Stay Off My Operating Table

Why Your Relationships Might Be Making You Sick: Former Drug Rep Mark Groves 166

• Dr. Philip Ovadia • Episode 166

Share episode

Former pharmaceutical rep Mark Groves shares his journey from selling statins to becoming a relationship expert in this thought-provoking episode. Groves delves into the often-overlooked connection between our relationships and physical health, explaining how suppressing our authentic selves can lead to inflammation and various health issues.

Learn how making small choices in diet can empower us to make positive changes in other areas of life. Groves emphasizes the importance of setting boundaries, using our voice, and addressing resentment to improve both our relationships and physical wellbeing.

Discover why the quality of our relationships at age 50 is a stronger predictor of health at 80 than traditional medical markers. This conversation explores how learning to express ourselves authentically can have far-reaching effects on our overall health and happiness.

Timestamps:
0:00 Introduction
5:30 Mark's journey from pharma rep to relationship expert
12:45 The connection between relationships and physical health
20:30 The power of making small choices
28:15 Setting boundaries and addressing resentment
35:40 The Harvard Study of Adult Development findings

relationship health, authentic living, inflammation, boundary setting, Harvard Study of Adult Development

Learn More:
Website: https://markgroves.com/

Send Dr. Ovadia a Text Message. (If you want a response, include your contact information.)

Joburg Meats
Keto/Carnivore-friendly meat snacks. Tasty+Clean. 4 ingredients. Use code “iFixHearts” to save 15%.

Chances are, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you didn't need to change your life and get healthier.

So take action right now. Book a call with Dr. Ovadia's team. 

One small step in the right direction is all it takes to get started. 

--------------
Connect with Stay Off My Operating Table on X:

Learn more:

Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings

Any use of this intellectual property for text and data mining or computational analysis including as training material for artificial intelligence systems is strictly prohibited without express written consent from Dr. Philip Ovadia.

Speaker 1:

Hey, welcome folks. It's the stay off my operating table podcast with Dr Philip Ovedia. Bill, I can't help but feel, after doing a little bit of research on this guest, that you picked this guy because this is the kind of stuff I'm really interested in. It's kind of more woo-woo and out there, so thank you, and out there, uh, so thank you, and at that I w I'm going to let you introduce him and get this whole thing started because I have questions.

Speaker 2:

So let's go. Yeah, definitely so, uh, you know the the real reason we have, uh, our guest on today, who is Mark Groves, is, um, I just really was blessed and fortunate to fortunate to come into his circle. Mark invited me onto his podcast a while back and I certainly wanted to reciprocate because he's just one of those people that's interesting to talk to in the end, and I feel fortunate when I get to meet people like that, and so I'm really looking forward to this conversation. Mark's got a background that does certainly overlap with our topics of interest here on the show, but, like I said, just a great guy to talk to and wanted to be able to introduce him to our audience, wanted to be able to introduce him to our audience. So, with that, I'm going to turn it over to Mark, our guest, and let him give a little bit of his background, maybe just talk about how he got to where he is today, which includes many different aspects, including host of a very popular large podcast, and then we'll jump into it from there.

Speaker 3:

Oh man, thanks so much for having me. I like that. I got thrown into the woo category. I'll take it. I'll take it.

Speaker 1:

The etheric. You know, ram Dass has a saying that miracles are just a way of life.

Speaker 3:

See, he's quoting Ram Dass.

Speaker 1:

Right, this is awesome, we're two minutes in, we're right, I of life. See, he's quoting Ram Dass, right? This is awesome, we're two minutes in, we're right, I'm sorry, no, I love it.

Speaker 3:

And the reason I'm so drawn to Ram Dass is he was this merger between the intellectual with the spiritual. You know, he started out really going that Harvard route of social sciences and then really found his way more towards spirituality and really merged those two things. And my origins actually start in a very similar vein, which I started. I did an undergraduate degree, originally in finance, because I thought the path to my highest mate value would be through making and getting a job that paid really well and and I'd be a good provider. And I actually started out as a pharmaceutical rep. So that was my first career and the quote I was going to say is miracles are just a way of reminding us that we don't know how it works, and I think it's always important to add a bit of that, like the sort of arrogance of human consciousness is this idea that we have it all figured out and that it is all figureoutable. You know, and I think what really drew me to your work and why I wanted to have you on the podcast was that I spent 14 years as a rep.

Speaker 3:

I spent 14 years working in the space of launching drugs, taking them off the market, of originally actually selling a statin. My first drug that I ever sold, which only lasted about three months in my bag, was Bacol before it was taken off the market. So I was just so drawn to the conversation as I started to awaken and study relationships because I was a rep. And then I went through a breakup in my late 20s and I thought why am I so good at talking about everything but my feelings? This doesn't make sense. It's not a skillset issue, there's something else going on. So I dove deep into the science of relationships. I wanted to get to know all about them. I went back to school, studied positive psychology and I wanted to understand like, how could I learn the skillsets that science supports that would allow me to create successful relationships for myself? And I saw such an overlap within the sales space.

Speaker 3:

But I also started to see that at the core of so much of our inflammatory process was our inability to manage conflict and our inability to be in healthy dialogue, and that the conflict we avoid outside of ourselves gets buried inside of ourselves. And I saw this overlap that you can't help. But also, if you're going to create a more healthy external environment, it also means eating differently. It also means reducing not just inflammatory people but inflammatory foods and inflammatory behaviors. And one is not. One does not lead to the other. One is incomplete without the other. It's a symbiotic relationship and as I sort of explored this and saw this, I was like, holy shit, I've been in the world where I've been teaching people that there's a drug that will fix their symptoms and that's the solution.

Speaker 3:

And I started to see I was part of the problem. So then I couldn't stay in that anymore. So yeah, and then I started writing. See, I was part of the problem. So then I couldn't stay in that anymore. So yeah, and then I started writing about relationships. That started to do very well. I started to write on Instagram and then I built a massive following there. I launched a podcast that did really well. I sense have now departed from Instagram just due to building up too much awareness around social media platforms and their impact on our nervous system. But that's up too much awareness around social media platforms and their impact on our nervous system. But that's probably a whole other podcast.

Speaker 2:

And I think we're going to get into all of that. I'm going to. I guess I want to start by zeroing in on that sort of realization that you came to as a pharmaceutical rep that you know the answers that you were selling, to be quite frank, weren't really the answers that people needed or were necessarily looking for. Just talk a little bit about what your experiences were around that. I don't. I don't.

Speaker 2:

I'm trying to kind of go through in my mind quickly all the guests we've had on here. I don't think we've really had anyone that did pharmaceutical sales and I'm not sure people really understand what goes on there. And I'll frame this by saying that probably the average person's impression is they go to their doctor and their doctor, having consumed vast quantities of knowledge and going through everything is, really ultimately makes decisions about what prescriptions they give to a patient based on that and that alone. And obviously you and I know that that may not quite be the reality, and so maybe let's start this and I think it will lead us into all the other fascinating things you've since done in life, but let's help people understand maybe what really goes into physicians' decisions around what medications they might be prescribing to patients.

Speaker 3:

Oh, man, the layers you know Well. First off, if reps didn't influence behavior, reps wouldn't exist. You know, because you know the average cost of a rep when I was a rep was to be in a territory for, let's say, family doctors Each rep was. I think their average cost was around $140,000 a year. That included your car and your gas and all that kind of stuff and your bonus and your total compensation. So you know they have to generate a lot of revenue in order to be able to pay all of that sales force. So just in case people are like no reps don't have any impact, they obviously do or there would be no job. Yeah, I mean essentially my whole job.

Speaker 3:

I remember in the first interview I ever did, I was 22. I didn't get the job and I asked the guy after why didn't I get it? And he said because when I asked you what a purpose of a rep was, you told me to educate, to build relationships. But you said educate and build partnerships. I didn't say sell, so I didn't get the job. Um, and and so the priority. You know it was really fascinating because when you start out as a rep you're within the system and so you know this, the sort of systems narrative, reminds me a lot of a vulnerable narcissist, because it basically is like people misunderstand us. We really are here for the best interest of patients and people misunderstand us and think we're about profit. So that's sort of like the internal and now again I left 11 years ago. It maybe it's changed, but I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it probably hasn't and also mine is a canadian experience to accept.

Speaker 3:

But based on is a Canadian experience. I'm willing to accept that, based on the last four years, I'm even willing to say they might have doubled down. But what happens when you start out as a rep is you call on family physicians and the idea is you're really influencing the direct prescriber. About 80% of the prescriptions, so that old marketing rule, are written by about 20% of the physicians. Now here's what happens, though when you get a promotion, you go into specialty sales and then in specialty sales and if I was selling a statin and let's say you saw a lot of people with cardiovascular disease which I'm sure you have a plentiful I would go call on the specialist and influence what they're choosing to use. And then when a GP or a family doctor in Canada you need to refer to a specialist, so the family doctor would see all these patients with cardiovascular disease, atherosclerosis, coming back to them from this specialist on this drug. I must use this drug. So this is really so. It's like if you influence one specialist, you can influence, let's say, 300 referring family doctors, and this is how this is set up really throughout. So when you launch a drug, you initially launch the drug to key opinion leaders, so the people who have an influential voice in those spaces, and a lot of the people who are developed as KOLs is what they're nicknamed are people who also partner in research, and I would imagine this is almost identical in the US. Is that true what I'm saying? Oh, yeah, definitely yeah, so there are rules about what you can do, especially the rules are a little stricter in the US. But you know, if you have a family doctor who writes 3,000 antihypertensives a year and there's five in the category that you're selling in and they're all relatively similar, which is true depending on the category, they're going to pick the one generally that they're in the closest relationship with the rep. And you know there was a different terms that you used, and this is you know, for different types of prescribing habits. You know there was a different terms that you used, and this is you know, for different types of prescribing habits. But there was someone who would be called a spreader and they kind of like give. You know, if there were five, they'd give 20 percent to each rep kind of thing, to each company. And then you'd have someone who's a loyalist who wrote like maybe 80 percent one, and if they had intolerances and patients, they'd switch. So, yeah, the work of a rep is really fascinating because you start to see that you are part of the education.

Speaker 3:

You know, I had someone recently who said to me well, how could you know better than a physician about what might be best for like? When we were talking, we were talking about the circumstances during COVID and I said there were a lot of truths about research during COVID that never made it to the general public, never made it in the media. And he said well, why would I listen to you and not the epidemiologist on TV? And I said well, the idea that you don't think I might know more about a subject which could be obviously true, I said, is also not realizing that. I also had a job where I taught physicians about how to use a product. So clearly you could educate them in some spaces. So it's really fascinating to look at all of it. Now. It's all changed a lot in terms of how I see it, especially from the last four years. But for cardiovascular disease, that was the first time that my mind, I, my whole world, got blown when I started to study cholesterol.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, which, uh, you know, and, and you, you mentioned uh sort of when you were giving your intro that you know, the first drug that you, uh, you know, ended up, uh, you know, being a rep for uh was a statin that got pulled off the market. Um and uh, and maybe we should go into that a little bit because I think it will be interesting history for our audience to understand. So Baycol, which was its trade name, was, as I recall and this happened to coincide with about the time that I was starting my career. It was one of the top statins, one of the most widely prescribed. It was on the market. I forget exactly how long, I want to say at least five, was it yeah?

Speaker 2:

I thought it was a couple of years at least that it was on the market until it was associated with increased risk of dying from a particular condition.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, no, I mean, you know it took a while the ironies that are available in this world are too good available in this world are too good.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, really, because people, you know again, people think, oh well, the drug gets approved, it must be safe, right, and you know, nothing ever goes wrong there. But things go wrong there and Baycol was ultimately taken off the market because of this fatal complication. It's called rhabdomyolysis. It's basically it induced muscle death and that could then lead to toxic effects throughout the body that can ultimately be fatal. But maybe talk a little bit about what your experience was through that from your lens, as someone who was hired to sell this medication.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. So I had that and then two other products that just had less importance, probably due to their market potential and their profitability, and I was freshly pressed out of the factory of pharma when I started selling that I was only in the field, I think, for a couple months, and then they told me maybe it was only a month and then we had to take it off the market. So I went into all these people who didn't know me, I was 22. So I'm like a young guy going in, being like all right, you can't use this anymore.

Speaker 3:

And you know the crazy part is you you know, for a lot of the reps who sell that sold that product or any product that gets withdrawn you spend, you know a year or two convincing people to use it, with the data that you have from the clinical trials, and then all of a sudden, like the potential for all of your rapport with these people to be taken away in one moment. I think often, because I took more than one product off the market in my career, you really witnessed how, on some level, physicians felt a bit deceived and that they were caught off guard and then it wasn't fair, like they'd put this trust in things. But to be honest, like over time, it was almost like there wasn't a feeling of betrayal anymore because it just was such a almost too much of a regular occurrence that it didn't damage relationships, which is kind of ironic. If anything, it deepened them because you were going through this, supporting them through the having to now take patients off the product.

Speaker 2:

That's pretty interesting to hear. That perspective. You know, and obviously you know as a physician you can't blame the rep for this, but to kind of hear like, oh, it helped to strengthen your relationship with physicians because you were kind of helping them through this challenge, is pretty interesting to hear. Interesting to hear. So you mentioned that you know cardiovascular disease, you know, was maybe what sort of started to open your eyes as to you know, things not being as they necessarily appear, as we're educated to believe. Maybe talk a little bit about that part of your journey.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so I didn't question statins or the pathology of heart disease at all. Early in my career I didn't even think about it. My father actually did heart research, so I grew up around a lot of cardiologists and you know I do have to preface to that, like as you've, I know you mentioned on the podcast we did together. I've worked with so many absolutely incredible people in that industry and I learned so much from it that the people who are in it it's like any system you don't even realize that you're part of a system that is itself don't even realize that you're part of a system that is itself. It can't see its own shadow, you know. It can't see its own darkness and in a way, it doesn't even believe it's capable of it, because the way it sort of sells its behavior is that it's here to save people and help people. And I think if you look at human history, that is often a, although that's a positive intention, it's also the shadow side of that is that a lot of atrocities can be created under the guise of doing good, and it was when I went to a doctor and I got my cholesterol. I got like a blood panel done just as a random blood panel, you know, for a checkup, and it came back with high cholesterol. And at the time I was trying out the bulletproof diet but I hadn't reduced my carbohydrates not near enough. And it came back elevated and he said I'm going to have to refer you to a lipid clinic. You know this isn't good. And I said, well, you haven't asked me what I'm eating, you haven't asked me any questions, you're just going to refer me to a lipid clinic. I said, well, I'm going to go read about this, because this was a guy I didn't have any rapport with. It was a walk-in clinic in Canada. So I started to read about cholesterol, I started to study it. I read Dave Asprey's book, which then just led me into Reddit threads and all these different places, and I it was like I took the red pill because all of a sudden I couldn't believe that there was so much quote, unquote misinformation which might be called disinformation in this context and misinformation. It really shattered a lot of my perception of myself as a rep. It shattered a lot of what I always. I just trusted the information I was always given because it was in clinical trials, and then I started to explore the totality of the data and the background of heart disease and diabetes and insulin resistance. And again it was just like I kept being met with what I thought was going to be the end of the bottom, but I kept finding a deeper bottom of the information and of course that eventually brings that was.

Speaker 3:

You know, probably 14 years ago that that happened and then more recently I decided to get back into exploring it because I was like why is no one talking about this? I was seeing I had a friend who had a heart attack. He had a widow maker in about four years ago and when I had to go visit him in the hospital, he, when I went, he was waiting to get his stents done and they were giving him these like it was like hospital food, but it was like tapioca with high sugar content and and I was like this is ridiculous, like I'm in the cardiac ICU and he's getting high sugar foods that are gluten free and fat free and I'm like, oh my God. So I was bringing them salads and meats and all these different things and I just couldn't believe. I was in the place that is supposed to be about health and there was an absence of health in the nutritional content.

Speaker 1:

Well, our audience by and large is not going to be remotely surprised by anything you're.

Speaker 1:

You said so my red pill revolution revelations I it is an awful lot of fun for me to hear uh, an ex-drug rep talk about taking the red pill. Um, I can remember a friend of mine good friend and he was actually in my wedding 579 years ago and he went into drug sales and he told me that he knew more about this particular drug that he was getting paid to rep than any of the doctors he spoke to, and I believe it was Lipitor. I believe it was an 18. I think, yeah, I believe, pfizer. I think he said at that point and this was God, this had to have been 30, it was easily 30 years ago. He said it was an $18 billion pill to that company. That drug's insane.

Speaker 1:

I was already deeply skeptical of most of what I was told by the medical community. That started when I remember them telling me that margarine was better for me than butter. But I remember thinking wait, a minute, year old friend who has a, an MBA, and his undergrad was I don't know underwater bath or something. He was. He was not a smart guy. He was capable of of uh doing schoolwork sufficient to pass classes to get a diploma and and he literally knows more than than these guys who've had well over a decade of training and I didn't doubt him. I mean, I knew he was right.

Speaker 2:

It just oh yeah, I mean, I think it's. You know it's certainly a feature of the system. You know thousands of patients with all different conditions and you know, and even you know a specialist in one condition you know there may be, you know 20 drugs that you know potentially could be used, and so obviously you know you're limited as to being able to get that entire depth of information, but it's an interesting, like I said, feature of the system. I'm not sure that there's a solution for that. I mean, it's something I think needs to be acknowledged, needs to be talked about more.

Speaker 2:

And as you were going through your sort of red pill journey, and I think back to, you know, to my similar journey and you know that initial discovery of oh, there's more information than we were told, you know, forgetting about judging which side is right, you know which side is wrong here.

Speaker 2:

It's just, you know, interesting to me as I think back, you know, and again, I went through medical school, you know, in the years where statins were being established as the standard and you know, maybe because of my specialty, but just my impression is statins are sort of one of the best examples of this. We were only told I was only educated. On one side of the story, it was only the positive information regarding statins and, probably similar to you, it really didn't even occur to me that there might be more out there until I started to discover it and then, like you said, it becomes just a rabbit hole that truly doesn't end and ultimately I think it has led many of us to similar conclusions, but just kind of learning that fact that you're only getting one side of the story and it's certainly relevant to many areas of life. But it's just interesting to hear that, similar to me, that was sort of your red pill moment as well.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it's kind of crazy. You're so right Like I have to know the mechanism of action of one product or a few products and my competitors and a physician has to know the algorithm of treating you know many different at something like statins. And if you were to challenge that fat is the cause of heart disease in the 90s and 2000s and up until really recently, and even recently it's still a controversial. Subject Like that to me just shows that when and I think we see this a lot with what's going on in the sort of public health space right now is that if you criticize the thing that is driven by profit and all the different mechanisms, you will first be attacked. And it's you know.

Speaker 3:

Think about the necessary behavior of all sort of radical awarenesses and changes. It comes from someone who, or a few people who, speak up against the status quo. And then we find out years later but look, we're finding out years later now that the data is, I would say, rather concrete that there little benefit to a statin in all-cause mortality, etc. And you obviously know the data better than I do. And yet no one's going to take back the billions of dollars that were made. No one's going to have to do an apology. None of that's going to have to happen and there's no accountability, because they're the largest investors in pharmaceutical companies, are the largest investors in media and advertising, so you're not going to bite the hand that feeds you, and I think this is why non-mainstream media is having such a radical rise because people don't trust, and they did it to themselves. You know people don't trust and they did it to themselves.

Speaker 1:

you know people don't trust mainstream media because mainstream media has been deceptive and now you can access more information and find out that they're often full of it well, I, I think the the recent presidential turn of events, where a candidate, a non-candidate, went from being the worst thing that had ever happened to a particular party to the second coming of Jesus in a matter of about 10 minutes, and everyone buying in Well, not everyone. All the media marching in lockstep, revealed that there is no, there's no journalism anymore, or at least not the way we used to think of it. Agreed, I would love to dig into something that I heard on one of your podcasts, um, which you actually alluded to in your intro. That relates to what this show is about, which is primarily about physical health.

Speaker 1:

Um, you made a couple of comments. One was uh, you talked about the inflammation we created in our bodies due to not listening, and you also made this statement that, when I heard it, I stopped, I rewound and went back and looked at it. Did I hear him say that? Right, yeah, the soul experiences being at odds with our biology, again, kind of in the woo-woo area, and yet not because we're about biological, physical health. Can you begin to unpack that for us, particularly in light of?

Speaker 3:

well, I'm not going to put any constraints on it, just unpack that yeah, well, let's bring it back to, because you know if, if you the audience listening are more like listen, I want to stay grounded in like, what is the science of this? What's the research in this? What's? If you look at the adverse childhood experiences study, which looks at people who experience trauma, and then the correlation to outcomes as they're adults, you could see that people who experience trauma have higher rates of autoimmune, have higher rates of things like asthma. So you know that there's an impact. And there's an interesting study I can't remember who did it, but it looked at children who were in foster care and they actually end up developing shorter telomeres.

Speaker 3:

So healthy, attuned attachment has a dramatic references on these. But if you look at research on leaky gut, it's correlated to high conflict relationships. There's a study where they actually put a puncture wound in people's arms and they assess the level of conflict in their relationships and the people who had higher levels of conflict in their relationship actually healed slower. So I always think like, well, if that's what challenges in our relationships are doing to a small puncture wound in our arm, what are they doing to our whole physiology? And we're really starting to understand on a much deeper level. Well, of course, the impact of things like sleep and and things like cold water exposure and healthy eating and insulin resistance all these things on vagal nerve tone, heart rate variability, right. So different ways of assessing the health of the nervous system. If the nervous system is in a rested state where we're not constantly vigilant and looking for threats which is what happens after we've been through things like trauma, had parents who didn't show up for us if we're in that state, we can heal the body. Think about how many gastroenterology, gastroenterological issues are actually due to dysregulated nervous systems, like we get.

Speaker 3:

Irritable bowel syndrome, which was and continues to often be a diagnosis of exclusion, is kind of how it's thought of. And when I worked and sold a product in irritable bowel, there were studies that looked at the correlation of sexual abuse in children that as adults or teenagers they had. There was a correlation where they saw that these people had irritable bowel syndrome, but it was something they didn't want specialists to present on and talk about Like I remember that and the physicians often really disliked or disliked is maybe the wrong term but they were very frustrated with their irritable bowel syndrome patients because they found them to be like they would also have things like fibromyalgia. They'd be people that were hard to treat, because the disorders of the gut are so often correlated, of course, to inflammatory foods and exposure to things like glyphosate, but also to an a lack of ability to find and create regulation in our bodies and our nervous systems. So what does that mean?

Speaker 1:

So regulation being.

Speaker 3:

So you know, when you're in conflict with someone, especially someone that's important to you, you can experience where you feel triggered, right, or in the research they might say, you feel flooded. So you feel like overwhelmed and where, if I was just talking to someone you know who didn't trigger me and I was like what would you do in these types of circumstances, you'd be like, well, I'd ask questions and I do, but as soon as you're triggered, all that stuff goes right out the window. And in the conversation about they call that the window of tolerance. So your window of tolerance is the ability for you to be in dialogue with someone else in a circumstance, in a situation where you still have access to your prefrontal cortex, to critical thinking. Now, in research that looks at workplaces, if you ask someone, can I give you some feedback? That often causes their prefrontal cortex to shut down because they're already preparing to be criticized.

Speaker 3:

So, as humans, we are always doing this, a hundred percent of the. We are assessing all our relationships to say am I safe? And am I safe to be myself? Now, if it's not safe to be me like, if me being me and self-expressing and being who I am, it potentially costs me the relationship, I won't be who I am. So when authenticity threatens belonging, belonging wins Because as humans we need to be able to maintain belonging right, we need to stay in tribes and have groups, and you see this. So if, like me, being me threatens a relationship, a family, a culture of religion, I'll abandon who I am to keep those things generally.

Speaker 3:

So if I'm suppressing my self-expression and you see, a lot of times when people suppress self-expression, there's correlations to issues with the thyroid. So if I'm suppressing my self-expression and you look at the pathology of anxiety, for example, we think of anxiety as being future-oriented right, like I'm afraid of a future, I'm afraid of what's coming. It's maybe an unknown circumstance. When you don't have access to your voice, you can't steer your life. When you can't steer your life, you can't create your future. When you can't create your future, you're going to be anxious. Depression, if you think about even the word, is to depress. When we don't self-express and we can't have access to things like yes and no and they're authentic yeses and nos, then we suppress our emotions. And when we suppress our emotions, we end up in a state of helplessness, depression, immobility, the inability to change our lives, and all of this is so heavily correlated.

Speaker 3:

I've worked with so many people who they have a pain in their arm or they have back pain or they have something going on, a breakout of psoriasis, something and as soon as they start using their voice, setting boundaries, all of us leaving a relationship. That's toxic. And I'm sure you've all seen this in friends and I'm sure with patients all of a sudden their blood pressure drops, all these things that they seemingly have no pathology we can't figure it out gets better and I'm seeing this. Actually recently One of my best friends is working with a friend of mine who's a specialist in gut health and she was on a biologic and she had Crohn's colitis which they all kind of can end up in the same space of diagnoses and she's since got off her biologic. Now she's done both internal the food she puts in her body has changed but also the nutrition that she has in her relationships has changed.

Speaker 3:

And to just like button it all up, the longest running study on happiness and wellbeing is the Harvard study of adult development and that looked at wealthy people like students who went to Harvard and compared them to poor kids from other areas of Boston to see if there was a socioeconomic impact. And now they're studying the second and third generations of these people and what they saw was that the greatest predictor of your health at 80 is not your cholesterol, your blood pressure or anything like that. It's the quality of your relationships at age 50. And not just romantic relationships, relationships of all kinds.

Speaker 1:

And you know, if you want to understand, the prediction, the quality of your health at age 50 80. 80 is predicted by the health of your relationships at age 50.

Speaker 3:

That even had a protective effect in terms of neurological challenges, pain, all those types of things. That love and connection in some way protects us from those things which I'm sure, from a physiological perspective, makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 2:

I mean, all of that is just so fascinating and you know, when you were talking through that, you know the power of using your voice. It really made me think. You know we obviously. You know, a major focus of of my practice is getting people to make better choices around what they eat. But for a lot of people it really comes down to what you just said.

Speaker 2:

Starting to make a conscious choice about what you eat is really one of the most powerful interventions we can do, because most people don't.

Speaker 2:

They don't have a voice when it comes to what they're eating. They're just eating whatever is thrown in front of them, essentially, or promoted on TV, and they're really not using their voice, they're not making a choice. And what's so interesting to me is, over and over again I see in my patients that when they just start doing that, they start having that voice about what they're going to eat. It just mushrooms out to all other areas of their life. You know their relationships, their other habits. You know maybe other negative habits that they might have, addictive type things, and it's just amazing how they seem to be able to get control of all of this at once if they just start with, you know, using their voice in one area, and I also see patients who you know, it kind of happens other directions. They start using their voice in a different area and eventually that then translates into I'm going to make better choices about what I eat and my habits.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it's so interesting because if you look at just the what would might be considered just the micro choice saying no to fries and getting a salad right that seems on some level inconsequential, like other than the like it's going to take you out of ketosis and that kind of thing but it actually, on a much larger meta level, what's so powerful about that choice is usually so. There's a saying that the opposite of trauma is choice, because trauma is usually an experience that happens that where choice was taken from us, it's often an acute thing, right, and so the belief we sort of create in our mind is that I don't have choice, I don't have agency, I'm going to stay with this person because I have no other option. I'm going to. This is the body I'm destined to have, this is the health I'm destined to have. But what happens when you make this small choice and maybe you're surrounded by people at a table who all order fries and you're afraid to order salad because they're going to make fun of you because it's going to be different, whatever, because they're going to make fun of you because it's going to be different, whatever.

Speaker 3:

The moment you make that choice at the cost of the social experience, which is usually what happens when people quit drinking, which is usually what happens when people start to set and these are all boundaries. The moment I do that, I now have access to my voice in a way I never have. So it's like if I don't have access to know and I don't have a choice in how I engage in any behavior with anything outside of me, then my yes, when I actually say yes, it's not authentic. Because if you don't have access to a no, that means your yes comes with small print. It means it's not real real.

Speaker 3:

So when someone's trying to navigate toxic relationships and like, try to find a healthy relationship but they still have toxicity oscillating around them, I always say, till you can say no to that, you can't say yes to what you desire because you can't trust yourself. It's still. You don't have access to all of you. You you know that if it comes to you or selling yourself out, you'll sell yourself out, and that's why food is such a great way to build the equity and the evidence that we got our own back.

Speaker 3:

It's such a powerful way. That's why you said they start to find it one place and they get. All of a sudden their lives change. They get their cholesterol and all the foods and they're in ketosis and all of a sudden they leave the toxic relationship. It's crazy because you can't tolerate toxicity in one area and not tolerate it everywhere, just like you can't find health one place and then tolerate what is not health anywhere else. It's impossible because the contrast causes too much dissonance, aka inflammation, which is going to require something to numb the awareness that you're tolerating toxicity. Insert addiction.

Speaker 1:

Bill, my health challenges were largely. Their root was largely in the kind of dysfunctional behavior that Mark's describing. They were relational and once I learned how to say no, things got better for me, so I can relate to what he's saying.

Speaker 2:

You reflect on your dramatic weight loss and regaining health, or gaining health, really after a lifetime without. It's coincidental that, you know, I was able to undergo this massive physical transformation, you know, lose all that weight, at the same time that I, you know, kind of took the red pill and radically changed the way that I practice medicine and really, you know, kind of took agency of my life, you know, stopped being an employed physician, went out, established my own practice, you know, started doing independent contractor work on the surgical side of things and just really completely changed, you know, my professional life at the same time that I underwent this physical transformation. And you can look at it, I guess, on many different levels but, as we alluded to earlier, it was sort of one red pill led to another, ultimately, I think, for me, and so I very much relate to what Mark was just talking about and, as I said, I've seen it in myself and I've seen it in my patients over and over and over again. So it really, you know it's interesting.

Speaker 2:

We talk about the pillars of metabolic health, right, we talk about, you know, your diet, your sleep, you know you're getting activity, getting sunlight and dealing with your stress, and you know everyone is always like well, which is the most important one, right? And you know, depending on who you're talking to, maybe you get sort of different weights on all of those as to their importance, of different weights on all of those as to their importance, but it really is, I'm going to say, incredibly rare right for someone to address one and not address the others. And, yeah, you know, maybe you know we all none of us are perfect and certainly I can point to which of those areas, you know, I don't do as well in uh, but I'm certainly still paying attention to it. Uh, and I think it's impossible, like Mark said, cause, you know, when you uh, you're you're not going to eliminate the toxicity in one area of your life and allow toxicity to continue to, uh, you know, dominate another area of your life.

Speaker 1:

I'm sitting here thinking about the incredibly physically unhealthy people that I know, and oftentimes they are also dealing with lots of other kinds of poor health other than just their own bodies relationships, jobs, work, living situations and, honest to God, all I've ever I've noticed that that stuff tends to go together, but I've never thought of it as all being different manifestations of the same dysfunction. I'm not overstating it, am I?

Speaker 2:

No, I certainly don't think so, and I'd love to hear Mark's you know perspective on that. And then I'd love Mark to maybe delve into a little bit more you know, what has become his area of focus on the relationships in our lives and maybe, mark, talk about how people can start to figure out, you know, what are those toxic relationships in their lives and how to start to change them.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, well, I don't think you're overstating it, jack, you know, I think you know what what I tend to see, because if you look at when we carry especially in a large amount of weight for a long period of time, one, it shows that you know, we, we obviously have the socioeconomic access to food part of that conversation, but then we also have the like, the recognition that a lot of the time we put on a lot of weight to protect ourselves. We put on a lot of weight so that we don't get seen. We sometimes put on a lot of weight so that we won't be loved. That's sort of the narrative or the story, and especially when it's chronic or long term, it also is representative. And again, nothing what I'm saying is judgmental or moralizing or anything like that, but it also is demonstrating and this was true for me that we lack access to discernment and choice. We lack access to a no, when we should be saying no to certain foods and yes to other foods. Now, again, that could be part of education, because of every physician and person in an authority position says eating Cheerios for breakfast is the best, is the breakfast of champions, and eating grains all day, all night, and having high fructose corn syrup is normal. Then of course you have this sort of environmental, systemic part of the problem.

Speaker 3:

A lot of people don't even know wellness. You know that's the thing. They've never felt well. A lot of people don't relate from a place of health they replace, they relate from a place of wounding. You know, it's like if you look at and this is why I'm so fascinated by relationship, because I think relationship leads you to these conversations anyways Like if you start to heal yourself relationally, you start to look more deeply at the choices you've made in your life. You start to look at the pathology of like. Why do you do what you do? Because all your behaviors, relationally, come from what you were taught. Largely, why you relate is a lot to do with how you were raised, what you witnessed in your families, your parents, but especially a relationship with mother, and those all are very predictive of how we're going to behave relationally as adults. Which doesn't mean that we're destined to that experience. It just means that we have to learn a different way.

Speaker 3:

And we don't teach healthy relating in schools. We don't teach emotional intelligence, we don't. And we don't teach healthy relating in schools. We don't teach emotional intelligence, we don't teach finance, we don't teach nutrition. If they taught those three things, we would have the healthiest culture and society in the world. Are you kidding me? But a healthy culture is not a profitable culture, although it is a productive culture. It's not profitable when the way you make money is health care and food right and or sick care maybe it's the is the more appropriate term. I see you're stewing on something this is big.

Speaker 1:

I mean, this is really, really big, and I'm watching the clock because that's my job. There's no way we're going to Solve it all.

Speaker 3:

To drill as deeply as I would love to drill in the time remaining, but I want to, well, maybe I can um bring it all together with the origin of why I focus more on relationship and and people connecting back to their purpose and their desires and really like starting to bring alive again the authenticity in them, the self-expression. And then my wife and I wrote a book called liberated love and one of the principles of liberated love, which is really the book, is about healing codependent patterns. When you abandon yourself for to maintain relationships, you are codependent. That's a codependent behavior. And so it's like how do I give birth to all of me and be in relationship? How do I honor your needs, your wants, your desires? How do we create a relationship? That's about bringing both of us fully alive and fully self-expressed and both people's ideally needs being met and one of the principles is a fierce dedication to the truth.

Speaker 3:

And the reason I think relationships are such a potent vehicle for change is because one our frictions and challenges and relationships are the most frequent one that we'll touch. Health is a big one, because when you have a health rock bottom, you in a lot of ways you don't have a choice, like you have to. Change is sort of the you've hit the end Relationally, breakups, frictions, challenges there's very few things we'll actually change for, and I think love is one of them. It's one of the most potent reasons we'll change, and that, to me, means it's one of the biggest access points to finally give birth to like the authentic version of who you are. And if people want to change their lives, first they have to look for why you do what you do and what are my challenges in relationship and where did I learn it?

Speaker 3:

But the thing is, I'll say, is like wherever you're triggered, wherever you get triggered, there's an invitation to some form of mastery, and what I mean by that is a trigger, is a sensitive space, it's a radar that says hey, when this has happened in my past, this has led to X, y, z, and what happens is is because we tend to react in a protective, defensive way to the trigger, we end up recreating the same circumstances we're trying to avoid. So if I'm afraid of being betrayed, what I might do is I'll get extra jealous and I'll push the person away, and then they'll betray me or leave me, so I end up creating the same circumstances. So what I'm saying is where the trigger is. If we were to ask ourselves, what skill would I have needed to develop when I was younger when this occurred. That would allow me to be confident to move through it today.

Speaker 3:

The second thing is to look for wherever you have resentment, because wherever you have resentment 100% of the time not 99.9, 100% of the time resentment is because you prioritize something or someone over you. Wherever you do that, you're creating inflammation. That's a promise. So you need a boundary wherever you have resentment and, um, at least that's a good start for people.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I'd say that's a good start. Oh my gosh, All right. Well, the book is Liberated Love by Mark Groves and Kylie McBeth. Mark's website is markgrovescom. It's spelled exactly like it sounds and he is the host of the Mark Groves podcast. Clever naming there, Brilliantly done. Honestly, this is. This just feels like the biggest teaser ever. I want to. I want to go buy you a drink and sit down and talk for without an end time, Just because there's so much there to dig into. But we're out of time.

Speaker 3:

Thanks for having me on, I'm very grateful.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, definitely been a pleasure, mark, it was really great to be able to continue the conversation and maybe we'll be able to get you back for a part two sometime as well, but certainly highly encourage everyone to check out Mark's work. The book that Mark and his wife have written, I think is, you know, is really great in starting to understand some of these things that we were touching upon today and just realizing how, you know again, the parts of our lives all interact. And for those of us that kind of started on the, you know, physical health diet journey track, don't stop there, you know. Use it as an entree into optimizing and examining all the other areas of your life that are so important.

Speaker 1:

I love thinking about relationship as an alternative angle of approach to fixing your health problems. That sounds like an extremely powerful lever. All right, well, this has been the Stay Off my Operating Table podcast. That sounds like an extremely powerful lever. All right, well, this has been the Stay Off my Operating Table podcast. Our guest has been Mark Groves. Our host is Dr Philip Ovedia. Please like, subscribe and share. Thanks for being with us, and we will talk to you next time.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Dr. Philip Ovadia

Host
Head Shot

Jack Heald

Host