Dr Chalmers Path to Pro - Depression and Exercise
Depression can often be more than just a mental or emotional struggle it’s sometimes caused by deeper issues in the body like inflammation, hormone imbalances, and poor gut health. It explains why jumping straight into exercise isn’t always the best first step and why addressing your body’s chemistry matters.
It also touches on the role of nutrition, how certain foods can affect your mood, and why some common treatments might not be as effective as we think. By focusing on getting the body healthy first, real, lasting improvements in mental well-being become possible.
Highlights of the Podcast
00:04 - Misunderstanding Depression & Exercise
00:45 - Case Study: Biochemical Markers of Depression
01:24 - Functional Disruptions in the Body
02:10 - SSRI Ineffectiveness and Gut Health
03:00 - The Role of D3, Testosterone, and Inflammation
04:09 - Why the System Doesn't Fix People
06:15 - Fast Food, MSG, and Depression Triggers
07:01 - Real Reasons for Widespread Depression
08:15 - Nutrition Suppression in Medical Education
09:46 - Testing and Functional Knowledge Gap
11:02 - Insulin Resistance Tied to Inflammation
12:04 - Parasites, Ivermectin, and Gut Health
13:10 - True Detox = Nourish Organs
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:00:04] All right, so a lot of people talk about depression and exercise and how you should exercise if you're depressed and that is not bad advice. However, it's not always the best advice, especially at the beginning. A lot of you will also talk about how depression is a chemical imbalance in the brain and that it 100% accurate. What we normally see, so, a great example. I got patient in the other day. We do a lot of work with depression and stuff like that. Pulled his blood, and then we did. So blood work is phenomenal at showing what's in the blood. Really good for hormones, really good for something like that, bad for tissue function. And so we do both blood work and we do Eastern medicine testing to test the tissues. Anyway, so this guy comes in. He's had depression for a while. Low thyroid, low D3, low testosterone. High C-rectal protein, high insulin, high fasting insulin, couple of other things. Massively inflamed, horrible nutrient deficiencies. So yeah, 100% chemical imbalance. This type of person, I would not recommend go work out for his depression. The first thing that you'd have to do with this guy is radically decrease the inflammation and then substantially increase nutrient functionality before exercise is gonna be a good idea.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:01:24] So just looking at a couple of different things. High fasting insulin, so he's in high insulin resistance. So his body's utilization of sugars and fats and whatnot for production of energy is gonna be a little bit altered. So we're gonna have blood sugar issues. Low testosterone, so it's not gonna heal. So it'll be extra sore and extra tired. Low iodine, thyroid function is gonna down. And he's got parasitic function in his gut. So we know he's not going to be able to make serotonin. There's no other path for this person than to be depressed, because that's what the chemical consistencies of this function shows. And so when you look at these guys, this is sad, because people like this person, I see all the time, and they have depression for five, six, 10 years, and they've been put on SSRIs, which is the dumbest thing in the world. I've never understood why people would do SSRI. From just a standard functionality standpoint. So what an SSRI does is it radically decreases your body's ability to break down neurotransmitters. Here's the problem. That's like saying, I'm poor and somebody is saying, well, you need to make sure you look for your nickels and your dimes. Your gut can make a thousand times or 10,000 times the serotonin that you're stopping breaking down and you take the SSRIs.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:02:41] Why not just fix the gut, allow the body to do what it was designed to do and make all the serotonin you need for your brain? I mean, this is very common sense type of stuff. We don't know if serotonine, all right, let's increase it by this much. Why we can increase it this much? No, no, no. Pharmaceuticals have to get paid, so we're only going to help you this much, which is why lots of times SSRIs don't really help that much. If you look at the research, the vast majority of people, you look it, it's barely above placebo function as far as benefits. So, um, horrible idea, but killing the yeast, killing the parasites, restoring gut flora, thus allowing the body to produce its own serotonin again. That seems like, that seems like the path that would make the most sense. And that's what we do, and we've had great success with it. But the other thing is, like I said, this guy has low iodine, so we've got to radically increase iodine absorption and intake, low testosterone, got to pull that up, and we're going to start suppressing all of the inflammatory stuff. High cortisol, high homocysteine, all that's methylated B6 functionality, so obviously low B vitamins as well. D3, which we've talked about this before, D3 is not a vitamin, it's a hormone. The definition of vitamin is essential nutrient. D3 is not a nutrient, it's a hormone. That is that cannot be created in the body. D3 is made in the body. So it can't be a vitamin. And it's not a nutrient. A nutrient is something that's within the chemical reaction. D three carries things all over the body to messenger.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:04:09] So, again, so we've got we got three major hormones that are out, low testosterone, too high insulin, which is insulin hormone, and too low D three. Like every time I see this, we see depression, which Is very, very, very common. But so does diabetes. So is insulin resistance. So if we're not understanding, if we are not gonna discuss how these things get there and how to fix them, we're gonna have all sorts of problems all over the place. But again, if you fix the insulin resistance or you fix diabetes, that's gonna radically take money out of pharmaceutical pockets and out of the medical system pockets. And that's what they don't want. That's why they're not fixing people. That's by they're putting people on drugs you have to take every single day forever. Because then you pay them every day forever and so that's why these things are not getting solved. Um the the high insulin thing is also a big indicator of massive inflammation so when your body there's there's a couple different key things on blood and when you start looking at these things when you have you know nutrient disruption or low nutrient function and things like high c-reactive protein high homocysteine high cortisol high insulin you know you're looking at a very very very inflamed system and so you've got to start breaking that down and so before i'd have this person go exercise exercise is 100 part of this program but what we're going to do first is we're gonna do, you know, kill and refill.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:05:29] We're going kill the things that are negative. We're gonna detox the things that are bad. And then we're really, really, really feed the organs tons and tons of nutrients so that we can one, get the tissue levels back up to where they need to be in this, in the storage department and the function department. And then, we'll be able to then start moving over into now you can exercise. Because until you're metabolically healthy, exercise isn't always the best idea. You know, yeah, you can get stuff moving around and your body can start utilizing things that, you know, stealing from here and there. They can feel better for a little bit. But until you get those chemicals right, until you all that stuff reset, you're going to have massive, massive problems. And then the problem we get into is that what happens is that as you start getting this, your brain, your body full of this inflammation, you start seeking things that are a little more toxic. And so people start craving sugars. They start craving, you know, the bad fats and stuff like that. So they start thinking, oh man, I want water burger. I want French fries. I want, you now, whatever. Because you're just trying to get whatever it can, specifically that MSG. So, you MSG in almost all fast food is monosodium glutamate. This is an excitatory thing. So your brain goes, oh, I feel better. I feel awake. I feel great. That was delicious. I feel happy. And then 34 minutes later, you're like, oh, now I don't feel as happy and I have a headache or and I had my, you know, whatever, I'm tired or whatever, you know, because that MSG is in cytotoxin and it's creating problems.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:07:01] So, you know, these are the type of things that we start to see when we start looking at the biochemical or the nutrient deficiency or the chemical imbalances in depression. And you're like, wow, why is depression so rampant? Why is it everywhere? They start looking at it like, well, you know, it's probably because the home life is bad. 100% agree with that. Absolutely. We need to work on our marriages. We need work on homes. We need working on our kids. 100%, no argument there at all. And they go, well. You know, it's because of the economy. All right, yeah, I can see how the economy would be depressing for a lot of people. But the thing we don't talk about is the actuality of it. Their nutrient levels are piss poor. They're not getting the nutrients they need. They're getting the things their bodies require to function. I think it's hilarious that we're starting to have to pass laws to force medical doctors, I'm sorry, sorry, to force medical schools to teach nutrition to medical doctors. You know what the funny thing about that is? You know why they don't teach nutrition? Because that's how the body works. If you teach a medical doctor how the body works, they're gonna start making people better. And that's not gonna be good for pharmaceutical sales. Which is why they do teach nutrition, which is why don't they teach, you know, all of the pathways that I keep talking about. Because.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:08:15] Again, the medical system, the NIH, the CDC, the FDA, their goal is to increase pharmaceutical profits. Not to make people better And you're like, well, that's crazy. We have the highest, like year after year, pharmaceuticals have made more money than they've ever made before. And our health is getting worse than it's ever been. I fixed diabetes all the time. I turned around dementia. You know, we fixed depression a lot. Like these are things that are not super difficult. The research is there. It's kind of, it's actually pretty old. Like a lot of the research I'm using is from the 60s. So we know how to do this. This isn't wild and crazy. And I'm sure lots of you guys have heard, people turned their life around. They were all depressed and they cleaned up their act and they ate better and they started exercising and all of a sudden they felt better. Yeah, but they started eating first. You've got to work on the diet first. You've gotta detox all the trash out. You gotta fill the body with nutrients. This is the other reason why I think that they made the white George W. Bush, not the medical, there were no doctors involved, just George W Bush decided that we should make testosterone illegal, the healing hormone, the one that fixes that has the biggest impact on depression, anxiety, fat loss, muscle gain, bone healing, erectile dysfunction, orgasm function, sex drive, mental stability. Yeah, let's make that illegal that that's gonna make massive profits for the pharmaceutical companies. It's gonna tear but it's gonna horrible, horrible impact on everybody else stuff.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:09:46] So if you guys are someone you love is dealing with depression. You need to start looking at the inflammatory pathways. You guys need to look at inflammation issues. You guys can start begging. Here's the problem we get into. Like I can tell you all the labs that have pulled. I can't tell you what to do. The problem is, is that if you have to tell your doctor to pull a lab, they have no idea why they're pulling it. They don't understand how that thing factors into the problem you have. And so that's the issue we get in to. So, well, how come other doctors aren't doing this? This requires a giant amount of biochemical knowledge in order to do this. You've got to understand physiology all the way through. Like this is why I get so pissed off when people talk about, you know, losing weight is a calorie deficit or your body runs on calories. That's bullshit. Calories are nonsense. There is no calorie function in your body. Your body runs onto dinos and triphosphates. It's made from fat or it's made from sugar. When you eat something that thing has a hormonal response to the body that tells your body what to do. If you don't understand that, that's the starting point. Right? That's like, that's like right after you read the instructions on a board game, you start you select your piece. That's the selecting your piece, understanding the body runs on ATP and how ATP is created is the chemical start for everything.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:11:02] So if they don't understand that, they're not gonna be able to help very much. So those, that's kind of the path. You guys have friends who are depressed. We do this a lot. Tell them, Ed, have them give us a get a hold of us. I'll walk them through the process and we can start getting these people better. If nothing else, you know, we can go through it. Like, you check your fasting insulin. If you're high, if you're fasting, insulin's high. The problem is, is that changing your diet is not necessarily going to get you where you want to go, because before your body can start regulating insulin, you have to regulate inflammation. When you have high inflammation, you will have high insulin. So when you have high insulin, you have insulin resistance, and that's what people call diabetes. The problem is, is that before you can change the diet and bring down the insulin resistance you've got to remove the inflammation, which is secondarily holding the insulin high. So yes, dietary changes are phenomenal for type 2 diabetes, and I highly recommend them. In fact, it's mandatory. However, you've gotta deal with this inflammatory problem that's holding the Insulin higher than it's supposed to be anyway. Because it's not always just what you eat.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:12:04] There's a lot of diabetics who've gotten better with what they've eaten, but their insulin still stays high. Why? Because they still have the high inflammation. You've got to pull the inflammation out. And the vast majority of people have a parasitic infection. This is why everybody's like, oh, I took ivermectin, I feel amazing. Yeah, all you did was kill the parasites. The things that medical science have been like, that's not a thing, parasites aren't real. Yeah, now that we find out that they are, it's just another lie the medical systems told us to keep you sick. So start by the way I do it. I'm not trying to tell you to do that would be there's a lot of pitfalls in this. You got to watch out for kill the parasites, kill the yeast, restore the function of the probiotics back to the gut while you're feeding the liver while you are feeding the kidneys. When we talk about detoxing the liver, there is no supplement or drug or technique that detoxes the liver or the kidneys, you have to feed the liver the chemicals it requires to do the job you're asking it to do. Then it will do the job it's designed to do, and it will detox the body. But you have to make the conditions for the liver to function right. That's how this all works, it's how detoxes really work.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:13:10] So that's kind of how a lot of this goes in. If you guys, if you're a little depressed, mess with it on your own, change your diet, take some supplements, get your hormones full. If you or a loved one has something that's pretty severe where they've got a decent amount of depression that's been going on for a while. Get with somebody who understands how to pull the labs what labs to look for how to deal with the inflammation How to reset the nutrient levels? Usually that takes me Four to six weeks. So not very long call it, you know, call it two months, right? Because everybody's nutrient function is a little bit different So let's say like the detox and the nutrient fill takes two months That'll include the hormones reset and I think then we can start exercising Then we can start moving on. Now what I do with it is that we always do, um, mental mindset work and stuff like that as well. So, but I don't do Freudian stuff. Like you guys want Freudian psychotherapy. You want to sit and associate into your problems and live in your problem and talk about your problem all day long. Fantastic.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:14:09] Go do that with a licensed trained therapist. We're gonna do stuff on the Alfred Adler model, which is we're gonna figure out which emotional issues you've got We're going to deal with those emotions. We're working with the subconscious. So we're going we're to look at and find and deliver and help You leave live your purpose That is where I have felt that the best mental function mental change comes from And don't let people tell you that the only way is to sit and talk about problems from a Freudian aspect You know Freud's a phenomenal a massive massive benefit to the community. However there's a whole other way Alfred Adler did all his stuff with Pavlov and Young and those guys that is the path I'd recommend. So if you guys have any questions, hit us up Questions@ChalmersWellness.com or jump over to PillarsOfWellness but get with us. If you've got that or if you have any issues with, if you've got any loved ones with depression, we'll kind of give you the ideas how to walk through it. Thanks for your time. You guys have Fabulous stuff.
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