Dr Stephen Cabral – Change Your Body. Change Your Life

Watch the full interview below or listen to the full episode on your iPhone HERE.

Stu: This week we welcome Dr. Stephen Cabral to the show. Dr. Cabral developed his passion for health & wellness after going through severe health complications at the age of 17. He saw over 50 different doctors, tried over 100 different treatment protocols, but still saw no hope of recovery.

It wasn’t until he met an “alternative” health doctor whom explained to him how he got here and how he could become well again, that he began his recovery process. It was at this young age that he knew his life would be dedicated to helping others rebalance their bodies and renew their health. In this interview we discuss how functional medicine has paved the way for weight loss and anti-ageing therapies, enjoy.

Audio Version

Questions we ask in this episode:

Get More of Dr. Stephen Cabral

• https://stephencabral.com

If you enjoyed this, then we think you’ll enjoy this interview:

• Chris Kresser: The ABC of Functional Medicine
• Alicia Lynn Diaz – Combining Ancient Ayurvedic Wisdom With Modern-day Science
• JJ Virgin – Linking Food Intolerances to Weight Gain

Full Transcript

Stu

Hey, this is Stu from 180 Nutrition and welcome to another episode of The Health Sessions. It’s here that we connect with the world’s best experts in health, wellness, and human performance in an attempt to cut through the confusion around what it actually takes to achieve a long lasting health. And I’m sure that’s something that we all strive to have. I certainly do.

Before we get into the show today, you might not know that we make products, too. That’s right, we’re into whole food nutrition and have a range of super foods and natural supplements to help support your day. If you are curious, want to find out more, just jump over to our website. That is 180nutrition.com.au and take a look. Okay, back to the show.

This week, I’m excited to welcome Dr. Stephen Cabral. Dr. Cabral is a Naturopath Ayurvedic & Functional Medicine Practitioner who developed his passion for health and wellness after going through sever health complications at the age of 17. His mission is to share how he changes his life and the lives of thousands of others from a state of chronic sickness, pain, weight gain, depression and suffering to one of energy, vitality, and happiness.

In this episode, we discuss the biggest mistakes people make with weight loss, how we may be unknowingly accelerating our own aging process, and the best form of exercise for long lasting health. Over to Dr. Cabral.

Hey guys, this is Stu from 180 Nutrition and I am delighted to welcome Dr. Stephen Cabral to the podcast. Dr. Cabral, how are you?

Stephen

Doing well. It’s so great to be here. Thank you for having me on your show.

Stu

No, thank you so much for your time. I know that you’re a busy man. But first up, for all of those that may not be familiar with your work, I’d love it if you could just tell our listeners a little bit about yourself please.

Stephen

Sure. I’m a board certified Naturopath doctor. I work out of Boston, Massachusetts here in the US. But we are actually at a probably 90% virtual practice right now. So we are trying to pioneer and push forward the ability to get people functional medicine, lab testing, all over the world. We basically work with people, well, all over the world but we ship to 19 different countries. I’m trying to get people to find out what their underlying root cause imbalances are. And I’ve just made that my mission in life. I had my own health struggles when I was young. I was able to overcome those with the help of other practitioners and that eventually led me to studying all over the world. In India, China, Sri Lanka, Europe, and all over the US. And my belief is this, is that there is no one best form of medicine but the best form of medicine is that which encompasses and integrates all forms of medicine. And that’s what I try to preach to this day.

Stu

Fantastic. Fantastic. And I notice that you feature your story on your website and other different formats online as well. Are you happy and open to share your story today?

Stephen

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it was a harsh story. I lost a lot of my childhood and young adulthood to illness and an illness I was told I was never going to recover from. I was diagnosed with Addison’s disease and Type II diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, POTS, fibromyalgia, CIBO, candida, a host of issues.

Stu

Oh boy.

Stephen

And this was a little over 20 years ago. Functional medicine integrative health, all of that, was in its infancy in terms of kind of bringing everything together. There was no internet. So that did not allow for the sharing of ideas. I mean, that’s the best part about the internet. The worst part is that things are at a very shallow level, meaning like there’s an article on this, an article on that. But the nice thing is that I didn’t know anyone else like me. I didn’t have any idea that anybody else was this sick or like me. And I didn’t know how to get better. And neither did my doctors. They had no idea. I went to the best specialists in the world. So it was piecemeal. I would find a practitioner that was good at this and another one that was good at this. And I would get a little bit better and then I would relapse. And finally, 27 years old, I met my mentor that … I was getting better but for sure she tied together functional medicine state of the art lab testing with genetics with Ayurvedic medicine. And from there, I learned about how to pull together the mind, the body, and really start to heal myself.

Stu

Fantastic. Fantastic. We were chatting just before we went live on people’s pain points. And I can only imagine that you’d have such a vast array of conditions and issues to sink your teeth into in your practice. But certainly from our perspective, one of the biggest pain points for our audience is weight. And there is a huge confusion in why perhaps we can’t lose weight, what we should be doing, what we should be eating, as a whole myriad of mixed messages coming out there. Is it as simple as calories in, calories out?

Stephen

Yeah, I think that’s … in the beginning, for an untrained person who’s never done anything else, if you are eating 3-4,000 calories a day and you’re 5’4” and you weight 160 pounds and you’re looking to lose 20 pounds, 30 pounds or so, it may simply be that you’re too sedentary and that you eat too much food. However, I will say for the people in both of our communities and the people listening to podcasts and try to better themselves, it’s almost never the case.

Stu

Right.

Stephen

And when I see people, and they’re eating 1200 calories a day and they’re exercising three or four times a week, which should be plenty. I mean, what am I really going to say? Exercise another hour a day, eat 800 calories? I mean, there’s only so little you can eat. So when peoples say it’s just about energy balance, you know, that’s not necessarily incorrect but the problem is that it’s so much deeper than that. It has to do with the thyroid, the adrenals, the absorption in the gut. It has to do with inflammatory levels based on viruses or stress or auto-immune. So for me, I actually feel it’s a great disservice what a lot of people are doing in the health industry right now by telling people they just need to eat less and move more. For most people, that’s anything but the case.

Stu

And it certainly seems to be the trend from a conversational perspective to be very, very different functional medicine, integrated medicine, versus mainstream medicine. In terms of the functional medicine perspective, how is that changed the way that you personally worked with weight loss clients? And I’m thinking about perhaps the tests that you might use and all of the modalities that would come into that process as well.

Stephen

Yeah, absolutely. I’ll tell you that it affects women unfairly of course a lot more than it does men. I see women on low carb diets and just like men, they respond very well for the first three to four weeks. But after that, the weight loss stops or tapers off. Well what we have is a very specific, obviously to the female reproductive system. If you put a female body in a survival-based state, it will begin to lower progesterone, increase cortisol and lower thyroid function. When that happens, very structured … this is very science based and very to the point. We just down regulate metabolism. I mean, women begin to down regulate their metabolism. That’s simply a survival-based standpoint.

We’re going to maintain our body weight so that’s going to either allow you to keep your milk supply or nursing supply for children or babies that you may have. But also it’s not going to allow you to get pregnant because you’re not in the environment which would be conducive to bringing another life into this world. So it’s going to shut down progesterone and it’s going to then make you seem like you have high levels of estrogen, which is estrogen dominant. So we get the ache, the weight gain, the bloating, cellulite, low mood, brain fog, lower libido.  And these are just told, “Oh, well, you just need to be doing this or that.” The truth is, it comes from us trying to hack our body or trying to force our body into a methodology which just doesn’t work with the hormones long term. Short term, yes. But long term, no. It’s not going to work.

Stu

Yeah, okay. And in terms of personalization … to dive into all of these methods that are available today. And I noticed on your website that you utilized DNA testing, which I thought was kind of interesting because I actually … I got my DNA results back just yesterday and it was fascinating. And it uncovered a few things from my perspective that I never would have thought, but will radically change the way that I approach my everyday diet. So is that … would that be something that you would call upon in the early stages of investigation as an option?

Stephen

You know, that’s a really great question. So what we do is there’s two parts of every person. There’s the genotype. In Ayurveda, they call it your Prakriti. And then there’s your Vrakriti or your pheno type. It’s what you become. So I have one person and they are more of the vata body type or the ectomorph, which means that they lose weight without even trying. And then I have the endomorph over here which gains weight when they even just look at food, right? So you have two different body types. But what we need to know now is the Vrakriti of what’s going on. Why can’t you lose the weight? So what I want to do is I want to run what’s called a Thyroid Adrenal Hormone test. And that’s going to look at your cortisol levels. If your cortisol is elevated, you don’t need all the thyroid medication. You need to lower the stress and cortisol, which down regulars thyroid.

I don’t want to get too technical but when your body produces adrenal anorapronefrin, those are call catecholamines. It blocks your THS, basically your body from making T4. It’s your first thyroid hormone. And then when you produce something called glucocorticoids that’s cortisol, we actually block T4 to T3 conversion in the cell. That’s 70% of all active thyroid. Or we convert T3 to reverse T3, which means we can’t use it for thyroid. Now we have a slowing of metabolism. So if you have thyroid issues, you actually need to look at the adrenals first, the hypothalamus pituitary adrenal axis of stress and how it affects your adrenals and thyroid plus vitamin D. I mean, vitamin D is so crucial. It helps with weight loss, it helps with metabolism and energy and mood, seasonal effective disorder. And the last part is the estrogen progesterone. If you have low levels of progesterone and even normal levels of estrogen, it’s going to be very challenging to lose weight. And it’s also going to affect your mood so you won’t even want to exercise. You’ll want to eat more of the comfort foods.

So what we do is in the short term, we rebalance the body. And in the long term, we do look at genetics to see what you’re more predisposed to.

Stu

Right. Excellent. And you mentioned stress in there as well as part of the issue and I’m sure it’s a large part of the issue as well. How would you combat stress in a patient that comes in and you can clearly see that they’re wired and tired and they’ve just run ragged through work and lifestyle. Would that be something that you would dive into from a mindset perspective in terms of mindfulness practices as well?

Stephen

Absolutely yes, without a doubt. I would say that most stress will be fixed in the long term through lifestyle mindset environment. Now that takes a little while, right, with reframing our thinking of our reality. Meaning that there’s an event that happens. I might look at it from a very stressful position, but you … you don’t. And so that’s why we all live in our own reality. Now there are universal things that most of us would find stressful, right? The death of a loved one or something like sick child of course. So what we need to do is also reframe it. From a perspective of what I always see work in my practice and what helped work for me is what I call perspective and gratitude. The first is grateful for what we do have, because we all have so much. I mean, we really do. If we’re listening to this podcast …

I studied quite a bit in India and Sri Lanka and even China, and I was in old Beijing when I was in China. And the level of poverty and destitute is just unbelievable. So we all have so much that we can be grateful for on a daily basis that when something does go wrong or is more stressful, well it’s a drop in the overall bucket. It’s hard to think that way in the moment, but going back to our breath, breathing, and having the perspective that no matter how hard it is right now, it’s not going to last.

You will find your answer of getting well. You will find your answer to lose the weight. So with that perspective that it will get well, it will pass, you can then have a little bit more of a playful attitude. A more of an education and learning based attitude. So we work in the mindset but then we also work on the Epsom salt baths, the acupuncture. Or using something like an adrenal soothe product, which is going to have Ashwagandha and phosphorylate serine to help you in the short term to even be able to get into the mindset to work for the long term. So we’re big on supplements in the short term but not mass doses in the long term.

Stu

Okay. No, fantastic. And would there be any go-to techniques or strategies that you would recommend that somebody could do right now if they’re feeling really stressed in terms of try this breathing technique or think or visualize about something along these lines. What would you suggest?

Stephen

Yeah absolutely and maybe ten years ago I would say, “You need to pick up meditation.” But the problem is to meditate, you need to get into a state of meditation. It’s the only way that it works. And it’s quite challenging.

Stu

It is.

Stephen

So I have two ways around this. One is listening to binaural beats with nature based sounds in the background and going for a walk.

Stu

Right.

Stephen

If you’re listening on your phone to the binaural beats, put it in your back pocket, use a little EMF case if you want, put it against your skin, and you’re good to go. And then those binaural beats will kick in quickly and they will work on brain entrainment. It will get you into a state of meditation without you actually having to sit down and practice the meditation. That’s a great way.

My other favorite way … and no matter what you do, it has to go back to the breath, because if you are chest breathing or holding your breath, you are stimulating the sympathetic nervous system nerves, which is fight or flight. When we can get you getting into the lower lobes of the breath, the diaphragm, we can help to stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system which is the rest, relax, and rejuvenate. When you do that, you begin to heal in both mind and body.

Stu

Excellent. I like it. Binaural beats. I have dabbled with it in the past. I struggle with meditation. I’ve got a monkey mind, it never seems to switch off. But certainly walking around the block always helps just getting out. Change the scenery.

Stephen

Yes, exactly. Get out into nature, even if it’s the city, walk around. It works great.

Stu

That’s right. I’m going to talk about aging because I think these days, it seems that we are being bombarded from every possible angle with clutter, whether it’s marketing clutter, whether it’s social media, whether it’s work life balance, all of these things. When essentially all we want to do is we want to feel youthful, want to feel invigorated and energized. But I am sure that we are probably unwittingly doing many things that are counter intuitive to that. So how are we, as a nation, unknowingly accelerating our own aging process?

Stephen

Yes, and this is the most under talked and under utilized form of anti-aging. But it’s also the most confusing form and that’s through a process called detoxification.

… detoxification. So, in our [inaudible 00:16:02] medicine they had [inaudible 00:16:04], they had a seasonal detox every season. Always been known for thousands of years. There would be the faster in Greek and Roman based times. Fasting with every nation based religion. You name the religion there’s fasting involved in it. Traditional Chinese medicine was doing broth based fast.

So it’s always been there, but for whatever reason, the time that we need it the most, since 1960 with the industrial based revolution, where we have now 77 thousand man made chemicals in the environment, half of which we know cause cancer, we stopped doing detoxification protocols. And the other problem is we have all these detoxes that we’re told that aren’t really detox because they don’t really do anything to support the liver, to actually remove these toxins.

One of the reasons why we see people age so fast and put on weight is because when your body’s exposed, the average woman right now, and man as well but more so with women because they use an average of 13 cosmetic or shampoo, conditioner, bath, moisturizer based products, is exposed 126 chemicals before they leave the house. That’s tremendous and that never happened before the 1900s at that level.

So, as our body accumulates, if the liver can’t keep up, it’s always detoxifying, but if it can’t keep up, it pushes them into the adipose tissue, which simply means our fat cells. Well those fat cells swell. We don’t get more of them, but those fat cells we do have swell. That makes us look like we’re over fat, but the truth is, that is really swollen is toxic water weight. So, what we need to do is combat the free radicals, combat the cancer, combat the inflammation. And the best way to do that is through functional medicine detoxification protocol.

It’s actually something I’m doing right now this week. We do a new years based one. We do one with the spring season, the summer and the fall. And honestly I’ve never seen anything work … If you were to do one thing, there’s nothing that can work better that combines fasting, plant based nutrition, the right supplementation and getting more rest to really just squeegee the body, emptying the rain bail as we say.

Stu

Got it. And what types of supplements would you use then to kick start phase one, phase two detoxification? How would that work?

Stephen

Yeah you’re exactly right. So phase one you need you essentially antioxidants. So it’s called a cytochrome  p450 pathway. And that’s just a fancy way of saying we need to take these toxins, create a fat soluble fat toxin which will eventually become a water soluble toxin that we can get out of the body.

So phase one is vitamin C, vitamin E, zinc, selenium and all your B vitamins. Your folate, your [inaudible 00:18:32], the activated form, not the folic acid not cyanocobalamin , but the activated form. And we need glutathione. Now after that, we move into the intermediary phase and then we have what’s called a phase two phase. And that’s called a conjugation phase. What we do here is we actually take that fat soluble toxin and make it water soluble so it can come out in our stool, our bowel movements, our urine, our sweat or through our lungs as a vapor. And we do that with cruciferous based vegetables such as your broccoli and your Brussels sprouts and your cauliflower and kale. But we also do it through what’s called [inaudible 00:19:10], glutathione, taurine, and that ramps up all of that phase two.

Now most people are getting a lot of vitamins and minerals, but they’re missing the phase two. So they have phase one, but they’re missing phase two. So, we have a functional medicine detox that we use, but the truth is that if you go with the functional medicine based brand, you’re able to look for all of those ingredients and see if it’s a real detox of not. And the answer is very clear because it’s based on science.

Stu

Got it. Could you, in theory, happily elicit stage one detoxification into stage two using just nutrition?

Stephen

From what I’ve seen lab testing wise, and again I love … I like using state of the art medicines which is the labs and backing up my previous knowledge from [inaudible 00:20:11] Chines medicine with what we see as ortho molecular medicine which is vitamin based. So, even 6000 years ago, they would never use food alone. They used herbs. So it’s very challenging. Now your daily basis is what you wanna do is not accumulate toxins, but it’s gonna happen anyways. I mean, if you drink tap water or eat ice cubes, there’s aluminum in them and there’s gonna be some type of fluoride and chlorine, it’s so hard, we can’t escape it.

So my goal is to get people getting their nutrition from whole food, a little bit of supplementation. And then every 12 weeks just ramping them back up. Now, if you are so diligent that you got this and this and this, yes. But most likely it’s not enough to combat all the chemicals. If you asked me this, and if I was alive 500 years ago, I’d say probably we can do it through whole food nutrition.

Stu

Yeah. But I guess the world is in a very different state now. Specifically the soil as well. So perhaps the food that we’re eating doesn’t bear the same amount of nutrition as it used to.

Stephen

Even organic food is 13 to 30 percent less nutrition than it was before 1960.

Stu

Frightening. Absolutely frightening.

Stephen

Because we don’t use manure anymore and we don’t use a three field system. So we never rotate to let the soil come back.

Stu

Crikey. Yeah. The future is bright. So let’s talk about diet then. So I … So contentious is low carb, high carb, keto, paleo, clean eating, mediterranean. I had my DNA test results back yesterday which I told you previously and I am best suited to the mediterranean diet. And again, that is open to so much conjecture because what is the mediterranean diet. So, what type of diet have you found to be the most beneficial then? When we’re looking for long lasting and optimal health?

Stephen

I think you’re onto it because I did a show called the foundation of all diets. And it looked at all the research. I mean like, just for your community to know and I know that you preach this, the only thing that matters is the truth. I have nothing to market. If keto was the best, I’d market keto. If it was carnivore, I’d do that. But the truth is that those are all gross exaggerations of a few studies and they can be used for medical use but should not be extrapolated for general population. That’s the truth.

They can be used well in the short term, but never for the long term. I mean we do low carb for weight loss for the first three weeks but then we are ramping back those carbs up. And then we find your carb tolerance. And your carb tolerance is gonna change after 12 to 16 weeks because then you get new red blood cells than turn over and we’re hoping that you’ve been eating less polyunsaturated fat. That your cell membranes are stronger. That they allow the hormone to actually get the glucose into the cell. But I can’t force it to do that until we get some new cell turnover.

So you would be hard pressed to ever find a diet better than the mediterranean diet or a formulation of that. We’re talking about 60 to 80 percent plant based. Low glycemic fruit. Lots of vegetables. Bright colored foods. Some nuts if you can tolerate them. Ideally raw. Not a lot of protein. About … .8 grams per kilogram of body weight. Which is simply take your body weight and basically cut it in half. That’s about the amount of protein which you would need. If you get it from animal based protein sources. More sardines. More mackerel. More wild salmon. More anchovies. Super high omega threes. Low omega sixes. I mean, you can’t beat a diet like that because it’s been proven to kill cancer cells. It’s been proven to help with cardiovascular. Proven for type two diabetes and proven for high blood pressure.

If you don’t get one of those four, your odds of living well into your 80s are very high because those are the main killers. Now, you can preach the carnivore or keto, but if you’re eating a lot of bacon and saturated fats, you can debate that those can cause cancer and there is debate that they can. And you can debate that it can’t. But you can’t debate that blueberries cause cancer. You’re not gonna make that debate. So, when in doubt, err on the side of what we know works. And that is a mediterranean high plant based diet.

Stu

Great. Yeah, no, that is … And interestingly enough all of those issues that you spoke about previously in terms of getting more omega fats, reducing your man made fats, came through on my DNA test and said you actually need this, this, this. And subsequently I was doing all the things anyway. Some of us naturally gravitate to the right thing, but it’s good to know from a scientific standpoint. But yeah absolutely. Not it’s great [crosstalk 00:25:10].

Stephen

To prove that point, on a DNA test, the maximum amount of fat that anyone is ever recommended to consume is 35 percent of their [inaudible 00:25:19] type two. Which is two to three percent of the population. The rest of the population, we’re recommended 20 to 30 percent, 20 to 25 percent of fat. So if you’re doing keto you’re doing 70 percent. If you’re doing it right. You’re doing 20 to 25 percent protein and you’re doing 25 to 60 grams or so of carbs per day. There is no genetic test that will ever say that that’s the right thing to do.

Stu

No that’s right. But there is some kind of bravado in the keto community of if it’s not covered in fat then I’m not touching it. And tread lightly and very carefully I would say on that ground. Or at least understand what’s going on with your own unique biology.

Stephen

That’s right.

Stu

What types of food or drinks would you personally go out of your way to avoid based upon your knowledge?

Stephen

So, I have no doubt that your community knows that we’re not gonna drink the things that I grew up with which were like kool aid and soft drinks and cola and all that. So we know that. That’s the worst thing that you can do. It’s worse even that eating the food because that just sends sugar straight to your bloodstream. So, we don’t want that since that’s gonna create what’s called advanced glycation end products, ages for short. And you have ages, think of aging, that’s it.

So what we wanna do is not be fooled though by all the sugar alcohols, artificial sweeteners and their dyes that make these brightly colored drinks. Those are as dangerous. They really are. Because the food dyes, when you see yellow five, or all the different colors in there. That is honestly paint. We gloss over it, we think it’s food coloring. Yes it’s food coloring. That is the same pigment they use for paint so that’s pretty dangerous. We know that it causes issues with children that are predisposed to ADD and ADHD. We’ve seen that through the different studies.

So no matter what it effects your nervous system. But also, the artificial sweeteners tell your body to still spike blood sugar. And worse, there’s no minerals that come along with them and it can increase hunger. So not a huge fan of that either. And the last part is the sugar alcohols. It doesn’t work for a lot of people that I work with. Some, yes. But not a lot because I work with a lot of people with cebo, candida overgrowth. And those are things are too fermentable, but also I would say is they cause a lot of bloating and gas and discomfort. So it’s simply not worth it.

If we’re gonna use some type of sweetener, it’s going to be a little bit of raw honey. It’s gonna be a little bit of maple syrup and maybe even a little bit of stevia which can have some beneficial factors as long as you’re using the right type and not the patented versions which is no longer stevia, to show as an antimicrobial for some forms of stevia.

Stu

Got it. Okay. And it is. I think like you said I mean, crikey, what I consumed when I was a child of the 70s and the 80s makes my hair curl right now when I think about it. And we just didn’t know. But we know now. And science has supported what we know and we continue to learn and it just does seem to be try and eat real food as unprocessed as possible and organic if we can.

Stephen

That’s right.

Stu

Where possible as well. So, we kind of glossed over weight loss and nutrition. So how about movement and again, so many different camps in terms of the yogees who just stretch. The cross fitters who really go hard out high intensity to the ultra endurance guys who just pound the streets day after day. I have had many different conversations with many different health pioneers in this space. There does seem to be a unified approval I think of the one type of exercise that seems to be better for us for longevity. But what are your thoughts on that? And I’m intrigued on learning how you keep fit as well these days.

Stephen

What is the one uniform way or are you waiting until you hear my answer?

Stu

I wanna hear your answer.

Stephen

Nice. Okay. So, and this is from a clinical perspective meaning that there is no one form of exercise that is best for every person alive. That would be, it would be biologically and physiologically impossible. Because you have someone that’s more your body type and my body type. And if we do a lot of hard training, we’re gonna burn out our nervous system. We’re already sympathic nervous system dominant, we’re already prone to losing muscle. And if we become too catabolic and work out too much, too hard, too much cardio, we’re gonna waste away. We’re not gonna feel well.

But if you and I, we do strength training, combined with not too hard of training mixed with some [inaudible 00:30:18] yoga, we’re gonna be able to keep the muscle on, we’re gonna stay pliable, we’re not gonna wear down our immune systems and we’re gonna be healthy and fit for life. So the only reason I know this is because we see a lot of people but also I did everything wrong. I trained as a natural body builder in my early 20s because when I was so sick, I figured what I could control is how my body looked and what I was putting into my body.

So I built up my frame. On average, weight probably about 165 pounds, I’m above 5’8″. It’s a good weight for my body. I can keep muscle on and I can be fit and I can be athletic. I pushed it to 200 pounds. And did I have a lot of muscle? Yes. But at the detriment of my health, my digestion, my mood. It was brutal. Now, you take someone else my size, and they’re an endomorph and they have a lot of mass on their body. Do they need to do as much mass building work such as strength training? They do not. They can do more of the interval based training, more of the cardio, which would be more catabolic. But yes, they’re an anabolic body type. So now, we’re helping them to lose that weight.

So that’s one aspect of body transformation. But then there’s also, let’s say I have someone in my practice, they have low thyroid, they have adrenal based issues, they’re low cortisol, like you said in the beginning, they’re tired in the morning and wired at night. Do I want them to exhaust their body more? Do I want them to push harder? No. I want to rebuild the body. I start with walking. Can you walk 10,000 steps per day? If the answer is no, you have no business training harder than that. Your body can’t handle walking. So then what do I do? Then I’m doing some cardio, some light upright bike. Why cardio? Because it’s not exhausting the nervous system. Once you can do that, I’m doing body weight resistance training. Can you do that? Good. Then I’m adding weights. Can you do that? Good. Then I’m doing high intensity interval training,

Stephen

… which is the ultimate, it is great.

Stu

Yes.

Stephen

But not overdoing it. So I believe that they’re all fantastic, and I wish I could give you the right answer. But the truth is, who am I speaking with? That’s my recommendation.

Stu

Yeah. No, that’s great. And that does sit in perfectly with all of the information that we’ve gleaned out of the past as well.

Stephen

Well that’s good!

Stu

There has been a tend to pull back on the [inaudible 00:32:23] stuff.

Stephen

For sure, absolutely.

Stu

Because of stress hormones and all that comes with that as well, and the science that supports the benefits of high intensity interval of short bursts and weight bearing exercises for longevity, but yeah, absolutely.

Again, great advice, and specifically unique to the individual. Because I’m like you: I’m genetically lean; very, very, hard for me to put on weight. I can run quite easily, struggle to lift weights, but I do enjoy lifting weights more for mindset and also muscle and bones, and all of the above.

So like I said, it depends on the individual and where we are in our life as well.

I want to talk about the Cabral Concept. And looked into everything that you’re doing online, and it seems like you are very, very heavily spread over many different areas. And so tell us what the Cabral concept is and what to expect from it.

Stephen

Yeah, so the Cabral Concept is a daily Podcast that I do.

Stu

Yes.

Stephen

Started about three years ago, excuse me. And what we do is we look at all the topics around health.

Stu

Yeah.

Stephen

So I have something called the de stress protocol. And it’s diet, it’s exercise, it’s stress reduction, it’s toxin removal. It’s turning on that parasympathetic nervous system, which is the res, relax, rejuvenate.

It’s working on emotional balance. It’s looking at good supplementation, third party tested, and it’s looking at the success mindset for overall success in life.

You can do anything for a couple weeks at a time, but what can you do at the rest of your life?

Stu

Right.

Stephen

That’s what we’re looking at as well.

So the Cabral Concept, each day is only one topic. I focus in on one topic and we go deep. It’s not a long show, it’s twenty-five minutes or so. But my goal is to help people understand that there is always an answer.

We’ve seen it all. We’ve done over a quarter million private client consultations. You name it, we’ve done it, whether it’s hormones, digestion, weight gain, etc. And we just tell people, “There’s always an answer why.”

The answer why comes down to two things: you’re deficient in something, or you have too much of something, the toxicity. Now that’s a gross oversimplification.

But the truth is that people are walking around right now depleted of hormones, vitamins, minerals, neurotransmitters, amino acids. Or they have too much of something: aluminum, mercury, candida, bacteria.

My job as a practitioner, but also just to teach, my favorite thing to do is teach, and that’s why I do the Cabral Concept, is to allow you to understand your own body to be able to take back control of your life. And the tagline of the show is: change your body; change your life.

I honestly believe, just like I went through, in order for me to get the life that I now live today, that I feel better than ever, that I’m disease free, my blood work, my saliva, urine, hear, all the hormone tests look great, I was able to get the life that I wanted now with the energy, being able to take care of my two young girls, all of that only by changing my body.

So I believe by changing our body, optimizing that, we’ll have the energy and zest and vitality to do anything we want with our lives.

Stu

Great. Fantastic. And many of our audience that aren’t listeners or frequent listeners to Podcasts as well might be a little confused about this whole thing. But it’s so easy if we have access to Smartphones, then I find Podcasts such an amazing resource to be able to tap into, irrespective of where we are.

So I listen to Podcasts when I’m lifting weights in the gym, I listen to Podcasts when I go out for a walk. And just a really, really great distraction in a way to turn off the monkey mind, to turn off any anxious thoughts and tap into information. And really start to educate ourselves and become purists about things that could possibly enable us to better our health. So yeah, fantastic.

Stephen

Great in the car as well. A lot of people on their commute, they can’t watch video, they can turn on a podcast, listen instead of necessarily watch. So either is great.

And then I just want to give this a shameless plug.

Stu

Yes, absolutely.

Stephen

Because if you do not listen to Podcasts, this is all of the information that basically I talk about in one book called The Rain Barrel Effect. And all proceeds from this book, a hundred percent go to charity, to a foundation that I believe in to help actually pregnant women in underdeveloped countries.

So that’s one more alternative. That’s all I …

Stu

Fantastic

And tell us about the title of the book.

Stephen

So The Rain Barrel Effect stands for the reason that we have trouble losing the weight, getting well, whatever it is, is that at some point in your life, like when I was seventeen, I woke up one day and I was very sick.

But the problem was that happened over many, many years. It was me eating the wrong foods, taking three years of antibiotics straight.

Stu

Yeah.

Stephen

And what we do is we fill up this thing we call our rain barrel. And the problem is we don’t check on that, we just run our typical yearly blood work. We’re never really looking at our gut health or food sensitivities, etc.

And then one day it’s snowballs, right?

Stu

Yes.

Stephen

It overflows. And then we say, “How did I get rheumatoid arthritis? How did I get Hashimoto’s, how did I get whatever.” No! It is years of accumulation.

So that is why the detoxification is the emptying of the rain barrel that we need more than ever. We live in a day and age where we lack for nothing. We have everything! We have too much food, we have too much exercise, too many supplements, too much of everything.

So my job is to preach the ayurvedic philosophy of well of emptying that rain barrel, so that’s what it’s-

Stu

Right, fantastic. And I think that’s great. And for any of us that are perhaps overwhelmed in terms of, “I have condition X, Y, or Z, my rain bucket is full,” its always pays to remembers that it’s the one percenters that make the difference as well. If we can perhaps just start with drinking clean, filtered tap water over [inaudible 00:38:35], chlorinated, and who knows what, it could affect our gut microbium or our toxin accumulation.

Just start with that one thing, or perhaps try and focus on our sleep, or pull the sugar out of your diet as best you can. And all of that I guess, will have an affect on the rain barrel. So that’s excellent; to be able to put that into a book is fantastic work.

I wonder whether, were you at peak health when you were writing that? Because I’ve heard when people write books, it’s generally the most unhealthy period of their lives.

Stephen

So when I did, this book is twenty years in the making.

Stu

Right.

Stephen

So essentially I told myself when I was very young, “If I ever got well, I would teach other people how to do it.”

Stu

Right.

Stephen

Because I had no plans to become a doctor, I really didn’t. That was not in the cards. And it was one of those things where it becomes your whole life when you’re that sick. So it was a natural transition into it.

And now it’s simply, that is a mission that I will follow for the rest of my life, is to share that with others.

Stu

Fantastic. So if we took the rain barrel effect and I asked you, and I apologize for this question in advance, but your three top tips that you think would make the biggest impact on our overall health, it’s a bit cool, I knew, what do you think they might be?

Stephen

That’s a great question. I’m going to give you three that no matter who you are, will make a difference maker. No matter the health issue, weight loss, energy, etc. So the first thing we need to do is remove what’s accumulated. There’s not a person … I’ve made this bet many times, there’s not a person in the world who could take a legitimate toxicity test, simple urine test, and not find toxins. It’s just the way it is.

So give yourself a week, seven, fourteen, or twenty-one days to remove those toxins. Do a functional medicine detox. Ours is called the Dr. Well Detox. You don’t need to do it.

You can link up with your local function medicine doctor, integrative health practitioner, you can find one that works for you. I have not problem with that.

After you do that though, that which it will incorporate fasting, elimination diet, you’ll learn so much. It’s not about just the detox, it’s about what you learn.

Stu

Yeah.

Stephen

Then after that, make your breakfast every morning the smoothie. I can’t even go into all the benefits of that! To be able to get all of the plant based nutrition in there, you can use an all in one daily nutrition support power, you can use, [inaudible 00:40:55] protein, you can use whatever you’d like. Lots of liquid.

Most people, they don’t drink any liquid in the morning!

Stu

Yeah.

Stephen

So this is going to combat the dehydration. You don’t have to do a lot of high glycemic fruit. You can put a lot of fiber in there. You can make it work for you. That will get the hydration going, that will get your antioxidants, it will flush your system on a daily basis.

And it will prevent you from doing the alternative, which is the cereals and the fruit juice and all of that.

Stu

Toast, yeah.

Stephen

Exactly! And so you’ll get the benefit and you’ll get the subtraction as well.

And the last thing would be this: get yourself up to bed before ten p.m. every evening and allow yourself to sleep to five thirty, six every morning. And get yourself up by sunrise.

If you do that, you will begin to reset your circadian rhythm, which will change your cortisol, it will change your thyroid, it will change your melatonin, which will change your serotonin. You’ll have more energy, you’re more vitality, you’ll have more zest for life than you’ve ever had.

Stu

Great advice. Fantastic! Yeah, absolutely game changers, certainly. And specifically with number one, if you are accumulating who knows what, then it’s going to be very difficult, I think, to optimize the other parts of your life. So yeah, great place to start.

Fantastic! So we’re just about coming up on time, and just couple of questions: what’s next? You have clearly got so many things going on. Anything in specific this year?

Stephen

So this year for the very first time, we’ve decided to take what we’ve done over close to three hundred thousand client appointments and probably close to let’s say a hundred thousand function medicine labs completed, to teach it to other practitioners, and to your every day person.

Stu

Right.

Stephen

So it’s called the Integrative Health Practitioner Course or Certification. And what my goal is, is I can’t keep up, and even my team, with all the people that we would love to see.

And that goes for every personal trainer out there, every massage therapist, every kinesiologist, everyone.

So eventually at some point, you want to teach others how to health themselves, and then to heal others. So my goal is to say, “How many people can I teach through whether it’s the book, the Podcast, or a more formal course or certification, to then go and teach others?”

So that’s what I’m most passionate about this year. And over the next I would say, eighteen months, getting on the road more, traveling more and being able to speak with more people in person and just share this message in a different format. Podcasts is great!

We’ll be doing a little bit more on YouTube in the future. But there’s nothing like connecting with other people in person as well.

Stu

Yeah, definitely. So how can we get more of this? And where can we go to find out about everything that we’ve spoken about today?

Stephen

So the daily Podcast is called the Cabral Concept. It is on iTunes and Android and everything else, right through your phone, on the app that comes with every phone now.

But also, you can just go to Stephen Cabral at Stephen with a “ph” dot com. And that will link up to the Podcast, it will link up to pretty much everything. For those people that are most interested in saying, “How can I learn more about what’s going on inside my body, my deficiencies and toxicities?” There’s a website which instead of going through your doctor, it allows you to take control of your own health, and that’s equilibriumnutrition.com and you can actually purchase you own at home lab test that come with a full consultation and protocol as well.

So again, I recommend people just get more education. Keep learning; keep going into it. Then when you’re ready, then you make the right decision for you.

Stu

Fantastic. That is huge amounts of information, great place to get it. We’ll make sure that we put all of the show notes together, including links and everything that we’ve spoken about today easily accessible as well on the blog post that we’re going to publish this on.

So thank you again for your time. Really appreciate it, and look forward to sharing this with the masses.

Stephen

It’s my pleasure, and thank you! Keep up the great work! I appreciate it!

Stu

We’ll speak soon. Bye-bye.