Summary: 

In the interview on Wellness Your Way, Dr. Bill Rawls discusses his journey with chronic illness and how it led him to help others with similar conditions. He explains the concept of a wellness and illness continuum, emphasizing the importance of addressing root causes to move towards wellness. Dr. Rawls also discusses the role of diet and stress in illness, highlighting the importance of a balanced diet rich in protective phytochemicals and managing both mental and physical stress. He further explains the role of microbes in chronic illness and the importance of maintaining a healthy cellular environment. Dr. Rawls advocates for the use of herbs to reinforce the body’s defenses and shares some of his favorites, including Chinese skull cap and cat’s claw. He encourages continuous improvement in all areas of health and wellness.

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Full Episode:

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Transcription:

Megan Lyons:

Thank you so much Dr. Bill Rawls for coming on Wellness Your Way. I am very excited to have you here today.

Dr. Bill Rawls:

Oh, thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Megan Lyons:

Well, I have been so enthralled by reading your book. I am in love with it, and I would love for you to tell the audience a little bit about you, your background, your book, anything you want to get us started.

Dr. Bill Rawls:

Okay, I’ll do that. I’ll try to make it short and quick. I’ve been a physician for over 30 years now. I started as a conventional doctor. I went to medical school, specialized in obstetrics in gynecology really because that dealt with a well population who cared about health, younger, bringing life into the world. It was really fun. The downside of that though, at that particular time was that I was on call for labor and delivery and emergencies in the hospital every second to third night and every second to third weekend. And most of the time when I was on call, I didn’t get much sleep that went on for 20 years and just stress of balancing everything in life and doing this really rigorous call and a really busy practice. By the time I was in my late forties, I was starting to develop a lot of different kinds of health issues.

Finally, my health crashed. I ended up having to stop doing obstetrics and kind of thought, well, as soon as things are better, I don’t have call. I can get back to sleeping normally and everything’s going to get better. It didn’t. And my sleep got worse. I really lost the ability to sleep. I started having joint issues and gut issues and brain issues and heart issues that were really scary, heart arrhythmias, and it just got worse and worse and snowballed. Conventional doctors didn’t really seem to know how to help me. They threw drugs at my symptoms, but that was about it. Lots and lots and lots of testing different specialists, but nobody could really pinpoint anything. I was finally given a diagnosis of fibromyalgia, but if you know what that is, all it’ll get you is just prescriptions for symptoms and that’s about it. So a lot of people with fibromyalgia, it’s like I got to find something else.

I mean, there’s something going on here. And I kept thinking about hearing about Lyme disease and thinking I got bitten by ticks plenty when I was a kid. It’s got to be something microbial. And initial tests were negative, kept at it until I finally found that I was carrying some of these microbes and thought, Hey, this is it. I’ll get antibiotics. I’m going to be fine again. And the antibiotics just made me sicker instead of better. Long story short, I did eventually through much study and searching with alternative therapies, found herbal therapy, which I now call phytotherapy because I was using really intense herbal extracts of various kinds and I started getting my life back and that just kept getting better to the point that I recovered my health completely. And of course I changed my diet and a lot of things about my lifestyle, but the herbs, while did that make a difference. So I’ve spent the past 15 years of my career helping people with those kinds of conditions and understanding what’s going on, why people get ill, and why the herbs made such a difference in my life. So it’s been a really interesting journey.

Megan Lyons:

Well, that’s fantastic. And so many of the most excellent providers have had this unfortunate downturn in their own health. So I’m sorry that you had to go through that, but goodness, thank you for turning it into a path that has helped so many others and will continue to do so.

Dr. Bill Rawls:

I look on it now. Yeah, it was just faith. I had to go through that to learn what I did. And there was a point where it was like I went from being frustrated and angry and confused to just paying attention and saying, alright, what am I supposed to be learning here and how can I use that to help other people? And that was the breakthrough. That’s when I just started learning. I started pouring into PubMed and looking at studies and just churning to figure out how can I make this something that I can help other people with? And that really accelerated that whole process.

Megan Lyons:

That’s amazing. And somewhere in that journey you came up with this wellness and illness continuum, and this was maybe in the first 20 or 30 pages of your book and that already got me sold. So I’d love for you to tell the audience a little bit more about that continuum, how it came about and what are some of the things on there.

Dr. Bill Rawls:

So much of what we do in conventional medicine is we ask how is this patient sick? What symptoms do they have? What abnormal labs do they have? What abnormal processes like inflammation are going on in their body? And we treat those processes, but we never get around to asking why is this patient sick? And with chronic illness, we do pretty good job with acute illness. You break your leg, we know why you’re sick, we’re going to fix that, we’re good at that. But chronic illness, they discount the possibility that a lot of things are coming together and we need to pay attention to that. So we end up treating these manifestations of illness, the symptoms, the processes like inflammation, but we don’t ever get around to asking that question why. And so that was part of my journey to figure out, to really get down to the heart of, get to the root causes of why that I’m sick, to see if I can move forward.

And realizing that illness wasn’t a diagnosis, it was a state of being. And when you look at that spectrum, at one end of the spectrum might be a 20-year-old in peak health who happens to follow good diet and good dietary habits and they’re an athlete. Well, that’s the peak of health. Yeah, it doesn’t last all that long. So none of us are completely a hundred percent. Well for most of our lives. We all have symptoms that come and go. At the other end of the spectrum is somebody that’s kind of at the end of life that their body is basically not functioning anymore. So what I see is no matter where someone is along that spectrum, they have the ability to increase their level of wellness. They can do things by looking, by asking that question, why do I have this symptom? Or why am I having the spectrum of symptoms or that’s defined as an illness, what’s driving those things? And when you get at those root causes, then you have the ability to kind of move back toward that wellness end of the curve. And I think anyone has that potential at any point in their life.

Megan Lyons:

I love that. One of my personal core values is continuous improvement in all things and health and personal development and business and you name it. And to feel inspired that we can always improve in our wellness on that continuum is just so motivating to me. So thank you for that. But let’s talk about the other end of the spectrum to start out, which is what creates illness. I want to start with diet because that’s my favorite. You have a quote, you say, our diet has been stripped of protective phytochemicals through modern farming techniques. I think that has so much in that quote. Can you explain this and any other problems you see with our diet?

Dr. Bill Rawls:

Yeah. Well, that kind of ties it into one reason why I think everybody should be taking herbs every day. And when you look at the modern diet, there’s a lot that’s going wrong there. It’s loaded with carbohydrates, abnormal fats that we really shouldn’t be eating and the wrong ratios of food nutrients. It’s got better nutrient supply than most people realize that people aren’t dying of vitamin C or different kinds of vitamin deficiencies. So it’s covering the basics, but it’s an overload of carbohydrates and fats that aren’t good for us. So when I look at the diet, it’s not necessarily nutrients I see missing as much as I do these things that we call phytochemicals. So phytochemicals are chemicals that plants produce to protect themselves, specifically to protect their cells. So all living organisms have stress. The world, it’s just living in this world. It’s a mixed bag of things that promote life and things that challenge life.

And so all living things have to deal with free radicals and toxic substances and radiation, but especially microbes. Microbes of every variety. So every living organism has to have a defense system. We have in our immune system, plants have the sophisticated chemical defense system, but it’s not just for microbes. It neutralizes free radicals and toxic substances of every variety and radiation, just about every stress factor that we could be exposed to. Plants are being exposed to and they’re making this chemical solution. But also plants have, they’re regulating their cellular function. So they’re multicellular organisms like we are so chemical messengers, hormones, other signaling agents. These are things that we use to coordinate cellular functions in our body. We’re all made of cells. And so plants are doing that same thing and they’re using a lot of the same chemical messengers and hormones and things that we are.

So when we take a plant, certain plants are actually going to augment what we’re doing in balancing our stress hormones. So when we’re taking an herb, we’re getting that defense and regulatory system of the plant. And when we take that in, it’s having that effect on ourselves. It’s protecting ourselves from radicals and toxic substances and microbes of every variety. So you’re boosting all of your own cellular defenses with those of the plant. And that can be very powerful, but we’re not getting it in our modern food supply. So if you go back 50,000 years, for hundreds of thousands of years, humans ate a forage food diet. They ate about two thirds plants matter, but an average human on the face of the earth that far back pre agriculture was eating up to 500 different plants in a year. So we’re eating maybe a couple a dozen, 500, but they were eating the raw wild plants.

So they were getting all of these protective phytochemicals that were rich and robust within the plant. So they’re getting all this stuff. We don’t get that anymore because our food plants are cultivated to produce calories. And by doing that, by cultivating our plants, we de-stress our plants. We use pesticides and herbicides and we protect them from stress. And in doing so, we’ve downregulated all those protective chemicals in our food plants. Now, not to say that eating celery and broccoli and all of our vegetables is really good for you, you do get a lot of that phyto chemistry, but not as much as their wild predecessors. But the other thing is we eat a lot of grains and a lot of beans, and that has the lowest concentration of these phytochemicals of anything else you can eat. So we’re just, that I see as one of our biggest dietary deficiencies is not getting these things. And it’s a really big argument for why each of us ought to be taking a regimen of herbs every day.

Megan Lyons:

Yes, really great point. So I’ll summarize what I heard is the two major factors here as number one, we’re getting too many grains, beans, and I would add certainly processed food, processed sugar, chemically stuff. We’re getting too much of that. But then even when we are getting the vegetables, which are, they do still retain some nutrients, I want everyone to hear that. Don’t stop eating your vegetables. But let’s say that zucchini that I get that’s perfectly shaped and huge and no nothing on its skin, none of that. Well, it makes you think that plant didn’t have to go through very much stress. It was probably given who knows what chemicals to protect it from all this stuff. So it did not generate its own defense mechanisms, which would have helped me if I had eaten that 50,000 years ago or whatever. And that is why we need some kind of supplemental phyto chemistry through herbal medicine. Is that true?

Dr. Bill Rawls:

Yeah. And that big juicy zucchini is going to have some of those chemicals still in it. So you go to the grocery store and you look and go, well, those organic zucchinis are kind of scrawny looking. They don’t look quite as good. There’s a reason for that, but they’re actually better for you.

Megan Lyons:

Yes, yes, absolutely. Thank you for all of that great information. Let’s talk about one of these other aspects on the illness continuum, which is stress. And when I say stress to people, they think only of mental stress, which is a huge part of it. But you make the distinction between mental stress and physical stress. Can you touch on each of these a little bit and how they’re contributing to our illness epidemic?

Dr. Bill Rawls:

Yeah. Well, here we’re getting down to the title of my book, the Cellular Wellness Solution. So along the way, I recognize that if you want to simplify something, break it down to its smallest functional unit. So in the medical system, we’d break things down into systems and systems are made of organs. And so it’s really complicated and because you’ve got all these processes going on and each systems so much that we have to have cardiologists and pulmonologists and rheumatologists and all of these different doctors, but that’s not the simplest unit in the body. The simplest unit is a living cell. So all of our cells you can think of is like microscopic machines that have a job. So your heart cells, they’re working away pumping our heart thyroid cells, they’re producing thyroid hormone brain cells, they’re firing impulses. So everything that happens in the body is done by cells.

So when you look at a cell, you go, all right, I’ve got these little microscopic machines. What are the specifications to keep that machine operating properly? So when you look at it from that point of view, all cells in the body need five things. Every cell, all cells need the right nutrients, every cell. Now that varies like you’re, that thyroid cell needs some iodine to produce thyroid hormone, heart cells slow burn, they like to burn fat brain cells, they’d like some quick energy with carbohydrate. But if you’re eating a whole food diet, you’re getting that full spectrum. Number two, our cells need a clean environment. All these toxic substances we’re exposed to collecting our cells. And it’s like throwing sand in the machinery of your cell. It’s going to work, but it’s going to have to work harder and it’s going to burn out faster.

Number three, our cells work hard, especially during the day and they need downtime. So nighttime when we’re sleeping is really important for our cells to recover. If you’re feeling fatigued the next day, it means your cells haven’t recovered from the day before. So downtime. Fourth thing is they need good blood flow. So we need to be physically active to move blood to flush away toxic substances from our cells. And fifth, our cells need protection from microbes, viruses, bacteria, all these things that we’re exposed to are our cells, arch enemy because basically microbes use our cells as food and that’s how they do damage. So you can flip those things around to the five stresses that drive all of illness, every single bit of it, nutritional stress, toxic stress, mental stress, physical stress and microbial stress, and that’s it. So looking at them, yes, they’re five different kinds of stress and they’re all important, but some may be more important for one situation or a person’s situation than another.

Megan Lyons:

Yes, very interesting. I think the one that people, of those five that people will be least familiar with is microbial stress. And this was a big part of your journey and I think is maybe part of more people’s journey than they’re aware of because these microbes, every human has microbes. I mean, it’s impossible and bad to not have any microbes. So we all have some, but when they get out of balance or when they become stronger than our own cells and they’re using our own cells for food, we can start having some problems. So can you start with the basics? What do you even mean when you say microbes for someone who might be unfamiliar? And then what symptoms might someone be feeling if they’re having an issue with this?

Dr. Bill Rawls:

Yeah, every symptom you can imagine, and microbes are microscopic single cell organisms, bacteria or single cell protozoa, single cell yeast from the fungal side of things or single cell and viruses are not a cell, but they have all the parts to introduce themselves into a cell and reproduce. And quite frankly, we’re exposed to a lot of different things. And it’s a big conflict of interest because everything has to eat, all living organisms have to have food, nutrients and other resources to survive. And all living things are food for something else. Our cells, our tissues are food for microbes. They have to have organic material from the living organism to survive. So the ones that we encounter are host dependent. They depend on a host. Now we have a relationship with some things in our body that they are living within our body. They’re getting the resources they need without necessarily attacking our tissues.

And here we’re talking about our normal four that live in our gut and on our skin and other body openings, but technically they’re separate from us. We have barriers. Our first level defense is barriers. Our skin, the intestinal lining, the lining of our lungs. So these things are designed to keep moisture in and keep microbes out because these things are threatening. So we need to keep those microbes contained inside the gut. So we have 40,000 different species of that we know of and who knows how many different viruses, they haven’t even been able to count them yet that live in our gut and they’re not threatening because they’ve got food. They’ve got food that they can survive off of, and that’s just can, we are an ecosystem. We support all of these things. Microbes on the skin aren’t as dense in concentration because they live off the oils that we secrete to lubricate our skin.

So lower concentration. But here’s the deal, the microbes of all varieties are constantly wanting to get inside the body because our tissues are a really good juicy food source. Now, I call it the difference between unprotected food and protected food. So our tissues and our cells are protected. We have our immune system, we have these barriers, and then there’s unprotected food, the oils on the skin and the food in our gut. But things are trying to constantly cross those barriers. So right now while we’re talking, we have bacteria that are slipping across from our intestines, from our sinuses, from our skin into our bloodstream, and we’re constantly exposed to things that we don’t even know about. So I’ve spent a lot of time working with chronic Lyme disease patients, and everybody’s worried to death about ticks. They should be very aware of ticks. But these micros that we get from ticks are Purdue low grade pathogens.

Most people don’t get acutely ill. That’s the problem. Some things like covid, well, you kind of know if you have it, but most people who get tick bites, they don’t even know it’s happened. The tick crops off and these bacteria get into your system, and most people don’t get sick. 95% of the people that I talk to with chronic Lyme disease don’t remember getting sick around the time of a tick bite. But just because you don’t have symptoms, don’t doesn’t mean that they can’t do damage, that they don’t do harm. These things are very stealthy. So it’s the low grade pathogens that really get us, because these things from our gut, from our skin, from tick bites, from putting things in our mouths from when we were kids, from being nipped by a hamster or scratched by a dog or a cat, all of these things were opportunities for microbes to enter our bloodstream.

And our immune system is that second level of defense beyond the barriers. But we know that now that things get past that, and when they do, they invade our cells. So a lot of viruses, bacteria, protozoa, they all have the ability to invade and live inside cells. But our third level of defense is our aren’t defenseless. They can fight these things off. They can destroy some of these microbes, but the microbes, they have one last trick up their sleeve. They can just go dormant. And this is an age old survival mechanism by bacteria, viruses, protozoa. Every microbe has this ability to go dormant. If you look at the total mass of all microbes on earth, 60% of them are dormant at any given point in time. So dormancy, microbe, dormancy is a really important survival mechanism and they can go dormant inside of our cells.

So what scientists are finding is we do have that in our blood cells and in our tissues, our brain, we have a microbiome and all these microbes within our body and all these things that we pick up through life can become dormant in our tissues. And as long as they’re dormant, our cells keep right on working. We don’t get symptoms. Everything is fine, but you have chronic stress. You go for 20 years without sleep and you eat a bad diet and you push that stress button continually, continually, continually and stress your cells. These things start to reactivate. And when they reactivate, they start breaking not only those cells down but the adjacent cells. And when that happens, your immune system comes in and says, we can’t have that. So they start attacking the cells where the microbes are emerging, which is what autoimmunity is.

And that process elevates to the point that it’s like a pot boiling over that it’s just self perpetuating that your body shift from an environment that favors healthy cells to environment that favors microbe growth with the microbes breaking down your tissues to create a continual food supply. And that is what I think fundamentally is going on with every chronic illness and different microbes reactivate different places in the body in different ways. So we have a lot of different symptoms and a lot of different chronic illnesses. But that in a nutshell, it’s a pretty good chance that that’s exactly what’s going on.

Megan Lyons:

Wow, really interesting and such a great paradigm shift for people. So let me again try to summarize and make sure that we’re all on the same page. If I as a thankfully healthy individual, if I get covid, it’s a virus, so I get it that it’s a little different, but let’s just go with it. My immune system, I feel it. The viruses causing havoc in my body, so my immune system takes care of it. It’s a miserable few days, but all good. If I was bitten by a tick, I grew up in Connecticut, so I have had several tick bites. If I was bitten by a tick, it’s possible that the Borrelia in this case could just be dormant in my cells and they’re waiting for a period when my cells are so unhealthy because I’m chronically stressed or under sleeping or undernourished or poorly nourished or whatever else, then they’re going to activate and take advantage of this time when my cellular health is low, then they’re going to wreak havoc and because already I’m unhealthy, it might spiral into an autoimmune condition or various other conditions, is that

Dr. Bill Rawls:

That’s the theory and that’s the theory of a lot of scientists coming around the world. The issue so far though is defining that, and it’s hard because we can’t chop up healthy people and look inside their cells very easily. We don’t do highly invasive biopsies of people’s brains that aren’t having any symptoms and other tissues in their body. So it’s hard to define. I would suspect that if you chopped up everybody in New England, you’d find that a very high percentage of people were carrying these microbes. And we don’t know. We’re putting together which microbes do which microbes like so far, they haven’t found evidence that the SARS virus becomes dormant inside cells, but they’re speculating that it is possible. But what does happen in people is you get that challenge from something like a covid infection and that allows reactivation of other things. So it’s not unusual that people have reactivated Epstein-Barr virus and other kinds of microbes.

And so when we look at the tick-borne microbes, there’s a lot we don’t know. I mean, they found that one TIG species carries over 237 different families of bacteria, and we don’t know what most of them do. And that’s true with so many of the things that are passing into our body and entering our cells. There’s even speculation that some of these things that may be crossing from the gut or skin or that we’re picking up actually have a symbiotic effect with our cells, that our cells need them to function properly. So we’re still on the learning stage at that time. But if all the science comes together that proves this theory to be correct, it’s going to totally upend our understanding of chronic illness. But even in its very basic form, it provides a really elegant explanation for any chronic illness. I mean, you start looking at the underlying stress factors and the possibility of what microbes someone has been exposed to in their lifetime, and you start to piece together exactly why they’re having the symptoms that they are.

Megan Lyons:

Yes, really interesting. So now people are like, oh my goodness, there are microbes all over the place. I’m going to get sick. And the truth is no one chooses to get a tick bite or chooses to get covid or whatever. We will encounter these microbes. But let’s talk about the section in your book, which is titled Defend. We’re learning by reading how to defend our bodies and keep ourselves healthy so their defense mechanisms are strong. Can you offer us some tidbits or tips from that section?

Dr. Bill Rawls:

Yeah, I think it’s just really important to keep our vigilance up without being paranoid about it. I mean, I do everything I can to keep myself from getting tick bites, but at the same time, I’m not paranoid about getting a tick bite. So in the summertime, protecting yourself the best you can from keeping yourself from getting a tick bite. But I’m outside a lot, occasionally I get that. But other kinds of things. We got really smart during the covid years about how we interacted with other people wearing masks, all of the things that we did. And it was really smart and it was remarkable that the incidence of influenza and a lot of other illnesses just plummeted during that couple of years that everybody was in basic somewhat of a quarantine. And I’m not suggesting that we have to live that way, but do think about the fact that yeah, there are a lot of microbes that are floating around Now, fortunately, the vast majority of these things that people are exposed to in life have a low potential to cause serious acute illness.

And it’s because they’re so common that our great ancestors were exposed to them. And we have built in immunity to most of the things, but some of them are going to get into our system. So keeping ourselves healthy is really important. Just good health habits, good dietary health habits, keeping your stress down, exercising, getting adequate sleep, protecting yourself against all the toxic substances that are floating around out there. But the thing that I think that everybody could do that they’re not doing that is probably more important than any of the things I just mentioned was taking herbs every day. Because every herb you take has antimicrobial properties. It’s like giving your immune system and all of your defenses this enormous boost. But the cool thing about herbs, unlike an antibiotic, an antibiotic indiscriminately kills all bacteria. But the herbs, it’s a system that has intelligence. So when you take an herb, it’s for pathogens, but it doesn’t disrupt normal flora in the gut. In fact, I’ve found that taking herbs does a better job of balancing the gut microbiome than probiotics or anything else that I’ve seen. So taking an herb can really reinforce your defenses without adding a penalty that you would find taking some kind of a drug.

Megan Lyons:

Yes, fantastic. And the world of herbs is so huge, but thankfully you’ve done so much of the research and compiled some of your favorite herbs and some of the highlights on those in your book, the Cellular Wellness Solution, and you have a line of herbs that people can buy. But I’d love for you just to choose maybe a couple of your favorite herbs. I’m sure that’s like choosing your favorite kid or pet or whatever, but talk to us about the power of one or two of the herbs that you’ve studied.

Dr. Bill Rawls:

Yeah. Well, I’m always taking new herbs and I enjoy trying herbs because herbs are safe enough that with the right categories of herbs, if you know what you’re doing, you can try things, embrace different things. So that’s part of my learning journey. But there are things that everybody ought to know about that are pretty simple. Herbs called adaptogens are very important because they have the potential to balance stress hormones, protect our cells, balance our immune system functions, provide some antimicrobial properties, but they really have no drug-like effects. And one really nice adaptogen is Rhodiola native to Siberia, but it’s also found in the Appalachian Mountains. So plants get around. That’s a really nice herb. Turmeric is a very nice herb for protecting us from inflammation. It’s good for arthritis, can help protect against dementia and a lot of other issues, it’s not just plants. Many of our mushrooms have similar properties.

So risi mushroom is a really nice mushroom that is considered an adaptogen. It also has been studied and it has some of the most potent anti-cancer properties that we know. And probably a lot of that is because many cancers have connections to microbes. So it’s really important. In fact, every year I’ve ever studied, I’ve been able to find information that has documented anti-cancer properties, another really important reason to take herbs. So those are a few basic ones. Now moving over to herbs that have a little bit stronger antimicrobial properties that we use for helping people with various kinds of chronic conditions. Japanese not weed, it’s an invasive in a lot of people’s gardens, but it’s an extraordinary antimicrobial herb with adaptogenic properties, also has resveratrol that to substance we find in wine, well, there’s even more in Japanese, not wheeling. Great for your heart, Chinese skull cap. People have asked, well, if you could only have one herb, what would it be? It would be Chinese skull cap because it’s a great antimicrobial. Adaptogenic properties has immune modulating properties that are exceptional, just balancing immune system functions, keeping down parts that are overactive and boosting parts that are underactive. So that’s a really nice herb. Cats claw is very good. The Amazon has many really wonderful herbs. So those are just a few that I mentioned in the book that are really good.

Megan Lyons:

That’s amazing. So if someone just wanted to start not with all of those, but with one or two that was best for them, would you direct them to your website? Does that have information to help them choose or to the book or both?

Dr. Bill Rawls:

Our website, we do have combinations of products. So any herbalists will tell you that you get a lot more benefit if you’re taking a composite of herbs that work together. So herbal formulas are something that’s been always used in herbal traditions. It’s like you get this synergy that’s just a lot more than the single herb. So herbal formulas have anywhere from three to up to a dozen different herbs in them. And getting that synergy can be really important to get the full value. So typically I’m using formulas that I’ve been working on for almost two decades now.

Megan Lyons:

That’s incredible. And you have been so generous to offer us a discount code, which we’ll put in the show notes for people. So thank you for that. For anyone who wants to head over there as we wrap up, I’m always just personally curious, and I know the audiences as well for Health Pioneers in the field. I’d love to hear a little bit more about your routine having gone through health challenges and now on the other side, what are one or two things that you do on a daily basis or regular basis that make you feel your best?

Dr. Bill Rawls:

Yeah, I try to really pay attention to those five categories of stress, and that’s really important for anyone. That’s a hard learn lesson. By the time I was 50, I thought I was reaching the end of my life, and now at 67, I’m still doing things like kite boarding and pretty vigorous exercises. So I’m pretty careful about my diet. I eat a whole food diet. I try to eat more vegetables than anything else every day. I’m really particular about trying to get a full eight hours of sleep. My minimum exercise is walking three miles every day. Amazing and pretty conscious about environmental toxins, just to try to minimize as much as possible. And the final thing is taking that regimen of herbs every single day. And I’ve been doing that for 15 years, and I think that provides a resiliency that you just can’t get otherwise.

Megan Lyons:

That’s so fantastic. Such an inspiration to just have your toe dipped in all of these different buckets. There’s no expectation that anyone has to be perfect and every single thing, I don’t even think that exists, but getting closer and closer where we started was continuous improvement. I know for me, I’m always trying something new with my diet. I’m never going to say it’s perfect right now there’s just always room for improvement. So I think in all the areas of stress and wellness and illness, there’s always room for improvement. You’re providing really great information for people. So we’ll include all of the links in the show notes, but if you could just leave the audience with any more thoughts and especially where to find more information from you, that would be great.

Dr. Bill Rawls:

Alright, well thank you. It’s been a great interview. Real pleasure. So our company is VitalPlan, V-I-T-A-L-P-L-A-N.com, and the book you can find on Amazon, but also our site. And just thanks for your support. This is a journey that we all need to make. There are too many people out there that are chronically ill and it’s not up to the healthcare system to change that. It’s up to us to change that.

Megan Lyons:

Yes, I could not agree anymore. I highly recommend getting Dr. Rawls book and heading over to vitalplan.com, we’ll put those links in the show notes. And one more time. Dr. Rawls, thank you so much for being on Wellness Your Way.

Dr. Bill Rawls:

Thank you.

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