GLP-1s, Muscle Loss, and the Bloodwork Story Behind "I'm Fine"

MELISSA Women are not supposed to push through. You're not supposed to white knuckle your way through exhaustion, brain fog, weight gain that will not move and a body feels like it's working against you. That's not discipline. That's you being failed by a system that was never designed to look closely enough. This episode is going to change how you think about health. Not in a motivational way. It's in a here's what is actually happening to your body and here's what you can do about it kind of way. So today, I am sitting down with Jennifer Aukman, a certified integrative health practitioner who spent years in corporate America, watched her own body fall apart while conventional medicine told her she was fine, and decided to become the resource that she never had. She built a protocol around the one thing most doctors skip, actually looking at what your labs are telling you. So we are covering GLP-1s and what they do beyond weight loss. We're going to talk about genomics, how your genes are influencing the way your body detoxes, processes hormones, and responds to everything you put in it. We're going to talk about why two women can do everything the same and get completely different results. And we are going to be talking about why the answer you are looking for is most likely in your blood work. So if you've ever walked out of a doctor's office feeling dismissed, told you're fine, and you absolutely do not feel fine, this episode is for you. So I'm so glad to have you, Jen. Welcome to Dialed In Health.

JEN Thank you so much for having me, Melissa.

MELISSA I've been looking forward to this conversation because you are the kind of person that makes us all feel a little more seen. You ran global operations at GE, you did everything right, and your body still said nope. So take us back to that moment.

JEN Well, I think when I started at GE, it was in my early 20s, pretty much right out of college. So your body is very forgiving at that stage. Right. So going through my 20s and early 30s, I loved my work. I was being promoted every, say, you know, 15, 16 months. It was very exciting. And I was so focused on work that I tended to neglect the other aspects of my life. Right. What I was eating and how I was moving and was I getting any sleep. So one day, it just felt like, oh my goodness, I looked in the mirror, I was prepping for a work trip, and I realized I had absolutely nothing to wear that would fit. My weight had slowly crept up on me, and I didn't even know what had happened. So that was a really big aha moment for me, and I think a lot of women can relate to that. You just kind of lose track of yourself. Now, this was before perimenopause and menopause. So again, your body's a little bit more forgiving. So for that first shot in the arm, that wake up call, I was able to dial in my nutrition and focus on exercise and do some smart intermittent fasting. And I lost 16 pounds. And that was great until it wasn't, right? Because your body isn't static. Your body changes as it goes through cycles and hormones fluctuate. We have adolescence and then we have like menalescence, right? So everything's going crazy again. So at that point, I had to learn a whole new set of rules because my biology had changed.

MELISSA Is menalescence a word or did you make that up?

JEN Actually, I read that just recently. It's in a terrific book by Dr. Vonda Wright. And I've started to use it. And every time I say something, my clients start laughing.

MELISSA I like that. I haven't heard that one before, so that's a new one. You said something earlier when we were talking that you don't trust doctors to keep you healthy. Can you unpack that a little bit for us?

JEN Sure, I mean, doctors are amazing. I am not anti-Western medicine. I think you'll hear a lot of voices out there on the internet that are. I'm not one of them, right? I love doctors. I think they are excellent. If I get into a car accident, if I break my leg, take me to the emergency room, right? I want all of it. I want the x-rays, I want the diagnosis, I want the cast, I want the surgery if I need it. They are amazing for sick care. They're amazing for diagnostics. They're amazing for life intervention treatments. But for keeping me healthy, they're just not trained to do that. That's a completely different job, right? And I think most women will relate to this who are listening, you go to your doctor for your annual checkup, you get labs done, a couple days later, you get an email, you check your portal, everything's fine. Yet at the same time, you're sitting there saying, wait a minute, I feel like crap every day. I'm not sleeping. When I do sleep, I wake up tired. My clothes don't fit. I can barely think my way through a process map at work. What's going on? There's a huge disconnect. So clearly traditional or conventional healthcare isn't really keeping us healthy, isn't keeping us optimized, which is the way we want to feel and the way we deserve to feel.

MELISSA You know, it's so funny that you say that because I have. It's like it hit me all at once. Totally fine, weight's all the same. And then it was like, hit 49 and boom, like 18 pounds. And I did go to the doctor for, I never go for a yearly visit ever. And I was just like, in my mind, I've heard all this stuff about functional medicine. And I was like, I'm just curious what would happen if I asked this to my primary care physician. And I got the same answer that everybody keeps saying. It was that just happens. Your body's slowing down. You need to eat a little less as you get older. And I was like, wow, it is amazing. I keep hearing these people talking about menopause and what happens. And you would think that in some ways that would reach the medical circles, but it seems like it still hasn't.

JEN It hasn't. I mean, in big ways, it hasn't. When I went to my last annual exam, I really got into an interesting conversation with my primary care. And she's a woman, and she's in her 60s, and she was conventionally trained. And we were having a conversation about HRT, and she flatly told me, I don't believe in hormones. I was like, you don't believe in hormones? What does that even mean? You know, I was just, the whole rest of the conversation, I was just completely floored that I had a woman doctor who looked me in the eye and basically told me that hormone replacement therapy is a joke.

MELISSA So what do we do if we can't go to a primary care physician or conventional medicine and ask for help? How do we know how to take care of us? Like no one's trained us either. So what do we do, Jen? Tell us.

JEN Yeah. What do we do? The answer to that question is why I got into functional medicine. Because my second wave of transformation came from despair. And I say that with all the emotion behind that word. I had been on birth control pretty much my whole life. And when I forgot my pills going on a vacation with my husband, I just said, you know what? I'm just going to go off birth control. I want to give my body a break, right? That seems like a good thing to do. Wrong. That was the worst thing to do because my body was completely unprepared for what happened. I ended up developing something that Dr. Jolene Brighton calls post-birth control syndrome. So it's when all of a sudden, whole life that you've been on birth control, your hormones are like locked in the trunk of a car, screaming to get out, totally disconnected from your brain, and then all of a sudden you let them out. Let me tell you, they're not very happy with you. So I got every possible symptom in terms of the worst possible hot flashes and night sweats and additional weight gain, and I literally felt like I was losing my mind. And that went right into perimenopause, and I was struggling. So that's when I turned to functional health and started looking at functional health practitioners who was available in my area. What could I read online? But this was more than five years ago. So at that time, you don't have the Naomi Watts and Halle Berry and Tamsen Fadal and Dr. Mary Claire Hever. You don't have all those great voices that are extending the conversation. So when I finally found answers in functional health, I realized that, okay, this is something that I need to do. This is my calling because there is no way I want another woman to go through what I did.

MELISSA And it's wild. I remember that you said just five years ago there weren't these voices and you're absolutely right. I remember being in my late 40s asking my female OBGYN, who was also younger, like she was about my age, should I be testing my hormones? And I was like, if you're still having your periods, you don't need to worry about it. So I think a lot has changed in a short period of time. I'm not sure that the medical community has maybe caught up or maybe knows what to do with all that information. Tell me a little bit, since we're talking about hormones and labs and what's optimal and what is normal, tell me a little bit about the difference between normal and optimal. And what do your labs tell you? What kind of labs should we be getting?

JEN Sure. That's a great question. Because I think if most women like me, when I got my labs, if the doctor said they were fine, I didn't sit there necessarily and study them. I was like, OK. And then I just kept going about my day. So there are definitely sets of labs that we should be getting every time we go to the doctor. And you want to think about what are the things that are really impacting me from a systems perspective? So definitely hormones. So you want to get a full hormone panel. Our thyroid, so many women develop hypothyroidism as they get older. So you really want that full thyroid panel. You want to be looking at your complete blood count, right? Your CBC, you want your complete metabolic panel. You want to know what's going on with your vitamin D, with your B vitamins, right? With your homocysteine, your C-reactive protein, you know, one of your biggest inflammation markers. So all of these things are labs that you should be getting. And unfortunately, we're not getting all of them. We're getting pieces, but we're not getting all of them. And I find the absence of some of those biomarkers is really hiding the true story of what could be going on, driving how we're feeling.

MELISSA So when someone does their labs with you, what do their labs tell you that maybe their doctor's visit never did?

JEN Well, I think they tell me, you know, what is the story behind I'm fine? So if we circle back and say, OK, what are the difference between your doctor and the lab markers that you have, you know, red, yellow, green, right, your in range or your out of range versus a functional lens, a functional view of the labs? And it really comes down to a conventional lab range is looking at disease markers. Do you have this disease or don't you? A functional lens has much tighter ranges and they're really kind of looking at the trends. Where are you trending towards something? Because if you can identify trends earlier on and take lifestyle or other interventions to turn that around, then that's terrific. So you're going from a potential, I could be developing something down the road that's serious to, hey, it's just going in this direction. But if I fix my food and I work out a little bit more and maybe, you know, fix some nutrient depletion issues, I can really turn things around. And so when I look at labs, I'm looking at them from a little bit of a tighter spectrum and really trying to look at the patterns between the individual biomarkers versus just looking at each biomarker on an individual basis. So really kind of those combination of things makes my lab reviews with clients different.

MELISSA So at what age do we start getting our labs and what labs should we be getting at what ages?

JEN Well, the labs, again, that we're getting your blood panel, your metabolic panel, your vitamin D, your B vitamins, thyroid, hormone, inflammation, all of those things, super important. I tell my clients now, man, I really wish that I had hormone panels for me when I was through my 20s, 30s, 40s and beyond. I think we should be getting all of these labs starting in our 20s. Because when you look at what the ranges are based on, it's based on aggregate data and trends, and you're looking at yourself against a population. That's great. But how amazing would it be also to look at yourself against yourself? How has my body changed over time? How has it changed because maybe how I'm treating my body has changed? My habits are better or worse? So really being able to see those trends over time is super important. But I tell all my clients, any young woman that you know, if she's in her 20s, please tell her to go get a full hormone and thyroid panel so that she can know where her levels are at. That's when we're supposedly at our ideal peak for hormones and having that as a marker to compare to is amazing.

MELISSA So if you take, for instance, a population of people, some of them are very, very sick. Some of them are healthy. We probably don't have enough healthy people to actually to de-risk, if you think about like statistically, right? I've got a group of people, and many of our population in America is not very healthy, right? We have a pretty small. So I would think if anything, the normal labs probably skew towards disease and people who are unhealthy versus having an optimal range of what's good for you.

JEN Well, yeah, and I mean, where that comes out really clearly is around the whole GLP-1 conversation right now. Because when you think about it, GLP-1s aren't new, right? They started being used mainstream, say what, 20 years ago, 2005, and they were being used primarily with people with diabetes who were also then heavier or trending towards obesity or already obese. And the big game changer with that GLP-1 is the fact that all the other diabetes medications before that caused someone to gain weight. This was actually a change where people taking the type of GLP-1, they were losing weight. So then that's where it became more and more mainstream as people hearing about GLP-1s and that gets us to where we are now. But all the research studies that had been done around that time, they're being done on a population that is already clinically diagnosed as being sick because they have diabetes. So we look at that data and say, okay, how is somebody who is taking this GLP-1 for diabetes going to react versus someone who's maybe fairly healthy, fairly active, but they have 20 pounds to lose and they're willing to do the lifestyle of things to going along with it, they're going to act and they're going to have probably a very different experience with a GLP-1. So again, what the labs are measuring, the population that they're measuring is super important.

MELISSA So let's talk a little bit about genomics. We're talking a lot about personalization, what your DNA can tell you. Differentiate for me health genomics versus something like a 23andMe. I'm really curious. Because I've done 23andMe. I've done Ancestry. I've done those tests. What does the health genomics do that those don't?

JEN Yeah, my dad is way into ancestry and genetics. He's done all of our things. But yeah, those tests are based on your heritage. That's where did your grandparents come from and your great grandparents come from. So it's that type of view. When you look at genomics, you're talking more about your health markers, not your heritage. And so there are all kinds of tests out there that are direct to consumer that you can get to give you your health markers. All this information back, right? The problem with that is that what do you do with that information? There's no context, right? So we're drowning in information already, right? From social media alone, you get a genomics test, you think it's gonna help you, and you're looking at DNA snippets and you have no idea really what it's telling you. So it's okay, but you have to have that level of information with context. And so the test that I do with my clients, it provides that context in terms of not just your genomics, which is maybe why something is happening, but also your blood work saying, okay, well, what's happening right now? When you put those two things together, you have kind of the genomics operating manual for your body, and then you have your blood work and saying, okay, but what's going on right now at this second, right? So it's very, very powerful when you get those two things together. You have some context then.

MELISSA So tell me a little bit about the tests that you do. What would a genomics test reveal that maybe a regular hormone panel might not have on it?

JEN Well, a hormone panel is looking at your hormones, and it just depends on what hormones you want to look at. We all know about our sex hormones, right? Estrogen, progesterone, DHA, testosterone, FSH. But then don't forget, cortisol is a hormone. Insulin is a hormone. Melatonin is a hormone, right? So even when you look at those, the difference is you can have inflammation, but do you know how efficiently you clear inflammation? Do you know how sensitive you are to insulin? Do you know how your body handles saturated fat? Do you know how your body metabolizes vitamin D? Do you know how your methylation pathways work? These are all things that a genomics test will give you that a regular hormone panel won't.

MELISSA So with your protocol, and you do both panels, right? The genetics and the hormone panels. How does the genetics, because I've heard about a lot of people doing hormone panels, not everybody tests for cortisol. Some will do that, some don't. Tell me how the genetics test changes your protocol as you're approaching someone if you have both of those tests.

JEN It's really fantastic. I mean, we just didn't have these tools before. This is your precision DNA blueprint to how your body is working and what you need to do to change it. So it's really exciting. So when somebody orders one of the kits, we're doing two things, right? We're doing a cheek swab for the genetics and we're doing a blood spot test for the blood work markers. What you get back out of that is really exciting. Number one is you're getting first, let's look at the blood work and let's look at what are the big primary markers that are out of range. For example, if your CRP number is really out of range, that means you have some chronic inflammation going on in the body, which chronic inflammation drives a lot of other things. That would be a primary system to look at. So when you know what your primary and your secondary and maybe your third level markers are, you can prioritize what is the protocol that we're going to do to address those? Because you want to hit the big things first, right? Now, you're also going to get all those current biomarkers, plus you're going to get a 12-week retest target. Because if you have 12 weeks and you're on your protocol, you should be able to see what changes are being made in your body. Is it working? Is it positive? Are you seeing good change? Or something's not moving. Okay, it's been 12 weeks. It's time enough that we can tweak something. I give them back their exact supplements that they need to take. I mean, supplements is such a big thing, right? It's this huge market. People are spending thousands of dollars on supplements, and the question is, are they working? Are they even making a difference, right? So this test tells you these are the supplements that you need to move the needle the right way. If it's appropriate, I will also tell these are the peptides that you should be taking to move the needle. It tells them I give them back something called their nutritional archetype. What is that? What are the foods that you should be eating versus the foods you absolutely should not be eating because your body doesn't handle them well. So that's really exciting. And then it just gives you, again, here's this whole 12-week blueprint based on your genetics, based on your blood work, and then here's markers, goals that we can retest against in 12 weeks. That is information with context. That's information with a plan, right? That's something that's actionable that you can go do. That's worth it versus just getting something back and you're staring at thousands of snips of DNA.

MELISSA Yeah, I had this, and you can tell me if this is a wrong analogy. But I was thinking about like, OK, it's like I'm in a car. I test, I know that the gas is low. I know I need more gas, right? Do I need unleaded? Do I need, you know, do I need regular gas? Do I get the premium version? And then, you know, like the DNA test is telling me like, well, you have, you get 22 miles per gallon, which is nothing, right? It's not so bad. And that you really need premium gas. It's telling you how to run it, but then there's the immediate test saying that your tank is a quarter of a tank left. So it's sort of this immediate thing, and then how to plan to drive your car.

JEN Exactly. You get your operating manual and then the fuel that you need to run it.

MELISSA Yeah. So you said something interesting too. Like how do you, is there really foods that I shouldn't be eating? Other foods I don't process well, how do I know that?

JEN Well, I mean, your blood work will tell you some people like can't handle nightshades. If you think of what nightshades are, when you look at peppers and tomatoes and things like that, they just, they can't handle them. It's not necessarily a food allergy. It's a food sensitivity or just the methylation process, how they can break that food down so that their body can use it. Maybe they just can't break it down appropriately. And so they think they're eating all these foods that are really good for them. And it's really kind of driving either a neutral or negative pattern in the body.

MELISSA If I couldn't eat nightshades, like my mom is Italian, I don't know what I would do if I couldn't eat tomatoes. Very sad. Okay, so tell me a little bit about the detox part of your protocol. This is super interesting to me because I see all this stuff in all the groups because I always want to understand what are people researching? Parasite cleanses and mineral and heavy metal detoxes and you need to do it constantly. Do I need to do it every month? Do I need to do it? What are these things? Tell me a little bit about your philosophy around detox and what actually works.

JEN Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, no. I think, well, there's detoxes and there's cleansing, juice cleansing, juice fast, like all the things, right? So some of them are, I think, just very trendy and maybe not necessarily very healthy. Others serve a prime function in your body so that it can work better. So when I start working with any woman, I'd like to do something called my functional medicine detox. It's three weeks. 21 days, and it's very tactical, and I'm focusing on very specific things because most women aren't coming to me with a clean slate, right? They're not feeling great. If they felt great, they'd never pick up the phone to call me or reach out and send that DM. They're overloaded, right? So this gets them to a point where the inflammation that's up, we can start bringing that down. The bloat that's up, we can start releasing some of that. Cortisol numbers are high, we can start bringing that down through interventions. Sleep is disrupted, energy level is low, nutrients are depleted. The functional medicine detox addresses all of those things so that when you're ready to start your 12-week plan, you're building from a clean slate. And that's just going to make it so much more effective. And it's terrific too, because you get your test kits in the mail, and you do the tests, and it still takes you know three to five weeks to get your genetic results back. So you're not waiting right immediately you can jump in and you can start working on this detox. And you know you're fueling your body with good foods, your foods that don't drive sensitivities in your body, foods that are very nutrient dense and then you're pairing that was some nutrient supported fasting because fasting, I mean it's been around for thousands of years. It is very effective when it's done the right way. It helps get rid of all those zombie cells that you hear about in your body that should be dying off and are not, and so are in there misfiring all over the place. It just really cleans you out, makes you feel better, gives you that fresh, clean start.

MELISSA So there's a lot of people out there that say, just do the basics. Just drink water, walk, put on your weighted vest, maybe eat more protein, and figure it out. Why do you think that a detox is helpful? Why is that advice not always so great?

JEN Well, for one thing, when we look at the concept of somebody being overloaded, it's going to take, if you do those normal interventions, which all are good things, I do all of those things. But it depends on where you're starting at. If you're somebody who's severely nutritionally depleted, chronically overstressed, just feeling terrible, your liver is congested, I mean, our liver, we don't talk about our liver much. Our liver is our queen organ. She's our biggest organ in our body. She filters our blood every six minutes. She is creating hormones, converting hormones, storing blood sugar. She's amazing, but she gets overloaded. So we have to help her out through nutrients, through rest, through detox, so that we can clear those pathways, just like the filter on the HVAC in our house. You have to change the filter, right? Or you have poor air quality. Same thing, you have to make sure that your bile ducts and everything is clear, your detox pathways and your liver are clear so that your liver can work more effectively. Your body is very smart. It wants to be in balance, but when it's overloaded, you have to help it out. So that's what doing a detox does. I recommend I do one once a year. I recommend that for my clients to do it once a year for three weeks. And then I might do like a seven day, you know, a couple more times throughout the year because we're constantly handling stress and pollution and heavy metals and you know, all the junk that's in our food, no matter how careful we are. So it's like showering. You're giving your body a shower on the inside. Nobody's like, I'm going to shower once. I'm never going to do it again. Right? It's a maintenance.

MELISSA How do you know that you might need a detox? What might be some symptoms that you have that say like, hey, I think this might be good for you?

JEN One thing that's really surprising, but it's very obvious. If you wake up in the morning and you've got like those sleepy seeds in your eyes, right? Or your eyes are overly red, that can be a sign that you need to detox. That was a new one for me. But just in general, if you are just feeling sluggish, if you are feeling heavy, if you are mentally feeling slow, if your sleep is like crap, frankly, right? That's a great sign that you need to refresh.

MELISSA You just described everyone in America right now. Sorry, I just was like, you just described everyone in America right now.

JEN Well, then everyone in America should be doing this. It's true. We're constantly, I mean, our bodies are constantly under attack in some way, right? Is our air the cleanest? Is our water the cleanest? Are we bombarded with EMFs constantly? Is there chemicals, you know, just about in every cosmetic that we put on, no matter how clean we are? Yes. So our grandparents and our great grandparents maybe had it a little bit easier because they didn't have the level and the of the chemicals that we're being assaulted with. So this is a way to help your body perform at its best.

MELISSA And you recommend this is part of your protocol that the detox is something that pretty much everybody does as part of the protocol or is it for a certain folks and not others?

JEN Everybody does it. Not everybody will do the fasting component. Because if somebody is severely nutritionally depleted, they don't need to fast for a day or two. Maybe what they do instead is they just eat clean during the day and then they don't eat after seven o'clock at night. And then they eat again at breakfast and they just focus on the food portion of it and taking some of the targeted supplementation that supports your liver.

MELISSA Okay, let's move into the big one, the GLP ones. So there's obviously so much that we could do like a whole series of episodes on GLP ones, but you know, it's interesting. I didn't realize that they backfire. So now I'm seeing all this information about maybe my GLP one stopped working or it worked, it didn't ever work for me. This one didn't work, but this one did. So tell me, you know, why is everybody taking them all of sudden? Like what made it super popular? And tell me a little bit about, let's just talk, we'll start there. Tell me, what is the GLP-1? Why are there like so many, now all of a sudden, I thought it was just Ozempic, but now there's like a bunch of them. Like, what is the difference? Tell me a little bit about that.

JEN Sure. So GLP-1 is a hormone that your body naturally produces. It's also a peptide. We'll get into that, but it's both a hormone and a peptide. And your body naturally produces it, but over time, the production of it can slow down. So when you're taking this as a medication, if you take the most basic form, the beginning GLP-1, the semaglutide, right? That is it helps regulate appetite by kind of slowing down or deafening those hunger signals. It clears food noise, so you're not constantly thinking about food, kind of those addictive tendencies that can go on. And it's slowing digestion, so you feel fuller longer. So when these happen, you're naturally, it's going to be easier to maintain some sort of calorie restriction. That doesn't mean we don't still need nutrients though. Let me just throw that in right now, right? You still need nutrients. It's just you're not, you're getting help in maintaining a calorie deficit that can help stimulate weight loss.

MELISSA So there's different versions or different brands of GLP ones. Help us understand what we need to, help us navigate that space because there's different brand names it seems like, or is it different types of GLP ones?

JEN Different brands and different types. You want to think about GLP ones like we think about our iPhones, right? I don't even know what, what's the latest version of iPhone we have iPhone 17, 18.

MELISSA Feels like 17, yeah let's go with 17.

JEN Yeah, okay. So that means there were lots of versions before that, right? We had 16 versions of our iPhone before then. So now we have GLP-1, the version one that was our semaglutide, right? So that hit the glucagon-like peptide one. That is our base lever. Then we had tirzepatide, right? So tirzepatide was the next level up, that next enhancement. Now we've got retatrutide, right? So retatrutide has even more benefits to it. So each successive generation of GLP is more and more effective. Like right now I'm microdosing retatrutide and one of the reasons it's so effective is because it has glucagon in it, which is amazing to help you just totally manage your blood sugar. And it helps you lose weight or not gain additional weight even if you're not working out excessively. So it's just each one is getting more precise, more targeted, has more benefits, less side effects.

MELISSA Okay. So one question I have is it seems like certain providers will push one GLP one. Others have their favorites. How do I know which one to get for me? How do I know which is the right GLP one that I should be on?

JEN I think it depends. Number one, I look at how much weight do you want to lose? You want to look at how much money are you willing to invest? The original semaglutide, the price is coming down on those a lot, even if you're not using insurance. And pretty soon, they're going to become incredibly inexpensive because each new generation that comes out, you're paying that price point for that higher quality product. So I think for me and my clients, I don't ever recommend semaglutide anymore just because that was that earlier version. People were prone to more side effects to that. So my clients are either all on tirzepatide or retatrutide. If people have insurance and they're getting them through an insurance provider, then it just depends on which one their insurance company will cover and rules differ all over the place. So I think really it comes down to how are you going to get it? And it comes down to, you know, or do you want to invest in the best and can you to get the best result based on the amount of weight that you are looking to lose?

MELISSA So why do we keep hearing about ozempic face or, you know, we see that people are getting really thin on some of the GLP ones. They look, they're exhausted. They don't really look that good. What is happening there?

JEN Yeah, I guess I would look at it a couple different ways. Being vegan and using a vegan lifestyle, like I can look at somebody and know if they're vegan because a lot of people who are vegan don't do a very good job and I'm probably going to get some hate comments for this, but don't do a very good job of making sure they are nutritionally diverse enough and getting all the right nutrients. You have to be focused. You have to be intentional. That is a fairly strict plan and it's totally possible to do great on it. It's also really easy to mess it up and to end up filling your plate with more pastas and starches and things that are, you know, maybe nutrient dense. So when we look at someone maybe who has ozempic face or ozempic butt, what's happening? First off, it's not the GLP-1's fault. That can happen with anyone who's been on a calorie-restricted diet for a long time, and they're not in tune with what they're putting in their mouth. Because all that's showing is that they are not eating enough calories, their body is going into survival mode, right? And so their body is doing what it can to keep itself alive. And what it's doing is it's breaking down, preferentially breaking down more muscle than fat. Which people are like, what? What are you talking about? Well, our hiney, our peach, our butt, our glutes, right? It's a lot of muscle. It's a lot of muscle. And muscle is the most, how do I say this? The most metabolically active tissue that we have, it is our organ of longevity, it is incredibly important for our health. And because it's so metabolically greedy, our body, being so smart, will preferentially break down muscle in favor of fat because muscle is grabbing at more of the calories. And that's why we see ozempic butt. Ozempic face is too much loss and you're losing all that fat in your face. Women tend to lose weight from the top of their body downward.

MELISSA That is really frustrating because you want right in the middle. That's where you want some of us anyway. OK. It'd be nice if you could target that. So tell me a little bit about why GLP 1 stopped working. What happens when we hear this? Like, your GLP 1 stopped working? Try this. What's going on there?

JEN It's not, again, it's not the GLP one that stopped working. It's the fact that it's natural that your body being so smart will adapt to whatever it is that you're doing. And it's gonna fight back if you're not giving it what it needs. So any calorie restricted diet, any workout routine, like if you keep lifting the same weights in the same way, in the same motion, what do you think is gonna happen? It's going to be easier and easier for your body to do that, right? So you're going to get less muscle growth because your body is used to doing it. So what do you need to do? You need to change up your workout routine. It's the same thing with GLP-1s, right? If you are not, you know, managing your food, managing your motion, managing your sleep, you're going to hit a plateau. And that's whether you're on a GLP-1 or not. I think a lot of these things we hear out there in social media, we're blaming the drug when it's not necessarily the drug's fault.

MELISSA So what might be another reason, I know your detox kind of clears the path for any of your next step, like a GLP-1. We hear people saying that the GLP-1s don't work. What might be some reasons that a GLP-1 doesn't work for you?

JEN A GLP-1 might not work if you don't have the right support mechanisms beside it. I want you to think about like this. If you have like, I have my women like what I like to say, the whole precision wellness toolkit. What does that mean? You have access to HRT. You have access to GLP-1s type of peptide. You have access to all the other sexy peptides. You have access to lab testing, genetic testing, coaching, nutrition, plans, exercise plans, all the protocols. GLP-1 is just one piece of that picture. So depending upon, you know, how much weight you have to lose, what your current shape is, what your current stress level is, what your current level of inflammation is, some things might work better than others. That's why it's important to get the lab work done first so you can get the most dialed in precise plan that you can. Then every, eight to 12 weeks, you can adjust it as necessary. There are clients who came to me that were on semaglutide and they were getting side effects for it. And I put them on tirzepatide and their body was handling that better. Again, with the right lifestyle support. If you aren't doing any of the lifestyle things along with your GLP-1, it's just expensive water because peptides are amplifiers. They're going to amplify what you're doing. So the better you can do the things to support the goal that you have for your body, the more effective your peptide is going to be at helping you reach that goal.

MELISSA So tell me, you mentioned this toolkit, peptides and hormones. What's the difference between a peptide? Now you said insulin is a peptide or hormone. GLP ones are peptide. Tell me what's the difference. How do I know what's what?

JEN You're both. That's so funny. When I first heard the word peptide, I had no idea what people were talking about. I'm like, what's a peptide, right? This is new for so many of us. The science is changing so fast. It makes it a really exciting time. So here's the best way to think about it. And I'm going to use the business context because I come from corporate, right? So think about hormones as company-wide email broadcasts. Right? They're getting the big main message out to everybody. This is a system wide thing. Right? So hormones impact full systems and more than one. So if we think about estrogen, when we're going through perimenopause and menopause, right? Our estrogen levels are dropping. That has a cascading effect on what? On our fat distribution, right? Our fat starts moving to our belly. So we get menopelly. We start losing cardio protective benefits, right? We start seeing other symptoms in terms of, you know, how we're regulating our body temperature. So it's impacting our thyroid. It's impacting everything. That's a hormone, right? Peptides are short, small chain amino acids. They're like text messages to your boss, right? It's a specific amino acid message to a specific cell receptor doing a specific job. That's really the main difference. So there's all kinds of peptides that we can use for all kinds of different repairs and functions and enhancements and optimizations in our body. It's really exciting science.

MELISSA So what are the most common peptides that you use with your clients and why?

JEN Got it. My favorite actually is the GHK copper peptide. We call it the glow peptide. This is one that helps your body produce collagen. We know collagen is really, I think of it as in the central nutrient because our body stops producing it when we get, especially in our 40s and 50s. And we need it, right? We need it for our joint flexibility and our tendon flexibility. And we want it for our hair and our skin and our nails, all of that stuff. So that glow peptide is very exciting. BPC157, a lot of people have heard of this one if you're researching peptides. This is about repair. TB500, a deep repair, reducing inflammation. You can stack, or what it means to stack a peptide, you're combining the peptide. So when you combine those two, BPC157 and TB500, you get what's called the Wolverine stack. And that's of course after the X-Men Wolverine, because he had such great anti-aging and repair capability. So those are really the three most common peptides outside of a GLP-1 that I work with.

MELISSA So if I have like, I wake up every morning with this little like, I call it the Rice Krispie neck, where I have the knuckle pop. Is the copper peptide or the BPC157 gonna help me with that? Okay. Well, we'll talk.

JEN Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And the glow stack is that exactly. So you can do, yeah, it's absolutely amazing because it gives those messages to basically say, body, you used to do this. Why don't you start doing it again? That would be really great.

MELISSA It would be really great. I'd love to wake up and not have that little like reminder that. Okay, what's the necklace?

JEN Or the necklace, I get the necklace, you know, on the three wrinkles on the chest, because I'm a side sleeper. Yeah.

MELISSA Yeah. Okay. We'll talk after the show about maybe some of those things. Tell me a little bit about your personal story. So you were in corporate, you were flying all over the place, getting promoted, kind of a big deal. And then you had some health issues. So tell me about what happened.

JEN I don't know if that was a big deal, but I was really excited about what I was doing. And corporate was really, really good to me until it wasn't. But I think for me, I talked a little bit about the first kind of weight gain event, right? In my late 20s, early 30s, I guess, where it was once I figured out I had an issue and started paying attention to it, the weight fell off pretty easily. And there was no other quote unquote symptoms besides weight gain. That's because in our twenties and thirties, our bodies are fairly stable. At the time I was on birth control, you know, there was a lot of movement going on there and our bodies respond well. Well, once you get older, right, and our hormones start going through that menalescence, right? That second puberty, that change, our body is just struggling on how to deal with that. So symptoms are just popping out of everywhere. And there's hundreds of symptoms. Most people are very aware of the big ones, the hot flashes, the night sweats, the brain fog, the sleep disruption. I mean, I had all of those in spades. People get frozen shoulder, joints get really stiff. Estrogen is really important in terms of joints and flexibility, whatever, so you can get really stiff. It can impact your recovery. That's why something like BPC157 is really, really helpful. So for me, it was really about coming off birth control and then immediately rolling into perimenopause. And it was just this massive like triple hit. And I honestly, I was so frustrated because here I had been at that point, I had been coaching in the woman's health space for many years. And all the stuff that I was doing before just wasn't working. And I was super frustrated. And that really impacted my confidence, not only as a woman, but as a coach, because I was like, okay, if I can't help myself, how am I gonna help my clients? Because they're all around the same age as me. I've got to figure out what's going on. And that's what got me into the functional health space. And understanding the foundations of health and really trying to solve things at a root cause level versus just doing some sort of slap a bandaid on it, get a prescription and call it a day approach really appealed to me. I don't know, maybe it had to do with my operations background where I was always doing process reorganization and lean and all these things, right? I needed to know why something was happening and just fix it so we never had to fix it again. So functional health to me means, look, our body is going to keep changing. But when you understand how much is really in our control, the foundations that are important, and then take advantage of the tools that we have, it's absolutely phenomenal. And that's ultimately came down to what I did, is I went on a search for answers. I needed to heal myself and I needed to be able to share that with my clients.

MELISSA One last question before we go into some myth busters here. What about those folks that are just like, you know, this whole menalescence is natural. It's part of what life is. You just need to get through it and, you know, a little bit of creeks and whatever. It's just part of life, part of getting older. And I just, I don't want to mess with all that stuff. What would you tell them?

JEN Wait a minute, are you my doctor? I would tell them, number one is that they're probably not suffering as much as somebody else. Maybe they're having a really even time with it. Some women go through it and they barely even notice it. I was not one of those people. So I think there's a real lack of empathy there in terms of understanding what somebody could be suffering and what it's doing for their relationships, both their relationships at home, in the office, in the community. I would say that hormones exist. Hormones run every system in our body. And when they are out of whack, right? It's like that analogy, a symphony orchestra. It can be beautiful when you hear it. And then all of a sudden, the French horn's out of tune, right? And it's just like, you have to be able to find solutions for these things. Because just because I'm over 50 now doesn't mean that I don't deserve to feel my absolute best every day. I deserve to get a great night's sleep and wake up and not be thinking about how I'm feeling or depressed or not able to wear what I want in the morning to get up and just not think about those things and think about other things that I'm excited about or that I need to get done. We deserve that. And I think the search for answers continues. I think the dialogue and the groups and the press, I think some of it is really good. I think some of it is going in a really strange direction now. I saw an ad, somebody posted something the other day for menopause body wash. I was like, please, I mean, what is that? So I think where the conversation is going in the right direction and the fact that we're having it. And I think there's just going to be a lot to learn and a lot of opinions to change. But at the end of the day, it's up to each one of us to take responsibility for our own health, to stop beating ourselves up if we don't have all the answers, and to search out somebody who does. Because it's not like when we go to work every day, we think we do everything all ourselves, right? We have data and we have reports and we have teammates and we have bosses and we have consultants. We have all these people to help us make the right decisions. Why aren't we applying that same logic and that same rationale to how we feel every day?

MELISSA Well, and I think we're also just sort of, especially as women and many high performing women too, just tough it out. Like you go into those boardrooms and you're prepared and many times twice as prepared as some of your counterparts to do the same job. And it's like, we are so used to just taking a beating that we don't sometimes notice when we feel like we're like, this is just part of it, right? Instead of, it could be better. It could be different. So I would bet that even just getting your labs done, seeing where things are at, even if you choose, then you can choose, do I want to do something or how bad is it? You can get a sense for where things are versus just continuing to keep on moving ahead.

JEN Yeah, I mean, think about it. We talk about midlife. So what does that really mean? Right? Where I'm 52. God willing, I have another 30 plus years left of life. There's a lot I want to do. And shouldn't I feel great while I'm doing it? Yeah. So why would I just suffer in silence?

MELISSA Exactly. I love that. And that's a great way to think about it too is like, would you not want to live your best life as long as you can? So a couple of myths for you. Mythbusters. All right. So you just need to eat less and move more.

JEN Well, if that was the case, we wouldn't have rising obesity and everybody wouldn't be jumping on the next TikTok diet trend. That's totally false. I mean, like I said, hey, that worked for me in my 20s. It doesn't work for me in my 40s and 50s because it's biology then, right? Hormone changes. That just means that, you know, insulin resistance is going up. Cortisol reactions are going up in the body. There's all these other things that we have to do instead of just less starving ourselves and working more.

MELISSA Okay, the next one a detox trend or detox is just a trend. There's no real science behind detoxing.

JEN Not true. That is definitely a false myth. The act of supporting our liver and supporting our liver's function and getting rid of the toxic buildup that exists in our body, especially like in our fat cells or the zombie cells that we have that won't kind of die off through normal rhythms and they're just hanging out in our body, emitting all these toxic things and causing all these problems. Detoxes help with that when they're structured appropriately. They can be such, such effective tools and just really, really impact somebody's immediate quality of life and also the longevity of their life.

MELISSA Working with a health coach instead of a doctor is too sketchy. Maybe many people think health coaches don't have a real degree in anything.

JEN Well, I think there's a lot of people who can do great work and they don't have a degree at all. So I think it behooves us to figure out, well, what is it that we want to solve? And then actually put a little bit of thought and conversation into the person that we're going to trust to help us solve that problem. That's what I do for women. I solve problems. They come to me because they have too much data. They've failed seven out of seven diets. They're ready to try their eighth, and they're really depressed about it and they wanna do something different. So it used to be not so long ago, 100 years ago, that people would have a quote unquote regular doctor and then they'd also have some sort of functional health practitioner. That was the norm. Because of the way things change with big money and big pharma, the functional health colleges, they slowly went bankrupt and went away. And so here we are, you know, a hundred years later, and we went through a phase where anything functional health was considered woo woo, right? Couldn't have possibly worked. So I think everyone should have a regular doctor that they see. And I think everyone should have a functional health practitioner that they can go to to ask for questions around keeping yourself healthy and feeling great every single day.

MELISSA How many times woo woo comes up as a term in these conversations. It blows me away how much we have characterized under that term. I should start a company called Woo Woo and it'll be awesome.

JEN Woo woo. Yeah, we'll do it together.

MELISSA That's great. All right. Last thing I want you to tell me if it's true or false. GLP ones are a shortcut for people who don't want to do the work.

JEN Oh my gosh, this is going to be the worst thing ever. This is the new form of fat shaming. Right? And you know where I think this is coming from? This is coming from trainers or weight loss coaches who just aren't on board with the science and don't understand it. And they're ticked off because they had to macro manage themselves, macros, calories, that sort of thing, forever. And they did it the hard way. When somebody goes to a doctor and they're told that they have high blood pressure and the doctor gives them a high blood pressure pill that they're expected to take every day for the rest of their lives unless they make other intervention changes, nobody shames them. Nobody shames them at all. So you've got a woman who needs to lose 50 to 100 pounds. She's tried her whole life. She's been judged her whole life. She's failed on and off. She's had small wins maybe, but she is really at her wits end. And she finally can take a pill or a shot that helps her lose weight, that helps her get a win, right? So that she starts to have confidence and feels better about working out, feels better about her food changes. How is that cheating? That has got to be the worst thing that I have seen about all of this is the stigma that people are getting. And when you think about it, we're women, we're judged for everything anyway. We're judged if we wear our hair too long when we're too old. We're judged if we dress the wrong way. Somebody's going to judge me because of the V-neck of the dress that I'm wearing right now. We're always being judged. But this rabid GLP-1 is cheating. It's just so wrong. GLP-1s are a tool. And when they're used effectively, they can create incredible results. And when somebody feels good about themselves, and they're healthy and they're confident, then so many other things about life are possible for that person. So I think that is one of the worst myths out there and I do everything that I can to combat that one.

MELISSA I need like a clapping button, like a staring button for that one. And I think your V-neck looks great. Wear whatever you want. I think it's perfect. Anyway, well, thank you so much. This is amazing. It's such a great conversation, one that many of us wish was, you know, louder maybe five or 10 years ago when we needed it. But I'm so grateful that we're having the conversation now so that those of us that are in it can get the help we need. I remember even my mom who is 80, we were listening to someone say, talk about, you should be on estrogen forever. You can still get on it at any age. And she was like, gosh, maybe I should go see somebody. And I was like, how bad that, I feel so bad that that was not available for their generation to have some help going through this. But luckily, now we've got people that are like you, helping our generation and the ones below us to navigate this crazy space and crazy time. Tell us where we can get a hold of you. Learn about your protocol and connect with you, Jen.

JEN Sure, so the best is just to, you can always find me on LinkedIn, jenoknin.com, you can send me a DM there. You can set up a free consultation with me. It's just jenoknin.com forward slash free consultation. Hard about that. And we can just talk. I think it's really, it's such a great conversation, because people come into those with me. They're a little apprehensive, they're a little unsure. And then we just start talking about what's going on with them, right? What's going on? What's happening in your life? What are you feeling? What are you trying to do? What have you tried? And it ends up just being such a beautiful, trusting conversation where we can really figure out what's going on and what are the possibilities. And then just lay those out and then, you know, they decide. So they're yes, no, or not right now. And that's fine. I've given them information that they didn't have before. And that's what's important to me.

MELISSA Absolutely. So we will make sure to include that link in the show notes on YouTube and in any of our social media channels. And if this episode makes you feel seen, make sure to share it with someone who could also use this information and who may also want to connect with Jen. The woman in your life who has been told she is fine when she's not fine definitely needs to hear this show. I'm Melissa Goodwin. This is Dialed in Health, and we will see you next time.