#157 Dr Molly Maloof on Intermittent Fasting and Psychedelic Medicine

Molly Maloof (0:00)

And it just really pains me when I see people on airplanes eating garbage food, because I'm just like, you don't need the kindling. You don't need it. You actually don't need it. You just, the problem is you're not metabolically flexible.

And so you feel like you need it, because you feel like you're going into starvation when you hit low glycogen. But really what's happening is you're just not able to tap into different pathways of fat metabolism.

And because of that, people are so chained to their crappy processed food lifestyles. And it's like, to me, it's just mass brainwashing.

SPEAKER_2 (0:31)

Do you want to know what it is?

Siim Land (0:35)

Body Mind Empowerment.

SPEAKER_2 (0:37)

Get stronger, faster, smarter, quicker, friendlier, more helpful, more driven.

SPEAKER_4 (0:43)

Everything the body needs.

SPEAKER_2 (0:44)

Control your mind.

Siim Land (0:48)

Welcome to the Body Mind Empowerment Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land. And our guest today is Dr. Molly Maloof. Dr. Molly is an MD, scientist and speaker who helps people optimize their health, nutrition, and fix imbalances in the body's chemistry.

Dr. Molly, welcome to the show.

Molly Maloof (1:02)

Hi, nice to be here.

Siim Land (1:05)

Yeah, we did a podcast together with you and Tim Morin a few months ago. So what have you been up to since that time?

Molly Maloof (1:13)

Well, lots of things. So in the last four months, I have done three meditation retreats. So it's actually September, October, November, December, January. So it took me five months.

And I've been really learning a lot about consciousness and fundamental well-being and really just exploring parts of health that I kind of kind of ignored for a while. So I've been so focused on the physical plane that I haven't really paid as much attention to emotional health and spiritual health. And so I decided to take a three month mini sabbatical.

And work on my book and work on whatever projects bring me the most joy. And so that's where I'm at right now. So I'm updating my practice. I'm working on a book. I'm doing podcasts. I'm learning to surf. Actually, I'm learning to kitesurf, doing lots of hiking and just enjoying the fruits of many years of labor being a doctor.

Siim Land (2:15)

Yeah, definitely. Doctors tend to be one of those people who, although they are supposed to be very healthy, oftentimes their own health tends to suffer because of working too much or doing the long hours.

Molly Maloof (2:31)

Oh yeah. And in fact, in America, this is something I try to explain to people. America, doctors have the number one rate of suicide. And although I've never been depressed, when I found out that number, I was so sad because basically doctors are chronically burned out and they're at capacity.

And it's because the amount of work on their plate is beyond their ability to maintain.

Basically, doctors can't maintain their health in their job most of the time because the job drains so much of their energy and there's not a lot of time for self-care. And so I believe that chronic stress plus energy deficiency breaks the brain. And whether you call it anxiety, burnout, depression, those are all just manifestations of brain dysfunction. And so what's really even more concerning to me is that medicine might be the third leading cause of death in the country, in America, because of so many mistakes made, and because of side effects of drugs and infections and surgical errors. So we are at a crisis point in our country with our health care system. And that's part of the reason why I pursued really trying to understand what is health fundamentally, instead of how do I just fix more sickness? Like I really wanted to understand that the first principles of health creation so that I could understand why chronic disease develops. And I discovered that most chronic diseases like cancer and heart disease and diabetes and these leading causes of death in America all have similar underpinnings and the underpinnings are actually disorder, energy regulation and metabolism through our lifestyles. So we sit too much, we eat the wrong foods, we eat too much of the wrong foods at the wrong times.

We have way too much stress and we live in a culture of the narrative self. So people are constantly telling themselves stories by who they are, which causes even more internal stress. And then we live in cities which are super filled with all sorts of source of generalized uncertainty which basically increases the baseline level of stress. So now we just have disordered energy regulation, which eventually if energy efficiency reaches 50 percent decline, then you start seeing the manifestation of chronic disease. So when I figured all of this out, I was like, oh, this is actually, I mean, our focus should really be on figuring out metabolism.