Crushing Chronic Fatigue: The Power of the Four Step Method with Lucia Tiffany, MPH RN

Crushing Chronic Fatigue: The Power of the Four Step Method with Lucia Tiffany, MPH RN

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Hey there, welcome back to the EnergyMD Podcast. So on this episode, we're going to switch things up a little bit and I'm going to be interviewed so you can hear about my four step process and all the latest updates that are happening in our program and what our current offerings are because we've made a bunch of changes. All right, let's jump in. Today, we are blessed to be speaking with Dr. Evan Hirsch and he's going to be speaking about the four step process.

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to resolving long COVID and chronic fatigue naturally. So thank you for being here, Dr. Hirsch. Thanks so much for having me on. What I'd like to do is introduce you to our audience and then we'll jump right into our topic. So Dr. Hirsch, is an MD, he's also known as the Energy MD, is a world renowned fatigue expert, bestselling author and professional speaker.

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He's the creator of the Energy MD Method, which is the science-backed and clinically proven four-step process to resolving long COVID and chronic fatigue naturally. Through his bestselling book, podcast, and international online program, he has helped thousands of people around the world to resolve their fatigue. He's been featured on TV, podcasts, and summits, and when he's not at the office, you can find him singing musicals, dancing hip hop, learning languages,

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and traveling with his family. So you can tell he has a wide range of interests. And we're just really so happy that we are able to chat today and share some of that expertise you have gained through your life experience with our audience today. So let's just kind of dive right into our main topic, which is what is long COVID? A lot of us have been hearing the term, but I'd like to know how you define it. Yeah, so.

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If you have had a viral illness since 2020 and you have symptoms that have persisted since that time and they have lasted for longer than two months, it is very possible that you have long COVID. The symptoms can be, they vary and they can be, there are up to 250 different symptoms that present themselves. The majority of people have fatigue, body pain, sleep issues.

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cognitive dysfunction where they have a hard time remembering things or thinking through things. Those are probably about 80 % of the symptoms that people experience. And then there's other ones as well. But the reality is, is that if you have some sort of persistent symptom that you didn't have before and it started after 2020 and after a viral illness, it's very likely that it's long COVID. Okay. So that's really interesting. I personally know a lot of people that have those kinds of complaints.

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that have persisted for months and months, and in some cases, years. So if someone thought, well, that sounds really familiar. I think that might be going on with me. Is there a way I can know for sure if I have long COVID? There are some tests, but they're highly imperfect. So you can look at the immune system's reactivity to the spike protein, but that really depends on whether or not the immune system is actually seeing the spike protein or the COVID virus, because oftentimes not.

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you know, I don't know the stats, but it's probably about 50 % of people who will show up with those. The reality is, is that it's really more based on the clinical picture, which is this chronology that I just presented. Okay. And so unlike some diseases where you can take a lab test and then know what's going on, this is more of a clinical diagnosis based on all of the symptoms evaluated together by someone that's worked with it. I love that.

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I'm pausing the recording for just a second. want to make sure that, allow to record to computer. I want to make sure both of us are being recorded. In terms of picture. I think so, but I just, okay.

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So what percent of people, or let's back up. We talked about some of the signs and symptoms of long COVID, and as people look at that, they're going like, well, maybe I should be evaluated. What would you say, what percent of people who have had COVID progress to long COVID? So according to the CDC, it's one out of five, so 20 % of people. According to some other studies, it can be up to about 40%.

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So for people, so yeah, those are the numbers for people who will get the virus and then end up getting the persistent symptoms. Okay, so once someone suspects they have long COVID or they've had the clinical diagnosis made, what are some of the ways that you work with people? What is this four step process you've developed that help people to actually overcome

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like the fatigue and the brain fog and so on that's so often associated with this. So the four step process starts off with first evaluating and figuring out what the causes are for the individual. And so these causes might be more than just the spike protein or the COVID illness. In fact, nine times out of 10, it's going to be a combination of what I call the toxic five that kind of set the stage. And then the COVID illness ends up being the straw that breaks the camel's back.

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And so the toxic fiber, a combination of heavy metals, chemicals, molds, infections, and nervous system dysfunction that have built up in the body over time. And so, you know, generally what this looks like is, you know, I have a 20 year old who just kind of started with me, who's long COVID individual, unfortunately. And so it's, you know, oftentimes we're eating fish, which is high in mercury. We're getting

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mercury fillings, know, the silver fillings in our mouths. We have exposure to non-organic foods. So there's pesticides and herbicides and insecticides. There's roundup in our foods potentially. There's living in homes that have water damage. So there might be mold in the homes and it could be in any home that you've ever lived in for any period of time. And then in terms of nervous system dysfunction, we're talking about trauma, whether it's really significant abuse.

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or it's anything that made you adapt who you were to remain safe, whether it's being raised by imperfect humans, we call parents, or the imperfect siblings we had, or the imperfect peers that we had, you know, where, and maybe there wasn't abuse, but maybe there was rejection of a peer group or something that was considered more mild, but it changed the way that you saw the world and made you feel less safe. So that causes nervous system dysfunction.

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In addition to the other toxic for the toxins and the infections will also cause nervous system dysfunction. So for those people that ends up setting up the, the stage where all of a sudden the straw that breaks the camel's back becomes the, um, that's the spike protein. And then they get the symptoms. So we want to figure out the causes that people have where it's, we're going to address the, the toxic five in addition to the spike protein. And then in step two, we start off by replacing any deficiencies that are present.

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So these are deficiencies in vitamins and minerals, hormones, lifestyle habits. And we do that to make people more robust and increases their ability to detoxify and tolerate the rest of the treatment. In step three, we open up the detox pathways. These are the exit pathways that get the toxins out of the body, the liver, the kidney, the lymph, the neurolymph in the brain, the gallbladder, the intestines.

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all those pathways that need to be open in order to be successful. And then we go after the toxic five and step four, including the spike protein. So even though that is the most important thing that we're doing in this process, we need the rest of the process to set the stage for step four, removing the toxic five. You know, I think that's really interesting. And I love how it really looks at those underlying causes because so many times people look for quick fixes. They want to fix the symptom.

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but not actually understanding what underlies it. You reminds me of a friend that I saw something they'd written here recently where they have been dealing with Lyme disease infection for quite a while and just recently found out that they have a mycotoxin problem in their home, which they were not aware of. And it's probably made this whole thing a lot worse. It's involved hospitalizations, extreme weakness for long periods of time.

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all sorts of symptoms that they didn't realize were being aggravated by some of these environmental factors that were in their home. And so it makes sense that you talk about how these can be like cumulative, know, one insult might not make you sick, two might not make you sick, but when you get like all five together, it's just like more than the body can handle and you start to have problems. Yeah, you nailed it. So as people look at those

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those aspects, is there testing that can be used at some of these different steps that help identify what they're actually dealing with and what are some of those tests that you might use? There is testing that is available, but unfortunately the testing is highly imperfect as well. And all the people that I work with, you over the last decade have been working with chronic fatigue, people with chronic fatigue syndrome. And what I found is that they all have all of the toxic five.

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after doing testing every three months. And that was doing a urine testing to determine the heavy metals, the chemicals and the molds, and then also the blood testing to look at the infections. And so over the course of time, when I noticed this picture, I realized that I didn't have to test those anymore because I was just going to treat it. It was more of a question of how much of each of these do you have and not a question of which of these do you have.

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Right. so exactly what you're saying is that the body can tolerate things until it no longer can tolerate. And then it says, I'm tired. I want to go to sleep and try to recover. And so how important is rest in that recovery period? Yeah, it's incredibly important. Now, you know, unfortunately in the conventional system, oftentimes the recommendation is pacing.

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So it's this idea that you just don't exert yourself and then you'll eventually get better. You just need to tell the body to rest. Well, it doesn't really work so well, you know? And so we do have to address the underlying causes, which are the toxic five. But what I tell people is that we want you to find your Goldilocks dose of movement and activity. And so this is the amount that's not gonna make you feel worse. If it makes you feel worse, it's because you're stressing the body too much.

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So for some people, this might be doing finger exercises like this, right? For other people, depending on how tired they are, they can walk around the house or they can walk around the block. you know, that's off, sometimes that's where they start. For some people, they're working, but they're just not feeling to their best. So really depends on where they are, but the Goldilocks dose really helps people determine how much movement they should be having.

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That's great. And I think that's important because some people feel like, I'm not moving and I need exercise. And yes, like how you balance it, I think is really important so that your body can also do its healing. So what do you find in terms of like the role of sleep in terms of like quality and quantity in the treatment that you use with your clients?

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So sometimes there are, you know, we can fix the sleep by replacing the deficiencies by going to bed a little bit earlier, generally between nine and 10 30, but usually not after 10 30, depending on the individual to avoid a second wind and getting seven to nine hours of sleep a night. That's, you know, creating that habit with, um, um, blinds, you know, or making sure that the room is nice and dark and cold and

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doing all those lifestyle habits can be very helpful. I also get more people to sleep at night by giving them things in the morning. And that's because we're recreating the circadian rhythm. So we're boosting the adrenals and the mitochondria and the thyroid in the morning. I call those the big three and they'll end up increasing the energy in the first part of the day and then coming down so that you can go to sleep at night. Cause oftentimes when you have fatigue, your energy is up down throughout the day.

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And then guess what? It's up down throughout the night as well. And so we have to recreate the circadian rhythm so that we can fall asleep. So giving things in the morning, very supportive. Oh, I forgot B12 and then iron can help be helpful too. And then in evening, if they still need additional support, then we go ahead and provide things like melatonin or some GABA support to try to help people fall asleep and stay asleep a bit better. And sometimes there's some hormones that are needed. If women are into menopause,

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Progesterone helps women fall asleep. Estrogen helps them stay asleep. And if they still need additional help, it's because of the toxic five. There's a number of, of infections, including the spike protein COVID, but then also Lyme disease, whether it's Babesia or whether it's Bartonella that will make it hard to fall asleep and or stay asleep. So, you know, sometimes I tell people we're going to do the best we can for your sleep and step two.

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but we may have to wait until we're into step four before we make a significant dent. I think that's just really fascinating. you know, as in this masterclass, we're looking at helping people, especially that are craving sugar, maybe trying to get these processed foods out of their diets. How do you see that interacting with long COVID, either in the treatment or the detox part? Like, where does this piece come in for you?

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Yeah. So sugars are incredibly challenging for folks. mean, as you guys know, you know, it's more addictive than heroin oftentimes. And so it's, it, what's really interesting too, is that, you know, when people are doing their darnedest to stay off of sugar, sometimes the, the hormones. So when you have stress in the body from the toxic five, that ends up causing dysfunction in your hormones and your hormones, especially the adrenal gland produces the hormone cortisol.

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cortisol manages insulin, insulin manages blood sugars. And so your blood sugars can be off. You can, you can have the most perfect diet and your blood sugars will still be off if you have some of these other stressors that are negatively affecting that cascade that I just talked about. So any sort of inflammation that cortisol is trying to deal with or the stressors, whether they're mental, emotional, or physical, like the toxins or the infections can upset

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the hormone balance, the insulin, and then consequently the blood sugars as well. And by eating sugar, that increases inflammation and inflammation is basically the immune system reacting to something that's in the body that's not supposed to be there and inflammation causes symptoms. So whenever we're working backwards from the symptom, the symptom is caused by inflammation, which is the immune system reacting to something. And we always want to try to limit

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those environmental toxins, including sugar, from causing that sort of inflammation, because it just distracts the immune system from what we're trying to do in removing the toxic five. Yeah, it kind of sabotages the entire healing process, doesn't it? It does. So I hear a lot these days about the health of the gut biome and how that's influenced by ingestion of simple sugars and highly processed foods.

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What do you do in your recommendations to your clients dealing with fatigue and long COVID in terms of how to have a healthier gut? So it's a great question. A lot of the people who've come to see us have been working on healing their gut, air quotes, for the last five or 10 years, and they haven't really been successful. You know, they've gone through different four hour programs if they're working with like functional medicine practitioners.

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And so.

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And so once they've, and, they haven't had success. And the reason why is because they've been dealing with the toxic five. So even though they've been trying to heal the gut, they haven't had success, you know, going at it with the probiotics and the prebiotics and the digestive enzymes and removing, you know, infections from the gut because they'll have the toxic five, the nervous system dysfunction. They'll have some sort of neuropathy.

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that potentially is coming from the toxic five. So that's one of the things that we see. But in terms of dietary recommendations, I do find that people do better when they're consuming more of a paleo diet, which is really more about what you're avoiding than what you're including. So it's avoiding gluten and dairy and grains and sugars. So meats and vegetables or protein and vegetables, little bit of fruit is kind of like where

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where we encourage people to go. And if you are feeling hungry, trying to consume more fat and protein instead of sugars, even if you're craving sugars or simple carbohydrates. And it takes a while for the body to kind of get used to that, but you do get to a point where it becomes easier, you know, if you're doing intermittent fasting or some of these other things as well. But, you know, that's my take on the gut, what I find to be a good diet.

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but then also in terms of healing the gut, just having that caveat, if you've been working on your gut for a number of years and you haven't had success, it's because there's something underneath what you're doing and that's the toxic vibe that needs to be addressed. I think it's great for people to see that connection and to understand that it's not necessarily they've been doing anything wrong, but they're just missing a piece of the therapy. There's maybe something they need to add to their regimen.

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or tweak about their regimen to actually optimize their healing. So I think that's just, that's really helpful for people to know. As we look at the gut, one other aspect that I've seen some science coming in on that I thought was really interesting was the fact that what we eat actually influences the balance of the microbiome and that when we're eating too many ultra processed foods, too much sugar,

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It actually encourages the growth of microbiome families that create real physiological cravings for more junk food. think that's so interesting that we can influence our cravings indirectly by the kinds of food we're eating and getting enough fiber and things like that that feed the other kinds of microbes can be helpful. Do you find that fiber is something that helps with the detox as well?

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Fiber can, yeah. It's not one of the main things we do. We use things that may be a little bit, a little bit more specific, but it definitely can help. And I would also say in terms of the food, feeling the bad bugs, it's also one of the reasons why people have cravings is the reverse. So if you've got yeast or if you have mold in your body, the fungus is going to request simple sugars. So that goes away as people

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end up addressing their fungi. Yes. I remember I had a friend who was dealing with a really severe yeast infection that was kind of systemic and her naturopath in Canada put her on a complete like no simple sugars for like six months, like no fruit. Now, you know, just couldn't do any of that. And it really took a while for her to

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get rid of that and then be able to feel good again, but it did really make a difference. And I don't know if everybody realizes that that sugar is really the food for yeast. So, right, if we starve it, then it kind of helps us with controlling it. You've talked about one of the steps in the detox being opening the detox pathways. So tell me a little bit about what those pathways are and how do we open them? Absolutely. And it's kind of, you know, this is more of a lay

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terminology, you know, there are different detoxification processes in the liver step one and step two. you know, the kidneys has its own process. The lymph is the essentially the garbage system of the body that, um, you know, when the immune system comes into contact with something and it walls it off and it takes it to the lymph, takes it to the heart and tries to get rid of it out of the body. There's the neuro lymph that's in the brain. You know, the brain shrinks about 60 % when you're sleeping well at night.

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And essentially it's ringing out the lymph system and allowing the lymph to kind of dump into the rest of the body. And if this process is not working right and you're not sleeping well, part of the reason why you're having brain fog is because the brain is not shrinking the way that it should and ringing out that lymph system. And then the gallbladder is kind of where the liver will produce the bile. The gallbladder will hold the bile.

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and that will help you digest fats, but there's also a lot of toxins that are stored in the bile as the liver is trying to detoxify itself. And then way too many people are constipated, unfortunately. If you're not having a good bowel movement every day, and ideally two, then you are constipated and you need to flush yourself out. We recommend utilizing magnesium and we ramp up a little bit at a time in order to get to the right dose for you.

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But you know, that's part of my story. Part of the reason why I had chronic fatigue syndrome for five years was because I was chronically constipated. I pooped like once a week for the first 20 years of my life. And you cannot get toxins out of your body if you're doing that. You have to be having a bowel movement every single day. Otherwise the toxins and the hormones will recirculate into the body and put more of a load on your organs.

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I think that's so important because so many people on the standard American diet don't actually know what's normal in terms of bowel movements and how often, and they think every few days or a couple of times a week is normal. But what I'm hearing from you is that is not normal and that is one of our main elimination pathways. So it makes sense that that needs to be activated if we're really going to eliminate the toxins creating the fatigue.

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How long do you find that it usually takes people to see a significant difference in their energy levels once they've started on this kind of a program? So about 50 % of the people that we work with notice a little bit of an increase in their energy in the first couple of months when we start replacing the deficiencies. And so this is as if they were

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you know, four out of 10 energy, if 10 is ideal, they'll go to a five out of 10 and maybe have less crashes per day. But the magic really happens around month nine when you have moved a significant amount of the toxic five out of the body. So it takes about six to 12 months on its own to remove heavy metals, chemicals, infections, and retrain the nervous system and molds.

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So all of those, we're kind of doing them all at the same time as you're going through the process. And we tell people that it takes at least 12 months in order to notice a significant difference. People are generally about 60 to 100 % better at 12 months. And we just don't know, we're gonna be addressing all these different causes, but we don't know how long it's going to take based on the volume that you have in your body.

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to get the toxins out appreciably where all of a sudden the body comes back online and it says, hey, I don't have these toxins on my mitochondria anymore. I can start making a lot more energy. I think that's important for people to know. So they don't think this is an overnight fix, but that it's going to take some time and some consistency over time to really get results. But I think it's also so important to know that there's hope.

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because often people feel hopeless when they've been experiencing this for months and maybe even years, because it can be very, very debilitating feeling bad all the time, right? So I think it's so nice to know that there's hope and that working with a professional that has experience in this area and really knows what they're doing can really make a big difference in your success.

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And I just love that you have generously provided a free gift for everyone that's listening to us today. And I'd love for you to just tell us a little bit about that. What can people expect when they sign up for your free gift? So we have a free masterclass and call with me if you want to see if we can help you and if we're a good fit to work together. On that masterclass, I go deeper into the four-step process. I talk about my philosophy of care.

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I talk about why I don't do much testing. I talk about why people haven't been successful at this point in resolving their long COVID or their chronic fatigue syndrome. And then on the free call, if you want to see if I can help you, I do an assessment and I'll let you know if I can help you and if I feel like you're a good fit for what we offer. And about half of the people that I talk to, I tell them that I don't feel like they're a good fit. So it's not a guarantee on that call, but it is a way for us to see if we're a good fit to work together.

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Well, I really appreciate that because I think that's something that a lot of you can take advantage of and learn more about what might be behind what you're experiencing. And I just want to say thank you for watching another episode of Crush Your Cravings Masterclass.