Many people focus on getting healthy, but staying healthy requires a different kind of awareness and consistency. In this episode of the Freedom to Flourish Podcast, Dr. Joel Miller and Dr. Tim Augustyniak discuss how long-term wellness depends on understanding your body, maintaining the habits that helped you heal, and paying attention to your personal “Achilles heel.”
The conversation covers foundational wellness habits including nutrition, blood sugar balance, sleep, movement, stress management, hormone support, gut health, detoxification, inflammation, methylation, histamine issues, and targeted supplementation. They also discuss how lifestyle and epigenetics can influence long-term health, especially for people who are prone to chronic symptoms, immune imbalance, or metabolic issues.
This podcast transcript is provided for educational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. Please consult with a qualified healthcare provider before making changes to your health routine, diet, supplements, or treatment plan.
Dr. Joel: Hey guys, welcome to the Freedom to Flourish Podcast. I’m Dr. Joel Miller here with Dr. Tim Augustyniak. Guys, we are talking about not only how to get healthy, which is what we talk about in most episodes, but we’re talking about how to stay healthy.
So many times we see people, if they do get well from whatever health issues they’re dealing with, tend to backslide or even revert to different health issues over time. Dr. Tim and I often see that people generally have a hard time getting healthy, but they also often have a hard time staying healthy. So how can we maintain good health over time?
I would also say that Dr. Tim not only maintains good health, but continues to improve overall slowly. So we’re gonna get into all that good stuff today. Dr. Tim, I’m glad to be here with you, and it’s good to see you.
Dr. Tim: Yeah, it’s good to see you too. This is gonna be a good episode because honestly, I feel like we just always talk about, “This is how you fix problems, this is how you fix problems.” But so many of my patients, once we get through the thick crowd, the question is always, “How exactly do we move forward?”
I don’t like to just say, “Hey, let’s automatically get you on a maintenance schedule,” because I don’t want it to seem like I’m in this line of work for just a money grab reason and that I just want people to come in because it keeps my business full of people.
Some people treat it like, “Okay, well let’s just keep up because once we fix problems, I wanna stay where I’m at.” Whereas other people like the suggestions that we can provide to keep themselves healthy without really having to come in.
A big part of what we do is patient education to teach our patients, “Okay, this is why you got down this road in the first place.” It was a hormone issue driven by blood sugar issues. You ran out of resources to detoxify things, your adrenals went out of whack, and from there your immune system fell apart and all these things crept in.
So we have to backtrack with dealing with inflammation, dealing with immune system problems, healing hormones, healing your liver, and providing your body with resources to fix all that stuff.
Then once you get there, it’s like, okay, after a couple of visits you should be good to go. However, if you creep backward with your diet, things go astray. If you don’t sleep well, if you get back on caffeine, if you do all kinds of stuff like that, things can start to fall apart again.
What we really would like to get into today is what we talk about with patients once we’ve helped them get to where they’re feeling really, really good, and how they can keep themselves healthy.
We’re gonna provide some examples of identifying what your Achilles heel is, that one thing you might have a problem with, and how to identify that and then keep an eye on it and take measures to make sure that doesn’t continue to be a problem, or at least maintain it.
Most of the time, it’s not like somebody has five different things they need to really hone in on once they’re healed. It’s more so one thing that can cause that whole cascade to creep back again. As long as we keep ahead of that, things tend to be pretty good.
So that’s the idea for today. Once you get past the healing-yourself stage, how do you maintain that depending on what your specific problems are?
Dr. Joel: I like it. And to comment there, Dr. Tim, on your kind of business mindset, we have the same thing here. I stole this from my front desk, Rachel. She says it all the time: “We love you, but we don’t wanna see you.”
Essentially what she’s saying is we want you to get so well that you don’t have to come back. Part of that is also understanding how to stay well.
So let’s jump into things. The first step we always talk about is overall digging yourself out of the hole, which is getting well. We talk about dealing with inflammation, healing gut issues, balancing hormones, and so on.
If you have specific autoimmune conditions, you wanna work to get to the root of those and support the immune system in reversing those autoimmune issues. If there are nutrient deficiencies, toxicity, things like that, obviously you wanna work to balance those things out.
For our listeners, that’s where we’ve made a number of different episodes covering different topics and conditions to really dig into each one specifically as far as how to get out of those holes.
Then the second piece, which I think is huge, is identifying your Achilles heel. I really like this topic. I think this is really, really big. Dr. Tim, anything else you wanted to add to the first step before we get into the Achilles heel topic?
Dr. Tim: Just whatever way you have to. We always talk about dealing with inflammation, fixing metabolism, blood sugar stuff, healing your gut, dealing with food sensitivities, heavy metals, whatever the situation is.
Whatever your inflammatory or metabolic issues are that contribute to your problem, fix those. We’ve got a million episodes talking about how to fix all those problems, but that’s not the goal of the episode today. The goal today is: once you get past that, what do we do?
Identifying your Achilles heel is something that, quite honestly, you will probably figure out through the process of healing yourself in the first place.
For example, I use myself as an example. I know for absolute certainty that methylation is a problem for me. My sister did some genetic testing, and she’s horribly sensitive to caffeine and has really poor methylation. All of her problems are problems that basically everybody in my family shares.
It’s a blatant dead giveaway that we have methylation issues. When I take methyl vitamins, I feel so much better. So if that’s your Achilles heel, maybe keeping up on stuff like that is gonna be helpful.
However, I also have food sensitivities, allergies, autoimmunity, things like that, where certain foods I just need to stay away from.
Usually with patients it’s not that you have numerous things in this list, but I guess I’m my own patient sometimes, and I’m a bit extreme with the list we have here.
So having your Achilles heel can mean methylation issues or genetic factors that lead to problems. It can be more prone to insulin resistance. Some people grew up in a household where health really wasn’t important. You grew up eating a lot of sugar, maybe overweight as a kid, things like that.
There are limitations into adulthood where genes expressed as a child when you had insulin resistance can carry on into adulthood. So you might be more prone to metabolic issues or dialing in blood sugar regulation. Keeping that maintained may be more difficult for you.
Maybe your Achilles heel is histamine intolerance. Some people have significant allergies to environmental stuff. I know that’s a huge problem. If you’ve got that going on, you’re gonna be more prone to all sorts of immune system problems.
Then the last thing we’ve got on our list here is lifestyle habits and tendencies. If you have a very addictive personality, and not in a good way, where if you have one cup of coffee you’re gonna have 100 of them, or you try out a video game and all your responsibilities go away and you dedicate all your time to that video game sitting on your butt, those personality traits can contribute to overall issues.
That might be your Achilles heel, where you need to be more dialed in on your habits lifestyle-wise to make sure you don’t spiral down that path.
So this isn’t really something we can say, “Oh yeah, these are concerns of this problem.” It’s more so understanding throughout your process of healing yourself what the biggest problem is, because sometimes that’s gonna be your Achilles heel.
If your biggest problem while working through things is struggling to take your supplements right, maybe it’s more of a behavioral problem. If you’re really struggling to detoxify things even with support from things like vitamins, you probably have a genetic issue.
There are a couple different things that point to different problems. It just takes being perceptive of what your weakest link in the chain is as you’re working through things.
Dr. Joel: Yeah, that’s good. I like it, and I’m gonna piggyback off that a little bit as well. I like how you’re phrasing this Achilles heel piece, especially when you mention that you usually learn what your Achilles heel is as you go through the healing journey.
For a lot of people, let’s take a common case like gut issues or constipation. One of the questions is, okay, obviously in getting well from constipation you go through that journey. There are usually a number of different things that you address that give you the biggest impact.
Maybe it’s a couple of herbs for small intestine bacterial overgrowth, maybe it’s a parasite cleanse, maybe it’s a certain way of eating, maybe it’s avoiding certain foods.
When you figure out what that is and you’re getting well from it, that’s a huge key as to what your body is more prone to struggle with.
Outside of that, it gets really interesting because when we jump into lifestyle, I feel like lifestyle often coincides with beliefs, which is a really interesting topic.
For example, let’s say you are constantly dealing with cortisol issues because you’re working all the time. I’ve had a number of patients that just work all the stinking time. Then the question is, okay, why do you work all the time?
Is it because you’re in financial lack, in which case you wanna continue working on your job and career and all those things? Or is it that you’re not in lack, but you just wanna increase financial security as much as possible?
Then the next question is, are you trusting God with your financial security? Are you pushing too hard in that area? Or maybe it’s more of God’s will for you to rest more and things like that.
So that’s one example of how your beliefs can impact your lifestyle, the decisions you make, and how you spend your time.
A lot of people are just in a rush all the time, so they don’t have time to eat good food or prepare good food. Okay, well if we don’t eat good food and prepare good food over time, we’re gonna see more inflammation, more hormone imbalances, more overall stress, and more issues with our health.
Again, a lot of it goes back to lifestyle. How are we spending our time? Are we eating well? Are we making the right choices? Are we resting enough? Are we getting enough movement in?
A lot of that goes back to what we’re prioritizing in our lives. In some deep sense, what are we worshipping? Where we spend our thoughts, our time, and our money all point to what we worship, which is a really interesting topic.
All of that can go back to your Achilles heel. Obviously, if you have a really bad leaky gut or inflammation issue, that could be the Achilles heel.
Yes, you take some herbs and heal the gut and it gets better within one to two months, but that gut overall might need consistent nutrition, sleep, and movement in order to fully heal over the next six to twelve months.
That piece could be the Achilles heel through that process. Those would be more of the root issues we talked about.
If you’re more prone to mold toxicity and you’re working in an old building or going to school in an old place that might have mold, then again you wanna consider that and keep that in mind so when you heal you don’t fall back into it.
Lots of different things there, but again, what is your Achilles heel? What are the top threats to your health that either put you in the position of sickness and disease or could potentially push you more in that direction?
Dr. Tim, we’ve got our next step here and that’s overall keeping up on metabolic health. We’ve got some of the basics here for maintaining good health, right? We talk about nutrition and diet, sleep, and exercise or movement.
What are some of the things you’re encouraging patients toward here when it comes to these core principles? What is the focus on maintaining health?
Dr. Tim: Yeah, honestly this part is probably the simplest. We’re gonna talk about supplements and things like that depending on what your problem is, and then your Achilles heel is something you have to pick up on while working through your own problems and identifying where you struggle the most.
But keeping up metabolic health honestly comes down to if you eat right, exercise, and sleep well, you’re gonna be good to go.
But what do we mean by that? When we say eat right, we don’t just mean eat lots of vegetables and green foods. Green leafy vegetables full of micronutrients can be really good, but if they’re not organic and they’re covered in pesticides, that’s not great either.
One of the best places you can get quality fats and nutrients isn’t vegetables, it’s good grass-fed, pasture-raised meat. Those are complete proteins that rebuild our tissues effectively and give us all the fats we need to clear inflammation and produce hormones.
One of the biggest detriments to our health is poor blood sugar regulation. That is the precursor to all metabolic disease, where you have too much insulin and too much cortisol from blood sugar constantly going up and down.
Intermittent fasting can cause this. Too many carbs and too much sugar can cause this too. It just depends on which end of the spectrum you’re on.
Most people who come into my office have been under-eating for a long time. They think they’re being really healthy, but things are just ill-informed.
If you’re not eating enough often enough, then when you do eat carbs you can get big spikes in blood sugar and lots of insulin introduced into the system.
The yo-yo effect of insulin and cortisol can contribute to pretty significant problems. Maintaining blood sugar properly is one of the biggest things we focus on.
In order to do that, eat three meals a day about five hours apart with plenty of protein and fat at each meal. I usually recommend 35 to 50 grams of protein and around 30 grams of fat per meal.
If you can’t make it five hours without feeling hungry, you probably need more food. If you’re eating too many carbs per meal, you’re gonna feel tired afterward, and that’s a good indicator.
Beyond that, just make healthy choices. Avoid processed sugars, avoid caffeine, and eat plenty of whole foods like fruits, vegetables, and meats. Not a ton of grains, because those can be inflammatory and high in sugar.
We always talk about the dysglycemia diet, and really basing things around that is gonna be beneficial. That’s not to say you can never deviate from eating three meals five hours apart.
If you’re doing really well and effectively healed, it’s okay to have ice cream late at night every now and then or a cup of coffee here and there. It’s okay to go off the rails occasionally with birthday cake, soda, and things like that.
As long as you’re doing really well most of the time, you’re gonna stay much more stable. Those little deviations are exceptions to the rule.
If you maintain good metabolic health overall, you’re not going to deplete the resources needed to detoxify hormones and cause that whole cascade of bad health to come back again.
So that’s the diet part of it. Honestly, it’s not even necessarily about the types of foods for the most part, as long as they’re whole foods and you’re eating enough often enough, you should be good to go.
As far as exercise goes, there are different recommendations regarding minutes of aerobic exercise and weight-bearing exercise per week. The general recommendation is about 150 minutes of exercise per week.
Basically, if you divide that into workouts, that’s five 30-minute workouts per week, with at least two of those focused on weight-bearing exercise like lifting weights and the other three more cardio-focused.
That’s probably the most textbook recommendation you can get. I would argue that if you build good habits and you’re feeling good, it could be beneficial to do even more weight training and cardio, but it just depends on what fits your lifestyle and what you can maintain.
Any exercise is better than no exercise. Just make sure you’re not pushing yourself to the point of injury, because that can kind of reset this whole thing too.
Then our last step here is sleep, which is just maintaining a good sleep schedule. There are a lot of ways to go about this. Set your phone down at 9:00 if your goal is to be asleep by 9:30. Don’t stay up too late on weekends.
Maintaining a relatively consistent sleep schedule can be super beneficial. I don’t tend to get too hard on this topic with patients because most people already know they’re supposed to be consistent with sleep.
You’re not supposed to sleep in an extra four hours compared to when you wake up during the week. It’s not really rocket science.
By the time you’re at the point of attaining health, usually your sleep is already doing pretty well. Anyway, Dr. Joel, do you wanna walk us through some things you say to patients on these topics?
Dr. Joel: Yeah, the beautiful thing about maintaining a lot of these things, nutrition, exercise, movement, and sleep, is that they’re really pretty simple.
I would say nutrition may be the more complicated one, but in general with movement I usually tell people to aim for around 10,000 steps a day.
Other than that, when it comes to physical movement, of course weight-bearing things like lifting weights are helpful, but beyond that just do what you enjoy. If you like pickleball, go play pickleball. If you like swimming, go swim. Do things you enjoy.
Same thing with sleep. Prioritize it, have a normal sleep schedule, and make sure you get enough sleep. That’s really important.
Alright, the last piece overall with maintaining good health is supplementation. I would say in general that if your diet, exercise, movement, and sleep are really good, supplements should be minimal if needed at all.
But the cool thing about supplements is that we can use them to make up for any lack in those other areas.
One of the things we always talk about is supplementing in a way that addresses your health specifically and your Achilles heel specifically.
So what does that mean? If you have a ton of stress, hopefully just for a season because of difficult things going on in life, you might need magnesium for a little bit, maybe even a couple different forms of magnesium.
If your issue is your schedule and it’s really hard to get good meals because you’re eating out more, you might need support to help balance out the seed oils and omega-6 fats from those foods.
It definitely depends on your lifestyle and your Achilles heel. Dr. Tim, I know there’s a lot more here. Walk us through some of the stuff regarding methylation and histamine or detox issues people tend to have and how we can support those things to maintain good health and avoid falling backward.
Dr. Tim: Absolutely. Before that, something hit me while we were talking about our second step, identifying your Achilles heel. I think we assumed people understood what that means.
It’s a common saying that your Achilles heel is your weakest link or the problem most likely to fall apart.
In Greek mythology there’s the Iliad, and Achilles is basically the main hero in that story. He was dipped into a river by his ankle, so the only part of his body that didn’t touch the water was his heel.
That’s why the Achilles tendon got its name, because that’s where he ended up getting shot with an arrow. The rest of his body had protection, but that one spot was vulnerable.
So that’s what we mean by Achilles heel. It’s the one part of your body or one issue that tends to be your biggest problem.
Depending on what your Achilles heel is, supplement recommendations and the things you need to keep up on are gonna be different.
For myself, things like camu camu or quercetin are phenomenal. I’ve got an autoimmune condition where I can’t have dairy from a cow, not even butter. I can do goat or sheep dairy, but cow dairy messes me up.
If I slip up, taking camu camu or bioavailable vitamin C works as a phenomenal antihistamine and helps me get back to normal quickly. It’s not something where I have to go through multiple layers of healing. I can just take those things and feel normal again within a day or two.
Those are probably two of my top recommendations when it comes to food allergies, especially for upper GI issues, heartburn, stomach issues, and gallbladder issues.
When it comes to methylation issues, some of the giveaways are things like struggling to maintain blood sugar properly, insulin resistance, or difficulty keeping hormones balanced.
That might look like hot flashes, headaches around your cycle, heavy periods, or things like that. In those situations, a methylated B-complex can be really important.
One commonly recommended one is Methyl-Guard by Thorne. It’s got activated B6, methylated B9 and B12, and trimethylglycine.
Those are some of the most common things I see helping with methylation issues. I wish it also had choline and maybe magnesium, but those are harder to combine into one supplement. Still, it’s a really good one that covers a lot of different bases.
Another phenomenal supplement for hormones and insulin is artichoke extract. Honestly, that might be one of the top nutrients we give out in the office.
So many people come in with hormone issues, upper GI issues, insulin issues, and all kinds of related problems. The glucuronidation detox pathway in the liver for insulin and steroid hormones is super deficient in a lot of people, and artichoke is one of the best nutrients to support glucuronic acid production for that pathway.
Glucuronic acid is also really important for bilirubin conjugation. I’ve got patients with Gilbert syndrome and similar metabolic issues where they struggle to conjugate bilirubin, and artichoke helps tremendously.
If they stay on it, they feel really, really good. So artichoke is helpful for a lot of reasons.
If you have hormone issues, gallbladder issues, insulin issues, or similar concerns, it can be great to use periodically.
When I say “here and there,” I mean situations where you know you’re going off the rails a little bit. Like if you’re out for dinner and want ice cream afterward even though you have a dairy allergy, you know it’s gonna mess you up.
Every now and then you can tolerate a little bit, but taking antihistamines like quercetin or vitamin C can help dig you out of that hole afterward.
Same thing with methylated vitamins. If you’re taking something like Methyl-Guard to support hormones, I usually recommend taking a whole bottle every four to six months as a sort of reset.
But maybe your symptom is hot flashes and you notice they start coming back around three months after stopping it. That’s a good indicator that maybe every three months works better for you than every four to six months.
It depends on your lifestyle and how well you’re doing overall. That’s why it’s an involved process where you have to pay attention to your symptoms and know what causes them.
Beyond that, some other things that are generally really good for hormones are vitamin B6, P5P, NAC, and artichoke, which we already talked about.
A lot of those are good not just for hormones but also for histamine issues and immune system function.
If you have enough of those resources, you’re able to produce more glutathione and other antioxidants that regulate the immune system effectively.
Overall, if you regulate the immune system and hormones properly long-term, you’re less likely to have other problems creep in.
If you have good antioxidants, good hormone detox pathways, and sufficient cortisol and insulin regulation, you’re gonna be in a good spot.
I know we talk about the same things all the time, but honestly if you boil it down to the most important and simple concepts, that’s really it: keep the immune system balanced, support your weakest links, and stay on top of things like antihistamines, B vitamins, or hormone detox pathways depending on your needs.
It all depends on what your weakest link is and what you personally need to maintain.
If your health is doing really well and you bounce back easily, maybe you don’t need to supplement much at all. But most people who end up in our office are there because they have some sort of underlying issue or a more out-of-the-box problem than the average person who can seemingly handle everything.
You don’t come to our office because you’re perfectly healthy. You come because you’re trying to figure out why your health is suboptimal or why you’re dealing with weird symptoms.
A lot of those things are tied to genetic tendencies, so maintaining support appropriately can be super helpful.
Dr. Joel: Yeah, there’s a lot there. That was really good. Just to comment on the genetics piece, genetics are definitely important, and honestly we should probably do a whole episode on that topic.
But there’s also a lot to be said about epigenetics. A lot of people hear “genetics” and immediately think there’s nothing they can do about it. But epigenetics is really about how your environment and lifestyle influence the expression of your genes.
If we focus on those things, most of the time genetics become far less significant. We could easily do a whole episode on that.
As far as supplementation for maintaining good health, again it comes back to your tendencies, lifestyle, and specific needs.
One of the basic nutrients I see a lot of people needing is camu camu, which is a whole-food vitamin C source.
From what I find with muscle testing, people exposed to more radiation from phones, Wi-Fi, and things like that tend to run low on antioxidants, especially vitamin C. I often find a correlation there.
Sometimes B vitamins can also be really helpful, although you wanna be careful with B2 and B12 because they can feed certain bacteria and fungus in the gut. You just wanna make sure they’re not worsening gut symptoms like bloating or gas.
Patients often ask, “What supplements should I take every day just for good health?” and honestly the answer is different for every person.
The focus really needs to be on nutrition, movement, and sleep. If you get all those things right, very rarely do you need long-term supplements unless you’re occasionally eating foods you probably shouldn’t or dealing with some specific issue you need extra support for.
Then you can support those areas so you can still live a relatively normal life and enjoy things here and there.
But yeah, Dr. Tim, I think that’s pretty much all I’ve got as far as this episode goes. Any last topics or thoughts before we close things up?
Dr. Tim: No, hopefully all of our listeners got something out of this. I feel like this episode can be really helpful in a lot of ways, but also kind of vague in some ways because a lot of it comes down to figuring out what your specific problem is and then adjusting based on that.
Once you get to this stage though, you usually should have a pretty good idea of what your tendencies are and what you need to stay on top of.
It really all depends on what you’ve got going on. Anyway, let’s wrap things up. Dr. Joel, why don’t you tell everybody where you’re located and how they can contact you?
Dr. Joel: Yep, Dr. Joel Miller here at Freedom Health and Wellness Clinic in the Dallas, Texas area, specifically Flower Mound. Our website is DrJoelMiller.com and you can also find us on Instagram.
Guys, if you have any questions or thoughts or would like a free phone consultation, we do that all the time for people who reach out, and we’d love to get you set up.
Dr. Tim: Yeah, and I’m Dr. Tim Augustyniak down here at Flourish Functional Wellness Center in Arkansas. If you’d like to find me online, my website is flourishfwc.com.
I’m there on the homepage and there are links to all the socials as well as contact information for the office.
If you have questions, comments, concerns, or suggestions for future episodes, feel free to reach out. We’re always looking for new suggestions because we’re kind of running thin on ideas, so please help us out. We’d greatly appreciate it.
Anyway, thanks everybody for listening. I hope you guys have a wonderful day or night whenever you’re listening, and we’ll see you guys in the next one.
