When you think of the word "healing" images of illness or being sick immediately come to mind.  But the definition of healing is much more than that; it includes “the natural process by which the body repairs itself” and “tending to cure or restore to health”.  I’ve spent decades working with people to help them along in the “healing process".  The most valuable education I have received is working with the people themselves, learning together, enjoying the successes and sometimes sharing in their defeats.  When I first came out of pharmacy school after being bitten by the bug of natural therapeutics, I remember being disappointed that I had spent so much time studying to become a pharmacist.  But over time I realized that it was the most important course of work I have ever done.

Whether it is a drug or a natural product, an emotion, or an environmental pollutant everything has a pharmacologic and cellular impact on your future health. Understanding how to apply, lifestyle and behavior changes, natural therapeutics and drug therapy when necessary and protect against potential side effects and interactions is key to rejuvenating your metabolism and restoring health.  Knowing if a natural product has value or is just hype, if a drug is depleting an essential nutrient that is needed for your body to function correctly, or what lifestyle changes will impact your particular health challenges became a passion that still burns in me 27 years after beginning this journey.  We are all looking for answers to improve our health or the health of a loved one. My goal has always been to provide real world clinical experience and knowledge, that I have gained, and to also share the insights from all the colleagues and mentors that have touched my life on this journey.

I’ve been studying human metabolism for more than thirty years.  I’ve written 17 books, hundreds of articles and 2 complete databases.  I founded the LaValle Metabolic Institute where we’ve treated thousands of patients using natural therapeutics, and educate thousands of health care professionals a year on integrative care strategies. These approaches are important because so many people who end up at our clinic were blindsided by serious illness or condition that seemed to pop up “out of the blue”.  Most of the time these conditions were attributed to aging or lifestyle choices. But honestly, if you look around the illnesses of old age are hitting people at younger and younger ages. We are in epidemic of chronic illness in the United States: cardiovascular disease, diabetes, fibromyalgia/chronic fatigue, digestive issues, autoimmune disorders,  Alzheimer's and cancer . Many of our clients have simply lost their struggle to manage their weight, became obese, and couldn’t figure out why it happened to them.  It is time for all of us to realize that having vibrant health is an active process that if you are willing to work at, you can achieve vitality as your aging.  You can restore your health using natural therapies and lifestyle changes and I have seen this in thousands of people over the last two decades.

I don’t promise miracle pills whether they are drugs or natural products. There is a tendency to over promise what any one product can do for you.   My goal has always been to help people who are serious about restoring health, but it takes a systematic step by step approach in looking at each area of your metabolism and applying solutions and strategies to balance each of them - that is a healing prescription.  There are thousands of studies to help guide us on using natural products to improve the chemistry of your body. It is exciting to see a natural product or a drug restore health in someone when applied correctly.   And lets face it, people are on multiple drugs today, so learning about the pitfalls and benefits could help you or a loved one avoid dangerous side effects or the prescribing of drugs to manage  the side effects of other drugs!  Better yet, I believe there are strategies to limit or in some cases eliminate the need for drug therapy, why not choose the safest options first for your health. If I had to categorize what it is I do . I am a metabolic investigator and a coach for your health.  I help people understand  how to use the wide array of natural therapies and  drug therapy  needed  to help them choose the safest choices to keep their  body moving toward health, vitality and longevity. This has become a bona fide field of Medicine with the University of South Florida College of Medicine initiating a post-graduate Masters Degree in Metabolic Medicine.  I am a clinical instructor and adjunct faculty for that program.

The people we help at the Institute are there because of one common underlying issue – a downward metabolic downward spiral that had taken them over time from little problems into significant chronic illnesses.  Diseases and conditions only appear to come out of nowhere.  In reality, your health today is the sum total of all the metabolic stressors that your body has dealt with up to now, and how good your body has been at defending against it.  So stressors like diet, stress, environmental toxicity, past and current drugs, genetics and exercise all are playing out their roles in disrupting your chemistry.

Our healthcare system focuses on treating disease, rather than improving health.  This statement is not intended as a criticism.  If you’re hit by a bus, the one place you want to be taken is the intensive care unit of a  U.S. hospital.  But when  dealing with chronic illnesses, our focus is on “disease or not disease”. It’s given us diagnostic tests with a wide range of “normal” results. These don’t test for the “biomarkers” that would show us where a patient falls on a scale of “health.”  There is no real value put on trends that are within the normal limits.  If you are one point away from the top or bottom value,  then you are considered normal because you didn’t fall into the “diagnosis” criteria for a given value. For example, you could be very close to becoming pre-diabetic, but you aren't informed because your blood sugar value is normal, albeit high-normal.  That puts patients in the position of often being first ones to detect the subtle signals from their bodies that indicate that “something’s going on" or "something's not right.”

For many of you, there comes a moment – most often in your thirties and forties – when it dawns on you that “something’s not right.”  You feel as though you’ve turned some “invisible corner.” You look in the mirror, and you don’t like what you see.  You definitely don’t like the way you’ve begun to feel.  The vitality you once had is gone? Worse yet may be you never have experienced it?  You feel as though “your brain’s been unplugged from the wall and your thoughts are trying to move through jello?”  Perhaps your overall energy level has plummeted, and crashing mid-day when there’s no reason that should be happening? You no longer fall asleep “the minute your head hits the pillow,” or “sleep like a log” straight through the night?  Or worse, you lie awake for hours with an endless list of tasks running through your mind. "And of course,  you’ve gained a little extra weight, maybe only 10 pounds, but it could be 20, 30 pounds or more life-changing pounds.  Maybe you can’t seem to stay on a good eating pattern because the cravings for carbs, sweets and salt at night are just too overwhelming.  Or you feel bloated and distended after eating.  With all of this your mood begins to flatten out, and the passion that you had for your hobbies wanes, and the scariest part is that you start to notice that your short term memory is failing you.  But you just had your annual wellness check up and your blood test says your healthy and your doctor says, you should accept it, your 40 now!    Whatever issue finally got your attention, when you know what to look for you can see that these changes happened so gradually that you never noticed the signals your bodies had been sending you. Those signals are the clues that your metabolism and health are changing and taking you down that downward spiral of health.  These issues should be addressed if for no other reason than to help you regain your vitality, but many times these annoyances are also increasing health risks.  For example, gas and bloating can be related to lack of healthy gut flora, and can increase inflammation via gut immune imbalances."

If this has happened to you and you weren’t satisfied with just being told you are getting older, especially if your instincts are telling you that "something's not right", I suggest becoming proactive by better exploring your metabolic health.  There’s a lot more you can do to preserve your health than just to “eat the right things, exercise a little more" and hope to avoid becoming a statistic.  In fact, after devoting several decades to an intense study of human metabolism, I believe there’s every reason to assume that “Forty can be the New Twenty.”

First let me tell you what I’m not going to do, and that’s insult your (body’s) intelligence by telling you that complex health problems can be solved with a single pill.  Good health isn’t a gift that gets dropped into your lap, courtesy of “a super supplement” or a “secret diet.”  Most of us are smart enough to know that.  And most of you are also educated enough to know that there’s an awful lot you could be doing to regain your vitality, if you only knew exactly what worked, and what steps you should take. The key is to understand what is right for you so that it can become a personalized approach to achieving your goals. The Metabolic Code has been a passion of mine because it helps guide people to learn how to take back control of their metabolism and health. If you’re tired of short cuts that have always left you short changed, and if you’re ready to get real – then my team can point the way.

For example, there is a real connection between the metabolic imbalance, that is occurring in so many people across the United States, and the epidemic of obesity and complex chronic illnesses we’re now seeing.  The common element is inflammation, a topic of great discussion in the recent medical literature but one you may never have discussed with your family doctor.  Silent inflammation is a metabolic issue and there can be several sources:  Poor diet, weight gain, intestinal flora imbalances and environmental toxins are examples. Chronic stress in most of our lives can also play a significant role in accelerating a downward spiral into poor health.  So there’s a great deal you can do to protect yourself.

Your metabolism is a lot more than just the calories you take in and the energy you expend.  It’s the sum of all biochemical reactions that go on in your body that make you feel and look right now, but more importantly where your future health will take you.  It’s also the sum of how what the “outside” environment does to you, and your own lifestyle choices that you “do to yourself,” come together to influence your genetic code that’s guiding your metabolism.  The reason I talk about “Your Metabolic Code” is because you have an important role to play in creating your state of health.

The Metabolic Code is organized around Nine Key interrelated areas of your body chemistry that significantly affect one another.  How these key areas operate affects your body chemistry right now, and also creates your own personal “metabolic roadmap” into the future.  If the roadmap you’re creating isn’t currently heading in a direction in which you want to go, it’s entirely possible for you to figure out what’s going on and redirect its trajectory.  You’ll end up feeling better than you have in years. The Nine Keys provide you with a framework in which to organize and make sense of the incredible complexity of human metabolism, and helps you choose the most straightforward pragmatic strategies to return your metabolism to a healthy balance.

As Yogi Berra once famously said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll wind up somewhere else.”   For those of you who prefer to retain some control over the state of your health, the Metabolic Code and the Nine Keys give you the tools you need to end up where you want to be, rather than “somewhere else.”

For some of you, this may sound like rather a lot of work.  I’m not going to lie to you – changing your whole health around does take more work than simply swallowing a single pill.  But the beauty of an approach based on “whole body metabolism” is that it’s real, it works, and it rests on a solid foundation of scientific evidence.  Because it’s real, you can begin to use this model for change no matter where you fall on the continuum between health and disease.

The initial pay-off for a modest commitment to changing some of your diet and lifestyle choices can happen fairly quickly.  In the short run you will likely notice an improvement in your overall level of energy, a decrease in cravings for specific foods, and an opportunity to enjoy better sleep.  In the longer run, because your health is both a journey and a destination, you will feel the vitality coming back to you, your body will respond differently to stress, you will optimize your total health, and you will gain lasting control over your weight.  It may sound like Magic, but it’s actually based on Science.