The Missing Link Between Health, Fertility & Happiness with Colleen Wachob from Mind Body Green ​

Colleen Wachob

Essentially, health, nutrition, or movement will have about a 30% impact on your overall mortality, but something like community and connection can really move the needle more like 40%. But I think it is by far the unsung hero of this health and longevity movement. I would say you have to make the same investment in your joint connection that you put towards other elements of your health and wellness routine. So that can be as simple as giving yourself calendar reminders to check in with friends because part of having friends is being a good friend.

Lorne Brown 

By listening to the Coherence Code Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition, either in yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guests or contributors to the podcast. Welcome. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast. The Coherence Code Podcast. Where we explore how the mind and body work together so you can move from stress and inner conflict to clarity, calm and alignment. My name is Lorne Brown. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical hypnotherapist. And through my work, I’ve seen that healing happens when we remove what gets in the way and allow the body and the nervous system to do what they’re designed to do to heal. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast.

My guest today I’m very excited about. I’ve been wanting to speak to Colleen for a long time. Colleen Wachob. She is the founder of Mindbody Green and I’m going to give you an intro to Colleen, but I want to share why she, I think, is a perfect guest for us. And it kind of goes in the title of our podcast. So we talk about consciousness. I’m hoping today Colleen’s going to talk about her wake-up call, kind of a life-threatening event that she had in her life. We talk about fertility here. She’s going to share that she’s had a fertility journey. We talk about beyond the meaning of perimenopause and menopause. I think she’s 45 and older. She looks younger than that, but I’ve heard her talk before. So based on the math, I would guess she’s 46 at the time of our recording, but she gave me a thumbs up for that.

And our whole thing is on a holistic and integrative approach with credibility. People know I’m always bringing on MDs, PhDs to talk about the stuff that sounds a little bit weird, but bring in that credibility factor. And as I mentioned, she’s the co-founder and CEO of Mindbody Green. And that has been my impression that they do think outside the box, bringing integrative, holistic approaches, but with some evidence informed behind it. They’re looking to vet out the nonsense, I guess I would say. So I want to welcome Colleen. Walk up to our podcast. She founded Mindbody Green back in 2009 and that is an independent media brand dedicated to wellbeing. And we’re going to talk about what wellbeing means to her. And they get over 15 million monthly unique visitors. Do check out their website if you haven’t done so already. That was one of the reasons why I wanted to have Colleen on our site to offer this resource to all of our listeners.

She graduated from Stanford University with degrees in international relations and Spanish. She spent 10 years working at Fortune 500 companies, including Gap, Walmart, and Amazon. Before she started to devote her life to Mindbody Green. She’s been a speaker at Fortune 500 companies and numerous trade conferences on wellbeing trends. And the first book, which is where I got introduced, I knew who Mindbody Green was. I didn’t know who the founders were. And then I picked up the book, The Joy of Wellbeing. I think your friend Gabby Bernstein might’ve been the one that I was listening to a podcast, mentioned it and I picked it up, read it, totally enjoyed it as she wrote it with her husband and business partner, Jason, back in 2023. And I had a chance to review it again in the lead up to our podcast.

Colleen Wachob

I’m so happy to be here. Thanks for everything that you do and for inviting me onto the show.

Lorne Brown 

Well, let’s get to know you a little bit better about your wake-up call. Now you had a pulmonary embolism in your early 30s and that can be a life or death moment. I wanted you to walk us through what was happening in your life at that time and basically what did you ignore before that happened and how did that experience reshape your relationship with your body and your purpose and what you’re doing now?

Colleen Wachob 

Yeah. So looking back on my pulmonary embolism, it was one of those inflection points in life and I think it could have been a breakdown, but for me it was a breakthrough. And at the time I was living the typical New York life. I had a demanding job. I worked out a lot. I had a very active social life and I was probably burning the candle on both ends. And I remember how it happened and I was even reluctant when I had gone to a yoga class in the morning and then I was having trouble walking around the West Village and I was like, “I’m kind of out of breath.” So I called my husband and was like, “Hey, can you come walk around the city with me? ” And then on our way home on the subway stairs, I collapsed and fell down. I got up and I got out of the subway station, called my doctor and was like, “I think I’m dehydrated.” I was doing everything to talk myself out of going to the ER on a beautiful Saturday morning in New York.

And I was lethargic the rest of the weekend. And then when Monday came, I was like, “Okay, I’m going to work.” My husband was like, “The only way you’re going to work is if you stop at the doctors on the way.” And I stopped within a few minutes. He’s like, “You’re having a pulmonary embolism.” I was so confused. He gave me a little sign that said, “I’m having a pulmonary embolism.” And this was pretty Uber taking over the world.

Lorne Brown 

Case they gave you that little side to hold?

Colleen Wachob 

No, the doctor did. 

Lorne Brown 

Oh the doctor.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah. Okay.

Colleen Wachob

And so I think he was concerned that potentially I might not make it there, or what if I made it there and wasn’t able to articulate what was happening. And when I got to the ER, I had showers of clots in my lungs and while they gave me blood thinners to work through the clots, it’s really a process with your body. And that was the wake-up call of really evaluating my life, evaluating my priorities, and evaluating whether or not I was thriving. And it was simultaneously when My Body Green was starting out. And so I was able to use all of these experts as almost like a Marco Polo game of, okay, are we getting a little bit better, a little bit worse? A little bit better, a little bit worse. I did a lot of things right. I did a lot of things wrong.

I met a lot of great people. I also met some quacks and it really shaped how I view health and wellness. And I want people to have a faster route to get there, to be able to get those high ROI kinds of experiences that are going to have the biggest impact on their health and wellbeing. And ultimately, I hope that people are living a life where they don’t have to have this wake-up call to reshape and kick them in the butt to change how they are living their life trajectory.

Lorne Brown

I like the comment about how you said breakdown into breakthrough. I’ve heard it as some people get PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, and then there’s post-traumatic growth disorder and you use that wake-up call to shift your trajectory on the wellbeing circuit and how you do it for yourself. I want to talk about the pillars of health, but I don’t want to spend a lot of time focusing on diet and movement, but we need to talk about it. I like what you’re bringing to this area about the joy, your book, The Joy of Wellbeing. It’s the joy of wellbeing, but if you read the book, you can really unpack joy here. And that’s what I want to do here because there’s other things that impact our health, these intangibles, it’s harder research, although there is some research. I think it’s the missing link. I’m 25 years in practice with us talking right now and I used to focus a lot on the body and I still do.

It’s bidirectional. But man, that spiritual side, that community side, that joy aspect, to me, if that gets right, everything else falls into place. And as you’ve experienced it, you were doing all the physical diet lifestyle, everything and you still had some health issues. So can you go into the difference between wellbeing and wellness and really why you and Jason wrote this book and how important joy is or why you think it’s so important in this journey?

Colleen Wachob 

Yeah. And the wellness movement has exploded over the past decade. And there was a moment in time where Jason and I were looking at the wellness movement and we were like, yikes, it’s a little cringe. We are people who have devoted our life’s work. You see the explosion in the market, but then you look at the metrics. People aren’t happier, people really physically aren’t much better. So while there’s a lot more wellness, we really haven’t moved the needle on so many metrics. And I think we kind of lost the plot with a lot of the way in which wellness is portrayed in social media. The algorithm favors extremes. There’s a New York Times article about the types of articles that go the most viral. It can inspire people, it can create awe, or the third is it can create anger. And that’s what you see, that third emotion of anger a lot of in social media because it’s easier to create that type of content.

And then you also see the algorithm favoring simplicity of message. It’s a lot harder to get a really nuanced balanced message across on the algorithms. And how that manifests itself into the modern wellness movement is you have these extreme points of view, you have really elaborate protocols. And when Jason and I were writing our book, it was the pandemic. We were entrepreneurs, parents of two kids with unstable childcare and an unstable school that was getting canceled every day. And we’re looking at how the wellness movement was being portrayed in elaborate morning routines and protocols. And we’re like, this doesn’t apply to us anymore and we’ve lost the plot. And if I were to recenter the wellness conversation, we really want to focus more on these major needle movers. My friend JJ Virgin has a saying that you have to bake the cake before you put on the frosting.

And I think the algorithms really favor these incidentals and these of the moment tools, but you have to nail the fundamentals before you can graduate to that. And I think the unsung hero of all of this is really connection and community and that’s where we kind of lost the plot. And in moving to Miami recently, I think it’s a city that really values community and that has a really vibrant health and wellness community. And I’ve seen the impact that it’s made on me in terms of having those connections. The journalist, Marto Zorowski has said that essentially health, nutrition or movement will have about a 30% impact on your overall mortality, but something like community and connection can really move the needle more like 40%. And it’s a much harder thing to develop a product around or to sell, but I think it is by far the unsung hero of this health and longevity movement.

And I want people to think about their joyspan in the same way that they do their health span and their lifespan. And what are those moments of joy that we have in our life? And if a protocol isn’t bringing you joy, I do think you need to evaluate it because at the end of the day, if there’s an exercise that you just absolutely hate doing, you’re not going to do it. And since these are habitual habits that we’re creating, how do we create them with that lens of joy and mind?

Lorne Brown 

Yeah. And the key is joy. If you enjoy it, you’ll tend to do it longer. What’s the expression? The longer you do it, the easier it becomes, the easier it becomes the longer you do it. So you got to have it and if there’s some joy. I want to go on a diet. I want to go into breath because I use that a lot in my practice, but you touched on connectivity and community and I don’t want to, and even spirituality, it is the important part, and like you said, it’s hard to build a product around it. It’s hard to patent something like this. Twice I’ve heard about the Rosetta effect. The first time I was reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book, I can’t remember what Outliers or Tipping Point was. And then the second time I was reminded about it in your book. Can you share that?

Because I think that stories help people realize how important community is. And at the time of recording with social media and just people are on their phones and I’m guilty of it too, I’ll be in the elevator, I’m in a waiting room wherever I’m at, as soon as somebody is bored, the phone goes out. They go and they look, if you make eye contact with somebody unconsciously, they pull out the phone and start looking at it. So Facebook does not create connectivity. Instagram does not create connectivity. There’s that loneliness epidemic. And I thought the way you discussed it in your book with the Rosetto effect is important. So if you’re willing to dive into the connectivity and how this is a health benefit.

Colleen Wachob 

You touched on so many important things there and the idea that a text message doesn’t really qualify as the same type of connectivity is really important. And I think about this a lot with my kids who are six and eight now, but there was a book that came out where they actually looked at Kate’s book about What Made Maddy Run. And it was a young girl who was lonely and unfortunately committed suicide, but she had all these friends and they were trying to understand, okay, how could this happen? She had all the right connectivity in her life. And they were looking at how a text message from a friend or a parent doesn’t have the same oxytocin effect as a hug or a warm embrace. And I think we’ve come to use these substitutes of like, oh, I’m in touch, I’m a good emoji, but it’s not having the same impact on our brain, which is just something to remember.

And there’s been lots of different ways people have come to really encourage face-to-face or IRL connectivity post COVID and it’s something we all have to work on. I’ve had a friend recently moved to a new town and she’s been tasked with going on 51st states with new friends, but there is this kind of agency that we have to have in connectivity that maybe we don’t apply to this part of our life with the same rigor that we do. Okay, I’m going to go to the gym four or five days a week, but you’re like, okay, how do I make that same investment in my friendship? You brought up the Rosetto study, which had shown how an immigrant community had just incredible lifespan while they were all living together. And it wasn’t until that they started breaking apart and living farther apart that it showed the biggest strain in lifespan.

So how can we keep these connectivity ties alive? How can we create these rituals in our life so that if we live in a very fast-paced digital world, we can still have those rituals. You also talked about breathwork and spirituality, like all my favorite things and one long question, but breathwork when we talk about those high ROI activities, like if you’re going to start somewhere, you breathe 30,000 times a day, it’s a great place to start. And I learned through my pulmonary embolism that I wasn’t breathing right. And I think we all have to kind of, there’s so many tools out there that I think it could almost be overwhelming because you kind of have to dip into and figure out what works for yourself. What I go back to each and every night for myself is the four, seven, eight breaths where you inhale for four, you hold it for seven and then you exhale for eight.

And I find that just such a great way to calm my nervous system down. But I really think it kind of goes back to joy. You have to figure out what works for you. I’ve tried them all, I’ve tried TM meditation, I’ve done all sorts of different versions of it and you got to figure out, okay, what’s the thing you actually look forward to doing at the end of the day?

Lorne Brown

That breath is … So I do 448.

Colleen Wachob 

Ooh, okay.

Lorne Brown 

I was doing a talk years ago with Dr. Angel Weil. You’ve probably heard of him. 

Colleen Wachob 

Of course.

Lorne Brown 

Okay. So when we were talking together, we were at a conference together and I was a speaker, he was a speaker and he taught the breath 468, but I heard it wrong and started using 448. I love it. So that’s how come I do 4,48? And I have to say one of the most common feedback from my patients is the biggest difference they’ve experienced is introducing the breath. And I’ll share, like many of the physicians I’ve interviewed and I’ve met, a few have always said, if you can get the body parasympathetic multiple times a day, it will heal. This is the key, the rest and digest, breathe and feed the nervous system. The other part that I want you to talk about that I use all the time in my practice is nose breathing, listening is so important. Here I am not listening to you ready to talk.

And when your nose breathes, your mouth is shut. So to me, breath, sleep, connectivity and spirituality is something that is not talked enough about that I thought your book did a great job. So can we talk a little bit more about the breath?

Colleen Wachob 

Yeah. And you brought up so many of the reasons that people are proponents of nasal breathing. And when I think of what had the biggest impact on my own journey, it’s that you’re more likely to be in fight or flight mode when you’re breathing through your mouth rather than your nose. And this can lead to chronic stress. And when we think of anxiety disorders and troubled sleep, sleep is something I’ve struggled with my whole life and a good night’s sleep really does start in the morning. It starts with how you’re breathing before we even start talking about nighttime routines. So that to me was one of the biggest needle movers in terms of why I was embarking on this nasal breathing journey. And I think the best way to start is during the day when you are in the car, when you’re in traffic, when you can be intentional and thoughtful about it so you can start growing those muscles now and so that when you’re at night, it comes more naturally to you.

And my six and eight year old, my eight-year-old does sleep with some mouthtape on and I wish these habits were having these conversations when I was a younger kid as opposed to trying to start it later in life. But what is one of the biggest ROI activities that really is sleep? So if you can set yourself up for a good solid night of sleep because otherwise without sleep, your body can’t recover, you can’t exercise. And we know that exercise is something that can have such a profound impact on your health span and your longevity. You’re really not setting up your body for success if you’re unable to recover that these two are just so interrelated and so important

Lorne Brown 

We’re looking at some of the key things. So we talked about breath. There’s many different types of breathing, yoga type breathings to do different things. Sometimes you want to engage the sympathetic, but I think the majority of people I see, they need help with the parasympathetic. We’re really good at getting to be sympathetic unconsciously and we need help to let the body get, we call it yin time in Chinese medicine and that’s when we heal. The sleep part, most of the perimenopause women I see, they’ll have all kinds of symptoms, but the most common symptom is insomnia and sleep’s important. I don’t know if it was in your book I read or one of your blogs, but you talked about you can miss your green smoothie for a week, you can miss exercising for a week and you’ll be okay. But if you miss a week of sleep, sleep is pretty important on your list of fundamentals then.

Colleen Wachob 

Oh, a hundred percent. And you do see people stressing out about, oh, did I get organic produce or kind of crossing some nice tangential thing off the quote unquote wellness to- do list. But sleep is just so foundational to it all. And I do think you can use it as a proxy of how my ability to manage stress is. And you talked a little bit about perimenopause women. And as a 46-year-old woman, we are in the sandwich generation. We got aging parents, we got young kids. We have probably more stress than we’ve had before in life and yet sleep is also getting more challenging. I think for me, building up stress resilience and being able to work through these inevitable ups and downs in life is just going to have such an important impact on my health span.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah, I will share with you, it’s the resilience factor. This is my opinion now. You’ll have to vet me on this one, but my opinion is as follows. It’s not the shifting hormones that’s the main issue. It’s part of it. It’s not the underlying cause because every single woman in your age group that’s in perimenopause, so in their 40s beyond, we’ll have fluctuating hormones. The estrogens are going up and down, progesterone’s declining, and then in menopause, they both decline. If it was the hormones, then every single woman would suffer. But we know not every woman suffers and not every woman has the same symptoms. The issue is resilience, the autonomic nervous system resilience. If you have the resilience, therefore the capacity to adapt these changing hormones is changed inside, you won’t notice it. But if you’ve burnt the candle or just your genetic predisposition, you don’t have the resilience so you can’t adapt and your body will send you messages, a hot flash, a night sweat, insomnia.

So we do want to balance the hormones and we do that in our practice with bioidentical hormones, acupuncture herbs, all the fun things. However, we want to teach the connectivity, the community, the spirituality in doing things to help build up that resilience because that’s really the issue. And if you just do hormone therapy, this is my opinion, then at 65 or 70, you won’t be healthy again because you don’t have the resilience.

Colleen Wachob 

I think it’s just such a huge indicator of thriving in life. And what’s so fascinating right now is what’s happening in health and wellness, because I think it’s a fascinating time in women’s health. There’s never been more excitement, more interest, but you have emerged from pharmaceuticals and hormones with lifestyle modifications. And before these camps didn’t really talk to each other. And now it’s so much more of an and conversation of, okay, we can do this if you fit all of these criteria, but it’s an and with, and we need to work on our movement, our resistance training, our friendships, our sleep. And it’s an exciting time to be in this space where there’s finally emerging of these two where we can combine the best in science with the best in holistic wisdom and healing.

Lorne Brown 

Can we talk about your fertility journey a bit? Yeah. Some of our listeners are growing their families. Some of them, as I mentioned, are perimenopause, menopausal, and some of them just want to know about the conscious side. So we’re going to talk about it all today. Where were you at? Because you had already had the pulmonary embolism. So what kind of fertility person were you? How perfect were you chasing perfection? And if you could go back and tell that today, if a 46-year-old could tell the early mid 30-year-old, how would you tell her to do it differently?

Colleen Wachob 

Well, for anyone who is struggling with infertility, if my husband and I can have a child after everything we went through, there’s so much light and hope at the end of the tunnel for anyone who wants that to be their path because it was a very long and arduous journey. And it did start with that pulmonary embolism, which when a 32-year-old has a PE, they do so much blood work on you. And what’s interesting is I didn’t have any of the typical markers of someone who would clot. So I didn’t have factor five, I didn’t have factor VII. If I had gone in to see an OB, they wouldn’t have been concerned about a clotting risk. But once you have a pulmonary embolism, you are immediately put into a very high risk kind of pregnancy kind of area. So first, it took me a long time for my cycle to come back after being on birth control for a long time, but all of my fertility markers were really strong.

So I had a really poor experience at the first fertility clinic I went to because they waited six months or so to test my husband, which is really not understandable, crazy.

Lorne Brown

Quick focus, just because there’s people listening. Yes, if your husband has not had a SEMA analysis and they’re waiting for you to fail or have a miscarriage, please do the SEMA analysis right away. And as at the time of this recording, most clinics, not all are doing the sperm DNA fragmentation, which gives even more information, a little bit more expensive than a SEMA analysis, but if that’s the issue, then the woman may not have to go through all the stuff that they go through while waiting to find out, “Oh, maybe it’s him.”

Colleen Wachob 

Yeah, a very important PSA. So we learned that my husband was Azuspermic and that they needed to extract his sperm through a surgery, which had about a 50, 50% success rate. Luckily after some hesitation getting the surgery, we were able to get to the starting line again, so to speak. And at that point, we thought it would be really easy because whenever I did an egg retrieval, I had a ton of PGD tested embryos and it was a really easy part. But for whatever reason, I had a lot of trouble getting a “thick lining” and getting the embryos who had been PGD tested to stick. And at the time we were in New York City, so I had the luxury of every great doctor in the US. I feel like I was available to consult and we never really got to the why of why it was so hard.

There was a little bit of adenomyosis, which certainly wasn’t helping things, but I think to get to our first daughter, we had nine transfers of so many embryos and-

Lorne Brown 

How many retrievals did you do, Colleen, to get that many embryos? Do you remember? There was one retrieval, you did multiple.

Colleen Wachob

Oh gosh. Oh, yeah. I think I did about three or four retrievals and I think I am a pretty rational person. So it was always like if someone had told me to stop or like, “Hey, here’s a reason why it’s not going to work,” I would’ve listened. But because there wasn’t a clear, okay, this isn’t going to work, I kept going and it was extraordinarily challenging because back in January 2017 my first daughter was born in January 2017, but at this time there wasn’t as much dialogue around fertility. It was this kind of thing I was doing on the side. I would be traveling from work and getting a blood draw at a local quest while I was traveling. And when it goes on for such a prolonged period of time, it’s hard to make it a discreet part of your life and be like, “Okay, for two months I’m going to do this and then I’m going to reemerge.” So it was an extraordinarily challenging time.

I think I always maintained the faith that we would have a family. I didn’t quite know what that would look like. And I definitely wanted a doctor who shared that same confidence and vision. I think when I moved clinics, it was really important for me to have someone who believed in me and who really had a non-transactional bedside manner.

And that was probably the most important kind of characteristic. And I luckily found an incredible doctor who I think wanted me to get pregnant almost as much as my husband and I wanted to get pregnant. And that was such an important part because that journey was just so much longer than I anticipated. And I think health and wellness can sometimes send conflicting messages to women about, oh, if you’re having a miscarriage, maybe you’re not spiritually ready for it. And I think it was really a challenging kind of time to navigate where you want to take the empowering parts of spirituality. And I really had to just drop everything else at the door and believe in yourself, believe that your body is capable of this and definitely was a formative experience and the second one was a lot easier than the nine transfers that led to our first.

Lorne Brown

And did you do other things like you did the IVF, were you doing, because you’re the mind body green person, right? By the way, I have to ask a question. So in Chinese medicine, I never use mind and body. I always say mind-body because they’re not separate. They’re one.

Colleen Wachob 

Exactly.

Lorne Brown

Is that on purpose that you have my body green all in one word? Mind

Colleen Wachob

Body green, one word because it’s all connected.

Lorne Brown

There you go. Okay. I was just curious because I always call it mind body and purposely never say mind and body. It’s mind-body. Okay. 

Colleen Wachob:

No, totally. I love that. Okay.

Lorne Brown

I see it on your sign there and I was just wondering, it’s not spaced out and I was wondering if that’s on purpose. So there is intention behind that. Were you doing other things? People come in and I often, again, I could be guilty of this, suitcases of supplements. I do my best not to do it. People have come into my practice and I say, “Bring in all your supplements.” And they bring them in. I go, “Did I prescribe all those? I’m so sorry,” because you forget, right? So I go, “Let’s clean this up. Let’s simplify this. This is redundant here.” So what were you doing? Were you doing acupuncture, supplements, naturopath? Were you seeing a shaman? What did you do doing this or was it just straight up you and the IVF dog?

Colleen Wachob 

So because there was kind of this period of time from my PE and it was a very quick transition into then trying to get pregnant, those two journeys had some overlap. And I remember seeing a, I will call him a faux shaman in New York who told me that my health was at a 1% and I had enough conviction and belief in myself that even after having a PE, I was like, “No, no, no, no, that is not correct. I will not be seeing you again.” And I think that’s an important part Part in that you can have all this data, you can have

People with credentials or respect in a field, but your intuition is also such an important part and making sure that you have that right practitioner fit to move forward. So acupuncture was a mainstay. As I look at my life now, I often wish that women in perimenopause, the sandwich generation, whatever you want to call it, we can always treat ourselves with the same grace that we treat ourselves when we’re pregnant because once I was pregnant and on the road there, I had weekly acupuncture. I was able to get a massage and I was doing a lot of yoga. And a lot of those practices I wish I had more of in my life right now and I could see the therapeutic benefits, but then I’m a little too busy and air quotes of course right now to treat myself with that same grace. So I was doing both.

It was really for me a blend of the holistic and then also the cutting edge science and fertility as well to put those two together to get to the best result.

Lorne Brown

In our practice, we go on site to one of the largest IVF clinics in Canada. So our patients that I see are all integrated because our clinic does the acupuncture naturopath and then we work with an IVF clinic and they often say they can tell who the acupuncture, the Acubalance patients are because in the waiting room they just seem a little bit more chilled. I like that. They could see that. But I

Colleen Wachob 

I will say, if I could go back in time, the one thing I would do differently, because the wellness world was a lot different then was I definitely was not having enough protein in my diet.

Lorne Brown 

Let’s talk about that because menopausal women also, that’s a concern about the energy that they’re getting. I had an OB/GYN and also that there’s the menopause weight gain that they don’t want. And you would think exercise more keto carbs or calories, but it actually impacts the cellular energy and you’ll get fatter by exercising more and eating less because you need more energy and protein’s one of those things that you need and still some carbs. So can you talk about protein? Because I do think a lot of the patients I see are undereating proteins. One of the things we do a lot of counseling around.

Colleen Wachob 

And one of the biggest shifts we’ve seen in health and wellness is a shift into protein. And it’s really more of a shift into strength across the board. So in the 2010s we were about detox and yoga, which yoga is still great. I still love yoga, but we had a very narrow view of health and wellness. And I think what’s wonderful now is we’re really encouraging women to step into their strength, to pick up the weights, to eat more and smartly with the right amounts of protein and really step into their power. And so at the time I was probably eating a diet that was way too fiber forward. I definitely had my fruits and veggies, but was missing both the strength component in both. I wasn’t doing any resistance straining and I also wasn’t consuming enough protein. And the RDA guidelines are 0.36 grams per pound of body weight and it’s the bare minimum to survive and not thrive.

And you probably need about double the RDA amount. So 0.7 to 0.75 grams per pound of body weight per day. And so if you’re looking to build and maintain muscle, it’s probably even, or sorry, if you’re looking to maintain and build, it’s probably even more than that. And I now have to be very thoughtful about ensuring that every meal does have the proper amount of protein and it’s obviously such a macro trend everywhere. And especially as perimenopausal women start to think about sarcopenia or maybe they’re looking at, hey, it’s harder for me to put on muscle or to look toned. There’s so many different ways in which this protein conversation is meeting women at all different facets of their life. But to your earlier point, as women think more about body recomp, they’re realizing that many of the things they’ve been told aren’t really helping them get to their goals.

And that it’s a wonderful trend now that you see gyms reshaping floor plans to move away some of the cardio because women are wanting more free weight space and more space to lift and do more resistance training, which is really exciting.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah. So there’s the bone health from resistance training. There’s the blood sugar regulation from resistance training, all the stuff that we need because we’re losing that with age. So we got to counterbalance that. Going back to just the idea around diet therapy and the protein, I saw on your site you have supplements and it looks like you got to the vet because who you guys are, you vet. So you look for supplements that you like. We’re seeing more and more for the menopausal population, creatine. And I saw that on your site and we like for our sleep people, we often do a B6 and a taurine and magnesium. And I saw you had creatine with taurine or creatine with magnesium. I was like, oh, this is … So because you’re 46, are you into creatine or magnesium? Because magnesium is one of the most common things we give in our practice, bisglycinate.

Colleen Wachob 

Yeah. I mean, what’s fascinating right now is in this world of health and wellness, it’s very divided. It kind of mirrors how we are politically, lots of division. I feel like creatine is the one thing we can all agree on. And the creatine market is growing at a really fast rate and women are driving all of that growth.

Lorne Brown 

No, it used to be the teenage boys. My teenage boys wanted to bulk up and now it was my paramenopausal women coming in and asking about creatine, so I had to go do a deep dive and I’m like, this looks fantastic for you guys.

Colleen Wachob

Yeah. And it’s really interesting what brings people into the creatine conversation. You have people coming at it at lower doses, so three to five grams for women who are thinking about lean muscle mass. And as you ramp up the dosage, there are benefits, bigger benefits, and it may play a bigger role in brain health, which is exciting and something that a lot of women worry about as well. It’s really hard for me to put on muscle, so I’m having a lot of creatine every day, like 12 grams.

Lorne Brown 

All right, so you’re doing the creatine. Okay. So two plugs. One is to check out Mindbody Green, their shopping area. They are really good … I was looking at them. I was like, “I like these combinations.”

Colleen Wachob 

I’ll have to send you some.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah, please do. I wish I had them. I would’ve done a picture, but I was looking at your creatine and the taurine, magnesium. You got some really nice stuff there, stuff for bloating. I was like, wow, this … And again, I trust you guys. Before we met today, I’m aware of your site and it was one of those sites I like because you’ve done some of the vetting for me. And I go into open evidence, I go onto my PubMed and look at things, but it’s nice how you guys have done this. I also want to plug in, we have a free fertility diet and a longevity diet. I want to talk about the joy of eating because the first rendition that I was responsible for, I don’t cook much. The feedback on the theory was great. The food tasted disgusting, like cardboard. So Dr. Katie McIsaac joined me on the second edition and she found recipes or gave recipes and they taste great.

And this reminds me of a quote from John Robbins, the hair of the basket and Robins. “It may be healthier to eat beer and franks with cheer and thanks than to eat sprouts and bread with doubts and dread.” So again, you could be eating perfectly and hating, resenting all those issues and it’s going to have a negative effect because of what’s going on in the psychoneuroimmunology, the P&I, what’s going on in your thoughts and thinking. And so there’s this idea of disposition, emotional disposition, how it impacts you and I wanted you to unpack that a bit. So can you talk a bit about … There’s enough stuff out there on diet. We have a great diet book. I want to hear more about the joy again because it’s so easy to get caught up and try to do things perfectly. And I think that perfectionism is bad for our health.

Colleen Wachob 

I 100% agree. And I know when we were talking a little bit before the podcast we were talking about HRV I will have my most stress resilient nights on those nights when I’m out with friends, out with girlfriends and laughing, probably not drinking, but really just where there’s this undercurrent of joy throughout the whole activity. And I think we’ve kind of lost the plot on making wellness a bit too protocol specific, a bit too rigid. And now in this new era, I would love to open up a more expansive form of wellness in which joy is such an important pillar of it. I fully agree if you’re doing everything perfectly but not doing it amongst friends or with joy, you’re probably missing the mark.

Lorne Brown 

And that reminds me now of the joy and the belief part. So I’m sorry for our listeners bouncing a bit, but when you talked about you wanted to believe in your body, because I want to tie in like Lisa Miller. 

Colleen Wachob 

Oh, I love Lisa

Lorne Brown 

I interviewed her, she’s episode 68, The Awakened Branch. We had a great conversation with her. So I kind of wanted to talk. I think we can tie all this in on the spiritual aspect. You said something that a few patients that come to me for fertility issues, only a handful have said that I believe I’m going to get pregnant. Everyone wants to get pregnant so I can see it over attachment. We work on surrender and wanting, but with a little bit of surrender in there, there’s only a handful and all have gotten pregnant where they truly believe they knew it. They just needed some guidance. And I kind of got that sense the way you were talking, you even made sure that the doctor aligned with you, you believed and you didn’t like this doctor, like the shaman saying you got a 1% health or this doctor made it transactional.

You were pretty clear unconsciously or consciously you’re going to get there and now you’re looking for the right people to support your journey. So can you talk a little bit about that? Because affirmations often don’t work for people because they say one thing, but viscerally, somatically they don’t believe it. There’s a disconnect. I think it’s Freud that says the mind forgets the body remembers. So I’d love to hear a little bit about your journey. And again, what would you say to your younger self or our listeners about your experience that may help them?

Colleen Wachob 

Yeah. I mean, you tapped on one of my favorite people, Lisa Miller, the PhD faculty member at Columbia University, and then she splits part of her time here in Coconut Grove. So I’m lucky to call her a close friend. And her point of view and perspective on spirituality has had a profound impact on our lives and how we raise our children fully and we’ll go back to Lisa, but yes, on the affirmations, I think there’s a natural kind of knee-jerk reaction of, “Ugh, cringe,” when you hear them, but there is this idea that your thoughts are powerful. And while I’m never in favor of thoughts without action, you need to believe you can, whether it’s getting pregnant or whatever it is, do the hard thing, but then you also need to do all the work that supports it. But going back to Lisa, she’s done so much fascinating work.

You referenced the study that when mother and child are both high in spirituality, the child was 80% protected against depression compared with mothers and children who were not as high in spirituality. In other words, a child was five times less likely to be depressed when a spiritual life was shared with a mother and she has a very expansive definition of spirituality. It’s not religious. It’s a deeper connection to your life, whether it’s prayer, nature, a walk in the woods, volunteering, picking up trash, essentially just a belief in something higher than yourself. And all these things bring us closer to what feels like universal truths and experiences that we’ve all shared. And this idea of a transcendent relationship and something bigger than all of us, I think is really important for anyone who’s grappling with something that’s really hard. I think so much of Lisa’s work is really important right now, whether it’s for girls who are growing up in a world that’s very lonely and depressed right now and how we can help them, whether the storm or just people who are looking for more purpose in life.

So she’s just such a thought leader in this space.

Lorne Brown 

And in her research, not only did she share both the less addiction and depression protection, but she showed how there are structural changes in the brain. So it’s not just, “Oh, I think I feel they could actually see changes in the brain as well.” So when we go into this area of spirituality, I love the fact, let’s emphasize that because some people cringe, oh, they hear the word God or spirituality and it can go really out there. And that’s just because society, we’re a very Newtonian, materialistic world, although that’s shifting. And when you believe there’s something greater than you, it takes you off of yourself a bit and allows you, it’s another tool of surrender. I find this form of surrender, which isn’t resignation, it’s a form of letting go. Basically, when the resistance drops, flow and receptivity goes through you and you talk about right action, I always say right action follows right thinking.

So if I’m cloned- I like that.

If I’m cloned, it’s my beingness. If the action’s the same, but one of me is coming from lack and fear and the other one’s coming from feeling whole and complete, even though they do the exact same thing, the beingness behind the action changes what I’m going to get from it. Lisa Miller’s work shares that you talked about, it could be volunteering. I think there’s a couple levels of giving, right? So you want to give and if you give to get, that’s still okay, but the most powerful shift is when you give for the sake of giving. You just do it because it’s kindness, you just do it for altruistic reasons. And when you can get to that place, that seems to have the greatest impact cellular and things change. So spirituality could be in nature then. What are you calling spiritual? Because some people may go, “Oh, I do that.”

And now they’ll do it with more intentionality. It’s not necessarily going to a temple to pray.

Colleen Wachob 

No. And we’ve been talking about the impact on Miami in terms of community and spirituality. And I think a big part of that is being by water and having a spiritual connection to the ocean and you were talking about the parasympathetic nervous system, that is such a great way to reset me is to be near an ocean. And everyone has to figure out what that is for themselves. The ocean and the water has a profound impact on my nervous system and my concept of the universe, but that might not be it for everyone. You kind of have to look into yourself and figure out what it is that gives you that reset that connects you to something that’s bigger that really resonates with you.

Lorne Brown 

So I want to see if I get you from reading your book and doing my prep for you. So I understand that movement and diet is important, so do that. And we didn’t talk too much about it because you can go everywhere and anywhere and it’s all there. The joy part’s important. So I get this from you. One is your breath is sacred and through your life and death accident from the pulmonary embolism, nasal breathing becomes a very important part of your life, helps you oxygenate, calm your nervous system and return on ROI. So for those that return on investment, you find that that’s a great one. You’re breathing anyhow, so just shut your mouth and breathe through your nose. Sleep seems non-negotiable for you.

Colleen Wachob

Yes

Lorne Brown 

Okay. So you take care of that as a vital sign to keep you healthy. And then emotions and intuition seem to matter. That’s something that I really liked in your book because it’s something I found for my own personal health and what I share in my practice and you talk about this a lot. So you don’t think that the pulmonary embolism was a random event then, do you?

Colleen Wachob 

No.

Lorne Brown 

And do you look at it as, can you tell now that your body was actually sending you little whispers, little messages and you weren’t listening to it and then it took a hammer?

Colleen Wachob 

Oh, a hundred percent. And I think it has to start with those little things of how do you sleep through the night? How do you feel when you wake up in the morning? And I think we’ve almost conditioned ourselves to believe that it’s normal to have so many, depending on what life stage you’re at, but not at the age I was at 32 to have so many trouble sleeping issues or to not wake up and feel energized. And I really wish that I had listened to those whispers so that I didn’t have to get that hammer.

Lorne Brown 

Right. So fatigue, irritability, muscle tension, insomnia, these are subtle signs saying change, right? Yes. And the part of you that has your best interest, although you think it’s not being nice, is changing because I’m sure you would never want to have what you had, the pulmonary embolism, but is there a sense of gratitude because of who you are today, what you’re doing today? Are you grateful for it because of how it’s changed your trajectory?

Colleen Wachob 

Oh, totally. It was a breakthrough moment for me and I think it could have gone either way, but ultimately shaped my life’s work and really kind of reinforced my commitment to the mission of what we do here each and every day. And I don’t want anyone else to have to go through a PE. I want them to have the tools at their disposal and the self-awareness to have high standards so that they feel their best throughout life and that they know that they shouldn’t have to settle for anything less.

Lorne Brown 

I like that. And you’re saying, listen to your intuition, listen to the whispers so you don’t have to have the life altering event. So I got one more I wanted to bring up. So we talked about breath, we talked about sleep, we talked about emotions, intuition, and the other one is that joy and connection is a form of medicine then. And there is research then on this that joint connections are on this. And this is that idea of all of a sudden the superficial goals that we’re constantly chasing outside of ourselves change. And it looks like from, again, my prep of listening to other podcasts you’re on, reading your book, family became a priority, community, purpose, and doing things joyfully, which is why you moved from New York to Miami. We’re nothing against New York everybody, just individuals. For you guys, that was the right move.

And so anything you want to share again about that joy and connection or tips on if somebody’s … Because loneliness is an epidemic right now. I think when I work with people in hypnosis, that loneliness shows up. Even though they’re successful, they could be an influencer, multimillionaire when we do the work and we regress, not feeling enough or loneliness is one of those programs that’s running. So what tips or what can you share to help people find that joint connection?

Colleen Wachob 

I would say you have to make the same investment in your joint connection that you put towards other elements of your health and wellness routine. So that can be as simple as giving yourself calendar reminders to check in with friends because part of having friends is being a good friend, being the one who invites people to an IRL hang. I learned friendships post-college, which was a long time ago from me. They require work and thoughtfulness and you have to put those investments in to be able to get the rewards and be a good friend before you can expect other people to be a good friend. And a lot of times it involves doing things that maybe make yourself uncomfortable and asking friends out on dates and dating, which is all part of the process. And I think part of moving to Miami, which has enabled us to find our community is there is a very vibrant health and wellness community here.

And so in so many ways it’s been easy to find our tribe and find people who want to work out, who want to go on that ruckwalk on the water in Coconut Grove because you have that kind of undercurrent of shared interests across what we do. I just wouldn’t minimize its impact on health and longevity because I think it’s one of the biggest levers we have.

Lorne Brown 

Excellent. So I want to remind our listeners that you can follow Colleen at Colleen Wakab. You can follow Mindbody Green as well under MyBody Green. We’ll put these in the show notes, get your copy of The Joy of Wellbeing. I have it both in audio and in print. I listened to it first and then I wanted to go back to it. And I want to thank you for taking the time to have this conversation with me. I think the only thing I said I was going to talk about is that we didn’t, so if you have any last things you want to share, do you have a different definition between wellbeing and wellness then? I think I said I was going to talk about that with you.

Colleen Wachob 

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I do think that the wellness, I have a bit of a complicated relationship with the word because I do think that the way it’s currently manifested across social media plays to these extremes of either Kardashian wellness where it’s like so many lymphatic massages and Korean skin treatments and just really buzzy words that may not have the science and the impact behind them, or it’s the rigid bro biohacker culture of protocols and new technology that’s yet to be proven where I think this idea of wellbeing elevates the conversation to something that’s bigger than all of us. And I think that’s the big needle mover.

Lorne Brown 

Thank you for that. And again, sleep and if you need help sleeping, there’s on your website lots of tips and tools. Our clinic, that’s one of the things we see. People come in for other things, but sleep is the thing we always ask about. So get yourself to sleep. The nasal breathing. I like Infra4. What was yours? 478?

Colleen Wachob 

478.

Lorne Brown 

478. The key is a long exhale, everybody. That’s what’s going to engage the parasympathetic and the inhales through the nose and your exhales through the mouth.

Colleen Wachob

Yes.

Lorne Brown 

And we’ll add a little Chinese medicine to it. The hookup point is behind your front teeth on the gums. So if you want to add a little bit of that, Chinese medicine creates the inner orbit circuit between the do and Renmai channels. And I like common sense. If your tongue is behind the roof or your mouth behind your front teeth, then you won’t clench your jaw. So it helps relax the jaw as well. So just a practical thing is there. All right. Anything I need to share where they can find you. I said how they can find you. We’ll put in the show notes, but that’s where we’re going to find you. Was this complete for you? Did we get …

Colleen Wachob 

Full and a complete picture of the joy of wellbeing.

Lorne Brown 

The joy of wellbeing. And you still need to read it if you want to hear more about the Rosetta study and you want to hear more of the tips. They really do unpack it and they’re not adding things. I like your book and I’ll share again why I encourage you as a resource for the people that are listening. We’re so guilty of adding, do this, do this, and we make your life less healthy because we’re adding to it. I find you’re taking away and you’re giving stuff that works. And so if you’re looking for simplicity and you’re looking for joy of wellbeing, then pick up a copy of the joy of wellbeing. Colleen, thanks for making the time today.

Colleen Wachob

Oh, thank you so much. We really enjoyed our conversation.

Lorne Brown 

Thank you for spending this time with us on the Coherence Co-Podcast. I’m Dr. Lorne Brown and I will see you next week for another conversation on coherence and healing. If this conversation resonated with you, please like, subscribe or follow the show and also share it with someone who might benefit from it as well. Remember to take a moment to breathe, reflect and stay connected. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast.