Dr. Jay Wrigley: Hormonal Health is the Key to Midlife Wellness

Dr. Jay Wrigley explores the critical role of hormones in midlife health. Learn why traditional approaches often fail and how understanding your changing hormonal landscape can transform your wellbeing. Dr. Wrigley shares insights on recognizing hormonal imbalances, the interconnected nature of hormonal systems, and the importance of personalized care. Discover why becoming self-reliant in healthcare matters and how eating "like a predator" can optimize your hormonal health.

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Transcript

0:22

The modern healthcare system won't help you heal. It's designed to keep you sick and dependent on drugs. If you want to get well, you've got to get out of the system. You've found Predictive Health Clinic. Join us as we get well and stay healthy. Hey, thanks for being with us, folks. I am joined today by Dr. Jay Wrigley, who I've actually spent a lot of time talking with, and I knew this was somebody I wanted to have on the Predictive Health Clinic. Jay, thanks for being with us. Glad to be here, Jack. All right. What's the one topic that you want us to focus on in today's episode? My specialty is in metabolic and hormonal health. So anything that we can go down the road of that I can help people with, and it would be In those issues related to hormonal changes in midlife that would affect women through peri and postmenopause, or even men going through drops of what we call now, andropause. And how that affects things like you know, the metabolic health issue of weight and things like that. So any, you know let's ordinarily, I would ask what got you interested in this, but I'm going to, I'm going to dive a little deeper into your first answer. look at their own set of symptoms and say, Oh, this might apply to me. You know, the, probably the biggest one that, you know, that I would deal with it again, I'm gonna try to stay within my wheelhouse and ballpark. And that would be what would be most common Jack would be, um, that certain point in time of age. And I think that you and I probably have both. Already been there. And that is where you get the first wake up call of, okay, you know, things are changing and The things that I used to be able to do to correct them so let me give you a better example. It'd be a woman or a man who, you know, somewhere mid forties, let's say, who has a tendency to, you know, throughout the holidays or whatnot, pick up an extra 10 or 15 pounds their past history has been, hey, I'm gonna hit the gym. Come January look at my diet a little bit, and that'll take care of that in a couple of weeks. Yeah, that'll all be back to the way that I want it to be in my energy will be better and all that kind of stuff only to find out that, oh, that doesn't work any like that that it's not that easy anymore. You just, you don't up your gym going and cut back on a few calories and things don't go the way that they used to. So this is where we have reached an area of our life where the hormonal landscape in our bodies, both men and women, I primarily focus on women, but I do a lot of work with men too is the landscape of hormones is changing and all of these hormones that are beginning to decline for various reasons that are, you know, that are natural, A lot of it would be for women to, you know, their body or bodies are not looking to support childbirth anymore. And a number of other factors, but as these hormones begin to decline, they all had a metabolic effect and they all had a, they play so many roles in how your moods. Feel how well you sleep at night, how well you burn energy, how well you are able to partition and not store fat, but use it for food. Fuel those things begin to decline and all of a sudden you're finding yourself in a situation where What's going on? And I can't get out of this like I used to be able to so those would be Those are the things that crop up where give you the first hint that there's something going on here And too many people just throw it out as a you know, either I'm not working hard enough. I need to do it harder or I'm just getting older. That's what a lot of doctors, unfortunately, would say to people. Hey, you're not as young as you used to be. Can't expect this and that and whatnot. You know, I call BS on that because what it is that I do as a physician is that it's not just because you're four years older than you used to be. It's you're playing with a whole different, you're playing a whole different game with a whole different rule book and nobody told you about that. So it sounds like the key takeaway here is. Most of us who are past 40 have begun to experience this. If you're seeing your body do things that it didn't use to do, and you feel like you're doing the right stuff and your body's not responding, you may be dealing with just a hormone issue. Is that a good way to summarize it? Absolutely. That. Yeah. No, actually, that's, you know, you nailed it. I mean, you know, my first thought was to go, OK let's explain why that. Is a hormonal issue because we could say things like, okay, maybe stress has elevated into, in your life at this period of time, for whatever reason, COVID financial stuff or whatnot. So we all know that stress plays a big role in throwing our health or our body function a little bit out of balance, but truth of the matter. is that's all because of the hormonal response to stress. Yeah. All right. So let me ask you, what got you interested in this particular field of healing? You know, it was not planned out at all. I just happened to, you know, when I was in med school you when you began the clinical part of your work or whatnot it was very common that some. One of your clinical teachers became a mentor of yours. You looked, you either wanted one or they were looking to be a mentor or whatnot. Just so happened that the oddest weirdest thing in the world that could have happened to me was I developed a relationship as a. Southern raised male. And I can probably just leave it right there to be in medical school on the West coast and have a woman clinician who was. A, can I say this, that she had an alternative lifestyle? How do you say that nowadays that she'd chosen for herself that, you know, that her partners were not Bible belt material. Not Bible Belt material, right? And I was a jock on top of that. So I meet this woman named Tori, this wonderful doctor. But she's gay and is about the opposite thing of anything that I ever was raised with. And we hit it off and developed this amazing relationship out of respect for each other. And she taught me so much about hormones and how they affect, you know, daily function in life and especially from the female side. And it. At that point, I don't even know that I had made up my mind that I decided to do that. What ended up happening, I'll speed the story up, Jack, is that when I graduated and did my residencies and moved around and did talk about other education that I did in functional medicine and traveling in Southeast Asia and picking up all kinds of education there. But when I came back to Charlotte, North Carolina, And built the clinic that I did called the art of living center, which was kind of a complimentary holistic model of a healthcare clinic. It just so happened to be that the people that came in on The majority of the patients and clients that I got, and I think that this is true for a lot of general practitioners anyway, happen to be women. Women go to the doctor far more than men. You know what it's like, and you have to drag men to a physician. So there's already an outnumbering of women to men. And then I began to pay attention to the fact that most of them, where I was demographically and everything, happened to be in the age bracket of somewhere between 40 and 60. And then I began to pay attention to the fact that what I had learned from Tori, my mentor that I was talking to you about, and realized that It's all hormonal. Every, you know, what they're coming in here for what they think is, I don't know, you know, I'm gaining weight and I don't have any energy and I can't sleep well at night and I'm anxious all the time. And I don't know where all this came from or whatnot. Basically there's You know, your answer is the progression of the dropping of estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, and how that played out for this particular woman. It all ended up being hormonal. So that's where I began to realize that You know what? Go with it. It's interesting to me. I love studying it. I love learning all of the biochemistry behind the hormonal pathway. So that just turned into what I do. And I've just kind of guided you down that path. Absolutely. So let's talk about the next question. I normally ask a couple of questions. What's the biggest misconception about This particular question and what's the truth? Often the answers go hand in hand. So let's talk about what's the biggest misconception about the role of hormones and how they affect us. And let's focus it on that particular cohort that you're talking about folks north of, let's call it midlife 40 ish. Okay. Okay. All right. Yeah, that's a loaded gun. That's a big one, huh? That's a big one, but it's the most important. I mean, it's so the biggest misconception, I'm going to guess one just sitting in the chair of a layman. Okay. They don't play a big role. It's kind of minor. It doesn't affect many people. I'm going to add to that and say that you're right. And but there's a reason for that being probably right up there at the top of the answer to that question. And that is because they don't nobody ever told them anything about it. They don't know to even think that this could be a hormonal. issue along with them thinking that it's probably not because they're not all that important, but it's a lack of knowing. It's a lack of education. It's a lack of doctors paying attention to that they're the most important thing that we probably have in our body. You can't let every single signal that's sent from anywhere in your body from one part of your body. Or one cell of your body to another cell to tell it what it needs to be doing right now is a hormone. And so it affects every single thing that's going on with you every minute, every day, how you, whether you're able to take a breath or not, whether your heart beats or not, whether or not you have energy, whether you can sleep well, it's at the heart of all this, but yes, the Like you said, is that it's not talked about, it's not well understood because doctors don't have, and I'm not trying to speak negatively, but sometimes I do, against some of my colleagues or whatnot, is that they don't, you know, once you've been trained in what you do, doctors don't like to go out and think that they need more education. So they don't, unless they do it on their own, they'd have to go and learn a bunch of biochemistry that they never was really never taught in our medical schools. And you know, in the model, it seems like the model of allopathic medicine is to increase the level of specialty. I think I heard once that an expert is somebody who knows, learns more and more about less and less until ultimately they know everything about nothing. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So Let's talk about, uh, you're somebody who recognizes yourself in this description. What's the most likely outcome if you don't get the hormone issue addressed? That may be too general a question, but so the answer to the question, Jack, is that if you don't get it addressed, then you're going to have a, these things are progressive. They're going to get, things are going to get more complicated because here's the thing, the challenge with hormones, when one gets out of balance. There's a, there's always a feedback loop and a safety mechanism of something else that's going to try to rescue that condition. It's so if this is the beautiful thing about our bodies is that they are so Always striving for homeostasis that, that balance, right? So if one hormone gets out of balance here, it would be a common one. If somebody develops some type of a thyroid dysfunction, where they're not for a number of different reasons, but if they're not getting enough thyroid hormone into the tissues of their body, which means they're not getting enough oxygen into their body, which means, That they're not burning fuel, very good. And what that's going to affect is your metabolism is going to slow down. You're going to gain weight. You're not going to think as clearly. You're not going to sleep well. You're not going to have any energy if I didn't say that one already. So these are some common symptoms of somebody with a thyroid issue. Now here's what happens is if that's not dealt with, what's going to happen is the two little glands that sit on your kidneys, your adrenal glands. are going to come to the rescue or they're going to be called to come to the rescue to make up for this thyroid deficiency. In their toolbox, They don't have thyroid hormone in their toolbox of the adrenal glands. They have ways of, okay, this person is, you know, their energy levels are running too low. Their metabolism is slowing down and this is beginning to affect things like their blood pressure is dropping too much. Their hearts not beating as strongly as it needs to. So the adrenals come in and go, okay, we can step in and help by secreting things like adrenaline called epinephrine or raising your cortisol levels, which is your stress hormone, which will keep everything in balance. And it's a great thing that we have that are we, you know, we wouldn't have survived so long without having these, what we call flight or fright. the adrenal glands. The problem with them is that they're doing a job that they're not meant to do. And they're not, they're long term. It's makes more of a mess than it does a fix. Cause if you have a bunch of adrenaline being secreted into your bloodstream, to make up for the fatigue and low blood pressure of a thyroid problem. Then after a while with all this adrenaline in your system, it's going to begin to wreak havoc because it's a huge stimulant. I mean, it would be like somebody who's on amphetamines. all the time, taking something that's speeding everything up because it's trying to make out, you know, for, so the get to get back to your question. The problem is that if they're not dealt with something else is going to come in to try to help, then it's going to burn itself out or cause problems. And then something else is going to try to come to the rescue. And it's all, It's the it's why people need to love their bodies is because to go, it's, it is working so hard for you, even when like you're doing all the things that are causing most of these problems, but your body is there trying to keep everything under control and in balance as hard as it possibly can. And a lot of those are symptoms and their symptoms that not only that don't feel good, there's, but there's symptoms that, that your body's actually working for you. But it's also kind of an alarm system of if this doesn't get dealt with that the root cause of this problem. You're going to run into some real big issues. Let's talk about avoiding running into big issues. What's, what are specific steps that someone can take to prevent this this catastrophic set of cascading failures. What are the, what do you do? This is called the predictive health clinic. So we're trying to say, Hey, if you don't do X, you're going to end up with Y results. So let's what is it that folks need to do? Okay, so there's two parts to that. I would probably 10 parts of that, but let's start to I, in the past and what most physicians would start this to answer to this question off with Jack would be to say something, you know, if they were. Holistically minded, let's say like functional medicine. Like I do is you're always going to go to you know, diet, diet is, you know, by far the number one foundational thing that has the biggest impact on preventability of problems down the road. And the biggest probably ability. To produce the level of health that anybody would want. So that, I mean, that stands out at the top of this. I have kind of changed that in a little bit that I think that there's a step before that, that I'm beginning to see. And that is. Because let's just get to it somewhere in there is, there's a way of eating that most people know would be better for them, even if they don't know the ins and outs of metabolic health. And some of the stuff that we talk about that, it's, you know, the things around protein rich foods and whole foods and eating a little bit on the lower carbohydrate side so that you're not stimulating insulin. Even without knowledge about that kind of stuff, most people would know that if they, you know, increase their level of intake of clean foods and ate more, you know, organic vegetables and fruits and clean meats and things like that. Anyway, I'm getting to, most people have this sense of most of what they would already need to know to, if they just went out and changed their diet that way. That they know it would be hugely beneficial to them and it always would be So the reason that we have such a problem Is that there's got to be a step before that and that step before that is you've got to have some kind of reason to Do that you've got to have a purpose of why it is that you want to eat in a certain way Now often it becomes people wait until they have some type of a major health problem before they even consider to change their diet. Other problems here, and I think that this is the one that's been on my mind for a lot lately is, and this is going a little bit left hand turn, but I think you'll appreciate it. Is that somewhere in there. People have lost. Yeah. We talk about like strengthening a muscle and making something stronger by, you know, utilizing it or whatnot. We have lost the ability to make and keep agreements with ourselves. We don't do that very well anymore. So many people on a daily basis are, I'm going to change my diet. I'm going to eat better today or whatnot, or I'm going on this or whatnot. But look at how many times that where the weakness was, is that the ability to make an agreement with yourself and actually keep that agreement. Is that's where it breaks down right there. So if you know, that's a whole nother podcast, but I'm trying to put in there that there's might be a step that we need to, in order to get to the things that are not as hard as people think they are, like how to align your diet. in a way that produces metabolic health and energy and a great cognitive functioning and leanness and strength and all that, that's all laid out. It's kind of right there, but the ability to do it. and maintain it seems to be coming from a place of you've got to first strengthen that part of you that has really answered your why you want to do this your purpose for this and you've got to get a little bit better at wanting to or not to when you make an agreement with yourself you keep that agreement. I think you're right. I think this is another podcast. Yeah. All right. Let's move it along then. Let's talk about, I'm going to back up and just reiterate what Dr. Wrigley said for our listeners. What's the specific action you should take to prevent this type of hormonal cascade collapse, get really good at making and keeping agreements with yourself. That's profound and powerful right there. Okay. I'm going to talk to Dr. Wrigley again. I like to ask our guests about common complaints, common compliments as a result of the type of work that they do. What's one of the more common complaints that you get from your patients? My work is so kind of laid out that's pretty easy to say that Dr. Wrigley, I am a 48, 49 year old female. I just in the last year, I just, I don't know what's going on. I have no energy. I can't stay asleep at night. I'm finding that I'm anxious a lot. I brain fog. I can't like my mind is not as sharp as it used to be. And my periods are all over the place. Irregular. I'll get, sometimes I'll skip a month with a period. Sometimes I'll have two periods in the same month. So that would be a, that would be a every single day. I'm going to. See a patient that's going to tell me that. Okay, ladies, I think, you know, you're going to recognize yourself in that description. Let's talk about compliments. What's one of the more common compliments that, that come as a result of your work? Frame that a little differently. Jack said, I understand how to play it into. So somebody comes to you and says, Doc, I need help and you lay out a plan for them and they actually follow the plan. Is there a fairly common response after folks? You know, do they, what's the compliment that they pay you? What are they talking about? Once they've followed your guidelines, what are they saying? They're, they give me way too much credit. This is what they do. They, if they are compliant in what I build out for them as a protocol. To put this biochemistry back into a balance that allows them to now feel Fantastic and energetic and they sleep great and they've lost 30 pounds in 75 days whatever they they're on top of the world and they think that that i'm some kind of master genius who all this kind of stuff and it's You it's complimentary. It's also, it's to me, I take it with you. My job, I went to school to become a doctor, which you know, the Latin word of that is docere, which means teacher. My job was to teach you how to be well in the midst of what it is that you brought to me. You had to do all of the work. I don't do the type of work that some doctors do where some, you know, somebody came in with a huge inflammatory response. And I was there to give you an injection of cortisone and then send you home with a prescription of prednisone and just shut all the inflammation down in your body and all of your rashes and your joint aches and all of that went away. And it was the medicine that did that. Now, unfortunately, we all know that once that medicine is run through the system. It's probably going to come back and it's going to come back roaring. What I'm trying to get at Jack is though, is that in my work, it takes a lot of work on the patient's behalf. Because it's all about compliance. It's, I understand what needs to happen, but what needs to happen requires you to do certain things that are, you might be unfamiliar with. I need you to eat in a certain way. I need you to eat at a certain time. I need you to shift things around. That you usually have done into a different way, and I need you to utilize and take maybe some nutritional supplements for a period of time to open up some pathways, so you're going to need to swallow some things on a regimen of how it's laid out, whether it be one, one twice a day or one three times a day or one a day. So there's the person who gets the success is doing the work. And I'm answering your question correctly, I get a lot of feedback of, I saved them and they, you know, the thanks they give me is unbelievable to the point of, it becomes uncomfortable. Because I'm picking up your lack of comfort with this question a little bit because it's like you did the work, you know, I'm glad that I was there for you and I had the knowledge to build you out what to do, but you had to go do that. Like I didn't, you know, there, I don't have some kind of magic pill where every, you know, patient here swallow two of these a day and all your problems go. No, you've got to. You gotta do the work. But I am, I'm rewarded in my work with appreciation for sure. But I want my patients to know that they should give themselves a big pat on the back. Yeah. Because they're doing they're doing some changing. This is my, we're come, we've come to question, question nine. This is my favorite question by far. And I can't remember if I framed this for you or not, but, in my work my, my real job that I get paid for, we will occasionally recommend to our clients that they put some ads up on billboards, but billboards are only good as a complimentary advertising medium. If you're depending on billboards to drive your business, you're going to be very disappointed. And then we go further and we say, look, and if you're going to use a billboard. You have to limit the number of words because most of the people are going to see that billboard or driving by at 30 or 50 or 60 miles an hour. And they don't have time to read much more than five, six or eight words. So that's why this question is, if you had to deliver your message and you only had Eight words, no more than would fit on a billboard. What would those eight words be? And it can be less. I wouldn't yeah, I'm not scared of that question. I was, I just wasn't really, I didn't have something already prepared for that. So I've got two that are on my mind. One would be the bigger picture. I think I would probably say something like this. Become self reliant in your own healthcare. That would be a big one because I think too many people are leave their health care up to whatever doctor that they see. And I think that's not a good practice anymore at all. Another one in there that just came to mind. Oh, good. He's got another one was because of so much of my work. Does rely on changing people's way of eating, because if I'm going to influence their biochemistry and hormonal balance or whatnot I definitely need them to understand the relationship of food and what foods are best and, you know, to promote hormonal balance and fat loss and energy production and brain health or whatnot. All right. So if I had to say one that was more related to the nuts and bolts of what I do, it would be something like this. Eat like a predator, not like prey. Ooh, that's the mic drop moment right there. Eat a predator, not like prey. Most people are protein deficient. Most people fuel themselves with way too much high processed carbohydrate food. You would not see this in the wild. You would see that the fastest, strongest, leanest, most healthy animals are those that are predators and they go after. You know what they go after, but I love that. Yeah. So you, if you ate more like a predator and less like their prey eats, which are usually grass vegetarian feeding animals you, you do well. Eat a predator, not like the prey. Our guest has been Dr. Jay Wrigley. This has been Predictive Health Clinic. Thanks for joining us. We'll talk to you next time. Are you a healthcare practitioner? Eager to escape the grind of corporate medicine? Are you ready to make a massive difference in your world? Listen up. We are the Wizard of Ads. For 40 years, we've created dominant brands in a variety of industries. Now, we're bringing our magic to healthcare. We're seeking one extraordinary health care practitioner to help us build the first national brand in direct primary care. If you think you could be that person, let's talk. Email us at health at wizard of ads dot com. Tell us why you think you're the one. That's health at wizard of ads dot com.