Guest: Chris Scott

Podcast Release Date: 4/16/2021

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Steve Washuta: Welcome to the Trulyfit podcast. I’m your host, Steve Washuta, co-founder of Trulyfit and author of Fitness Business 101. On today’s podcast, we speak with Chris Scott. Chris is the founder of fit recovery. And the supplement bio rebalance. Chris works with people overcoming alcohol addiction, he wrote a book called drinking sucks. He has a course in which he helps people overcome an alcohol addiction, he has a very interesting approach. First, he starts with the physiological components. That could be associated with long-term or short-term alcohol addiction. In so far as you being deficient in certain nutrients, and or certain vitamins, and getting your body back to homeostasis. This is before you tackle maybe some of the psychological issues. I’m putting words into his mouth, he’s going to explain that better.

But it is a fantastic wealth of knowledge around addiction. How it works from a physiological standpoint and the things that he is doing in the space. It is maybe slightly controversial, but guess what it works, his approach works, and I’m fully behind Chris. with no further ado, here’s Chris Scott.

Steve Washuta: Okay, Chris Scott, thanks for joining the Trulyfit podcast. I will let the audience know full disclosure that unlike a lot of my guests who I’m meeting for the first time, Chris and I are actually very good friends. Still thank you for being on. Why don’t you give the audience a bio on you what you do for a living and what drove you there? Feel free to unpack that and tease that out? And whatever way you want.

Chris Scott: Steve, thanks for having me. And yeah, we could talk for hours and hours and hours. So I’ll try to stay concise. You know, I’m good at digressing. So I’ll try to be focused but bio basically, I used to work in finance, I was a very heavy drinker. I lived in Manhattan for about four years. And I kind of lived the lifestyle of work hard, play hard. And eventually, it caught up with me, it really started in college, but in college, you can kind of your camera flash because everyone’s doing it.

At some point, I started drinking a bottle of wine a day, then it became you know, bottle service and clubs, whatever, switch to vodka, lower calories, it became half a bottle of vodka a day. Then it became a bottle of vodka a day, then a handle of vodka a day. By that time, people were starting to notice I didn’t look healthy. And I was having serious issues with sleep, anxiety. My Fitness was horrible. I would go get the most pathetic workouts of all time. And, you know, my blood pressure was through the roof.

There was a time in my apartment building. I’d actually moved to Atlanta to keep working in finance, just, you know, trying to blame my problem on New York, I moved. The problem followed me and I went to the apartment gym, got on the elliptical, I hadn’t been working out. And my heart rate was nearly 200 beats per minute. all I was doing was sitting on my couch.

That was alcohol withdrawal. And it had been at that level for probably an hour, you know, cold sweats, Misery, just feeling horrible. So ultimately, I did end up telling everyone I knew that I had a problem. And I went to detox 12 step traditional program and spent a couple months there. But I came out and I realized that something was still missing. I was gonna go back to what I was doing if I didn’t fix some missing link.

Fortunately, I decided to leave finance. So at the very least, I had reduced the amount of stress in my life started working to become a personal trainer. I started getting myself back in shape. And so I stumbled upon some supplements that are pretty common. At least with bodybuilders or people who worked out such as branched-chain amino acids, l glutamine, vitamins, and minerals. I was taking a multivitamin called Legion triumph. And I started feeling a little bit better.

And I started researching that. Like maybe there’s something here is it the workouts is it maybe supplements? I remember actually in the rehab program, I was encouraged by one of the counselors we all were to laugh at these Kooks who thought that vitamins could cure alcoholism. It sounds absurd on its face. Turns out that you know there’s a rabbit hole there. And there’s there are underrated strategies to help people use nutrition to repair their brains and their bodies.

What I now know is the gut liver brain axis to reduce cravings, get rid of insomnia, help with reformulating your stress response. Basically, repair your whole system so that you can optimize yourself. So you do not turn back to the same substance that you were on. Whether it was alcohol or hard drugs or whatever. So that’s kind of where my business came from.

I ultimately transitioned from personal training into a company that I started called fit recovery. At fit recovery, we help people use nutrition and fitness, but a big emphasis on nutrition to fill in those missing physiological gaps in their addictions, primarily alcohol. But we also have people with other addictions, too. So now, our blog has 200 free articles on that site, but also an online course, and podcast called elevation recovery podcast. And I have a supplement called bio to rebalance. So all of this is based on my experience. I hope that was a good bio.

Steve Washuta: Yeah, that was fantastic. I want you to put yourself in the shoes of a personal trainer. And if I’m talking to my client, how do I tell them in maybe more of a layman’s term; What alcohol does to their body physiologically? How do I explain that to them?

Chris Scott: Right. So it’s actually very interesting that there’s very little physiological explanation given to people who enter detox or treatment or meetings. Nothing about what alcohol is doing. The best they tend to get is that it’s a baffling disease. Whether it’s a permanent spiritual disease, and you don’t really get much more than that. But there have been a lot of studies on this.

There are a lot of good books on this subject. In a nutshell, what happens when you are drinking copious amounts of alcohol over time, is you are creating deficiencies. Nutrients and neurotransmitter deficiencies, and hormone deficiencies do become progressively worse over time. So it’s not baffling at all, that these things become worse. You can kind of think of it as you have. If you have a normal baseline of neurotransmitters like dopamine, endorphins, serotonin, and GABA, then you’re going to be fairly balanced. You’re actually not going to have that much of an inclination most likely to fall into an addiction.

But for a lot of people are affected by stress, or maybe they have a predisposition for lower data levels or lower Gabba activity. Data is the primary calming neurotransmitter, it’s also the one that ethanol is structurally similar to. So these people will feel tremendous relief if they have depleted Gabbeh. And that’s just one neurotransmitter as an example when they drink. So the drinking experience for them is unlike the experience of drinking for other people. It seems to be pretty universally pleasant.

To some extent, not for everyone, actually, some people who don’t like it at all. But for certain people, you know, it’s like the thing they’ve been missing their whole lives. And that was the case for me, the first time I ever drank. When I was about 16, I finished the entire fifth of 99 bananas. And I felt like I had found the thing that was missing my whole life. So naturally, that leads to a cycle of heavy drinking over time, which then causes worse inflammation. Alcohol is a poison that gets broken down into acetic acid aldehyde, which itself is really toxic as well, you know you have a hangover. Or if you feel kind of crappy for several days after quitting drinking, your body’s trying to mop up that acid aldehyde.

That’s literally poisoning all of your cells. So it’s causing inflammation in the gut, the acid aldehyde, and the alcohol. And what happens for a lot of people over time is that you start, you create something called dysbiosis. Which is a sub-optimal proportion of good bacteria and bad bacteria. So you end up with more bad bacteria, more things like Candida yeast, and this situation actually causes a leaky gut as well. So you have endotoxin, which is like a bacterial byproduct, essentially dead bacteria poop, which is pretty gross.

But you can tell that to your clients in case they need to quit. You can say bacteria are pooping in your gut and dying and it’s leaking into your liver. Once it gets to your liver, it creates something called foreign inflammatory cytokines and liver damage. But we’ll stick with the cytokines for now. And so these cytokines go to cross the blood-brain barrier, and research has shown that they’re actually able to inhibit the release of certain neurotransmitters. So serotonin for example. So that can lead to depression. And then it’s a vicious cycle. Because what do you do if you’re somewhat dependent on alcohol and you get more depressed you drink more. So that’s another reason that it tends to be a progressive condition. It’s not mystical. It’s not that baffling. We have science that explains it and we also have ways to repair it.

Steve Washuta: Yeah, it makes perfect sense. And I think for you know, personal trainers listening or people who, you know, follow the science. It, it resonates with them, and they’ll understand that perfectly. So that and that was a really good insight. Maybe somebody who is, you know, an alcoholic is dealing with somebody who’s coming off of alcohol. But can you give me some insight into somebody who may be a Friday night drinker? They throw back three glasses of wine, and then a personal trainer may have a session with them Saturday morning. What nutrients are they likely to be deficient in? What are the issues that they most likely have? I know people talk really mainly just about dehydration. But I assume there’s more to that story than just dehydration.

Chris Scott: You also do get an inflammation response. Even if you’re just an occasional drinker. A binge or occasional drinker. They’ve actually revised the studies, they being the National Institutes of Health and other organizations on how much alcohol is safe. There used to be two drinks a day for men and one for women.

Now, they’ve recently changed it to one drink a day for men and zero for women. Even though that’s not politically correct. But alcohol has been tied to at least seven kinds of cancers now. This isn’t just due to inflammation, which inflammation is the root cause of most diseases. So it’s not that, you know, it’s not that weird. But for someone who is going out, and having a couple glasses of wine or beers, I’m a bit unorthodox. I’m not an abstinence-only person, I don’t even tell people who have a problem that they must quit drinking. I say most of the time, the research supports the idea that you should at the very least take an extended break to try to repair your brain to regain balance.

Since we tend to view reality through the lens of our biochemistry, what ends up happening is that people who take a break, whether they have a serious problem or not, are less inclined to overdo it. So taking a break can be a really good thing. But you want to maximize that break, optimize the break by taking certain supplements, and you know, working out making sure you’re getting enough sleep, enough sunlight for people who like to drink occasionally, and they don’t have a problem and they’re just not going to stop doing that. I have no judgment at all.

That’s most of my friends are like that. I do know of some supplements that are worth looking into to minimize the damage. And some of these have been well known for a while. Others are fairly new. But if I happened to be a social drinker at this point, let’s say every Friday I went out had a couple glasses of wine. If it was affecting my workouts, which is quite possible, you know, and for people who don’t drink every day, you tend to be more aware of how somehow the alcohol is affecting you the next day. Because it’s not a daily occurrence, you don’t have baseline resetting, so your sense of well-being isn’t permanently low, so you just don’t know the difference. But you could take something called milk thistle which helps to detoxify the liver, you can take something called NAC and N-acetylcysteine.

Also my pronunciation of these things is horrible. I’m usually reading them, but I’ve taken all these things myself and they also help people who are detoxing and trying to taper down and alcohol but can be just as useful for the social drinker. So NAC is a precursor for Bluetooth ion, which is the liver’s master antioxidant that can help you mop up that acid aldehyde. Another good thing to take is an electrolyte powder. I like a brand called genius electrolytes. I use that for my MMA training and for my workouts but I’ve also recommended it to people tapering off of alcohol. And also some branched-chain amino acids can be helpful. People who do a lot of working out are familiar with bcaas.

There, they actually lack certain targeted amino acids that can be useful for brain repair. But they also do feed the brain now. So it’s good to have that because along with glutamine, glutamine can help especially if you feel crappy the next day because alcohol sets off a blood sugar rollercoaster, which is the case for a lot of people. l glutamine can be turned into glucose in the brain without causing a corresponding insulin spike. So that’s one of the cool things about it. It’s also the most prevalent amino acid in our bloodstream that helps to repair the gut. So help it helps the immune system.

That is a really cool one as well. So yeah, if I were drinking every Friday, I would probably before I drank wine, I would take those things the milk thistle, NAC electrolytes, and bcaas and glutamine. I know that sounds like a lot. I could keep going I’ll just mention two more. A lot of people are deficient in magnesium, which is a mineral that we used to have in abundance in our soils and is involved in over 300 different bodily processes, and really helpful for brain function and the nervous system.

As soon as I started taking magnesium after I quit drinking, I started sleeping. I was technically sleeping before, but I didn’t have a whoop strap or a Fitbit at the time. But if I had I guarantee you that I would have seen my REM sleep jump. And I just felt like a different person. I was shifting onto a different plane. So most people I think over 70% of Americans are deficient in magnesium. When you take a drink, you increase the rate of magnesium excretion by three times which is incredible.

That’s just one there. If you’re having three or four, you’re excluding way more magnesium, and magnesium is an electrolyte. So ideally, you go for a bioavailable form of magnesium because magnesium oxide is not great. That’s the most common one found in stores. So magnesium citrate glucagon, eight, three, and eight are all helpful, you may aim for a couple 100 milligrams of that before you drink. And I would bet that they would help get rid of some of the after-effects of drinking. Then the last one I’ll mention is called de Hm. And that is a compound that’s been isolated from the Japanese raisin tree.

And it has been shown to help detoxify alcohol, and help to mop up acid aldehyde, similarly to some of the others, we mentioned, protecting the liver. It can also keep ethanol molecules from binding to GABA receptors in the first place. So there have been some studies showing that people who do take DHL voluntarily drink a little bit less and they feel a little bit better the next morning. So there are some hangover cure supplements or supplements marketed as such that do contain some range of those ingredients.

Steve Washuta: Oh, wow. That’s it’s interesting. I know, we’ll get back more to the science into the supplements at the end. But I want to like zoom out here real quick because I know you have great insight into this next question. And for people who are, let’s say, trying to wean off alcohol, I know that it’s important for them to, you know, replace bad habits with good habits, healthy habits, so fitness and exercise and things surrounding that community to be put into those new good habits are important. Can you tell us exactly how you’ve worked with people and you’ve seen that either anecdotally in yourself or with those you those that you work with closely? 

Chris Scott: For sure. I use something I called the biopsychosocial spiritual model for addiction recovery. And I didn’t invent that it’s an adaptation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. And also a brilliant psych psychiatric pioneer named Dr. Ayman, who uses the same model for people with behavioral issues, often people who are deemed to damage to help he does brain scans. And then he recommends a combination of supplements and lifestyle strategies to fix that. So all of that is to say I’m not only supplements, I’m not simply through supplements, it’s someone and sees how they do. That’s usually the first part because it’s the easiest part.

And you just put stuff in your body and visible work is done for you. But it’s also really important to crowd out the bad habit. So you want to introduce a range of new activities, new coping mechanisms, as even ones as trivial as drinking other things.

I like to joke, you know, I’m drinking tea right now, it’s an herbal tea that actually has a range of ginseng and other Chinese tonic herbs in it, which is a whole nother discussion and I joke that I still have a drinking problem, I just don’t drink alcohol, I have like three different kinds of teas and like some rock a cow drinks, and, you know, matcha and all sorts of stuff. I’m waiting on my CBD kombucha. I want it to be sipping that here. But I ran out. So I ordered that it’s expensive. It’s not as expensive as beers though. I tried to keep like 40 in my fridge at all times. So I have all these options.

Steve Washuta: Put a bookmark in that because, at some point, I want to have a conversation with you about healthy drinks, because I think it’s not really talked about and everything from like the things you can buy a target to the things you can make yourself. I think it’s important not just for the health community in general, there’s outside of water, people sometimes just don’t know what there is to drink. So I think I think we need to talk about that more at some point.

Chris Scott: That’s right. Yeah. And actually, the industry of non-alcoholic beverages has come a really long way since I was trying to quit. I mean, I remember there was almost nothing. It seemed like there’s almost nothing You know, I could do clubs, soda with lion, but I get so bored. And now we have CBD kombucha. And depending on where you live, and how open-minded you are, and what your recovery thing is they have THC, non-alcoholic wine, and beer in California. So I mean, I’ve heard of all sorts of crazy things from people.

So yeah, you want to have options. And that’s we’re still at the level of the easiest things to replace. Now, it might seem trivial, but it’s not. I mean, I know from experience that it’s hard when you’re quitting drinking to sit on the couch with a glass of water when you’re used to sitting on the couch with some, you know, popery wine stuff, or scotch or whatever it is, you have these really strong and stubborn neural pathways that involve scent, and taste. And you’re, you’re sitting there with water, and it’s just a matter of time. So you’re going to throw the glass at the wall and pick up where you’re used to drinking.

So you do want to distract yourself. But you also want to distract yourself with healthy activities. And depending on how far someone has gone into addiction, you might want to start up slowly with something like exercise. So when I quit drinking, when I was in detox, my first workouts were like five minutes on the elliptical and one set of like six reps of machines, and I was so tired. You know, that was all I could handle. And I get a lot of emails from people you know who see my stuff on Instagram now and you know, I’ve worked on deadlifts for a long time I’ve gotten back into MMA, I can do three-hour workouts with guys who are trained To be in the UFC, I’m not at that level, but they are and I can kind of keep up. And it’s cool.

But it pays to remember, like, it’s gonna take a while for you to get back to that point. Think of it as a distraction. You know the worst thing I tried to do, after getting out of detox was I, being somewhat OCD, made up this long list of exercises that I expected myself to do. It was crazy, like 10 sets of 10 for squats, 10 sets of 10 for the bench, you know, we’re gonna do German volume training, and then we’re going to do some supersets, we’re going to do some pyramid sets, we’re going to hit our one-rep max, you know, it’s a two-hour workout. And I was my heart was in the right place, because I wanted to get better and keep myself from drinking.

But that was too much to do. Ultimately, I settled on. It’s a victory if I get to the gym, and I’m aiming to get sweating because as soon as I start sweating, it’s usually accompanied by an endorphin release. And as soon as I get an endorphin release, I usually want to stay there for a little while. And I don’t want to put myself in a position where I’m so sore that I can’t work out for three days. So people I think can be reasonable about expectations and slowly get back into something like exercise, if they weren’t anywhere near the spot. I was, but for someone who’s just trying to cut down on drinking, maybe they can benefit from a little bit of the David Goggins or Jocko willing approach. But you do want to be kind to your body?

Steve Washuta: Yeah, I think anybody making changes, the problem is going from zero to 60. Sometimes it’s the wrong way to approach things, right? So for me to say, like, I haven’t gotten up off the couch, in two months, I’m going to go, I’m going to run, you know, I’m going to run a marathon, probably not the best approach, right? You need to take steps in the right direction. I can’t speak to alcohol, specifically, because you know, I don’t work with those people. But I would assume even replacing a bad habit with a less bad habit would be good. Like, if you’re craving two glasses of wine, every night, when you come home, maybe you replace that with like, some sort of ice cream, right? So maybe it’s just a little bit, maybe it’s three or four scoops of ice cream.

You’re still getting some sort of sugar high, right, but it’s not alcohol, but one is obviously worse than the other, right? And then you work your way into switching that to a protein bar that has a little sugar in it. And before you know it, you’re down to something, you know, even healthy or not. I would imagine and this and I feel wrong to categorize here. But I would imagine dealing with people who struggle with alcoholism, they may be likely to try to go zero to 60 based on their personalities, right? They might have wanted to just slowly take that a sense. So how do you work with people to say, Hey, listen, you got you to have to like not to beat yourself up, basically?

Chris Scott : Yeah, it’s interesting because I think there is a stereotype of the lazy alcoholic who just wants to drink and have a good time while everyone else is working. And they want to sleep in. The people that I’ve worked with are some of the most type-A accomplished executive people. I mean, this is it’s a biochemical disorder, and I don’t think it’s a permanent disease. I think it can be transcended, it doesn’t need to define your life. But these people and I included in some ways tend to be hard-driving people and all-or-nothing people, and that can be used to your advantage.

And I think that’s also a potent psychological tool. No, you can reframe yourself, you’re, you’re not someone who’s just who’s some rational, horrible person who just does these things. And you know, you’re like a fire on the on humanity, you concern that to your benefit, you know, you can be intense, I started becoming intense about my business. You know, I was writing a blog, it took a year before anyone really read it, but I was just pumping out these articles and hoping that someone would find it and someone would benefit from it. And it fired me up and so I wasn’t drinking, but I was getting up.

And you know, I was battling alcohol cravings for a while but the supplements really helped. But it was like I’d switched the time for my own personal hi-me time, you know, from night with alcohol to morning with coffee, and I’m typing away, and I was having a great time doing it. And then I’d go to the gym, and I’d be relaxed, have a steak or whatever. And some greens take pride in what I was doing. But it was like I shifted my time to experience euphoria from the evening with booze, which inevitably made me feel horrible and regretful the next day and just got worse and worse and worse to the morning with coffee.

And ultimately, I’ve experimented with, you know, not doing so much caffeine because that itself can be a problem. So maybe herbal teas and other things. And I’m not against the use of other substances if it helps some people, um, your CBD is something that I mentioned. Often I’ll have CBD if I have coffee because it kind of takes the edge off the caffeine. There. There is a whole range of herbs and other compounds that I get into in my course and on my website. I’ll try not to go down that rabbit hole now.

But yeah, having other alternatives is crucial. And I often say you know, alcohol used to be my number one priority resource and coping mechanism for all things tired. I’ll have a drink, you know, need to do laundry. I’ll have a drink. Because it’s boring, and you know, oh, I need to go in the elevator in my apartment building and I’m going to see some guy who’s annoying, I need to have a drink, you know, I need to go

Steve Washuta: A bad day at work, have a drink, now it’s a good day at work.

Chris Scott : Yeah, so you get the point. So eventually, with all of these other alternatives, and with the help of biochemical repair, which just made me feel a baseline level of good so that I had free will, you know, if you feel good, then the reason for turning to something like alcohol or drugs decreased, there’s less of a reason. So I started feeling pretty good, I got more of my free will back. And then I just flooded my life with other things.

And just, you have to keep an open mind. You know, in some ways, I went from being very introverted and isolated to being at the very least an outgoing introvert. So I would, instead of staying on a Tuesday night, because I was tired, I would go hang out with someone that I wouldn’t have done that when I was drinking, I would just open about a wine. Or if I did go somewhere, I would make sure I was drinking so I could deal with the boring people.

But why not instead, go meet up with someone who I’ve been meaning to catch up with why actually like, and you know, who knows my situation, or if they don’t know it, they at least know that I’m taking a break from alcohol. So you know, you crowd out your time, there are only so many hours in the day. And if you have a lot of things to do, that is really good that you enjoy doing, and things that you’re working towards, like for me, it was my business, then you’re gonna notice just each date goes by and you’re not drinking because you don’t have time for it.

So alcohol eventually became your number 10 number 20. On my priority list, I kind of miss it, but kind of not. And then eventually we just off, you know, I have like, I like to say if we had a nuclear war right now, or something horrible happened, I would have about 100 coping mechanisms to use that I would rather use and drinking has fallen off the list.

Steve Washuta: Yeah, I want to add to something you said that that stuck with me here. And I’ll unpack it a bit in that, if your baseline level is bad, right, that you’re more likely to fall into, you know, those bad habits again, and go down that rabbit hole, not the same thing with fitness, right, all the trainers out there work with clients who might come in and they have a bad relationship with their, their significant other, or they hate their job at work, or they’re not sleeping well, or they’re drinking too much one of these things, and you could see your clients sort of slipping a bit, right, they’re gaining weight, they’re not doing the right things, they’re taking too many sessions off, they’re doing all these other things.

I think not addressing the physiological, which some people do not, which you obviously do first, to get somebody to a baseline level, where they don’t have to keep falling and getting back up and falling and getting back up is going to help them in the long term. And it helps both in the fitness world that I’m sure in the recovery world to get people stabilized at a baseline and understand that, you know, you’re sort of you’re setting yourself back by not having that that baseline buy-in, you know, in the trainer’s world, it’s getting a certain amount of sleep, eating the right foods, doing all these things for our clients so that they don’t fall off the wagon, so to speak.

Chris Scott: Right, I actually borrowed the term baseline resetting from a book called why we sleep by Matthew Walker, who and I love that book. And restoring my sleep was one of the best things I did after quitting drinking. And I think it’s a cornerstone just like supplements work for me. You know, it’s part of the realm of the basics that need to be optimized there, no one who gets two or three hours of sleep a night is going to achieve much of anything unless they’re the one in 100,000 people who just doesn’t need it.

For some reason, we don’t understand. Most people are not like that. I used to think that I was like that I would get five hours of sleep when I worked in finance and everything else, you know, I lived in a nightmare. So black and white universe, you know, thanks to sleep deprivation and alcohol. Baseline resetting I think also pertains to your physiological well being your nutrient levels, so you can get used to it, I guess I should explain what he used for baseline resetting means in the context of sleep, that you’re used to getting four or five hours of sleep a night, let’s say.

So you don’t realize how good you could feel if you got eight hours. Right? You have no idea you think that you feel good, but you don’t. Because we don’t really perceive absolute states, right, we perceive changes in our state, usually minute to minute, hour to hour, maybe day to day, week to week is harder, month to month is harder. Now you can look back and say you’ve made progress but it’s um, you know, you don’t usually perceive your absolute level of well-being at any given time, you have to compare it to something.

So people who are drinking a lot have, I would say they’ve had baseline resetting where they simply forgot how good it feels to not have the alcohol in their lives that they think that they need the alcohol, they actually do physiologically, but they can get back to a point with the help of biochemical repair. And all of the strategies that we’ve already mentioned sleep fitness crowding out of the drinking, they can get back to a point where they feel better naturally than they do with the alcohol. It doesn’t happen right away because withdrawal, and withdrawal can be protracted, there’s something called post-acute withdrawal that can last up to a year, the way to neutralize that is to use nutrient repair.

And, you know, also to work on the other pillars, the psychosocial spiritual pillars are just as important. A lot of people have unhealthy thought patterns that they might not even be aware of their self-talk isn’t good. There, they can’t sit and try to meditate because they feel like they’re being sapped out of their own brain. That was my experience when I started meditating after quitting drinking. So I had a lot of work to do on different levels, in order to get my baseline back to where it should be an overall sense of well being.

Steve Washuta: This is gonna be a really tough question. So take a second before you answer. I’m ready. Do you know of a supplement that could help someone potentially I don’t know rebalance themselves? And if you do, could you tell us why that supplement has maybe nutrients are micronutrients in them that you won’t find in other supplements?

Chris Scott : Yeah, I don’t know if I do? No, I do. We’re in luck because I actually have a supplement called bio to rebalance. That’s my supplement company. And it does help people to rebalance after I like to say after quitting an addiction, but we’ve had a lot of people use it, to help them in that process. Now, we’re very careful to say it’s not a cure for addiction.

That’s not what it is. It’s not a drug. It is a supplement. And it contains a range of some of the most important nutrients backed by research for rebalancing the brain-body system, specifically for alcohol use, but we’ve had some people use it for other substances, even for smoking. I’ve actually had some people say they’ve used it and their issue is gambling. So we’re rebalancing the brain. And we’re trying to establish that higher baseline level of well-being physiologically so that they’re not in a state of extreme deficiency trying to fix their habits.

So yes, bio rebalance contains vitamins and minerals, which are cofactors for the synthesis of these important neurotransmitters like dopamine, endorphins, serotonin, and also the amino acid precursors for there are brain chemicals. And not just that there’s a range of brain chemicals that it helps to increase levels of naturally. So we have five HTP, which is a serotonin precursor, we have DPA, which helps to increase natural levels of endorphins. LPA, which helps to increase dopamine along with L tyrosine, which does the same thing, oh, glutamine, which is a precursor for GABA, and, and things that support that. So in order to create more GABA, for example, you need l glutamine, vitamin B, six, and magnesium, all of those things are in bio rebalance.

And we also have some fatty acids that are very useful for brain and liver repair. PPC or phosphatidylcholine is one of those omega threes is one of those, we’re actually taking out the omega threes because it was so horrible for taste. So we recommend that people do use omega threes, we’re taking it out of the official formulation, but we’re adding in some vitamin d3, and some co q 10. For immunity. So our formula is actually in the midst of a change.

But the good news is, it’s getting better, not worse, it’s gonna taste better as well. And so you can learn more about that at bio rebalance. com, that’s bbioreblanc.com. And we might be out of stock for a little while, because it’s been flying off the shelves, and we’re waiting for our new shipment. But keep an eye out for that. Because, yeah, a lot of people have found it helpful. The primary complaint has been tasted, but we have fixed that for our next round of production. I think it is amazing.

Steve Washuta: People, it’s worth it.

Chris Scott: Yeah, I mean, it’s really not worth, you know, if you want mouth pleasure, you know, there’s your Kool-Aid and other things out there. With that said, it’s always best to get them the best of both worlds. So I think we’ve managed to achieve that with our new formulation that’s not out yet. It should be out in the next couple of months. But if anyone’s interested in bio rebalances, you can check it out, go to the website, because we were about to be out of stock serum. So so you might want to hurry up.

Steve Washuta: I’ll list all of Chris’s information below the podcast and he’ll talk about that when we wrap up here. I recently was reading about how they’ve gotten to do some like longitudinal studies using psychedelics with like addiction recovery and how that you know works as far as like, like you were talking about neurotransmitter Brain Stuff well above my paygrade. But really what I’m wondering is have they now pumped a lot of money into research about vitamins specifically helping out or is it like the lobbyist and people kind of push against that sort of research?

Chris Scott: No, I think it’s because vitamins minerals, fatty acid amino acids are very tough to patent. So the big drug companies have very little interest in that. We do see them taking out patents on or at least trying to pour compounds and say Ibogaine, which is a psychedelic known to help people with addictions, think there’s a drug coming out called 18 MC, could be wrong, but that’s a psychedelic derived drug that is hopefully going to help people get the benefits of using a psychedelic without going on a wild trip.

So no hallucinations, but you do get some of the neural circuitry, resetting that happens with those things. But yeah, I mean, I’m just as excited as anyone else about the research into psilocybin and Ibogaine, and even AI or Wasco. psychedelics, I think are probably a missing piece of the puzzle. It’s a big puzzle nutrient are part of it, it’s unfortunate that there’s no interest on the part of big drug companies.

And in fact, there’s, you know, almost arguably a cover-up. But that’s long been the case about certain nutrients. I was actually surprised to see vitamin d3 given the attention that it deserved, finally, in the context of immunity, and the pandemic. So you don’t often see that if the system was honest about the relevance of natural compounds for addiction, as it is about vitamin d3 for immunity, we would have relapse rates, that would be far less than what they are, the typical relapse rate for addiction is around 90% 90 to 95% of people relapse, and that slide back into active addiction within six months of attending a treatment center.

And the sad thing is that a lot of people will, you know, spend their kids’ college savings on treatment. It’s a lot of money, it can cost 30 to $60,000, to go to a Good Addiction Treatment Center. Some of them are way more, you know, you can go to the luxury ones that are a couple $100,000. You get a massage, and you’re hanging out in the sunset. The root causes of the biochemical repair problems are not talked about. So that’s what I tried to do is help people fill in the gaps. I think that’s just going to be necessary for a while, we’re going to have to have independent voices talking about this. It’s not going to get the same kind of funding that other admittedly exciting but other methods such as psychedelics are

Steve Washuta : 20 years from now, if everything goes the way that you wish it would go,

Chris Scott: Then I’ll be out of a job.

Steve Washuta: Well, explain what that could possibly look like? Between psychedelic use and maybe a little bit more of I guess you’d say a lot, a lot more money being pumped into research concerning vitamins and overall health and wellness. How that plays into addiction and all of the pieces that you have in your course and your book and what you do with people in your supplements. If if it’s 20 years from now, and it goes the way you wish, how does it look? How does the industry change?

Chris Scott : The industry becomes more personalized. It starts utilizing data that we can probably gather currently, whether we can process it perfectly remains to be seen. What I envision is a series of algorithms, taking blood test data, nutrient tested and neurotransmitter tested an ancestral change considerations, genetic data, and figuring out what’s going on in a person’s biochemistry, how do we get their baseline back to normal as fast as possible? The good thing for us now is that these natural compounds, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, etc, are really benign.

You know, I’ve never heard of someone taking any of these and dying. Of course, there are certain interactions that can exist. So you wouldn’t want to take a serotonin precursor amino acid-like l tryptophan or five HTP if you’re on an SSRI, but even then there’s actually some research showing that it can help people get off of SSRS. But you don’t want to overdo it. So the point is that these things are pretty benign. And so people now can get away with, you know, throwing stuff at the wall, seeing what sticks. And usually, that works. I call it trial and error. That’s what we have now.

But I would be way more comfortable with a system that helps people determine the exact dosages they need, the exact duration, they need those just for, and gives them insight into what they should do exactly with their diet. Because we know that not everyone needs to have the same diet. Some people do really well, on a vegetarian diet. I’m not one of those people. I know you aren’t either. Some people do really well on a keto diet long-term. Some people do better on keto for a while, and then you know, periods of having carbs. So all of this is highly individualized. And I think until we figure out how to crunch all of the relevant data and how to gather it. We’re not going to know exactly how to do it.

Luckily, as I’ve said, trial and error seem to work. The success stories in my course are awesome. We don’t have some advanced AI algorithm yet, but I would love to see things go in that direction. And I would love as I said, to have implications not just for what infusions to give people, but also what they should be doing with their lifestyle. You know, there’s some interesting ancestral considerations. There are people from Scandinavia and, and the UK, whose heritage from those places who are deficient in omega threes. People tend to be deficient in an amino acid called GLA. Which is necessary for mood stability.

And the only way to cover that up is to use massive amounts of alcohol. A lot of people when they start supplementing with omega threes, and with GLA, usually in the form of orange or primrose oil, end up feeling much better their baseline goes up, and they can take or leave alcohol, they don’t need it. It’s almost like full alcohol. It’s like pseudo alcoholism, it’s not even a real addiction is just the result of this. But that’s an ancestral thing. You know, and so I think all of these things need to be taken into account. People need to be treated individually, instead of brought into rooms and told that they’re defective. That they need to declare their powerlessness over this baffling permanent spiritual disease forever.

Steve Washuta: Well said, and I think that should also be going on in all industries. And it looks like it might be shifting that way, at least in the nutrition and personal training world. People paying a small amount of money, and getting a vague plan is not going to work. You have to have somebody who is looking after you and your body and your physiological and psychological issues, Create a plan for you specifically. I think that that has to be the way that the entire health industry goes including addiction. Which I consider part of the health industry. So why don’t we let everybody know where they can find all of your stuff. From your course, your book, your supplement, and even if somebody wants to reach out to us specifically with questions,

Chris Scott: for sure, yeah, my website is fitrecovery.com. And that’s where you’ll find my blog. The free articles, you’ll also find information about my online course, which is called Total alcohol recovery, 2.0. And you can sign up for my email list there. I try to send out very helpful emails to anyone who’s in this predicament. And, you know, there’s a lot of information about supplements. But also, you know, the full biopsychosocial, spiritual spectrum, you can find my podcast at elevation recovery.com.

And that’s a show that I host with a guy named Matt Finch, who’s an awesome guy. He’s a former opiate addict and former alcoholic and former with lots of things. I mean, he used to smoke crystal meth to get rid of alcohol withdrawal, and then shoot up heroin. So way more experienced than me, we have different histories.

But we happen to have to use the same exact strategies, some of which I’ve mentioned, to get better. So we agree, it’s kind of crazy. We were like lone voices in the wilderness online, we found each other and started this podcast. And so that’s I think a lot of people would like that podcast if they’d like this episode. My book is called drinking sucks, and you can find that on Amazon. It’s a short book. It’s about 163, or four pages long. And that was the book I wrote when I was three years alcohol-free.

I just wanted to create a small unintimidating pamphlet-style book for anyone who wanted to get started and headed in the right direction. So it’s not the 800-page anthology that I sometimes in my OCD streaks wished I had made. That’s more you’ll find more of that in my course. Which has like 20 hours of video, and other things. Also a really great community, private Facebook group, really supportive people, and anonymity. But the book is a good place to start. And let’s see, and the buyer rebalances my supplement.

So I think that just about covers it. Oh, I’m sorry, if anyone wants to reach out to me, my email address is Chris@fitrecovery.com. So feel free to do that. We also have a contact form on the fit recovery website and on the elevation recovery website. I try to at least read all emails. We have a large volume of emails, and I respond as often as I can. If you have a question about the course or if you have a question about coaching, you will definitely get a response.

Steve Washuta: Awesome. Chris, we have to have you back on at some point, again, to talk about what we bookmarked earlier, those healthy drinks. It’s going to be an awesome conversation because you and I spent a lot of time either creating or making up or buying healthy drinks and probably 1000s of dollars at this point on healthy drinks. It would be good for the listeners.

Chris Scott: Yeah. And there’s a lot more stuff out there that’s available. And it’s exciting. So I think that will be a fun podcast. I could even make a couple more.

Steve Washuta: Awesome. Thanks for your time, Chris Scott, and we’ll talk soon, hopefully 

Chris Scott: Thanks, Steve appreciate it. 

Steve Washuta:  Thanks for joining us on the Trulyfit podcast. Please subscribe, rate, and review on your listening platform. Feel free to email us as we’d love to hear from you.

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