Inside the Biohacking Routine of a Mom and CEO I Lindsay O’Neill

Speaker A: 00:00:00

There's a lot of functional medicine doctors that don't know anything about biohacking.

So I wanted to originally give firsthand experience to these practitioners to learn about these devices and these different wellness solutions that they could implement into their practice.

Because then I felt like, okay, if I can reach 100 doctors and each one of these doctors has 100 patients, you know, now I'm reaching thousands of people.

And then those thousands of people are going to get healthy and they're going to tell, you know, dozens of friends and then their dozens of friends are going to tell their doctors, and then their doctors are going to learn about this stuff too. And it's just going to go on and on and on.

I come from a background of pharmaceutical advertising and so I know that pushing direct to consumer is tough. It's really tough. And there's a lot of brands out there that are created by amazing scientists and doctors.

You know, like these big, these red light panels, these hyperbaric chambers, cryotherapy, all of these amazing devices that are really efficacious that work so well, but they're not marketers.

Speaker B: 00:01:04

Welcome to the Optimized Woman, the podcast for high performing women ready to take back their health. I'm Orshi vangotten, a board certified holistic health practitioner and functional nutritionist.

If you're tired of feeling stuck, you can't lose the weight. No matter what you do, your energy's in the toilet and you lost the spark you once had, then you are in the right place.

We are here to unleash the unstoppable force you meant to be and give you the tools to fix what's holding you back. So if you're ready to own it, start thriving again, and live the life you deserve, then let's get to it.

Can you tell us a little bit about how did you first find your way into the world of biohacking and health optimization?

Speaker A: 00:01:48

It was actually a car accident while I was pregnant, seven months pregnant with my third baby girl. And over the course of a couple of years I got really sick, I think from the trauma to my body.

Also from potentially the medication that they, that I took whilst on, on bed rest. And then I did some of the things to get myself better. You know, we kind of like do the bare bones.

I had three little kids at home, three kids, four and under. And I was at the height of my tech career, so I, I couldn't really spend too much time helping myself out when I was sick.

But it wasn't until my daughter started to exhibit symptoms of chronic inflammatory disease, that I dove in deeper into the health optimization world because, as you can imagine, she started to get sick when she was three. I was sick in my mid-30s. The things that I could do in my mid-30s were vastly different from the things that my daughter could do.

So where I transformed my diet and lifestyle completely, you really can't do that with a three year old. So I ended up trying to find alternative methodologies for helping her to heal.

And I came across this amazing practice at Yale Pediatrics and our nurse practitioner there was also a Reiki practitioner, which is so crazy that there's this cross section between allopathic and traditional medicine and sort of fringe Eastern medicine, you know, the oldest ancient medicine that you can get, like using harnessing the power and energy of the earth. So I threw her into a whole bunch of different programs, both allopathic and naturopathic.

starting this, and this is in: 2019

So she was in. She was actually five turning six.

And during the pandemic, the pandemic really set her back because she wasn't able to go to the doctor's office and do her biofeedback. She wasn't able to, like when she was in school, she wasn't able to drink enough water because they forced them to wear masks the whole time.

And so a lot of the work that we had done in the first couple years of her healing started to get undone throughout the course of the pandemic.

side. And in the beginning of: 2023

My business, to get my business off the ground.

And one of the people that I met sent me a podcast from Ben Greenfield, who had interviewed the founders of Immortal, which is an amazing stacked biohacking technology that includes seven different things in one central bed chamber. So it has pemf, which is pulse electromagnetic frequency. It has vibroacoustic pulse, it has near and infrared light.

So that's four things right there. Then you have a cannula in your nose with molecular hydrogen. You have guided meditation, breathwork, Sound bath, all in one bed.

It's a zero gravity bed. So I called up the company and I said, I would love to have my daughter try this because we basically tried everything.

And Reiki seems to work really well for her. She's done, you know, some meditation and breath work and Kegel exercises and all of the, all of the different things that she could do.

And biofeedback and energetics seemed to be really helpful for her. So I flew her down to Florida.

They had this cool contraption in the back of a 31 foot Airstream that they were driving around to different sporting events and wellness centers all over the country. And they were so nice.

They drove it into my friend's driveway and I basically like threw my 8 year old daughter into this magical thing that looks like it's from Mars. She comes out a half hour later and she said, mom, I realized that I'm no longer supposed to be the sick kid. I'm actually supposed to be the healer.

And I think just having that emotional transformation also stimulated a physical transformation.

So there was obviously a physical transformation that happened too, because all of her muscles, which had not been functioning properly her entire life, were now functioning properly after a 30 minute session in this chamber. So I dove in deeper into the science behind all of these different modalities that were stacked inside the immortal chamber.

I joined the company to help them with one of their conferences, their first conference that they were going to, the biohacking conference. I'd honestly never even heard the word biohacking until two years ago, which is wild.

You know, this is an incredible nascent stage industry that is worth talking about because it's made such a huge impact on my life, my family's life, and I really want it to make an impact on millions, billions of other people's lives around the world.

Speaker B: 00:07:01

Before we go any further, I gotta ask, what is the health condition of your daughter? Like, does she have any type of diagnosis? So do you know what her underlying issues are?

Speaker A: 00:07:11

They diagnosed her with low muscle tone.

If you look up in pregnancy, if you're pregnant and you look up medications that are safe in pregnancy, you'll see that there's class A, class B, class C. So the medication that they put me on whilst in bed rest to help control the contractions was class A10, 11 years ago when I was originally hit by the car.

Now if you look it up, it is no longer class A. I believe it's class B or C and there are some ties to it causing fetal underdevelopment of so it wasn't just her fine motor. You know, she did have to work on writing. When she first started writing in kindergarten, it was like, you know, graffiti all over the page.

So she needed to. To really focus on the fine motor skills. But then also it did impact her digestive function.

So for all of the women that are listening to this, if you've ever had a UTI, they're extraordinarily painful. From the time she was three and a half until she was four, she had 17 UTIs because she was not able.

Her bladder function didn't work properly, so she wasn't able to fully void her bladder, which caused residual urine to be left in her bladder. Anytime there's residual urine left in your bladder, it has a greater chance of becoming infected.

And so the doctors just kept her on a course of antibiotics over and over and over again. And then they kept her on a course of muscle relaxers to try to get her to relax those pelvic floor muscles.

And then that's why we started to do biofeedback and other exercises to help strengthen the internal muscles, to help with her digestive function, with her motility issues, with all of that.

And as you can imagine as a young girl in public school in New York, it's not fun to be the kid that's always going to the nurse because you need to change your outfit or call mom to come pick you up early to go to the doctor. And so she has made a huge transition, not just in her confidence level, but also in her emotional state.

And now at 10, she's already level 2 Reiki certified. She. She teaches me breath work. She teaches everybody breath work. Like, it was so funny this last Thanksgiving. I'm like, where, Where'd she go?

And she was in the dining room that I just set up for for dinner. And she's just like, talking into space. And I'm like, rin, do you want my phone to, like, record yourself?

And she's like, yeah, I came up with six new breathwork techniques. I'm like, cool. Who are you? This is like the craziest 10 year old on the planet.

But the time if you talk to people who are in the biohacking, the longevity and the wellness space, they get into it because of some sort of painful experience that they've either experienced firsthand or through a loved one. And, you know, I've experienced both. So my own healing journey came before my daughters.

And obviously it's continuing now because when it first started, I was in my early 30s, and now I'm in my early 40s life and my body and my hormones are very different now, as you can imagine.

Speaker B: 00:10:03

I love hearing the pain to purpose stories because there's so many of us in this space have that story.

And to be honest with you, I think if you interviewed 100 women in midlife, I think the vast majority of them would have something, some story of a healing journey that they've already gone through. I'm curious, just to finish up with your daughter. How much time did she spend in the Immortal Chamber?

Was that part of her regular treatment to turn around her condition? Was there anything else that was a groundbreaking tool or supplement or strategy that you use to turn her health around?

And how is her health now at 10 year old?

Speaker A: 00:10:46

Her health is perfect now. It was perfect after about four sessions in the Immortal Chamber. So that's. I think that's all she did. Maybe, maybe five.

There was one session where we went in together and that was really cool to experience. Kind of held her while this electrical current and all of this vibroacoustic pulse went through our bodies together.

And it was just such a magical experience to, to have with my child who, you know, I was really worried about for many, many years. It took up all of my brain space, a lot of my heart, my time, energy, effort and money and, you know, drained. Drained me significantly.

Speaker B: 00:11:22

Is she your youngest, your youngest daughter? Yeah, she is. And you have three daughters. The other ones are all healthy?

Speaker A: 00:11:28

Everyone's healthy. You know. My oldest daughter has a little dyslexia. She's in a specialty school for dyslexia. We all have dyslexia and add, probably just add.

I find that we have to figure things out the hard way many times, but it's actually a good thing in, in most cases in relationships, sometimes it can be a little challenging because sometimes your partner or whoever you're in a relationship with might think that you're not paying attention to them. But it's really just. You're focused on so many things at once that it's. It's hard to. To drill in. But my middle daughter is healthy.

She's got some asthma stuff with allergies, especially in this season right now. Literally, it looked like it was snowing in New York today, even though it's April, because there's pollen flying everywhere, all over the place.

So, you know, normal kid stuff. But my kids are not normal, quote unquote, because they live in a house with a Harvard certified culinary medicine chef. So they eat really clean.

We have a pulse, PMF device. We have a sauna. We have a salt chamber. We have, you know, a. We have an amp coil. We have a red light panel. We have two red light panels.

We've got a lot of supplements. And you asked about supplements that also helped Bryn.

There's a company called Utiva out of Canada that has amazing bladder health, sexual health supplements that have been massively transformative. I'm not gonna claim that it's is better than antibiotics, but certainly it's, you know, in terms of efficacy, but it's certainly safer.

So they have like the highest concentration of cranberry. They also have D mannose and other things that are really helpful. She did also practice Reiki with a Reiki practitioner once a week.

She did biofeedback at Yale Pediatrics once a week leading up to, you know, her, her time in the immortal chamber. And then we completely transformed her diet.

So my other business, in addition to Wellness of Turtle, the biohacking business was and still is smallhinges health. And that whole concept is small hinges swing the big door of positive change. You don't have to change everything.

So I do a bio individual blood spot test that tests for IgG IgA antibodies as well as the complement C3D protein to look at food inflammation triggers, as well as four different indicators of leaky gut. So presence of candida, ocludin, zonulin and lps. And this test is great for bio individual meal plan. So I've done this test on Bryn. I do it on me.

I just did it on my oldest daughter because she was having some issues with her skin breaking out. I mean, listen, she's 14, so her hormones are going crazy right now, but no one wants to walk around eighth grade with a face full of pimples.

And we found within a week of removing the foods from her diet, my oldest daughter, her skin completely cleared up, which is wild.

Speaker B: 00:14:23

I know Children are so responsive.

I mean, obviously it's nice to have a biohacking mom that can have all these cool gadgets and some expensive gear at home and, and also have the knowledge to how to implement that.

And you mentioned this in your TED talk too, of food sensitivity testing, addressing leaky gut and addressing that in such a young age, your gut can heal so quickly if you let it. You know, I remember when I was, I was growing up, I had no knowledge.

And just like, as a, just like a lot of people, I was on antibiotics as a child for many, many years with ear infections and all kinds of issues. So my gut health was completely Just terrible. Growing up, like, like I was permanently constipated.

And as a kid I just didn't even know that I was constipated because that was my normal, you know, that constipation was like my normal state.

So I didn't know what it was to be normal because my, as a child I was just that way, having headaches and having things that were kind of like a normal part of my life as a child. And so I didn't even understand what really a healthy state was. And it took me time to even get to that point.

And so simple things like, you know, food sensitivity testing and other type of, you know, gut testing is so foundational, so fundamental.

And I think a lot of, especially moms out there, since we have a lot of moms that are worried about their kids, sometimes it's not obvious that it could be a gut issue, you know, when you're looking at symptoms. But starting with the gut as a foundational place is almost, you can never go wrong with that.

And you being a chef, you're able to also curate, I'm assuming, a really nice healthy diet for your kids. So your kids are very lucky.

So would you say that where is the place where you usually try to start with the troubleshooting, whether it's an adult or a child? Would you start with the gut health first or what's your approach?

Speaker A: 00:16:22

I think it's, it's kind of like cheating. Doing the food inflammation test.

It tests for 176 different foods, additives and colorings, as well as your gut health though, you're looking at, you know, what foods specifically are inflaming you, which is pretty cool because there's a lot of IGG sensitivity tests out there that really don't give you the same level of depth because they're just looking at the IgG, ant antigen and antibody, which is a step down from ige, which is the food allergy. So when you have an IGG reaction that's kind of like, you know, maybe gas rumblings, maybe a little bit of a rash or something like that.

But if your body's not clearing that reaction, that's when it, it sends intuitively that complement C3D protein to the site of the reaction. But that protein doesn't go in there like a laser beam, it goes in like a wrecking ball.

And so it's damaging all of these healthy cells in the process, trying to clear out this reaction that's not being innately cleared by your body and that damaging of healthy cells. Is what inflammation is, basically.

And because inflammation is the root cause of everything, if you can change your diet and remove some things that could potentially even be quote, unquote healthy, like on my list, the top thing that I have are bananas. I had a banana in my smoothie almost every single morning where she. And like I felt three months pregnant immediately. It was crazy though.

I took bananas out of my diet. I also had collard greens, pineapple, coffee, which kind of sucked.

But you know, you can work some things back into your diet over the course of time. Once you allow your body space and time to clear the reaction, you can reintroduce the foods over. Over time. Yeah.

But because inflammation is really the root cause of every major illness and condition, like cancer is an inflammatory disease, type 2 diabetes is an inflammatory disease, there's 400, maybe 500 plus autoimmune conditions that are out there that are all inflammation based.

Most of the things that we deal with on a day to, day to day basis as women or just as humans, whether it's fatigue or brain fog or skin issues or issues with your hair, your nails, your libido, that's all related to inflammation.

So yes, taking the, taking a test, going to smallhinges Health and signing up for the test, you literally get it mailed to your house, you prick your finger, you put five blood spots on a card, you send it back to the lab, and within two weeks, you have not only all of the foods that are causing an inflammatory reaction, you have a full picture of your gut health as well. Because as you know, your gut is your second brain. So if your gut is a mess, you cannot be happy.

A lot of emotional issues, depression, anxiety, sleeplessness, fatigue, brain fog, all of that actually comes from having leaky gut.

And a lot of people don't realize that some of the stuff that's getting out through your gut barrier can also cross your blood brain barrier and get into your brain.

And that's what's causing potentially even early onset dementia, Alzheimer's and so many other chronic conditions that are avoidable if you address them very early on.

So, yeah, finding out what's going on with you specifically and then, you know, going to like the biohacking index, which we just created, biohackingindex.com and looking for the best products to help suit your needs based off of, you know, whatever it is that you've got going on.

Speaker B: 00:19:52

Just to wrap up this conversation on testing and leaky gut and all that, I think what people are, the people I work with seem to be Surprised about is that a lot of foods that can be perfectly healthy show up on that test.

Like, oh, I eat avocados every day or eat, you know, a piece of vegetable or fruit that even with a trick like AIP elimination diet, you may not eliminate. Like, I have clients are allergic to beef or are like, a certain type of protein that, you know, you would never eliminate normally from your diet.

And. And then you realize that for that specific food, you. Your body is sensitive for whatever reason.

And so sometimes it's almost impossible to really find these on unless you do some sort of testing.

Speaker A: 00:20:39

So diagnostics are a great thing to do. But there are also foods that everyone should avoid. You know, processed sugars. I mean, I've become addicted to my yucca yuka.

I don't know if you use this, but I scan everything. I very rarely eat anything out of a box bag, or can if I can't, and if I can avoid it.

But, you know, when you're traveling or if you're hungry, my kids are all ski racers, so we spend a lot of time at ski lodges. Their food is crappy. It's really bad. It's all fried food. You know, you want to avoid the seed oils, the processed sugars, the processed wheat.

Anything that comes in a box or bag, you should scan with yuca because there's so many additives that the US Allows into our food systems that are called G ras, generally recognized as safe, that are really not safe in mass quantities. And if you're constantly eating these foods, you're just overloading your body with an incredible amount of toxins.

Another diagnostic test that I always love to either do on my clients or to tell women about is the MTHFR test. So you can tell what that could stand for, but it's the methyltetrahydrate folate reductase genetic mutation.

are really important are the A: 1298

And so a lot of women who are pregnant are being told by their OB GYNs to take extra folic acids.

So what ends up happening is you're actually toxifying your body by adding too much folic acid into your bloodstream, and you could end up with some really awful conditions when you come off of folic acid after you have the baby. Like, you know, severe depression can come from a significant drop in your folic acid intake.

But there's also a lot of other things like heavy metals.

So that heavy metal fish that you could eat, if you're eating tuna or swordfish, often, you know, any of the big fish, the cods of the world or the bottom feeding fish that have a lot of bacteria in them and potential for other toxins, your body is not getting rid of those toxins.

If you're drinking alcohol, which you know, many women do, especially moms, the end of a long day, maybe you're working, you're taking care of kids, you like to have your glass of wine, kick your feet up and, you know, not hear the word mommy for a couple of hours. But that is a toxin. And if you have this methylation defect, it's important to understand how these toxins are potentially impacting your body.

So it's getting all of the data. Obviously a data nerd. That's what I did for 20 years of my career.

Utilization of big data and machine learning and AI for optimization of advertising and media. And now I'm using data, bio individual data to optimize health.

Speaker B: 00:23:36

Yeah. And I think a lot of what people don't realize is the cumulative effect is what creates that rain barrel effect of spilling over.

The stress, over the elastic load becomes too big on the body. So one glass of wine is not going to be a problem.

If you have a glass of wine every night, plus the mercury from the fish and plus the emotional stress, plus a whole bunch of other things, at some point your body is not able to handle that stress load and that's when you, you start having symptoms. So it's really not the tiny bit of individual dose is not the harmful thing. It's, it's the cumulative dose where, where it becomes an issue.

And then people that their detox pathways are impaired or have the, the mutation, as you mentioned, then their bodies are just not dealing with this as well as the regular person. So I agree, like testing, I always say test, don't guess. That's always a good way to start.

Now, just to kind of go back to our initial discussion, I'm just curious, what role did your personal health crisis and your daughter's journey play in shaping the work that you do today now?

Speaker A: 00:24:49

So I wish that I had all of the, the friends, the community, the technology, the insight and knowledge back then that I have now.

So my purpose through pain has become sharing all of this information as publicly as possible through my podcast, through the biohacking index, and through, you know, just being a speaker on Stage and being on amazing podcasts like yours, sharing this wealth of information with the masses. A lot of what I originally set out to do was to educate practitioners.

There's a lot of allopathic medicine practitioners who haven't even spent more than four hours learning about nutrition in their education to become a doctor. And then there's a lot of functional medicine doctors that don't know anything about biohacking.

So I wanted to originally give firsthand experience to these practitioners to learn about these devices and these different wellness solutions that they could implement into their practice.

Because then I felt like, okay, if I can reach 100 doctors and each one of these doctors has 100 patients, you know, now I'm reaching thousands of people.

And then those thousands of people are going to get healthy and they're going to tell, you know, dozens of friends and then their, dozens of friends are going to tell their doctors, and then their doctors are going to learn about this stuff too. And it's just going to go on and on and on.

I come from a background of pharmaceutical advertising and so I know that pushing direct to consumer is tough. It's really tough. And there's a lot of brands out there that are created by amazing scientists and doctors.

You know, like these red light panels, these hyperbaric chambers, cryotherapy, all of these amazing devices that are really efficacious that work so well that they're not marketers, these founders are not marketers, they're not salespeople.

And so I, I thought if I can just help them talk about their products to doctors who can then implement them in their practice and they can help heal hundreds of people, then we don't have to do that traditional pharmaceutical advertising. Oh well, you know, or she go tell your doctor about your IBS issues and tell, you know, have them give you X and X medication.

But you know, it might cause stroke or death or something else like that. So instead of trying to get the, the patient to advocate for themselves, because that's really, that's a, it's what we should be doing.

We should be our own advocates. But nine times out of ten I think we just say, okay, whatever doc, whatever you tell me to do, I'm gonna do it.

Speaker B: 00:27:32

So the doctors don't have the time to listen. I mean, they have five minutes with you and they don't want to be educated or lectured by, by their patients. Right?

Speaker A: 00:27:41

And, and honestly, it makes them look bad.

It's like, okay, well I've, you know, my 40 year degree is not going to be like taken out by your, by this five minute conversation with Lindsay who's telling me all about this crazy stuff. Now. My doctor, who I actually just went to today, he took out like 20 vials of blood on me, so I'm a little woozy at the moment.

But he started doing the food inflammation test because of me.

Like I brought him the food inflammation test and he actually took the results from my test even though I had already been administering this test in the market for two years. Once he did, once he looked at my results, he actually gave me more insights than I was even able to give my, my client.

So it was a great little working relationship. He also has an infrared sauna in his office now. So these doctors are starting to pick up on the things that people need.

And he was originally the person that taught me all about MTHFR mutation, the impact of inflammation in your body, mold, Lyme. He has a, like a crazy Lyme test that looks at like all of these different variables that most doctors don't even look at, don't even know about.

So it's, it's hard to find that needle in the haystack of a doctor who's fully educated on this stuff.

Luckily I found that doctor, but then, you know, I've surpassed him in some of my knowledge on some of these modalities and we just have a good, a good flow that's, it's hard to.

Speaker B: 00:29:08

Hard for, hard for doctors to really stay on top of all the new knowledge that's coming out.

I mean, and I think even doctors that are in the allopathic space, you know, obviously functional medicine, doctors are more integrated with their approach and they probably are a little bit more on the cutting edge. But even in the allopathic space, if you talk to doctors, they say like, oh yeah, I have a, maybe I have a red light panel or I take supplements.

But if you ask, do you recommend that to your patients? No, because they stick to the standard of care and that's still considered woo woo in many ways in the allopathic space.

And even though I would say that probably at least 50% of allopathic doctors still take supplements. Right. But they don't recommend that to their patients.

If you ask them, they take at least a few supplements for themselves, but they would never recommend it. I think it's slowly shifting and hopefully you and I can be a piece of that puzzle of shifting that perception.

So tell us a little bit about the biohacking index. So how does it help women sort of personalize a path to Optimal health.

Speaker A: 00:30:12

So it's really simple. We built it to be like the Yelp of biohacking and longevity, its ratings and reviews.

It's brand new, so it'll probably take a few more months to gain statistical significance. But go on the index, find your favorite brands, rate, review them, do some additional research. You can read other people's ratings and reviews.

And the idea is that these brands, whether it's a product technology or even a practitioner, so practitioners can actually list themselves as well. Wellness centers, med spas, IV clinics. And what ends up happening is we have a. A backlinking technology in the back of the website.

So all of this information, all of the links to and from the different profiles, you can, if you build a profile, let's just say it's Lindsay's Wellness center, right?

So we have Lindsay's Wellness center on there, and I put up a bunch of videos and content and I have a podcast that I list on there, and I have links to articles and research and all this other stuff. Booking links, products you can purchase right there.

And you can also fill out a lead form if you're interested in coming to my Lindsay's Wellness Center. All of that gets indexed, which is why we call it the biohacking index with the search engines. So it's kind of like an SEO machine.

The idea is that if you go to Google and you search up something in biohacking, best red light panel or best hyperbaric chamber or Ivy clinic near me or something like that, you might get so much information that information may not be vetted, it may not be verified. You know, Google ratings on products aren't really there yet, especially in this area. More on the medical side, a little bit on the beauty side.

But this is a platform to normalize the noise in the industry and to provide real information to anyone who's searching for it. And it's, it's categorized into eight different categories, and then we have dozens of subcategories underneath there.

So, like, for example, if you go to nutrition and supplements, you can look under women's health and you can see all of the nutrition and supplement companies and providers that offer women's solutions through nutrition and supplements.

Speaker B: 00:32:32

I think it's a, it's an amazing tool because as you said, there's so much noise in this space, it's very hard to. There's a lot of information out there, but we are almost drowned in information now. So how do you find something that trusted that's highly rated?

So I think it's going to be A great tool. So congratulations for launching that.

Speaker A: 00:32:52

Thank you.

Speaker B: 00:32:52

Now, going back to your personal health journey. You had several autoimmune conditions and you reversed them or put them in remission to some degree. How did you know?

What kind of tools do you use to do that for yourself? We talked about your daughter, but let's talk about your health transformation.

And then also as you now shifting into perimenopause, early 40s, what are like the specific tools or biomarkers that you track now as a 40 year old.

Speaker A: 00:33:20

Female, That's a really good question. I mean my, my healing journey was hell. Honestly, it was really difficult because my kids were little.

I was still working full time in tech and when I was working full time in tech, I was an executive and I was flying all over the country, speaking on stages. I was running big teams mostly as a gm. So I was really stressed and I was just totally adrenal fatigued.

And when I met my doctor, Dr. Alan Rochowski, he said, not only are you going to do a three month detox protocol where I removed almost every single food from my diet and then slowly put it back in. And then I took tons of supplements to help supplement and keep my body functioning at a high level.

But I had to dry brush, I did coconut oil pulling, I jumped on a trampoline, I got sunlight first thing in the morning. I took my shoes off when I grounded, you know, I started drinking clean filtered water.

I went to Costa Rica and did some meditation and breath work classes and yoga. And I turned off my phone, chewed my food. I would sit there quiet as quietly as possible with three little ones running around.

And over the course of three months, I literally detoxed everything out of my body because I had lost a lot of hair. I was hospitalized for crushing pain. They diagnosed, diagnosed me with rupus, which is rheumatoid arthritis and lupus.

And it was very much like my whole body was just in pain all the time. I just felt like creaky, like the Tin man, like I needed some oil in my joints. I started taking creatine and collagen.

I started taking vitamin D3 with K2 because I was very depleted in my, in my D levels. I started taking a pretty strong probiotic because my gut was a disaster.

I've always been skinny and have looked like this even, you know, even after having three kids have been, you know, 110, 115 pounds. And so I ate whatever I wanted to until, you know, obviously this, this accident. But up until then I spent 35 years wrecking my gut.

33 years wrecking my gut with everything and especially stress. Stress is a major contributing factor.

Stress can produce cortisol, which messes with your endocrine system, your lymphatic system, so you cannot detoxify, you can't sleep, which helps you detoxify. Your hormones go crazy, right? So it can spike your estrogen, it can spike your progesterone.

A lot of women who have trouble getting pregnant or have issues with hormone fluctuations or have really bad period cramps have like a lot of stress in their life. So what I had to do was not just change my diet and my lifestyle, like exercising more, moving more, that kind of thing.

It was a massively transformational emotional journey as well. And I think that's one of the reasons why I ended up getting divorced.

It's one of the reasons why I never went back and worked full time in tech after I got better because I just couldn't put myself back into that sympathetic mode. I needed to be in parasympathetic more than I was in sympathetic. And especially going into the pandemic when everything was just so stressful.

the middle of the pandemic in: 2020

And I'm very close with my ex husband and he's a great father and a great co parent. We're very, very lucky that we get along as well as we do.

I had a lot of friends get divorced during that time and so it was like I wasn't just going through my divorce and my healing journey and my daughter's healing journey was going through all of my friends divorces too. And it's hard, it's hard to manage all of the stress that's around you, especially when your community is under siege. I live in New York.

New York is not a calm area in the world. It is a high functioning, energetic, business, money focused, you know, power hungry area of the world. It's not a blue zone for a reason.

It's not the best place to get healthy. It's, it's getting there and it will continue to get there. It's a fun place to visit.

I very feel very lucky that I don't live in New York City anymore, which is where I grew up. But I now in my early 40s as my health is transitioning, I also have to change what I'm doing. Like I used to intermittent fast.

It doesn't work for me anymore. And it wasn't doing it for weight loss.

I was doing it to optimize my sleep, to help boost my endocrine system, my lymphatic system, to get my body into a good circadian rhythm so that my digestive health and my gut health would be on point. But at this particular point in my life, and for a lot of perimenopausal women, intermittent fasting is not a great idea.

So I eat a lot of little meals throughout the day to keep my digestive system going, to keep my lymphatic system draining. I do have the flopresso a lymph. I use the vibrant blue oils, lymphatic drainage oils on my lymph nodes and and down in my fascia.

I do use like pulse PMF and amp coil to help regulate my hormones. And anytime we have period cramps in the household, we put the pulse PMF on the back, a heating pad on the front.

Magnesium is great for, for period cramps and also for sleep. Regulating your sleep is so important at any age, but especially as you're going through a hormonal shift.

So whether you're a teenager coming into your womanhood or you're perimenopausal going into the post menopausal phase of life, sleep is so vitally important. You need more than eight hours per night and you need good quality sleep.

So not just like taking a pill so that you can sleep or having an extra glass of wine so that you can unwind at the end of the night, that's actually going to end up disrupting your sleep and keep you out of a full REM or deep sleep cycle. Your body needs that repair.

And if you don't have the right foundation, then anything that comes your way, any sort of stress or anxiety or issue, let's just say you have a fight with your husband or you have a big meeting at work that goes terribly wrong, or you're stuck in traffic and missing your kid's soccer game or school performance or something like that.

If you don't have a strong foundation, it's going to completely wipe you out and then you're going to spend weeks getting back to where you want to be.

So I always tell people I spent a lot of my healing journey building that foundation, cleaning out the crap, making space, and then building a foundation. So if you think of a hundred story building, you want to get to like the 80th story and then keep trying to get that extra 20% right.

But you don't want to continuously be going from like the fifth Floor to the basement, fifth floor to the basement, and just completely bottoming out. In your health, you want to keep building upon the foundation. In your own health, whatever works for you.

What I do in my life may not work for you at all. And you should try everything honestly, but you should also get the data first.

Get your own bio individual data, figure out exactly what it is that you need.

Go do the research on the biohacking index, listen to your podcast, go to one of your, you know, your virtual sessions, come to your conferences, you know, listen to my podcast and just share the, share the information with your doctor and create a plan together. But be the quarterback in your own health 100%.

Speaker B: 00:40:56

Like, taking ownership of our own health and our own data and performing our own inequal one experiments is really what it's all about. Because instead of comparing yourself to other people, you should compare yourself to your own data and make changes and then see how that shifts.

And I completely agree. The biggest issue that I see with women in their 40s and 50s is our ability.

Our stress resiliency diminishes, as you said, going from the fifth floor to the basement. It's kind of where we are at.

And we really need to build up our stress resiliency to that eighth floor, as you mentioned, so we have the resiliency and we can bounce back easier. And you mentioned so many different biohacks and supplements all in one sentence. So I wanna break it down a little bit.

Can you walk us through one typical day of biohacking for yourself? So what does it look like? What do you e. What do you track? What do you supplement in like one day? A typical day?

Speaker A: 00:41:57

t really falling asleep until: 10:30

So I set my alarm for 5:55 because it's an angel number and it's a great way to start your day. So my alarm goes off at 5:55. I get right up. I don't drink coffee, not just because it was on my food inflammation test, but because it's dehydrating.

So I start my day with a glass of hydrogen water and I put a little shot of methylene blue in my water. Now, methylene blue is not great for everyone. It's, it's great for me, I'm not on any SSRIs. If you're on SSRIs, you should not take methylene blue.

It's fun because it helps to flush your body with ATP.

So then 30 minutes after I take my methylene blue shot and drink my hydrogen water, I also take methylfolate lozenge while I'm, while I'm like getting my day started. So I just do some yoga flow some light stuff.

I don't do too, too crazy of exercise in the morning because honestly my body's not awake yet, so I, I need it to wake up. I'm not a hardcore workout person. I do a lot of strength training.

So I either use my own body weight or I use like weights to do, do some strength training. So I've got, for a skinny girl, I've got a good amount of muscle on my, on my body.

And then I sit underneath a red light panel for, you know, 15 to 20 minutes and I do my prayer and meditation in the morning and I set my intention for the day. And this is before I even like touch my email. I don't go on slack. I don't.

I have a big team overseas and they're up earlier than I am because it's 12 hours ahead of, of me in New York. So I, I tend to not look at the things that are going on at work yet. But it's only 6:30 when I'm starting to, you know, 6:30, 6, 45.

If my kids are with me, that's when I wake them up. Sometimes they like to come down and exercise with me. So I'll get them up a little bit earlier when I get up. And so I'll get them ready for school.

A lot of times we'll make smoothies because we can add a lot of things into a smoothie. So we have good organic protein powder. You can add seeds and nuts, avocado. We add C60 powers MCT coconut oil into all of our smoothies.

They also have these gummies that you can take if you don't end up putting any of their oil. But that helps with brain power. It helps with. It's a massive antioxidant.

So any of the free radicals, all of the gunk that's left over from the day before. But now I've got an emotional foundation. I've got tons of ATP in my body, which is what my mitochondria use to keep my cells healthy.

I'm having at least 30 grams of protein first thing in the morning and then I Take some supplements.

Speaker B: 00:44:59

So how do you get your protein in in the morning? What do you do?

Speaker A: 00:45:03

So I either have eggs, steak and eggs and organic like locally grown sourdough with grass fed butter or I do a plain Greek yogurt with berries, chia, which you have to soak overnight because if you eat chia raw can be like little bullets in your, in your body. I'll add some sort of nut butter or seeds to that as well to amp up the protein.

Or we'll make a smoothie and we'll just put some extra stuff into the smoothie because the protein powder is usually like 25 grams of protein for two scoops. So we'll add some extra protein in there. Some almond butter or some pumpkin seeds are great. They actually help to balance your thyroid as well.

Sometimes we'll even add in like some, some stuffed dates into breakfast meals. Stuffed dates are a great little snack.

I make like protein balls with dates and protein powder and nut butter and coconut and all sorts of other stuff. So that's usually breakfast. And then there's the supplements that go along with the morning time.

So I take a probiotic, I take my d. I'm actually on one pharmaceutical medication that's not really a pharmaceutical medication, but it's called low dose naltrexone and it helps with my autoimmune. It's a great drug that is not prescribed enough in my opinion. But you know, for, for everyone it's different.

But it's been, it's been really helpful for me to, to just keep me with a, keep me with a strong foundation. So I take my ldn. You can take it at night, but it keeps me up.

So I take it in the morning and, and then I get to work and I'll drop off the kids at school. Sometimes I'll. I'll stop by the, the grocery store on my way home, get some stuff for lunch.

I do a lot of juicing, so I juice beets, carrots, celery, ginger, apples, lemon. Most days I'll have that as kind of like a snack that really helps to pull out all the toxins out of your body.

I have a great cold press juicer at home. And it's fun, it's fun for the kids to do too. It's also a good way to get your aggression out.

You can jam the carrots in there and then juice them up. If you're having a bad day around lunchtime, it's usually a salad with protein or it's a soup with, you know, if I Hadn't had my sourdough bread.

I'm kind of addicted to sourdough bread at the moment. I'll have like a little soup with some sourdough bread. And then, you know, I don't really snack or eat anything before dinner time.

I make dinner at 6 o', clock, so it's nice and early. One tip that I learned from my doctor is not to drink water or anything for 10 minutes before you eat and until 15 minutes after you eat.

Because if you're drinking while you're eating or before you're eating, it's actually flushing out all of the digestive enzymes out of your gut. And so you're actually not breaking down the food and getting nutrients from the food that you need.

So you should really drink half your body weight in ounces of water per day, ideally hydrogen water or some sort of really good filtered water. Right. But you should not drink while you're eating, which is something that I learned from my doctor and that's been really helpful for me.

So we have dinner and then typically we have family dinner. So we don't like, eat in front of the television. We don't eat standing up in the kitchen. We sit down at the dining room table. We talk about our day.

It's a no phone zone in the dining room. We have a record player. So one of the kids or my fiance or I will pick out a record to listen to during dinner. Music is really therapeutic.

So whatever we're in the mood for, whether it's Amy Winehouse or, you know, the who or the band or Bob Dylan or whatever we're listening to. My grandfather was a musician, so we listen to his record sometimes too.

We clean up dinner and then we, in the wintertime, usually make a fire, play a game in front of the fire, or read. We love to. We all read for at least a half hour a day. Sometimes we'll have movie night, like on rainy or snowy days, we'll have movie nights.

On weekends, we make popcorn as a snack before we go to bed. Popcorn is high in fiber.

You get the organic kernels, we pop it in organic olive oil, and then we put some ghee or butter on top with a little bit of Himalayan salt. And that's pretty much what we eat if we want a sweet treat. We have some really great farms that make delicious, raw organic ice cream.

And we also will, every once in a while eat those like Hue bars, those Hue chocolate bars that are, that are vegan and good for you. They're not. They're not bad.

For you, they don't have a whole lot of sugar, they're not super processed, and they actually do have a good amount of protein in them too, so. So, yeah, that's the typical day of biohacking. Before we go to bed, we say our prayers. I forgot to tell you so bath time. Four pounds of Epsom salts.

Plain Epsom salts in a bath before you go to bed is magic for sleep. Magic. Magnesium just helps relax all of your muscles and helps you sleep.

It also helps with any motility issues and cramping issues and it helps to regulate your hormones. While I'm in the shower and before I get in the shower, I dry brush for five minutes. Before I get in the shower, I pop some coconut oil in my mouth.

I swish it around for the five minutes that I'm dry brushing, I hop in the shower, I do all of my non toxic skin care, hair care routine, scan everything on the UKA app. Don't use anything that's below 70 because all of that stuff that you put on your skin gets directly into your bloodstream.

Within 30 seconds, I come out, I spit out the coconut oil. I brush my teeth with biocide and toothpaste, which is amazing for restoring the flora in your mouth. You can also use charcoal.

You can use something else. Just baking soda is great. And then after that, I cover my body in Queen of the Thrones and C60 body oil.

So I use two pumps of C60 for my face, the serum, and then a pump of my friend Dr. Marisol's Queen of the Thrones castor oil. And I put that all over my face. And I'm 43 and my wrinkles are going away. They're not coming back.

I don't do any botox, no fillers, none of that stuff. I don't even get facials. I don't get chemical peels. I don't do any of that stuff.

So I just use castor oil and C60 on my face and then castor oil and the C60 body on my body. Sometimes I use skin food. I cook a lot in, in beef tallow. You can also use it on your skin, but you shouldn't use it on your face.

You can use it on like the bottoms of your feet on your hands when they're cracked in the wintertime. I'm trying to think of what else that's pretty much it.

Oh, I sleep on a grounding blanket from anti aging bed which neutralizes free radicals while you're sleeping so that you have much better sleep. When I Don't sleep on it. And I bring a little pillowcase with me everywhere I travel to. If I don't bring it with me, I don't sleep on it.

I don't get the same quality of sleep.

Speaker B: 00:52:23

That's a grounding pillowcase or grounding pillowcase.

Speaker A: 00:52:26

Okay.

Speaker B: 00:52:26

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think most women listening to this, like, oh my God, that is a lot. How do you fit into 24 hours? You must be stacking this.

But I think, I think women need to think that you, you put together this lifestyle practice for yourself over like the last two years. It doesn't happen overnight. You slowly.

Speaker A: 00:52:48

Seven years. Eight years.

Speaker B: 00:52:49

Eight years, yeah. Eight years. It really takes time to learn about each technology, each lifestyle practice, each supplement, see what works for you.

And you just kind of have to do the trial and error. But start with the foundational things that you mentioned.

Optimizing your circadian rhythm, getting your good sleep, just some foundational supplements. Finding ways to manage your stress.

I love what you said about your morning routine of really not jumping onto technology and having the mental emotional bandwidth to deal with the rest of the day. Right. Setting the stage for your day. I think that's one of the most important things we can do.

Because when you start the day hectic, busy, it's likely that the rest of your day will be like that too. And how we get our day started, I think just really kick things off the right way and set you up.

So that's why having these foundational practices in place are so important. And it seems like you have a very highly curated daily routine, which I love. And so many things you mentioned, I'm like, I'm doing that too.

I'm doing that one too. Yeah, I don't do everything, but I do a lot of the things that you mentioned. So, so much of that resonated.

But I also figured those out for myself over many, many years.

Speaker A: 00:54:13

So. And if you just try one thing, if you start one new thing, it takes 66 days on average to create a new habit.

And it took me probably six years to create all of these habits into, into a cycle that works for me. And it doesn't always work.

You know, I, I do have ski races on weekends where I have to get up at 4:30 in the morning and I'm running out and I'm stopping at Dunkin Donuts.

I'm not perfect, you know, I, I will get like an egg white wrap or something from Dunkin Donuts and every bite that I'm taking, I'm like, oh, this is terrible, this is toxic. I can't believe I'm putting this in my body. But I need some sort of food because it's five o' clock in the morning and nothing else is open.

And then I'll bring a bunch of my stuff.

I'm like the crazy lady who brings all of her vegetables and her dips and her, you know, homemade hummuses and wraps and stuff and heating up everything at the ski mountain while everybody else is eating chicken fingers and french fries and hamburgers and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, there's just only so much we can do.

Speaker B: 00:55:19

Perfection is the enemy of good. Like, it's better if, oh, you just do your best of whatever you can and don't stress out about the rest. Like whatever you have control over.

Sometimes you just don't have control over certain circumstances and you just have to let it go and make the best choice you can make in that moment. Not everything's going to be perfect. I want to wrap it up with one last question about data.

And since you are an expert in that, how can women use data, whether from variables, lab tests, self tracking to avoid the burnout that often comes with, you know, chasing health goals.

Speaker A: 00:55:56

So it's really all about what you believe you are worthy of.

And I know that's a very broad and very weird statement to make because a lot of us don't believe that we are worthy of time and attention, of healing, of self care. We don't advocate for ourselves.

And it's unfortunate because we as women, as mothers, as caregivers to our parents, our loved ones, bosses, you know, our colleagues, workers, whatever we are, you know, nurses, doctors, we're always taking care of other people first. And so what's most important in terms of data is how you feel in that moment. A lot of times I'll say, skip the fit test.

You know what, hold an apple next to your heart like this, close your eyes and just say, okay, if this apple is good for me, fall forward. If this apple is bad for me, fall back. If it's neutral, don't move. And you just see what your body does.

Having that level of intuition and pausing, just taking a break, looking at yourself in the mirror and saying, you know, I've got this. You know yourself better than any doctor, than any test, than any data point. I actually hate diagnoses.

They do add a level of clarity that is comforting to many people. You know, like the food inflammation test.

It's, it's like I said, it's like Cheating, because then you don't have to sit there with 176 different food additives and colorings and do the, you know, the muscle test of falling forward or back if that food is good for you.

So it's like cheating because you can save time and money, but the information that your cells have, that your brain has, that your heart has, when you become heart centered and you become connected to your own spirit through, you know, whatever faith you have, or even if it's just faith in yourself, that's the data that you should listen to the most, is your own intuition.

If your doctor tells you, hey, take this pill, the first thing you should check in on is, okay, well, you can ask your doctor, well, what is this pill going to do for me? Is there any negative impacts, you know, based off of what you know about me, do you know enough to give me this pill?

Have you tested me for MTHFR mutations? Have you tested me for, you know, my hormone imbalance? Like, how do you know my endocrine system, my lymphatic system?

Do you know if I'm, you know, I have toxic overload right now or if I'm massively inflamed? What is this pill going to do for me? Do you have enough data for me?

But then also, like, is your first gut reaction, oh, no, I don't want to take that. Or, you know, this could be really good for me because whatever that first intuitive thought you have is probably right. It's probably right.

I would say nine times out of ten, it is right. Our intuition is the biggest and best data point and we have to get to a place where we feel worthy of the healing that comes from ourselves.

I love that.

Speaker B: 00:59:18

And I think that's one of the superpowers that women can develop for themselves is intuition. And one of the issues is that we get so disconnected from our bodies.

And if you can find a way back to, to be connecting with yourself, as you said, becoming heart centered, learning even how to do that basic muscle testing that you described can be so helpful.

Just when you're shopping in the grocery store and like literally holding pieces of different types of foods and asking yourself, is this good for me or not? And as you said, that's a skill that you can learn. Just starting to listen and see how you do with that.

I love that, that we should listen to that more than any other, really, biofeedback device or variable data. So I love that.

Speaker A: 01:00:04

And it is very valid data. If you think about kids, for example, right? Like my, my middle Daughter has a lot of food allergies because she has the birch pollen allergies.

So she can't have, like, raw carrots, celery, a lot of stone fruit, peaches, plums, cherries, apples, that kind of thing. And when she was a baby, she wouldn't eat those things. And I kept, like, dying of force. And I'm like, shay, just eat a carrot.

Come on, just eat a carrot. Like. Like, even bribing her, I'm like, I'll get you this doll. I'll get you a Barbie. You know, we can have a playdate with your friend.

You just have to eat these vegetables. And then what happened? She broke out in hives and a rash and, like, her face swelled up and her mouth got all puffy.

I'm like, oh, my gosh, what did I do to my kid? She knew her body at 2 years old better than I did at 32 years old, you know, trying to force healthy food down her throat.

So we've gotten so far removed because of the devil in our pocket, the technology, because of stress, anxiety, you know, we have to pay the bills. We can't just. We don't live a free life.

You know, we need money to buy food and clothes and keep the lights on and keep the heat on and drive our cars. Life gets in the way of our intuition many times. So if we just go back to that. That connection.

And I think prayer and meditation, especially first thing in the morning, is probably the. If you're going to do one thing of all of the 90 things that I mentioned that I do in my daily life, pray first thing in the morning.

I read Jesus Calling every morning, and it seems like every single day when I crack Jesus Calling because it's just a quick little blurb and some Bible verses. It's like, exactly what I need for that day based off of what happened the day before. You know, it's like, walk with me. Trust in God.

Give up all of your stress and anxiety. Have faith, you know, let it go. Let me work my miracles. And it's just so calming.

But it allows me not only to have a connection to a higher, higher source, but it also allows me to have a deeper connection within myself. So that's my biggest biohack.

And spending time with my family just being silly, playing games, you know, doing each other's hair and nails and laughing and watching funny videos, taking the dogs for walks, going to the.

Speaker B: 01:02:27

Lindsay, thank you so much. You shared so much. I really appreciate you. Everything you do, can you share.

Like, how can people find you all your wonderful companies that you started. How can people get involved and follow you?

Speaker A: 01:02:41

Yeah, absolutely. So my primary website is Lindsay O' Neill dot com.

There's links to Wellness Eternal dot com to Smallhinges, Health to BiohackingIndex dot com you can follow me on social media, Malhinges and Elness Eternal Underscore.

Speaker C: 01:02:59

Thank you so much for tuning in. This is Maya. Our production team pours our hearts into this show because we believe women deserve better.

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