Excel & Thrive

“If you are always tired, or struggling with a chronic health issue, it should be obvious that whatever you have been doing to alleviate your problem is not working. You need to confront that truth, accept it and be willing to let go of the concepts and recommendations that you have been given by your doctor and others that have not provided you with the relief you are looking for…so that we create the space and the opportunity for ourselves to discover what actually is true and does work.”

— Morley Robbins

I know many of you suffer with tiredness, fatigue, lack of energy, or a chronic health issue. As we learned in our last post, the “root cause” of these problems could be an imbalance of minerals in the body, and the subsequent resulting disruption of the energy making processes in our mitochondria.

I am not saying that this root cause is the summation and total explanation. As you will see in future posts, there are other problems that can contribute deeply to your chronic concern. But to address any issue, we must first fix the ROOT cause, then work from there.

So let’s first summarize what we talked about in our last post:

Bioavailable copper has a vital role in our energy production. It activates oxygen, deactivates oxidants (clearing exhaust), decreases the accumulation of unbound iron in our bodies through its action in ceruloplasmin, and reduces our magnesium burn rate.

If we do not have enough bioavailable copper, magnesium and ceruloplasmin, the regular stress that affects us all every day will not be dealt with properly. Plus, the iron that should be regularly recycling through our bodies gets stuck in our tissues. The “rust” accumulation contributes to even more stress. This stress becomes persistent fatigue which leads to chronic disease over time.

Morley explains it even further this way:

“Stress causes magnesium loss

Magnesium loss causes electrolyte loss

Electrolyte loss causes energy loss

Energy loss causes cell death

Cell death triggers the natural bodily response of inflammation to clear dead tissue

Inflammation is followed by the natural bodily response of calcification and fibrosis”

If you have chronic fatigue of any sort, IT IS CAUSED BY INFLAMMATION. Period.

How to treat this inflammation is where most doctors fail and where Morley Robbins has succeeded, not because he has all the answers.
But precisely because he doesn’t.

“The greatest challenge for practitioners today is that they have come to confuse their “training” with the “truth.” No, they are NOT the same.”

Finding your solution is about conducting your own N=1 experiment. You must be willing to do what we keep encouraging you to do, and that is to take your own health into your own hands and do your own work to fix your own body.

“When it comes to you and your health, there is only one true expert on whom you can always rely. That expert is not me, it is not your doctor, it is not a health organization, a health website, or anyone or anything else.

That expert is you!”

The “Root Cause Protocol” or RCP as it is called, consists of STOPS and STARTS that you will implement over time. I like this approach a lot, because it mirrors my own advice to STOP eating NOT FOOD and to START eating FOOD.

Today we will cover the STOPS. All of these can be implemented at once, and I highly recommend you stop them all immediately.

The STARTS you will add in phases, and we will cover them in our next post.

Remember our goal: to help our bodies “make” and “empower” ceruloplasmin in order to reduce oxidative stress and inflammation. All of the STOPS are critical to achieving this end.

Here they are:

STOP taking iron supplements
STOP taking vitamin D3 supplements
STOP taking calcium supplements
STOP taking zinc supplements
STOP taking molybdenum supplements
STOP taking “drugstore” multivitamins and prenatal
STOP taking B Vitamins from a bottle
STOP using synthetic Vitamin C
STOP using high fructose corn syrup and synthetic sugars
STOP using industrialized omega-6 oils (seed oils)
STOP using fluoride
STOP using colloidal silver (sovereign silver is ok)
STOP eating low-fat, high-carb processed, refined foods
LIMIT exposure to environmental toxins, including unchecked blue light exposure

Morley has specific reasons for stopping all these, and you can read his book if you want all the details (and there are many). So, let me provide a summary for you.

Stopping iron is a no-brainer. There is absolutely no reason for you to be consuming iron filings (which is what iron supplements are). As we discussed, your iron recycling system is the problem that we need to fix, not the amount of total iron in your body. The small amount you need every day is easily consumed in whole foods. More iron consumed means more rust.

Stopping Vitamin D3 is surprising. In fact, we are going to have to revise our list of recommended supplements after deep study on this topic. Let’s just say for now we have learned a lot, and mainly that it is not really a vitamin, but a hormone, and you need to be really careful with taking hormones exogenously. The supplement form is actually the storage form of Vitamin D, not the active form. It shouldn’t be flowing through your blood in high amounts anyway, so even measuring it can be faulty. Pumping yourself full of it puts stress on your liver to convert it to the active form (which some people can’t do very well), using up magnesium to fight the stress.

The best way to get Vitamin D is through sunlight, and the best supplement to take to enhance the activity of your own endogenous supply is to take retinol (or Vitamin A) by consuming cod liver oil. Here is our favorite. Sunlight not only triggers the biosynthesis of Vitamin D, it also “activates the breakdown of vitamin A (aka retinol) into the many retinoids that run our metabolism.” You need about 3 times the amount of retinol in your body than Vitamin D.

Calcium, zinc and molybdenum should all be consumed in your diet through raw diary, meat and other foods. Calcium supplements will cause calcium to be deposited where you DON’T want (like in your tissues and arteries). Zinc supplements negatively affect the amount of bioavailable copper that is transported throughout the body. Too much molybdenum will tear down your vital ceruloplasmin proteins.

Multivitamins never have the right ratios of the important minerals, and their chemical slurries can be detrimental to your health, full of iron (even if they say iron-free), petroleum byproducts, and test tubes. You do not want that junk in your body.

I have already told you in previous posts why processed and synthetic sugars are bad, and why industrial seed oil sludge/waste must be completely eliminated (link) except on rare occasions (when it can’t be avoided).

Adding fluoride to our water and toothpaste was a terrible idea. Filter your water and choose fluoride-free toothpaste. Fluoride is extremely reactive with oxygen (think that could be a problem in our bodies?) - an oxidative stress explosion. Fluoride displaces magnesium (we’ve covered how important magnesium is to combat stress… we need LOTS of magnesium). AND, it also impacts our copper levels and our copper compounds negatively.

Silver displaces copper, which is bad because it cannot activate oxygen nor deactivate oxidants. So you lose that ability with every copper atom that gets kicked out by silver.

Finally, you can review these posts (here, here and here) about STOP #13. I have covered this topic many times.

Morley mentions a famous motivational coach, Lou Tice, in his book as inspiration for him and I want to close us out this time with a quote from him.

“Life is about choices, and you have the ability to choose. You always have had this ability. I suggest that not only do you have the ability, you have the responsibility to make choices for yourself. It is your life, and you are in the driver’s seat…

There’s only one thing we have to do in life. We have to die. Everything else is a choice.”