doctors were like “Yeah, your blood pressure is through the roof, your heart rate is through the roof like everything is through the roof.” She had to dial it back. She ended up quitting her career and going and starting a whole new career and because she had to, like you did, reevaluate her values and realize that she was digging herself an early grave with her stress. Stress is not an emotion. We cannot feel when we’re not stressed. If you actually feel yourself stressed out, you are revving at the top. You’re at like 12,000 RPMs revving at the top. Maybe your heart is beating out of your chest.

But that’s why it’s sort of like they say blood pressure is the silent killer. Having high blood pressure, you don’t feel it. And if you feel it, you're really in danger.

[01:05:06] Dr. Oz Garcia: That's correct.

[01:05:07] Ashley James: Heart rate variability allows us to see where is our baseline stress level because if we can lower it, if we can do things like get to bed on time, not eat sugar, and alcohol increases the stress levels in the body, and you can track it. You can track your heart rate variability.

[01:05:22] Dr. Oz Garcia: Oh yeah, you’ll see on the occasions where I’ve had even a couple of glasses of wine, after having a good run for several weeks with elevated HRV, I can see my HRV plummet just from a few glasses of wine at nighttime and waking up and going, “Damn it.” You kick yourself and you realize that yes, in terms of long-haul COVID, it may not be so smart. But even if you don’t have it, overall, it does seem to affect how long you may live, chips away at your DNA’s desire to stick around longer.

[01:06:02] Ashley James: And that's so important. Everything we’re doing now will affect us in our later years. I’ve watched several family members who didn’t take care of themselves really suffer in the last 10 year of their life. I really don’t want to spend the last 10 years of my life suffering and being a burden on my family. It’s just not fun for anyone. We’re dragging everyone down. First of all, a lot of people are ignorant. I should say they're naïve. Where people are naïve, they’re buying into the marketing, the food marketing. They go through the drive-thru’s and they don’t take care of themselves. They don’t take care of themselves emotionally, they don’t take care of themselves physically and they're just going with the flow. And they’ll end up like a statistic. Like the heart disease and cancer, the leading causes of death. It’s so unfortunate that the people die much younger in America than they do in other countries.

If you want to be a statistic, first of all, go Google the statistics, go look at them and then keep doing what everyone else is doing. But my listeners don’t do that. My listeners are here learning from you because they want to be 90 years old, hiking at 90, and they don’t want to be a burden on their loved ones. And they want to enjoy the last few decades of their life want to be filled with joy.

[01:07:14] Dr. Oz Garcia: That's correct.

[01:07:15] Ashley James: The choices we make now, like you said, drinking alcohol, let’s say, and not getting to sleep on time every night, staying up late every night, that eats away at our DNA. The eats away at our body.

Dr. Alan Christianson was on the show a few months ago and he quoted this massive study where they found the single most important factor in all-cause mortality was stress levels. Smoking was the second. So, it’s like quitting smoking is less important than making sure you go to sleep on time and manage your stress. So, the idea of getting serious and, you know what, I’ll make sure my husband doesn’t hear this because I’ll tell you what I got him. I got him a Fitbit for Christmas. We were looking at the Apple Watch and all that stuff. But there was all these fees attached to it. So, I got him the best Fitbit and I’m so excited for him to start tracking because now, he’s becoming more aware and he wants to take even better care of himself. We talked about how you can track sleep and stuff like that. So, I’m getting him a Fitbit and he notices how great he feels when he starts doing all the things I tell him to do.

[01:08:26] Dr. Oz Garcia: Wonderful. It turns out to be a game. I mean, you start playing a game with yourself where the feedback itself, the numbers that you get kind of entice you to want to get a better score the next day. Like, how do I get my 90 again? How do I get my HRV over 45? So, it’s almost a game that I play with myself. It’s the first thing that I do in the morning. Open up my Oura app and look at my scores, and it’s like “Yes!” There's the Garmin, there’s Whoop, there’s Fitbit, there's Oura. So anything that turns you on that will allow you to measure what’s going on with your body and most importantly with your sleep, that becomes a critical aspect certainly for most people. Long-haulers I think need that kind of information so that they can autocorrect. But just about anybody that wants to get better control of their bodies, they need to quantify certain kinds of data. I would say central to all the spokes, is your sleep. Many times, when I’ve got clients that come in and they want to know, “Well, how am I going to eat? When are you going to put me on an eating program?” it’s like, well, how’s your sleep? Horrible. Really. Okay, so I’ll start by cleaning up their sleeping practices and then, we’re going to talk about something else. How’s your level of fitness? Do you meditate? Are you a mindful human being? Let’s get all the basics in order then let’s talk about food so that you get maximum value out of what you eat and it’s not such a struggle. It’s just not a struggle.

What you're finding is, it’s all something to contemplate over because you're well-rested, you’re in better moods. You can think about what’s going to empower you and give you energy at the beginning of the day. Should I have a smoothie? What kind of smoothie? Do I put fruits in it or not? Should I throw in some MCT oil, half an avocado? Okay, do I have lunch? Do I skip lunch? Do I have a high-protein lunch? Or is today vegetarian day? Should I skip dinner? Should I do intermittent fasting? What’s the latest that I should eat?

So, it isn’t about being an overthinker; it’s about being a mindful, thoughtful individual about what you're doing with your body. What you’re putting in it, what you're doing to it, how you're resting it, what information you're exposing it to. It used to be that I would get up and years ago, first thing I’d do, I’d get out of bed and put on Morning Joe in the background. I can’t believe that that would be how I would start my morning. I would be stretching, do an exercise. And the TV would be on in the background listening to politics. I’d prepare my tea and just as unaware of how this was warping my thinking. And now, when I get up, I don’t even have a TV set anymore. I had two TV sets in my old apartment. Since COVID, I just don’t watch TV. If I want to watch a movie, I’ve got my iPad and I’ll go on to that, if I want to watch a documentary.

So, it’s a very different experience to not have a TV set on. And I’ll put on Alexa and ask it to play some great jazz in the morning. So I’m good to bed and enter my morning with music. Which is one of the more remarkable ways for any of us to enter our mornings. Not blasting a TV set or listening to news first thing out of bed and wondering why the rest of your day, you’re on edge.

[01:12:33] Ashley James: I love that. Setting up an atmosphere. I heard there’s a whole thing around sleep hygiene like creating an environment to go to sleep to but I never thought of creating a hygiene of an environment to wake up to, to set the tone of the day to, to help the body and the stress hormones to ease into the day in a more motivated way than have my feet hit the floor and it’s like go, go, go, race, race, race and all the stimulation. You're rising, you’ve created an environment for healing going to bed at night but also waking up in the morning and considering that your mental and emotional state affect your physical stress levels, it’s important to nurture ourselves mentally and emotionally because that takes care of our body as well.

[01:13:25] Dr. Oz Garcia: Very much. Morning rituals I think are critical for everyone. For me, to know that I had a routine that I could follow at my worst that I had no idea that anything I was doing was going to work. So whether it was through my breathing, having my weird concoctions in the morning, making sure that I got body work 3-4 times a week, I had no idea of this was going to give me my life back. Because I was reading the news just like everybody else. This is what happens with long-haul COVID. My blood tests indicated that there were blowouts within my immune system that if I was to believe what I read on Google didn’t bode well for me.

So, I kind of stopped even doing that. I just started to do everything that I believed would get me back and that also started to nurture my mindset. So, it became a very flexible mindset and allowed me to look at things that were way out of what people would consider healing practices or could possibly have an effect on long-haul COVID. Then, reel it all the way back in and go, okay, so these are the protocols that I find make a difference for me. This is what got my fill-in-the-blank back to acceptable levels. And a lot of that occurred within the first 3-4 hours of waking up. So, I get up relatively early and I like to go to bed early, read before I go to bed for a while, maybe watch a little bit of a movie or documentary and then, all lights out by between 9 and 10 PM.

Then, it’s up early between 5 and 6 AM. I’ve got plenty of time before work to do my morning routines, my morning rituals, and that includes doing meditative practices. I may do 10 minutes of meditation, 20 minutes. And I love to use the Sam Harris app which is called Waking Up. That's a world of information. Different teachers that are presenting multiple portholes into how to meditate, different kinds of meditative practices. There's a lot of theory that you can listen to. Recently, I listened to an interview with Laurie Santos who is a professor at psychology at Yale. Now, her course is called Well-being and Happiness. It’s the number one attended course in Yale. One in 4 studies in Yale attend it. So, I listened to the interview on Sam Harris and I thought this is unlike I’ve ever heard before on the subject matter of happiness. Went on to Coursera, signed up for a course and completed it and have a very different understanding of what it is that produces happiness. Like I thought I knew what it was before. But there are nuances, there are subtleties. That, by the way, I would say, Ashley, added much to my evolving perspective, what I knew wasn’t producing happiness. All right, so what does produce it? And this is like kind of the other side of it. So, these are the things that you should be looking at that will produce happiness. This is what happiness may or may not be. You may have had preconceptions about the subject matter, we’re going to kind of blow them up here. So, I’ve incorporated much of that simply because I’m listening to a meditation app every morning for 10 minutes.

[01:17:16] Ashley James: And that definitely reflects your value shift. Our values, it’s our unconscious motivators. A lot of people don’t know. Like we know what a value means and we don’t understand how it affects our behavior. So at an unconscious level, it dictates our behavior. If you want to know what you value, so I have a master practitioner and trainer of neurolinguistic programming and there's a very simple thing you can do. Get a pad of paper and a pen and either you can do it yourself or you can ask someone else to do it. Sometimes it’s nicer if someone else is writing down what you say because you can just kind of go unconscious and say whatever. And you pick something. For example, my career. So you write down “my career”, these are the values that you're going to list about your career and you say what’s important to me about. But for this podcast, let’s say health. My body’s health. So what’s important to you about health? And you can even do what’s important to me about my life. Right? Then you just start writing down. So you say, what’s important to me about my health? That I have energy, I feel great in the morning, that I feel strong, that I’m able to run up a flight of stairs. You do sometimes say things in the negative that I’m not tired, that I’m not winded. So whatever you say, write it down. It doesn’t matter whether you say it in the positive or negative, you write it down. Then, you get about between 5 and 8 things out, and your mind goes blank. That’s the unconscious mind bringing it to the conscious, so you wait 15 seconds, 30 seconds, ask yourself again, what’s important to me about my health? Then new stuff will come to mind. You do this, you kind of rinse and repeat 3 or 4 times, you get a list. You can get a list of up to 40 things. It doesn’t have to be that long, you can just do 20 things. Then, you look at the list and then you number them. What is the most important thing about my life or my health? What’s the most important thing? Then you go down the list and you number them, and then you look at, oh very interesting, it will give you insight what is an away from, so what is a negative, like I don’t want to feel fat or I don’t want to look too skinny. When you say “I don’t” and it’s away from and you say a negative, you really want to highlight that or put like a little red line or under it, and then everything that’s stated in the positive, that's good.

The values that have a negative associated to it have a negative belief system. That actually will drag us down and it will negatively impact our behaviors and our behaviors are what get our results in life, right? If your behavior is sitting on the couch and doing nothing, that’s getting your result. Doing nothing is a behavior also. Choosing not to do anything is a behavior. When people are negatively motivated, they’re the ones who join the gym in January but don’t go by February. Right? They’re the ones who you’ll get short-term gains but then you’ll give up. You want to examine and look at how many negative belief systems you carry that are attached to your negative values. This is a great self-exploration or you can find an NLP practitioner to work with to kind of go through and explore this, but even just like writing down and looking at your values and listing your values and looking at your values and going, this is all the results I get, all my behavior both conscious and unconscious in my life, the things I’m doing right now and the results I’m getting right now, this is what is motivating me to do or not do those things. Then looking at what is actually important. Because if you're not pursuing the things that are important to you, you might have a negative belief system holding you back.

Someone might be listening to you going, “Oh, but I couldn’t afford to do IV. I’m not even going to try. I’m not even going to start. I don’t have money so I can’t do it.” They cut themselves off from any further action because there's a negative belief around money or around time. What you're saying is you don’t need to be a millionaire with free time to get your health back. These are the things you did and even someone who like is on a pension or on disability, there are so many things they can do. There are so many free apps they can do. Maybe they can find a used on eBay, find an old used Oura ring or something. There's ways. But if you believe you can’t, you will stop seeing possibilities.

[01:21:44] Dr. Oz Garcia: No question about it.

[01:21:45] Ashley James: I want people who are suffering to see like if they have the brain fog and they're like “I don’t know if I can even do this,” but you could do breathing for one minute, you could start for one minute a day, or you could start to write down one thing you're grateful for and then the next day write two things you're grateful for. Like gratitude journaling, even if it’s just three things a morning, writing three things down, start somewhere because doing something is going in the right direction. As opposed to saying “Well, I can’t because I don’t have the time or I don’t have money.” Then boom, they’ve just cut themselves off from this world of possibilities whereas you built your health up so much so you went from crawling up to two flights of stairs in half an hour to being able to run up and down flights of stairs. And that's what I want for everyone who’s suffering. It does take that mindset.

[01:22:36] Dr. Oz Garcia: It does.

[01:22:40] Ashley James: So knowing what motivates you and shifting your values but also understanding that you might have a belief system that is preventing you from even taking action and saying you know what, I’m not going to let this old negative belief that I created dictate my life anymore because what I want now is to be like Dr. Oz Garcia. I want to be healthy, I want to be building my body again, I want to overcome. And so it does take that. I too lang had long-haul COVID but my experience was really unique in that April of 2021, I was giving birth and my daughter died right at the end of labor. Her head was halfway out and she passed away and we don’t know why. We have no idea why. Of course, with the grief, my blood pressure was through the roof, paramedics were there for an hour and everything. It was incredibly traumatic losing her and right after that. I think I had a visitor, one of my friends came to visit within a few days and she didn’t know him and his son had COVID. You don’t know. Who knows? I just had that feeling like I couldn’t breathe almost like an asthma attack. Couldn’t breathe. My oxygen was low, I felt like I was passing out. I couldn’t stand, I couldn’t walk. At this time during COVID, I didn’t know how much of this is my tremendous amount of grief that I’m going through, how much of it is recovering from birth because my body is still recovering from birth and then how much of it is grief, how much of it was birth, how much is COVID, and then afterwards, again, I didn’t notice how much of my recovery because at that time also we found that we had to move. So, we’re packing. So now, I’m recovering from pregnancy, like having grief and trauma and now, post COVID, and not really knowing which is which. It’s all just a package of weirdness. And what a stress. What a stress from not knowing where we’re going to live.

One of my really close family members went into hospice care and we’re taking care of them. So it was just one thing after another. But what I realized is my brain was Swiss cheese. Doing interviews was really difficult. I was still very dedicated to the podcast but I went from… at the start of the podcast, I could do three episodes a week, three interviews a week and I could barely do one a month at the time. I just felt like my brain was Swiss cheese. I would be reaching for nouns or reaching for names and I couldn’t access it. I always thought maybe this is the trauma brain but this could be COVID brain. I also had a huge amount of muscle weakness. I could barely walk up the stairs. It wasn’t really winded like my lungs. I just could barely carry anything, could barely lift my arms. My legs were incredibly weak. I had to hold on to railings and go one step at a time, one leg at a time going up each stair. That was in April.

Then in December of last year, I decided to go for IV ozone, doing an ozone 10-pass.

[01:25:55] Dr. Oz Garcia: Remarkable, 10-pass is terrific. I did many of them as part of my recovery. It’s good for you.

[01:26:02] Ashley James: It was like night and day and I sat there with this wonderful naturopath and she did the 10-pass with me. It took about three hours. We talked the whole time, it was great. Then, so I pick up orders from Azure Standard. It’s like buying in bulk and I had these 25-pound bags of lentils and brown rice and whatever that I had bought. Her clinic is also a pick-up location for Azure. My order had arrived and I’m like, okay, just give me a sec. And I ran down, there's this long cement staircase all the way down to my car, and I ran down it and I opened up the trunk of the car and got it ready, and then I ran back up taking like not doing one step at a time, like jumping up each step, grabbed two bags, so carrying 50 pounds now, ran back down the stairs and I had maybe 4 or 5 bags. Normally, my husband would be the one carrying the bags. I was crying by the end of it, like tears of joy. I’m like, my muscle weakness was gone. I was like, this ozone 10-pass is amazing and so I thought, man, I didn’t realize that my muscle weakness was from the damages of mitochondrial damage from long-haul.

[01:27:21] Dr. Oz Garcia: Tremendous. Long-haul does create mitochondrial damage. Mitochondria, for those that don’t know, are the engines within all our cells. Each cell that we have, each neuron that we have has hundreds, if not thousands, of these little engines and their job is primarily to produce energy by burning off sugar, fat, and protein to the extent that that may be a fuel like ketones, for instance. So, when you get COVID and any number of other illnesses for some people, I would say Lyme disease, chronic Lyme’s, I would say long-haul in many ways is very similar to having chronic Lyme. The ability of your mitochondria to perform is corrupted. They don’t burn off fuel like they're supposed to. They're not burning fat like they're supposed to. They're not burning sugar like they're supposed to. Energy is not being produced adequately. So, there is severe fatigue. For some people, it’s similar to having fibromyalgia. Just this exhaustion where you can’t lift your shoulders, your back, your legs hurt. And you were extremely fortunate. I’d say that some people have genetic capacity kind of like what you’re describing to rise above the damage that you sustain, the damage that you're living through and recover. I would say you’re describing the capacity to be antifragile. Which is very different than what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Who knows if that’s true or not? But certainly, as you go through very demanding events and you look back and you reflect on how you made it through, it does point towards your ability to, well, be anti-fragile. You just don’t come apart that easily. And that’s what I’m hearing through everything that you're telling me.

Certainly, having that you know you’re anti-fragile in retrospect. You did it, you did this that all this went wrong and this particular event and the pregnancy and on top of it, COVID. Who knows what else? And when you look back, yes, there's trauma that builds up and sometimes you can even overcome that. It doesn’t leave you in a chronic state of PTSD where you’re incapacitated. You can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. You’re just like, “life’s too hard.” There are plenty of people with events in the way that they occurred to you that they just kind of toss in the towel. There's no further capacity, there's no resilience left. It’s kind of like, that's it.

[01:30:33] Ashley James: In your discoveries, have you uncovered what helps people who are sort of in that level of despair to be able to rise above and start to feel like there's hope?

[01:30:46] Dr. Oz Garcia: This all goes the way almost to the beginning of our conversation, Ashley. Doing one little thing every day instead of filling up a whole list of to-do’s, this is everything I need to accomplish today, and doing that day in and day out and day in and day out and finding that you hardly make a dent. But if you can pick maybe 1 or 2 things when you’re in the pits of despair and whatever it may be so that you're moving towards pulling yourself out of this tailspin where you're not clear about why did I get hurt in this manner, why am I suffering so much, whatever—whatever you're asking why over, that you can project that and go, “this is what I can do today, I think I can do this.” As time goes by, you can reflect on the totality of many of the things that you live through, accomplish, and just like you, you're well aware that “oh, I can actually get motivated, I can actually get things done.”

[01:32:02] Ashley James: Beyond doing like ozone IV which is amazing, what other things have you found help people to heal their mitochondria from long-haul?

[01:32:14] Dr. Oz Garcia: I meditate a lot. Not only do I do Sam Harris’ Waking Up but I also use a device called Muse. There’s one called Muse S. It looks like a headband. It’s a neurofeedback device in many ways besides being a meditative device. But it trains you to quiet the voice in your head. It trains it be calmer. I’m on my third Muse device now in I don’t know how many years, and that I like because it helps you work through much of what’s destabilizing you. By doing 10 minutes of that or an hour of that, I don’t know, 3-4 times a week works really well.

I use a device called Plato and it’s a biohacking/neurohacking device that you place on your device, it has certain electrodes on it. Actually, you can set it on your app to calm you down, help you sleep better, increase focus, prepare for a workout, run better and so on. It does it by, I want to be careful, stimulating parts of your brain but optimizing how certain parts of your brain work in the areas of your concern. So like that, I’ve got, I don’t know, two dozen different devices that I work through during a day or a week or a month, each one designed to actually improve different areas of my health and well-being.

I’ve got the NormaTec compression boots. Now, for many people that have suffered from severe blood pressure problems, heart problems, POTS as a result of long-hauling, the problems that they suffer with blood pressure shooting up and shooting down, you can stabilize by using the NormaTec compression boots. Not only that, but you can do a 10-minute session with NormaTec, I don’t know, 3-4 days a week. I keep it right next to my chair in my office and I’ll be talking to you and I can have them on. And it improves circulation both in and out of your heart. Tremendous improvement in circulation.

We now know for instance that even doing hot baths on a regular basis 3-4 times a week improves circulation tremendously to the extent that you can do it 4-5 times a week, it reduces your risk of a heart attack by 28 to 38 percent, if I’m not mistaken. It’s almost a 30 to 40 percent win by just soaking in a hot bath. I add Epsom salts and stand there for 5-10 minutes then get out. Relax, breathe a little bit. And you wake up feeling better the next day but you also did something really good for your body.

So, in totality, there are tools, like I said, practices, the extreme hot bath, saunas which we know for many people, infrared saunas, 15 minutes or regular stone sauna. A cool sauna. You don’t have to go in at 180 to 200 degrees. But you can go in for 150 degrees and go in for 15 minutes and build up your time over the course of many weeks and months. But saunas seem to have a profound effect also on life extension, mood, anxiety, depression, heart health. So, there are what are called heat stress proteins that are activated in your favor whenever you expose yourself to extreme heat. The same thing could be said for extreme cold. When you do an ice bath, when you do a session of cryotherapy, that that stimulates, again, activates cold stress proteins and it stresses your body just enough, what’s called hormesis, the kind of stress that actually repairs your body. If you're dealing with a lot of stress in your life, you want to look at every instrument that I’m talking about in terms of what can you do—what can you do Monday, what can you do Tuesday, what can you do Wednesday, what can you do Thursday. And in totality, when you look back over a month, you realize that you’ve done so many good things for yourself that are contributing to the stability of your body.

You had mentioned earlier living longer and living longer better. What I would say about living longer better is you want to live better with a minimum amount of infirmities. You dodge a heart attack, heart disease, adult-onset diabetes, dementia, hopefully crippling diseases of the joints or arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis and so on. And really, because of all the things that we’re talking about, many of the things that I appropriated from life extension I use to actually heal me from long-haul COVID. And like you did when you did the 10-pass, these are things that will reduce your risk of dying young from the wrong things.

So I think infirmity control is critical in terms of all that you and I are talking about. Is what I am eating today going to reduce my risk of infirmities down the road? Is the fact that I only did 10 minutes of exercise today going to reduce my risk of having infirmities down the road? The answer is yes. Yes. And so on and so forth. Is the fact that I’m being very cautious with eating processed foods something that will reduce my risk of gaining too much weight, being obese and building up plaque in my heart? And on and on and on.

Curiosity is a very powerful practice and tool for people that don’t have motivation. If you're not motivated, then can you rely on your curiosity? And if not, you just kind of fade away. You miss out on this gift which is existence. The brief time that we have here, can you make it worth it?

[01:38:47] Ashley James: I love that you pointed that out because if you don’t have motivation because long-haul does suck the motivation out of you, but having innate curiosity and that's I guess probably why I’m good at podcasting. I’m so dang curious, I spent many years suffering. In my 20’s I suffered hugely from chronic illness and I overcame them. Even though MDs told me I never could. I was told by an endocrinologist after a battery of tests I’d never conceive. And we have a beautiful son that's 7 ½ and he’s largely the motivation on those days when I was so sick. Taking care of him, homeschooling him, like I have an amazing husband. If I can’t live for myself, I’m living for my loved ones. I also know because I’ve been through so much, I know that life does get better. I suffered great depression after my mom died when I was 22 years old and I remember the first time I laughed after three months or the first time I smiled after three months. First three months, no smile, no laugh. I remember the first smile. I remember the first laugh. And I remember the first feeling like the doom was fading. So, I know that there is that light at the end of the tunnel and it is so brilliant and amazing and life can be so rewarding. It might take months or years after trauma. It is worth it. Those that love you just cherish you so much and want you to not only not suffer; they want you to thrive and they want you to be around and stick around.

So, if you don’t have motivation because you’re exhausted, having curiosity and I’m sure those who are listening do because they're listening, to having that curiosity, holding on to it and going let’s go down this rabbit holes and let me just choose 1, 2, 3 things a day that I can do that I could just start to do something towards that goal of just feeling better. Dodging infirmities is a great way to put it. But also, the same activities that dodge infirmities way down the road are things that are going to make you start feeling good today. They’re not separate. It's not like you’ll feel bad today but you’ll be better tomorrow. It’s like going for a walk in the sunlight, that's good for later on. That's good for now too. Same with eating your broccoli, it’s good for now, it’s good for later too. You're treating yourself. You're treating yourself to things that are going to build you up in the short-term but also sustain you in the long-term. So, I love that you pointed that out.

[01:41:18] Dr. Oz Garcia: So long as you're ambulatory, you're six feet above ground and you can just keep moving, you can certainly make things happen. You got to be careful with the way that our thinking is set up. There’s so much work being done now on the conversations what we have with ourselves. The voice in our head and how it all thwarts our ability to carry through and what we know is in our best interest. It’s referred to as the neuro default network. It’s a very lazy kind of mechanism that’s built off different parts of the brain that all together produce the illusion that there's a self inside our heads. The real me is this little me inside my head talking. It just talks innately, incessantly, involuntarily, wakes up and it’s got a million things to say about everything. Most of it is just dead wrong. When you can see that for what it is, that's a long process of mindfulness and meditation so that you can see thoughts kind of just passing your mind like clouds and you act on what you said before, on your list, the list of your goals. “Okay, so I’m going to act on this one thing today” rather than listening to what I had to say to myself because it’s just not all that original. I think that that was critical for me in getting better.

So, as I started to find my strength back, I knew that much of what I was saying to myself in my head, you're never going to get better, this is going to be a struggle, look at how many people have died afterwards or remain cripple. I just kind of disregarded that stream of thought and would go do what I had to do. Don’t get out of bed this morning, stay in bed. Then, get up, go get my breathing device, make my tea, sit there, look at something that I wanted to read and spend an hour or two outside of my bed. Okay, good. Am I going to get a massage today? You don’t want any company, you don’t want people to come over and go. That means that you need to call the person to come over and get body work — going against much of what we often say to ourselves which produces nothing but apathy.

[01:44:03] Ashley James: Thank you so much for all the amazing things you shared today. I could just talk to you for hours and hours. I love that you’ve brought up the sauna because that's actually another. I have a Sunlighten sauna. I’m actually right beside it.

[01:44:16] Dr. Oz Garcia: Wonderful!

[01:44:17] Ashley James: I’m knocking on it. it’s in our office. People think they don’t have enough room for a sauna. But it’s the size of a closet but it’s square.

[01:44:28] Dr. Oz Garcia: You can stick it in a closet.

[01:44:30] Ashley James: Yeah, you could. It’s right beside me. This is our Sunlighten and it’s in our office. We just turned one of the bedrooms into an office. We live in a 1200-square foot townhome and we gave our son the master because that way, he has enough room for his homeschooling stuff and all his play stuff. Then, we took a small bedroom for the office. I converted half the office into a studio with all the sound equipment. I got this sauna here. Oh my gosh, I love the Sunlighten. What I do is I soak in transdermal magnesium using the Livingthegoodlifenaturally.com and they give us a coupon code for listeners, coupon code LTH, and I get a big bowl of water and soak in it in the sauna. I just make sure not to spill it. Oh, I feel so good, I feel so, so good afterwards and it’s not too hot.

[01:45:26] Dr. Oz Garcia: It’s cool, yeah. It’s a cool sauna.

[01:45:28] Ashley James: It’s a cool sauna. But I’m sweating and my core temperature is raised so that heat shock proteins work in my favor, I feel so good and my husband does it also and our son, he asks for it. He loves it. He jumps in and of course, we don’t give him a full session, we give him a smaller kid version. But he’ll sit in there and he’ll get a little sweat up. And then, we always run into the shower and got to encourage my family to end with cold, get the blood pumping further. Because that also, it gets the feel-good chemicals going. If you're depressed and you wake up in the morning and you're depressed, after you’ve done gratitude, write down three things you're grateful for. But try getting in a hot shower. Even if you can’t stand, I got a seat to sit in the shower because when I was sick, I want to use hydrotherapy. So you can get a medical seat, you can sit in the shower, sure, if you don’t have a bathtub. But sit in the shower or stand and do nice and hot, and then do 90 seconds to 2 minutes of as cool or as cold as you can stand, have it be on the back of your neck and do some nice deep breathing because your body is going to force yourself to start breathing deep and you try to just get it as cold as possible, but start cool and then turn it down, and that gets some amazing endorphins going.

[01:46:55] Dr. Oz Garcia: Terrific. It does.

[01:46:57] Ashley James: Yeah. So you can use hydrotherapy in your home. There are so many things you can do for free. Like you said, sweating in a hot, hot bath and then you could take for hot, hot baths, some people get headaches. But if you take a towel and you get like cold water on it. You can wrap it around your neck and that helps to prevent the headaches, so you can get a really, really hot bath and then can get a cold wet cloth around your neck which all the blood going to your brain is cooler there.

[01:47:24] Dr. Oz Garcia: Terrific.

[01:47:26] Ashley James: I love the Sunlighten sauna and they actually give a great discount to my listeners as well because when I interviewed the founder Connie Zack, after trying to find the best sauna that I felt was like the most nontoxic and low EMF and all that. But it’s been monumental for me for recovering from heavy metal issues and detox issues. So, that's been really helpful. But yeah, my recovery has been great using that as well. So, I love that you brough that up. There's all these devices. I love the biohacking you do. How can listeners keep learning from you? What’s the best way? Now, of course, you have a website and that is easy to remember because it’s your name OzGarcia.com and of course, all the links are going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at Learntruehealth.com. Where should people go to learn from you? Is there social media or a YouTube or a podcast? Where should we learn?

[01:48:27] Dr. Oz Garcia: Absolutely. Well, of course, the website and we’re constantly putting up blogs and information. I would say our fan page on Facebook which is Oz Garcia, and we’re constantly posting articles that I think are relevant in just about every area of health that needs to be addressed. If you want to live a long life, if you're into the subject matter that you and I are recovering besides long-hauling, what can you do so that you reduce your risk of infirmities as get older. So, we cover everything from diet to fitness to different ways of eating to the aspects of neuroscience that fascinate me, and the tools that I use.

On Instagram, it’s Oz Wellness. There, I tend to address much more my philosophical bent, my thinking in terms of what makes for a good life. I would suggest for sure getting After COVID which is on Amazon and the full title of course is Optimize Your Health in a Changing World. I put a lot of really good information in there that is a good beginning for supplementation, diet, all the things that we’ve been talking about today. I think beyond that, they're always free to contact me through our website.

[01:49:49] Ashley James: Awesome. Thank you so much. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview? Anything that maybe I didn’t touch on or didn’t ask that you really wanted to make sure you conveyed today?

[01:50:03] Dr. Oz Garcia: You and I covered a lot of territory. And I want to emphasize something that I had mentioned we talked about albeit briefly which is happiness, that to the extent that you look at happiness also as a study, something that you can unpack and put together, so that your life has meaning, is meaningful, and you find that there's purpose to it, that's the message that I want to leave everybody because that's where I wound up, that's where I am these days. How do I have meaning, purpose, happiness, contentment, peace of mind? Those are very important features of being a human being.

[01:50:46] Ashley James: Just to reiterate. Where did you go to watch that course? Can you just let us know? Because I’m sure there are some listeners who are like “I got to go do that course right now.”

[01:50:56] Dr. Oz Garcia: You can do the Wellbeing and Happiness course with Laurie Santos on Coursera. If you want accreditation, it’s $49; otherwise, you can do the course for free which is amazing.

[01:51:08] Ashley James: Oh my gosh, that is amazing. Thank you so much for sharing that. I love that. So here, there’s always some people who are like, “Oh, money is really tight.” And I totally get it. Money is tight for everyone right now. But to give someone the gift of happiness, a course about happiness for free, oh wonderful. I was thinking to myself, as you were talking, I’m just like, I’m giving this course. I don’t care how much it costs. I’m giving this course to my mother-in-law for Christmas. And now that I know it’s free, I’m going to give her that course, she’s going to love it. And that's a free gift, so how good is that?

[01:51:44] Dr. Oz Garcia: There are dozens of courses on Coursera of extreme high quality that are available for no cost at all. And I’m looking at which two or three other courses I’m going to be doing soon. So, can’t recommend it enough.

[01:51:59] Ashley James: Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Please come back on the show any time you have more to share. I’d love for you to come back and teach anytime you feel inspired to come back and teach more, we’d love to have you.

[01:52:09] Dr. Oz Garcia: Let’s do it. I’d love it, Ashley.

[01:52:12] Ashley James: Awesome. Thank you so much.

[01:52:14] Dr. Oz Garcia: Thank you. This was terrific. And it flew.

[01:52:18] Ashley James: Wasn’t that an amazing episode with Dr. Oz Garcia? I am blown away. I just love him. He’s fantastic. He’s agreed to come back on the show and he’s going to share the next time he comes back on the show about the science of anti-aging and getting your cellular age to be younger and younger. You know, it seems to be a theme in my life right now because I have two things that we’re going to be talking about very soon, I’m really excited. Just a little sneak peek, no spoilers. But there's two things that have popped into my life and I really believe in divine intervention and divine timing that this podcast has taught me that. I’ve talked about it on the show before where I give this link for guests to put themselves on my calendar and I will go out and I will reach out to all kinds of really cool holistic doctors on different topics. Like I’m not going to one day I don’t just go through and go okay, heart health, people. Like I’d just go, oh, this guy wrote this book, this person, I want to get this person. Oh, I’ve heard about this person. And I’d give them all this link and then they put themselves on my calendar. And almost every time I do that, all the heart health people book themselves back-to-back. All the diabetes people book themselves back-to-back.

It happens so often that I just laugh. I go, of course, of course you guys did. Then, when I publish, I don’t always publish in the same order, sometimes I publish, I go, okay, I really feel like it’s time for this episode to come out, and I just get a feeling in my gut like okay, it’s time for this episode to come out. Then, I’ll get a listener messaging me saying, “how did you know this was the answer to my prayer? Yesterday or today, I’ve been just lost and I’ve been asking for an answer. Then, I look at my phone and I get a notification for this episode and this is the answer to what I’ve been looking for.” That happens so often. I believe in divine intervention. It is so remarkable. What started to pop up in the last month or month and a half in my life are a few things that are blowing my mind, the science behind these things. And these things are unrelated but what they have in common is they all reverse cellular age, and there's this one thing that this company actually sent it to me so I could try it myself. My husband and I are hooked. It is so cool and they did a study and they found that by using it for three months, your cells are 8 years younger after only 3 months. That just blows my mind and it takes only a few minutes a day to use this thing. We’ve been loving it.

There's this other company who’s been around for almost 20 years. They have so many studies. It’s really, really exciting. They are able to reverse cellular age. They're able to remarkably increase stem cells in your body to the point where you can test in your blood and it’s like you’re a newborn baby. You have so many stem cells. It increases stem cells hugely. It increases peptides in the body that end up doing all these things like for us vain people, fine lines and wrinkles go away but people are noticing more flexibility. They're actually seeing that there's more muscle growth and more fat burning. They're able to bring down the stress hormones and the stress response in the body noticeably. They see it in heart rate, heart rate variability. So, the list goes on and on. It’s something that you can use at home, again, easy to use at home. I think it’s really affordable compared to like these giant machines that these holistic clinics have. So, I’m very excited because what keeps dropping in my lap is all these antiaging and reversing cellular age, decreasing oxidative stress in the body. Oh yeah, and another thing, there's been Parkinson’s patients who are shaking and then they use it and they stop shaking right away.

So, it has this effect, calming effect on the nervous system and it stimulates the body’s ability to heal itself. How cool is that? So, I’m very excited. We’re going to be talking about that in upcoming episodes, so watch for that. But I have a feeling, I just keep getting this intuition that at least part of 2023, if not all of 2023, my podcast largely are going to be about reversing cellular age, reversing degenerative disease and supporting the body to create new healthy cells in its place. So, very excited about that. I think you should be too because it’s not that I want to live be a thousand old, yes actually I do, I think that’d be really amazing. I want to live the healthiest, youngest life possible until I’m ready to leave this world. Right? If you’ve ever been around someone who didn’t take care of their body and they were on their deathbed, it is anguish for those people. It’s sometimes years of suffering. What I want for you is to live fully, live so healthy, so happy where when you're 70, you're going “I feel better than I did when I was 20. That's what I want for you.” I want you to be outrunning the 20-year-olds when you're 70 and when you're 80 and 90, feeling absolutely on top of your game and amazing. That's what I want for all of us. So, I’m going to find those experts and I already have two lined up like I told you about. I’m going to keep finding them and like Dr. Oz Garcia, he’s going to come back on the show and share his tips and tricks because he is gorgeous. This man is so handsome, he does not look like he’s in his 70’s. He looks like he’s in his 50’s and of course, it’s because he’s living proof. He’s living what he preaches. So, get ready to feel amazing no matter what age you are by continuing to listen to the Learn True Health podcast and as always, please share this with those you care about because we got to spread this message and help all of our friends and family and co-workers to feel amazing at every age.

Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day. Whatever holiday you celebrate, I celebrate Christmas, so Merry Christmas. Whatever holiday you celebrate in the coming months, I hope you have an amazing time and just remember, stress is the worst thing you can do for your body, so let it go. Take some deep breaths and put yourself in a position where you're feeling love and letting go of all that stress because stress is not helping you or anyone you're around. So, just focus on that. Focus on love and let go of the stress. I’m aiming for a completely stress-free holiday season this year and I think it’s going to be very healthy for me. I hope you do as well.

Get Connected with Dr. Oz Garcia

Books by Dr. Oz Garcia

After Covid: Optimize Your Health in a Changing World

Oz Garcia's The Healthy High-Tech Body

Redesigning 50: The No-Plastic Surgery Guide to 21st-Century Age Defiance

The Balance

Look and Feel Fabulous Forever

493 The Covid Hangover, Dr. Oz Garcia's Holistic Journey Recovering from Long Haul Syndrome, Nutrition, Biohacking, & Self Optimization To Recover & Upgrade Your Health After Covid 01:59:12 Share

Learn True Health with Ashley James

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493 The Covid Hangover, Dr. Oz Garcia's Holistic Journey Recovering from Long Haul Syndrome, Nutrition, Biohacking, & Self Optimization To Recover & Upgrade Your Health After Covid