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Do you feel bloated and like you aren’t digesting anything? Maybe you are gassy or constipated, or the food is going right through you?

I recently shared my own digestive issues on my IG stories and was floored by 95% of people following me also experiencing them! I knew something bigger is up. In this episode, I sit down with Mind-Body Connection expert Nate Ortiz to discuss how our digestive and hormonal issues are linked to deeper spiritual causes and suppressed trauma, which we are especially sensitive to as empaths.

Nate shares his incredible story from growing up around drugs, gang violence and poverty and even experiencing homelessness throughout his childhood, to overcoming adversities, healing his trauma and helping others heal theirs through his psychosomatic approach.

This episode blew me away and is one you will want to listen to again because it is JAM-PACKED with wisdom. I’m also glad to say since being coached by Nate, I have noticed enormous differences in my digestion and body and learned SO much about myself. Let’s dive in!

TRANSCRIPTION

Episode 442: Why You Have Digestive / Hormonal Issues – The Spiritual Causes with Nate Ortiz
By Sahara Rose

[00:12] Sahara
Namaste, it’s Sahara Rose and welcome back to The Highest Self Podcast, a place where we discuss what makes You, Your Soul’s Highest Evolvement.

[00:19] Sahara
If it’s your first time listening, welcome, I am so grateful to have you here. I’m a bestselling author, I’ve been hosting this Podcast for over 5 years now, and really, I’m here to make spirituality fun, grounded and relatable, so it can serve the needs of today’s young people, especially as queens out there, who are wanting something a little bit more feminine and joyful.

[00:42] Sahara
So, with the spiritual journey, for so many of us, it begins with the healing journey, and I will say that the healing journey never completes.

[00:50] Sahara
I began my spiritual journey with my digestive and hormonal issues in my early 20s. My body went into perimenopause when I was 21 years old, so I stopped getting my period for 2 years, I had horrible digestive issues, IBS, any food I ate, I would be in so much pain, so bloated, gas, constipation, like, all of the things, and that’s what led me to my healing journey, which eventually led me to Ayurveda, the world’s oldest health system and the sister science of yoga, based on the mind-body connection.
So, I became obsessed with Ayurveda, learned everything I could about it, studied it in India for 2 years, and later on wrote three books on Ayurveda, “Eat Right For Your Mind-Body Type”, “Idiot’s Guide to Ayurveda” and “Eat Feel Fresh”, with Forwards by Deepak Chopra, and went on to realize that what was missing, really deeper within, was the fact that I was not in alignment with my Dharma, my soul’s purpose. And that’s really my story of how my spiritual journey began.

[01:47] Sahara
So, throughout my life, I have had periods of time that my digestion has been more of like the forefront of what’s going on, what’s holding me back, and then times that, you know, I’m good and it’s not really bothering me.

[02:00] Sahara
Now, more recently, I will stay, starting the end of April, and I was sharing this on Instagram, and I know a lot of you have been feeling this too, all of a sudden, it’s like I had a new digestive system. Food was just getting stuck in my stomach, it wasn’t breaking down, I was, again, feeling those same symptoms of bloating, gas, constipation, but this time I started actually to feel nauseous after I would eat, which was new for me and make me really anxious about eating, because every time I would eat, I would be worried about feeling nauseous, and that would make me not want to eat, especially during the work day.

[02:34] Sahara
So, because of this, I had to go back into my healing journey, and the same things that worked for me before, were not quite working for me right now, just because our bodies shift so much. And of course, I have so much more going on in my life, running a business and stress, and all of these things that definitely play a huge role, but I always know, now when I have digestive issues, it is a spiritual wake up call for me to dive deeper.

[02:59] Sahara
So, I started to follow different TikToks and Instagrams and really dive into digestive health, and that is how I found Nate Ortiz.

[03:09] Sahara
So, I came across one of his TikToks and it was about the connection between your digestion, your physical body and then your trauma. And that, to me, was just so multi-faceted, and that’s the realm that I see the world in, that the mind and the body and the spirit are not disconnected but rather are reflections of each other. And I love Nate’s approach because, one, he’s from New York, you’re going to hear his accent on this, he’s so real, he’s like the thug, body worker, medical, mystic medium, and I love that because I also have that side to me as well, so I just loved him as a person. But the wisdom that he was bringing through, I was like “Wow!”
It was so fascinating, he was drawing the connection between people who have digestive issues, a hard time building their glutes, turned out feet, anterior hip pelvis (in your hips), anxiety… I’m like “Dude, again, you are reading my autobiography! This is me!” So, I had to have him on the Podcast because I know so many people are dealing with the same types of issues.

[04:15] Sahara
So, since this conversation, now a few months ago, I have been working with Nate and it has been incredible! So, I was able to see that my hips were twisted, and my hips being twisted were causing asymmetries in my body, and those asymmetries in my body were leading to holding patterns that were not allowing, basically, my energy to flow, and then, also, I had very low stomach acids so I started to take HCL before my foods, and having digestive bitters. And I’m happy to say that I no longer feel nauseous after I eat, I feel totally now. I have gotten so much netter with my workouts, my squats and my dead lifts, because my hips are more symmetrical, and I have just learned so much about myself.
So, I’m so excited to share his wisdom with you today because he really is someone who isn’t afraid of going there, and he shares a lot about how, often, it’s traumas from our childhood, that are creating these digestive and hormonal imbalances.
So, we speak a lot about various forms of these, and his own story, which is one of the most inspiring stories I’ve ever heard in my life and on this Podcast. From growing up, and periods of his live being homeless, and I’ll let him tell you the rest, but really coming from an under-privileged background and being able to take what he learned from that experience of growing up, really needing to be worried about his safety and worried about his survival and being able to heal himself from his own traumas and find balance within himself and then share that with other people. He’s truly an example of someone who’s living their dharma, their soul’s purpose. And just the wisdom that he shares today, I know is going to help so many of us do that deeper healing work that allows us to – you know, he says “You’re never going to have that butt if you don’t heal that gut”, so, it’s going to allow us to heal our guts, get those butts, but also do the deeper inner work that, you know, no diet or no personal trainer is really going to solve, it comes from within.

[06:18] Sahara
So, without further ado, let’s welcome Nate Ortiz to The Highest Self Podcast.

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[07:53] End of Advertisement
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[07:54] Interview

[07:54] Sahara
Welcome Nate, to The Highest Self Podcast, it’s so great to have you here!

[07:57] Nate
Thank you for having me, I’m super excited to be here!

[08:00] Sahara
And the first question I’d love to ask you is, what makes you your highest self?

[08:06] Nate
Being completely honest, extremely honest. I always look for ways of how can I be honest with myself because honesty is the only way I can get better. If I lie to myself and I’m not honest, I create shadows, and then the shadows, subconsciously, give me a life that I don’t want. So, I think being honest makes me my highest self.

[08:26] Sahara
Beautifully said! And you have an incredible story of growing up in a tumultuous background and now you’re a medical intuitive, basically, and I’m so excited to dive into this. So, can you share a little bit about your story and your background, and how these powers turned on for you?

[08:42] Nate
Oh man, absolutely! When I was a kid, I grew up in a very, very traumatizing childhood. When I was born into this world, my mom was a drug addict and I actually was born with heroin in my system. So, I wasn’t allowed to leave the hospital for, you know, a couple months until I got rehab of getting heroin out of my body.
So, as soon as I came into this world, I came into pain. And then I grew up; I grew up with a lot of self-identity issues (a lot of people don’t know that). My father’s black (African American), my mother’s white, and I never felt like I was a part of something. So, if I go to my black side of my family, what a lot of people don’t understand is that, there is a lot of bullying if you’re light-skinned. If you’re going to the black community, as being a light-skinned kid, I used to get in a lot of fights because I was light-skinned. And going to my white side of the family, to be honest, we were all mixed – Puerto Rican, Dominican, Italian. So, growing up for me, I had to figure out who I was at a young age and my mind didn’t allow me to do that, I had to sense intuition in my belly. If we did something bad, like, for an example, trying to skip class, I just couldn’t, I wasn’t built for it, my gut was – I would just get this guilty feeling of like “No Nate, this isn’t what you’re supposed to do”.
But growing up, my mom and my dad, they both had addictions, and my dad was kind of a criminal in a way, where we were hiding from the cops my whole life, and my mom had, you know, a really bad childhood herself and she didn’t get the help that she really needed. I like to look at my mom as a young soul, she’s a sweetheart but she’s been through a lot, she got hooked on some things that, you know, messed with her mental health a lot.
So, when I grew up, I had a mom that was bipolar, multiple personality disorder and also, either going through withdrawal or on drugs.
So, I used to open up mu room, as a kid, and just knowing what to listen out for, I can predict what momma had that day. And then, that taught me body language around, like, 10 years old.
Also, growing up on the streets of Jersey City in New Jersey, there was a lot of crime, I was jumping from neighborhood to neighborhood, I would jump, like I said, from the black neighborhood one moment, and the Spanish neighborhood, the white neighborhood; there was a lot gangs, so at a young age, I had to really learn intuition of understanding “This guy, is he going to rob me? Is he going to kill me? Are they going to jump me?” And as soon as I get a little bit of an intuition that this is not the right block to walk down, I would take the long way, which probably would be an hour, but I knew I can avoid conflict.
And then, at 11 years old, that’s when my life really changed, that’s when I learned about manifesting; 11 years old, my sister was murdered, I mean, accused of murder of my niece; my niece had epilepsy, my sister was charged with murder and her boyfriend was charged with murder. My mom was only clean for 3 months, she was a great grandmother, she had a reason to be clean. And my mom disappeared for a month, my brother went to jail, my sister went to jail, her boyfriend went to jail, the State of New Jersey took my nephews away. And at 11 years old, I had my little brother and I, and I’m like “I have to figure out what I’m going to do with my life, I can’t go down this road.” So, I went to school and they were like “Nate, you need to go to therapy, you need to see a counsellor”, I’m like “Man, I’m not going to see no counsellor”, because you’re too cool to see a counsellor, and then, his name was Mr. Fernandez and he was like “No Nate, you need to see a counsellor”, and I said no.
So, I remember one day, I went home and nobody knew that our mom wasn’t around because we kept it as a secret, so as nobody knew, we couldn’t tell you we were hungry, we couldn’t tell you we didn’t have money to eat, we couldn’t tell you we didn’t have clothes. And like I said, my dad was trying his best to provide for us, selling drugs, but, you know, at the same time, my dad is hiding from the cops. So, when we spoke to our dad, it was on a payphone and we would have, like, code, on the phone. So, my dad, we’d meet him at Burger King on Wednesday, at 4:00PM and we wanted to hang out with dad but we couldn’t because dad had to go and we couldn’t be seen with dad.
You know, it got to the point, sometimes my brother and I would have undetective cops following us from school, back to the house, to see if our mom is home, it was very crazy. So, at a young age, I went home, at 11 years old, and I said “How do I change this paradigm?” My family had, all, addiction, runs through my family. That’s when I found out manifesting. So, I wrote down a dream and I said “How can I get out of Jersey City?” And I sat there for like three hours and I figured out that we had the number one basketball school in the country. And it was St. Anthony’s, and a coach named Bob Hurley, who’s inducted to the Hall of Fame, I’m like “If I could play for this guy, I can get out of all of this, and if I play for this guy when u get older, I could get any job, or anybody’s going to believe me because I play for one of the most respected coaches ever”.
So, I went to school the next day and Mr. Fernandez was like “Nate”, for like the seventeenth time, he was like “Nate, you’ve got to come see me”, and I’m like “You’re right, I do have to come see you”, and he’s like “Oh!”, I said “I’ll make you a deal, open up the gym, every morning at 6 in the morning and catch my rebounds and I’ll tell you everything you want to know”, and he looked at me, shocked, and he’s like “I’ll make you a deal, the day that you miss, you have to come after school and when you come after school, you’ve been out playing basketball in the morning, you’re going to talk to me after school”, then I was like “Man, do I want to make that deal, man? Because if I miss one day, I’m not trying to stay after school”, then I’m like “You know what? Let’s go, you’ve got a deal!” I never missed a day of school, sixth grade, seventh grade, eighth grade! I went to school with the flu, I went to school in blizzards. You know how you grow up, there’s a blizzard and you don’t know if school’s going to get canceled until 7, 8 o’clock, I was still in that gym, shooting a ball, we’ll find out, when I was in that gym, if I was going to go to school or not. But Mr. Fernandez used to come and tape up, St. Anthony players getting scholarships, because everybody that played for Hurley, you’re going to college. And he used to put it up and he used to tell me to go up there, read it and act like that that’s my name, and close my eyes and imagine, and then ‘Let’s go, we’re going to go work on your game”, and we did that for 3 years. I ended up getting a full scholarship to play for St. Anthony’s three years later.
When I got to St. Anthony’s, that’s when we went completely homeless, that’s when they completely found out my mom wasn’t home. So, we lived in front of the Holland tunnel, right in front of New York City, and I used to pretend, I used to have to manipulate my brain not to be embarrassed because it’s extremely embarrassing, you lived there for 3 years. I used to manipulate my brain and I used to say “This hotel, this is my mansion and I got people hanging out in my mansion, it’s cool”. And that’s what I did, and it really helped me, but when days got really low, I used to leave that hotel and walk right up the block to my school. And anytime I felt low, I felt scared. 11 o’clock, to this day is still a trauma to me because that’s when we had to pay that hotel, and I would be at school, shaking, sweating, texting my dad “Did you make it, did you make the payment? Are we okay?” And sometimes we didn’t make the payment, sometimes we did make the payment, but no matter how bad things got, I used to look over and I had New York City as my skyline my whole life, and I’m like “Man, life is so bad for me right now, one day they’re going to write a book on me, I’m going to make it out of this situation, but I’m right here, next to New York City, it could’ve been worse.” Even though I lost my whole family”, even though my mom, you know, is going through a lot, my dad’s going through a lot, I’m like “Man, I’m right here, next to New York City”. I ended up being homeless, playing, and then, out of nowhere, we got an apartment, my junior year in high school, and then, that year they started a football program, like “Nate, why don’t you just give it a try?”, I’m like “Fine, I’ll give it a try!” I became the first division football player in school history. Then I went on to play on for, I chose a small school because I wanted somebody to teach me more about football, I didn’t know what I was doing, I would’ve huddled and just went straight, like, okay.
So, I played for Delaware State University, that’s when I was like “When I go to school, all my teammates took easy classes and things, and I went for the hard one, I’m getting my bachelor in science, I’m going for Movement Science, I want to know everything about the body because I have digestive issues, rheumatic arthritis, I have learning disabilities. I couldn’t read until I was about 20 years old. When I was born, since I was born on drugs, they told my dad that I was going to be mentally challenged growing up, that I would never be a normal kid.
So, when I went to school, I took it serious. Now, I wasn’t the best student my freshman year, because I had a lot of ego. When I went down to school, there was a bunch of fake tough guys and I used to have to try to prove myself to these tough guys, but then I learned like “Oh man, this isn’t it, this is how you get caught up and stuck in the streets”.
So, I ended up going to Delaware State University, thought I was going to the NFL, career ended with a spinal injury, went through depression, and then I had 3 months to graduate, I had nowhere to live and my girlfriend’s father was like “Man, I believe in you, you’re going to be something in life. You can come to Washington Heights, New York City, and live here with us”. So now, I graduated college, I’m back in another urban area, and every day I woke up and I studied the body, I studied a lot of Paul Check, one of the biggest reasons why I am where I am today, and he had a lot of free information. I had no money and my girlfriend’s father used to leave us $20 every morning on the counter and we used to stretch that $20.
So, I used to go to Starbucks, sit down, you can get a coffee, water and a bathroom code for like $2.49 (and Wi-Fi), and I used to just sit there and pretend that was my office, I’m like “Alright, I’ve got to figure out what to do today”, I had no job, I had no guarantee of success, but I had my imagination, the same thing I did as a kid to get me through a scholarship and things like that. And then I made videos, they got like 4 views, 5 views, on YouTube, and I was like, when I made a decision, I think a lot of people would get over the fear – when you make a decision that you’re going to do what you’re going to do, till you die, fear escapes the room, it doesn’t bother you. I told fear, I told any, you know, you’re going to get people to doubt you, I’m like “Man, listen, I’m going to do this, I’m going to try until I die! I’m going to get this dream or I’m going to die trying!” And fear doesn’t want to bother you when you’re at that point. So, any time I saw 4 views, I used to put six zeros, I’m like “Oh, it’s 4 million, okay, cool, I’ve got 4 million people watching me!” Because what’s the difference between me making a video and having 4 million people watching, and 4? It’s my attitude, it’s the attitude, so, my attitude was always sharp.
Out of nowhere Goldman Sachs’ vice president finds one of my videos, he gives me a job, he needed someone for 8 years of experience, made me the CEO of his small private gym in Westchester. So, now I’m in Westchester, I’m working with moms all day, with training, then I start working with their kids, then I start working with their husbands, I had to learn how to build a business. His business partner left, the head coach left, and then everybody’s looking at me, I was 24 years old and I’m like “Okay, time to manifest again, I’m going to make this happen. And that’s what my highest self, as you say, being honest with myself, where am I weak at? I’m weak at writing emails, okay, I’m going to vest money to grammerly.com, I’m going to I’m weak at reading, okay, I’m going to vest money into learning programs. And I built a business in Westchester, New York, became very successful, and then boom, out of nowhere, still making videos, I’m like 4 years in, I’m still, now I’m at 17 views, and I’m like “Alright, that’s not a lot for a lot of people, but that’s a lot for me, that’s progression”. And then, at the same time of doing this, I was supporting my girlfriend’s acting career. So, I was making the money, I made her quit her job so she could focus on her dream, I would work all day, come home and I’m going to do scripts all night with her, all night, for 5 years straight. And then one day, she books Saved By The Bell, reboot and becomes the star of Saved By The Bell, and she took over Zach Morris’ power in the new Saved By The Bell.
So, then we came to LA, I came to LA, I learned how imbalanced that was, I was always “Go, go, go, go”, and I saw people taking a walk at 12:00PM, I’m like “Yo, why are you talking a walk at 12:00PM?”, and then I learned I was way too yank, LA taught me I was way too yank. And then I ended up, I told myself, I was like “Man, I wish I can just take New York and bring it here”, I just didn’t know how, but I asked the universe, I’m like “Hey, can you help me out with that? Can you help me make a business here?” Anyway, while I in the business, helping that gym build, I was building my own business on the side, I was learning how to build a business. Covid hits, three months later, I end up coming to LA, and thought I was going to be here for 2 weeks, and I ended up moving here with my girlfriend. Now she’s on billboards, driving around LA, I’m like “This is crazy”, then I had a self-identity thing going on, I’m like “Who am I? How am I going to show myself I’m good enough? How am I going to make money out here?” And then, when I got over stressing and I learned most of it was pushed by fear, then, out of nowhere, I got one actor, and then I worked with another actor, and then HBO called me to work with their actors, and then I started working with a bunch of actors. And then I got Cord A, who’s a Grammy-nominated hip-hop artist, and we need to get him ready with Naomi Osaka, to get ready for GQ magazine shoot. And I’m pulling up to their house, waiting in my Honda, go in their house, working them out, and I took Cord A one day, I said “Look, if you listen to everything I’m going to tell you to do, with your mind, your body, your digestion, your skin, everything, you’re going to look like a whole new person!” And I said “If you don’t, I’ll pay you!” We made that deal, Cord A lost 35lbs with me, no longer needs to see skincare people, I fixed his ankle, I rehabbed his ankle, no more digestive issues. Naomi Osaka jumped in a lot of work out, she ended up winning the Australian Open, and then, I was still making videos, and then one day, someone said “Try TikTok” and I took my videos, I chopped it up, I put it on TikTok and out of nowhere just blew up, from last June 2020 to today, 230.000 followers, over 30+million views, it went insane!
So, yeah, I know, that was a fast version of my story, but I’m sorry if I went a long, but I just want, I feel like, I don’t want to cheat you, you know.

[21:41] Sahara
There’s so much there, and wow, I was with you every single step in that journey, and just, like, your soul ability to see the higher picture, no matter where you are at in life.
And this thing that you said, I once said that to myself, of “This is just the shitty part of my memoire. One day, this will be part of my book, and I will look back on this”. And it’s really hard for people to have that awareness when they’re in the experience, it feels like “This is it, this is who I am, this is my identity”. So, I love that, from such a young age, you were continually able to take really challenging and painful experiences and be able to see the higher vision and transmute them, and the way that following your intuition has guided you now, and your TikTok is how I found you, and you’re here, and just the ripple effect continues. So, thank you so much for trusting your intuition and being an example for so many people who also have families with addictions and trauma, and to show people what’s possible on the other side.

[22:41] Nate
Yeah, thank you! And I say all that to say, I had to learn about my body, I had to learn about my trauma, I had to see how things, everything from digestive system, core muscles, lower back, consciousness, how each level of the body holds its own information.
And when I went to school, we isolated the body, and that’s when I went to study with Paul Check, I’m a level 1, 2 and 3, check practitioner. And Angie Check, Paul Check, they mentored me, and learning that and connecting the science with both, I’m like “Oh, this is beautiful and that’s what I’m able to do”.
When I was a kid, I learned the power of how the body’s connected to the mind. I remember when my stepfather came home from prison and he was a different guy, and I’m like, he is no longer angry, he wasn’t drinking and he would get up every morning, at 7:00AM and go to the park and work out. So, one day I’m like “Hey, can I come with you?”, he’s like “Of course”, so we went, and him, and the other guys from jail would be doing pull-ups, push-ups, 15-20 minutes in the work out, they started expressing their feelings, I’m like “Whoa, whoa, whoa, what is this?”, and I was like, I was about 12-13 years old, I’m like “I need to learn…”, because, since I was a kid, I wanted to learn to know why, and I’ll do push-ups with them and I started working out and I walked away from that workout and I felt different. So, then, all my friends that were in gangs, I’m like “I’ve got to go show them this!” And we knew this one friend that his dad used to beat him all the time and one day it would happen right in front of us, but we would never talk about it, and that suppression can cause depression. And if you suppress emotions, energy, emotion, it can be depressed.
So, I remember one day, we were doing push-ups and he gets up from like the third set of push-ups and he goes “Nate, man, I’m tired of my dad smacking me”, and I was like “Wow!” So, my whole goal was, I got everybody that was in a gang to join sports so we can start moving their body, and I started having probably 15-20 kids, at 6:00AM, in the gym working out with me. Remember that I told you that we never missed a day of school? They started coming with me. And they got families now, they’re all alive, thank God. The ones that couldn’t get off are in jail or dead, so, yeah, at a young age. So, that’s when I got obsessed with this, connecting body language, organs, muscle, nervous system, and then why people do the programming of a person, I can connect all of them.

[25:11] Sahara
Wow, so powerful! Yes, the way that, when we open up the body, we open up the mind, and how interconnected they are. And I think, especially for men, often, they need to be doing something with their hands or something physical, for them to open up emotionally.
I remember hearing about this study that for young girls in therapy, the therapist could look and face the girl, and the girl could speak, whereas for boys, they would have to sit next to each other and both be doing something like a puzzle. Because of evolution, there’s something in a male psyche that if someone’s just staring at you, across from you, like a man, in the eye, that could mean he would want to fight you. So, it’s something about being next to each other and both working on something together versus against each other.

[25:53] Nate
Hmm, I’ve got to look into that. Wow!

[25:55] Sahara
Yes!

[25:56] Nate
It’s awesome!

[25:57] Sahara
So, we’ve got so much to dive into! So, I want to talk about digestive issues, because I think that that’s really where it all begins. In Ayurveda, they say “It’s not you are what you eat, but you are what you digest”. And so many of us, myself included, have actually gotten into spirituality because of our digestive issues, and also, I think is a blessing and a curse because for me, if I eat a little bit off or even if I don’t eat off, just randomly, my digestion will talk to me.
So, what are the emotional and spiritual imbalances behind this?

[26:29] Nate
Alright, I’m about to teach you something that’s deep, you ready?

[26:32] Sahara
Okay, let me have it!

[26:34] Nate
I never met a person who is not, that is brought to earth to change, you know, make tomorrow a better day, a soul that came here to make, that’s on a job, that’s on a mission, that isn’t sensitive to man-made things.
What I mean is, people that come here with the strongest souls have a very sensitive avatar, a very sensitive wiring system, because pain is in more in the way we learn, pain is the strongest teacher, it teaches us “Don’t do that again, that’s not good”. And what happens is, when I get a client that tells me they have digestive issues, the first thing I know is “Okay, what’s the person’s dream?” As soon as the person is not connected to a dream, then, when they get off, they’re getting signs from the soul, in the body, that they’re going the wrong way. So, that’s the first thing I look for.
Number two, digestion is very deep, so the first thing we look at is, it starts in the mouth, right? People would argue “It starts with what you put in your mouth”, yes, but we have saliva. So, let’s just say, for an example, someone’s dehydrated, okay, and they’re not drinking enough water, when they eat things like starches, we have amylase, digestive enzyme that’s in the saliva, that mixes with the saliva, that helps you digest starch. So, we have to, first see if they’re dehydrated or not. Number two, we have a lot of people being, in my opinion, and you could read the book “The Importance of Stomach Acid”, you can listen to an audio book – a lot of people walk around with low stomach acid, but they’re getting diagnosed as if they’re having too much. And what happens is, the esophagus valve does not close if there’s no stomach acid to break down food. Food can start coming back up and then you could be diagnosed as if you have too much. And when someone doesn’t have enough stomach acid, they have issues breaking down protein, they also have issues keeping pathogens out the body. Stomach acid, it helps us eliminate any bacterial pathogen that we take in with the food.
So, the next thing I look for is, if there’s anything with the digestive tract, like, specifically, the stomach, and then I have to see if the client, if they do have that, then we have to go down this way because if someone doesn’t have enough stomach acid, then the signal from the liver and the gallbladder, it doesn’t release enough bile, which then balances out the acidity from the stomach acid, and then they don’t release enough enzymes. So, it can cause a chain reaction of food going to the small intestine, undigested, which then, you have bacteria which comes up and that eats the food for you, and we call that SIBO. That’s one thing for SIBO, there’s many things, but if you really look at research, that’s one of the four main things of SIBO, is not enough stomach acid.
Or if a person has liver issues and they’re not producing enough bile, that can cause issues; or if a person is eating dead food, over-cooked food and processed food comes in dead. And if you read the book “Enzyme Nutrition” by Dr. Edward Hau, he predicts, and his assumption is that most of our degeneration diseases are from not having enough enzymes in our diet. And any time that we don’t eat food that has its natural enzyme, the more dead, or the more cooked the food is, or processed it is, we have to sacrifice our metabolic enzymes, to then come down, to that transfer into the pancreas that didn’t convert it into pancreatic enzymes to help us break down food, okay?
So, there’s many different things. And then we can get to the gut itself, dysbiosis is very seen today, people having more bad bugs than good; fungal infections which can be considered a dysbiosis in a way. Fungal infections are very high, remember, fungi eat anything you can’t digest and assimilate, okay? So, these are the things that I see.
So, the first thing I’ll do with a client when I get them – see where the problem is and then I can try to predict “So, that’s the organ”, then I can automatically know what muscle connects around that – your transverse abdominus, which protects your lower back and your spine. Your transverse abdominus is that belt, you know how people put that belt when they go to the gym? We have a natural belt like that called the TVA (transversal abdominus). When the body has an organ that’s inflamed, it’s signals to the muscle nearest to it, on that nerve channel, that it’s inflamed, which then the muscle picks up as if it’s in pain and it inhibits (inhabitation) of that muscle, turns off and then, now, the body has to compensate into something called the anterior pelvic tilt.
The first position would be the hips all forward, QR muscles get tight and then when a person walks and runs, they’re usually going to be utilizing more of the gluteus medius, rather than maximus, and they’re going to create a tight lower back and pain, and hip pain. And then if they keep that up for a long period of time, the body will shift to protect the spine, to go into something called the sway back, the feet would turn out, butt cheeks get really tight, and you can kind of take a pencil or pen and put it right between the butt cheeks and the pen doesn’t move.
So, we went from an organ communication, to the nerve, and then the muscle, and then the fourth layer, I call the four layers to strength. The fourth layer is going to be the consciousness. In my opinion, I have no scientific research, but I want to dig deep on this. Each nerve connects to a muscle and organ, they connect, the best example to think – your heart connects to your left chest, and what’s the emotion of the heart? “I love you” or “I have a grudge against you”, right?
The heart – so, you have the muscle, the nerve, the organ. I think, since they all use the same neurotic loop, is what I call it, I think they communicate to the limbic system because it creates very consistent issues. For people with digestive issues, they could be very insecure, workaholics, they can sometimes be controlling, angry, they care what other people think, sensitive to criticism is another one, substance, they like substance, eating, they’re usually emotional eaters, they can be an emotional eater. And then, this usually, problems, I look for problems from their life, a trauma from 14-21 years old.
So, we dive in all of them, but the first thing that we do with a person like that, is, and I work with a lot of women, 85% of my clients are women. I have to tell women like “Hey, when we work together, the first week of homework, you’ve got to check your bowel movement, for 7 days, some of them are “Oh my God, I’m not telling you my bowel’s name”, and I’m like “You’ve got to, because it’s a report card of what’s going on”.
So, then we see what kind of bowels we’re getting. Constipation is usually not enough fiber and not enough water, and then, in some cases, not enough bile from the liver. Diarrhea is a way for the body to eliminate something that it doesn’t want. And then, alternating between hard and soft tools is a huge sign of dysbiosis and a fungal infection.
So, where we start of is, we put them on something like a cave man diet, a lot of people don’t like it. When I say that nuts and seeds are very hard, and grains, are very hard to digest, those are the first three things I take out of a client’s diet, with dairy, and then we see what kind of water they’re drinking, we take out tap water, we put good water in there, we put organic food and I like to use salable fruits, meaning, salable fruits are the fruits that are the bacteria the microbiome like to eat. And then we start to see what we can do from there, and each week we adjust. After I attack the digestive system, then I immediately have to go to the muscular system and rehab the muscular system.
I went to school for strength, condition, movement science, nutrition, physical therapy. So, then I give them the – we do a program to fix their hips and then, when you get those two, now you have the communication between the core muscles and the digestive system, there’s no inflammation there, so the correlation between the nervous system is good, the muscles are good, the organs are good.
I got one more – consciousness or the limbic system, or the emotion. Now, this person, I have to get them to step into their power (personal power, self-will). The first session of what the client, when I usually work, after we do all the paperwork, we do something called ‘The Dream Map’. It’s a lot of work, if I make you take off things, I have you do workout programs, I have you do this process, you need to do something you love enough to want to change for. And you don’t have something enough to change for, then you have no core values. If you have no core values, then you eat things you know you shouldn’t be eating, which then bring you pain, to remind you you’re going the wrong way.

[34:29] Sahara
Thank you so much for sharing that process and how it’s so interconnected. And it brought me back to, when I first started my health journey, and I couldn’t even eat food without being in so much pain, and I wasn’t living my Dharma, I wasn’t living my purpose. And as I have stepped more into my power, those digestive issues and hormonal imbalances, and all of those things have swayed away. And now I see my gut as almost like a compass to tell me when I’m in or out of balance.
And even, sometimes I’ll be in conversations with people and I’ll feel nauseous, and I’m like “Oh wow, there’s something, energetically, that I’m picking up on”, because the moment I leave the conversation, I’m no longer nauseous. And before I was like “Oh, my digestion must suck, what’s going on?”, and I’m like “Oh no, it’s signaling me something”.

[35:12] Nate
Good for you! That’s powerful! Good for you! You know, that’s next level and some people have got to be able to trust. The more you ignore your intuition, the more you create a battle between the mind and the heart. So, the easier you are to be programmed, you know what I’m saying?
So, I try to teach my clients that all the time, it’s like, you’ve got two languages, it’s good to know vocabulary and language of a programmer, but that intuition is everything, it guides you.

[35:39] Sahara
So, for people who are experiencing bloating, I know that’s such a common thing amongst many women, and you said, you mentioned two things – stomach acid and cooked foods. I hear a lot of different things around this. Should people take stomach acid and digestive enzymes, and that type of thing, and should they only take that if they’re eating meat? What’s your take on this?

[36:00] Nate
Yeah. And that’s what’s challenging about the fitness industry and the nutrition industry, because you’ve got people that argue and can’t see both sides.
Okay, do you take stomach acid? We’ve got to see if there are signs of low stomach acid. Signs of low stomach acid is low vitamin B12, iron, white spots on your nails, because there’s zinc deficiency, seeing food in your stool is a huge one, that’s another one that could be signaling to low stomach acid. So, we don’t play guessing, we don’t guess, we go, we test, we see what works and what doesn’t work. And if a client does have low stomach acid – a lot of times people will go vegan for a couple years, or vegetarian for a couple years, and then try to throw meat in the body, it’s a big no, no, because you’re not going to have enough stomach acid, because what signals stomach acid? The most is protein. So, the first thing I would do with that client is, immediately, if they do have low stomach acid, we would do something like, take two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar, put it in water, and then drink it, and then eat the meat and tell me if you feel better.
And another trick we can do is, you could take a lemon, cut it in half, squeeze in water (half the lemon, squeeze it in water), drink it before the meal, or during the meal if you did apple cider already, and then after the meat, after you’re done, drink it after. And if you feel like there’s no bloating there no more, that just told us that we may need to take hydrochloric acid for a couple weeks to get the stomach acid going too, and it stimulates stomach acid.
And then the sign that someone can do, if they’re doing that, a trick that we learned is that you take one before a meal, and as you eat, if you don’t feel a warmness in your belly, and this only goes if you have low stomach acid, you don’t want to do it if you have high. And then the next meal you can go two, and then you continue to increase until you feel warmness in your stomach. And I can’t tell you how many times the average person that has low stomach acid, we’re looking at 12-19 hydrochloric acid pills, before they feel that warmness. And then, of course, over time it comes down.
I have a client from Sacramento, who, she was at 19, and now we’re at 11 with her, but she’s a whole different human being. Because, remember, if you’re not breaking down protein correctly, if you look up protein deficiency or you look up the studies – I didn’t mention, I’m going to get my Master’s to become a Mento Clinician Therapist in trauma, with emphasis on trauma right now.
So, I got to get more into studies, it’s been, when I graduated in 2017, I didn’t have to do so many studies, like, demanded on me, I did on my own time. But if you look up depressed people, there’s a high correlation between depression and Vitamin D, we know that, but there’s a huge correlation between depression and protein deficiency.
Now, remember, you said it in the beginning, it’s not what you eat, it’s about what you digest. Well, if you’re eating meat, you can’t digest it and it can create a lot of issues as far as being deficient in Vitamin B12, iron, zinc, etc.
And then, as far as the digestive enzymes go, in my humble opinion, I would recommend people reading that book, or looking up Dr. Edward Hau. Look at that information or read his book “I Would Forever Take a Digestive Enzyme”. What Dr. Edward Hau shows, over and over and over in his book is that people don’t die from old age, people die from a lack of enzymes, because enzymes are lifeforce. So, unless you’re on a completely raw diet, which, I’m not saying is a bad thing, but you’re only helping yourself going on enzyme. Read that information, you’ll be blown away! You’ll just be blown away!
So, when a client comes to me, I never tell them what to do or what to believe, because that’s manipulation. I tell my client “Here, let’s try this” or “Listen out to this, I’m going to send you these references”, I never tell them what to do without references, and I say “Hey, try it, and if it works for you then that’s a belief now, if you’re getting results from it”.
So, those are the two things I would say as far as bloating with those two things, on what to do. Sometimes I’m hard to listen to because I don’t have one belief system and I’m not dogmatic on one diet, everybody’s built differently.

[39:55] Sahara
Same! I believe in that as well. And I remember a few years ago, I actually tried the HCL and seeing how many I could take, and I remember I took 8 and I still couldn’t feel anything and I was like “There’s no way I should take more than this”, and I just kind of stopped the experiment, but as you’re speaking, I’m like, I probably still do have low stomach acid because I was a raw vegan for so many years, and vegan, and I do have such a sensitive stomach. So, apple cider vinegar, I feel, is a really great, just like, natural way to get that going again.
I crave lemons, I want to eat lemons, which is a sign from my body of “I want that acidity”.

[40:30] Nate
Aha, that’s a huge sign. Yeah, and if a person is not digesting – remember, fungi would digest and assimilate anything, you can digest and assimilate. And fungi, or bacteria, would digest it, right? So, when they eat, they create bloating, it can create inflammation in the digestive tract, which then can create – remember, if you’ve got bloating, I’m not so much concerned about bloating because of the looks, I’m concerned about what it does to the muscular system. Nobody really talks about that a lot, I mean, outside of Paul Check, nobody really speaks about that a lot, or is aware of the importance of not being bloated because of your muscular system.
I got people who see chiropractors three times a week because they’re readjusting, I’m like “Hey, look, I’m not against that, I think that’s a beautiful thing, but can I ask you a question?”, I’m like “Yeah, how long have you been doing this for?”, “Oh yeah, 2 years”, I’m like “Okay, have you ever thought about what’s causing you to get the pain back instead of trying to get, you know, a quick adjustment?”
So, what happens is, if you’re bloated, you’re going to have a lot of compensation from, everywhere from your hips, to your ankles, to your shoulders, like a neck, it has to happen. The body compensates, since that TVA is not working. And I don’t advise you lifting heavy, I don’t advise you running because the more you put that into the nervous system, the more of an imbalance you create and harder it is to get out of it.

[41:50] Sahara
Wow! I mean, I really resonate with the ankle pronation and feet turned outward and the lower back. And I was also a dancer growing up, too, so I, like, trained myself to walk, kind of, with my feet turned out, but I think it’s also related to that.
So, if someone is bloated, is that, maybe, preventing them from gaining muscle in their stomach?

[42:11] Nate
Absolutely, because if the muscle is bloated, you’re going to compensate with the upper abdominals that are attached to the ribcage, that then would pull you into something called the internal rotation. But you’re never really get into the transverse abdominus or lower abdominus.
So, the definition of your stomach won’t be present with bloating and yes, you won’t be able to fire through that muscle due to the neurons, the nerves being inflamed from the communication of the organs. So, that’s why a lot of people wake up one day, they ain’t do no ab work or nothing like that, they wake up with no bloating, they’re like “Oh, look at my stomach”, and then they eat and they have bloating immediately. So, it does take away the definition and the ability to train the muscles of the internal obliques, lower abdominus, transverse abdominus, and you will compensate if you keep doing crunches and things, which you shouldn’t be doing, especially if you’re bloated, you will compensate by the upper abdominus pulling down the ribcage, so now your body is going to be an internal rotation, when your shoulders go in, your neck comes forward and now you get a bunch of neck pain going in the back, and then, now you’re going to be messing with the zone fours, what we call is, the heart chakra, zone four, speaking up from your chest, doing something you love in life, your beliefs about relationships, etc. So, now I’ve got to go with that, so we’ve got a lot of digging to do.
That’s why we need to know what your dream is, we’ve got a lot of work to do. And as soon as the person knows their dream, they, deep down inside, remember, being honest with yourself is being at your highest self. You know, people really know the truth when they really sit there and think about it. Nine times out of ten, I’m talking to the client, they’re like “I know, corn makes me bloated, I’ll take it out”, I’m like “How long did you know that?”, “I knew this since I was a kid”, but why didn’t they change? Because if they don’t have a reason to change, they won’t. Why would we change if we don’t have a reason to? That’s why we figure out a dream. And this is why we have to do a lot of life coaching, because when we go to a dream and then figure out what they want, and they have to figure out why they’re not actually taking steps towards that dream, because of belief systems – mom, dad, trauma, being molested as a kid, and that’s when I have to go down that.

[44:26] Sahara
Beautiful! And I had the same epiphany when I was on my own healing journey, of why am I even doing this, do I get a gold star at the end for having perfect digestion? And I realized that what I was really searching for was my soul’s purpose, the big reason why I’m here, and I started to write a book, and writing that book and giving my energy to something that’s greater than me healed me beyond any form of, you know, and I still totally believe in vitamins and nutrition, and all of that, but having that deeper sense of purpose rose me above any of these pains and obstacles. So, yes, it’s like in that collective feeling of connecting to something so much greater. And I love that you stuck with your gifts and sharing your gifts, and that’s what allowed you to be seen and recognized.
So, another question that a lot of listeners had were around hormonal imbalances. What are some of the emotional and spiritual reasons why, especially so many women, today, have different hormonal imbalances or being diagnosed with PCOS, fibromyalgia, endometriosis, where is this all coming from?

[45:31] Nate
Okay! So, I’m going to break the sign down to be simple so I don’t overwhelm the audience.
When the body is in fight or flight, okay, we turn on the sympathetic nervous system, okay, which is opposite of the parasympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system is a fight, flight or freeze. Okay, a lot of us are learning about the freeze moment, which means, if something stressful happens, we run as fast as we can. If there’s a tiger that comes into the room, our adrenaline goes so high, we can run through a door and not feel anything and run as fast as we can.
Well, what happens is, a lot of women, at least my clients or my girlfriend, have high levels of stress, okay? High levels of stress come in different ways, it’s just not mental stress. It could be stress that comes from digestion, not digesting and assimilating food causes stress on the system. It can be dehydration, it could be overstimulating the body with caffeine, it can be not sleeping enough. And I’m saying these things because there’s people listening like “Wow, that’s all me!”
Okay, so, if you have more than one or two things that you can relate to as far as what’s bringing stress, EMF (brain stress), what happens is, the more stress you bring in the body, your stress doesn’t say “Okay, this is mental stress, I’m going to put this here”, “Okay, this is digestive stress, I’m going to put this here”, no, it goes into one bucket, and then the nervous system becomes overwhelmed and it gets the body going into fight or flight.
Now, in fight or flight, the body does not want to reproduce, the body doesn’t want to reproduce because the body is built to see when the sympathetic system is firing or it’s turned on, especially when it’s overwhelmed, just overwhelmed with responsibilities turned on, the body senses that the environment isn’t safe. So, what happens is, we go through something called progesterone steal, women go through progesterone steal, men do too, but we’re talking about women in this situation.
Now, your B5 and your cholesterol that feeds pronethalol, it stealing from feeding your hormones of testosterone, estrogen, DHEA, it is stolen, progesterone steals it to feed cortisol.
Now, cortisol, being spiked, goes through the hypothalamus, the pituitary gland, the adrenals, which then, and it goes through your adrenals again, and then releases adrenaline, glucocorticoids, when the body has to produce its own blood sugar. Now, a client will have blood sugar issues as they go, and then too much of this signal starts to block the thyroid from working properly, and then people would develop thyroid issues, okay.
So, when it comes up to infertility, I have a client, I just did an episode, she’s on my podcast, her name is Christine, she didn’t have her period since she was 14 years old, she’s been trying to have a kid with her boyfriend for like the last couple years, she can’t get pregnant, she can’t have a period. She just had her first period, she had two periods, back-to-back, with me. What did I do? First thing, I went in, when I got Christine on the phone, she was fired up, she couldn’t breathe, and as soon as she, like, took time to listen to me, smoking a vape, smoking a vape and what I figured out, anytime someone’s smoking, smoking connects to the lungs and diaphragm and it also connects to the same chakra or zone as the heart, so something’s wrong with that person, something’s going on with the heart, they’re not doing something they love, they’re not forgiving, etc., so she couldn’t. So, what we did is, we immediately, I saw how stressed she was, so we immediately, she was drinking a bunch of tap water, eating Doritos and chips and things like that, we fixed the nutrition, we figured out what she wanted in life, mentally, to give her something to look forward to, if you haven’t got something to look forward to as a human being, life can be very hard, if you’re just paying bills. And if you think you came here just to pay your bills, let me tell you something, whatever made us, is smarter than us, it could’ve just made robots to come down here and do that job. You’re born with emotions, intuition, ideas, for a reason. So, if you don’t think you’re here for a reason, sit down with yourself and rethink, I’m telling you, that’s not the case.
So, then, after fixing her lifestyle factors and doing a bunch of other work, she got her period back, but you know, she was told by her doctors she may never have it again and all these things, and I’m not anything against the doctor, but this is what they told her. So, when it comes down to infertility, we got to see how stressed the client is.
Now, PCOS is heavily connected to insulin resistance. I have a client right now, in Australia, that has PCOS, and I said “What’s your A1C number?” she goes “Well…” I just learned this, in Australia, they don’t tell you your numbers, the doctor will call you and tell you what’s going on, but they don’t give you your own paperwork, a copy of the paperwork, so I’m like “What are your numbers?”, she goes “I don’t know”, I said “I can bet money that your blood sugar, your facet glucose is high, and I can bet money that your A1C is high. You’re insulin resistant, we’ve got to fix your nutrition”.
What I like to do with a client is, I don’t like to eliminate a whole food group, but if people are insulin resistant, they’re going to be sensitive to lean meat, because that spiked insulin, and starches, those are the first two things that I play around with. And what we do is, we increase, we give them berries, we give them organic meats, green leafy vegetables, and a whole bunch of other vegetables, and we make it work for them where they’re – now, if I put a client on that and their bowels are not good, their skin is not good, their energy is not good, their weight is not going down, then it’s not working, right? So, then I have to go to another thing and try something else.
So, immediately, when you adjust these things, then the client loses 20-30lbs, blood sugar goes down, and then PCOS markers are not the same.
Now, you can stress out the reproductive system when women are bloated and the colon is pushing down on the ovaries. You can do a lot of damage to the ovaries by your, literally, because, remember, why do women get bloated when it’s that time of the month? Why do you think you get bloated when it’s that time of the month?

[51:28] Sahara
Just the size of your womb really expands.

[51:33] Nate
Aha. It becomes inflamed and the nerves that connect to the lower abdominals, in the pelvic floor, connect to the ovaries as well, and what the body says is, the ovaries, right now, need my attention more than the muscle does, so it takes the blood flow, oxygen and the nutrition that usually feeds both and pulls it a little bit more towards the organ. So, then the lower abdominus is not firing as well and you get that little pouch and you get bloated, and then, from there – so, I’m saying that, imagine when you don’t have that time of the month and you’re inflamed from eating food and now you’re bloated, what happens to the colon? It pushes down on the ovaries, it can cause a lot of, your organs are not being held in the right position, which causes a lot of issues and a lot of pain.
I had a client who had this pain, that she said is like someone had a knife in her pubic bone, that’s how she described it. So, she flew into LA, stood with me, I did test her on the first day, I looked at her, stood up, her stomach was going over her pelvis or her transverse abdominus was way too out of shape, so we had to redo the diet, train the transverse abdominus, retrain the glutes, communication with the glutes and hamstrings, and then she no longer had that pain.
So, with the ovaries, the PCOS, we’ve got to look at my opinion, we go and I look for insulin resistance and then I support them with a bunch of research with it, and I say do your own research, let’s try, let’s see what that does.

[53:10] Sahara
Yeah, well thank you so much for sharing. And I remember I did not get my period for 2 years, in my early 20s, after getting off of birth control, being a raw vegan at the same time, living in Boston, where it’s really cold and definitely is not native to coconuts and pineapples, doing 3 hours of Ashtanga yoga a day, and being disconnected from my purpose, disconnected from my feminine, stressed, all of the things, that my body, physically was like “It is not safe for you to create a child”, so it had to shut that off. And again, it was part of my path to bring me back into my feminine and receiving it and all of that. But it’s so interesting the way that the body will turn off systems if it feels like it can get in the way of your safety.

[53:54] Nate
One hundred percent! It’s a beautiful thing, I love it, I love the body, I love learning about it and I love helping people realize, I came up with this term with my work as ‘the hero syndrome’, I just made it up one day. Hero syndrome is when somebody is out of alignment with their core values and putting ‘we’ and ‘or’, in front of “I’, putting your family, your friends, your work, in front of taking care of yourself. These people are used to thinking they’re the hero to everybody and they can get extremely numb to regular stress signals, the body is just numb to it, it’s nothing to them. The only time they really pay attention is when it’s a crisis. And the reason why I’m speaking about that is because I love when I can get those clients to realize the small signals again. But the only way I can do that is to, you know, have them realize that most of their stress and digestive issues are coming from the having time for themselves because they’re putting everybody in front of themselves.

[54:55] Sahara
Absolutely! And I want to ask you about intermittent fasting. What are your thoughts on this? Who is it right for, who is it not?

[55:03] Nate
It’s a good question. Alright, in 2012, I did intermittent fasting, I lost probably 60lbs off of it. I did it when it was not popular, when it wasn’t a good thing. When I woke up in the morning, my only job, this was my off-season from playing football, this was a Spring semester, so we didn’t have practice or anything, all I had to do was to get up and go to four classes a day and then I’d do some light workout and watch YouTube videos all day. And it worked great, I lost a lot of muscle, I’m just giving you my own experience, I couldn’t lift as heavy, and then, I tried it again, after 2017, to lose weight. I lost the weight, I lost a lot of muscle, again, I lost too much muscle, and then, here’s my opinion on it.
If you’re not a stressed person, intermittent fasting is a beautiful thing. If you’re not stressed, if you don’t have a lot of responsibilities, I mean, there’s research and I have experience with it and I have had clients who have experience with it, who got great results. But when I started to – I never believed in stress until I was like 25-26, I thought stress was all, like if your mindset is too weak, a very yang energy, it’s like “Dude, no, that’s not true!” But the body taught me better, it gave me a panic attack and I thought I was going to die, it was the scariest day of my life, I thought I was having a heart attack, I was losing consciousness.
So, when your body is under a lot of stress, when you go on an intermittent fast, you’re pushing a button a little bit more, to release your own… Keto, and it can be challenging to some people, but if you’re intermittent fasting and you’re not on a Keto diet and you’re jumping in between, using body fat for energy for one moment, and then using calories from food another moment, it could be challenging, it depends on the person. So, we depend on the person, based on the amount of stress that person has. A person that’s really stressed is going to have glucocorticoids and blood sugar issues, and that’s going to create energy spikes and then drops that can burn out the adrenals, and then that can cause issues with what, the thyroid.
So, in school, in my integrative health practitioner school, we learned that intermittent fasting can be very tricky for people because, especially drinking coffee, when you’re doing because it could just stem up those adrenals more to release your own blood sugar and cause problems.
So, here’s what I say, I always tell my clients, if they come to me and say “Hey, I want to try intermittent fasting”, I say “Okay, try it, let’s go, let’s do it”, and then you tell me, you become your own research. Because a lot of research shows one thing and then shows another, right? And, you know, as someone, I go back and forth, but it doesn’t mean one study only is applied to one person, some people are different. So, we try it and we get feedback from it and then we see what works and what doesn’t work. And then if it works, we keep going, if it doesn’t work, we don’t.
And here’s another thing really quick I want to bring up. I advise people, if they’re going too fast, before they do it, for like at least 2 weeks, clean up your diet as much as you can, specifically, with a lot of vegetables, green leafy vegetables, organic green leafy vegetables, because when you fast, your body will use body fat for energy, and body fat actually stores toxins. So, if you’ve been eating junk food all this time, and then one day you’re like “I’m going to fast”, you’re going to get something they call ‘the keto flu’ or you’re going to get a bad reaction as far as getting headaches, you may breakout, because you’re going to overwhelm the liver with the toxins that you pull out from the fat cell. And a lot of people don’t understand that the liver goes through two stages of detoxification – stage one and stage two. And in order for the liver to properly go through stage two, we need to appropriate nutrition on board. So, if you’re fasting and you’re not eating correctly, that can be a huge set up for you.

[58:36] Sahara
Thank you so much for sharing all of that. And yeah, we hear so many mixed reviews, I’ve heard some people say that women should not intermittent fast because of the nature of the female hormone cycle, but for myself, just, my whole life, I’ve never been into eating breakfast. Something about just eating first thing in the morning, I just can’t do it.

[58:55] Nate
Well, that’s very common. I don’t eat breakfast either, only if I know I have back-to-back clients, I do it. But that’s why it’s important to become your own researcher. Researcher is cool! That’s what I tell to my clients, don’t let that mind and heart battle happen in your life. If someone goes “Hey, this is no good for you”, but you’re like “But my body feels good on this”, then that means that, what? That we’re going to manipulate ourselves to be programed to do things that disagree with our body? And that’s how you start miscommunicating the intuition with yourself.
So, there’s a book called “Metabolic Typing” that you can look into, or, there’s another book “How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy”. I’m going to name Paul Check a thousand times, and if you haven’t interviewed Paul Check, I’m telling you that he will be a great fit for your podcast. He’s probably the best, one of the best human beings I’ve met in my life, and he just is a great human being, but he changed my life, he helped me change thousands of people’s lives. But Paul and William Wilcock, explain in their books that each of us have a different metabolism. Some of us are fast-oxidators, some of us are slow-oxidators. People who are slow-oxidators, usually think about food all day, usually crave salt on their food and usually do better with a breakfast in the morning, even if they don’t feel like it. And protein types are somewhat, and they’re considered protein type because they need more protein and fat in their diet, because if they oxidize food into energy fast, that means if we take a carbohydrate like a potato and put it in their body, potatoes digest fast, so we overwhelm their system and they rave too much. So, you can get things like ADD behavior, sweating, peeing a lot, stool that smells fatty, I know that sounds weird. It’s also connected to the pancreas not developing enough digestive enzymes, but these are the things I see every day.
So, that person, when they drink coffee, we’ve got to make sure that they have some fat in their coffee to slow down the digestion of that coffee, and we’ve got to make sure they don’t overdo it with coffee, because coffee assimilates in the body pretty fast and we don’t want that to – they’re fast-oxidative. You’re going to be something that we consider a slow-oxidator.
A slow-oxidator is someone who doesn’t really need to eat breakfast, they can take an apple and be good until like 12:00PM, and then when lunch comes, then they’re ready for lunch. Usually, these people will never be obese or have weight issues growing up; usually, these people don’t need a lot of meat in their diet, they don’t need to overwhelm a big pound of steak on their plate, kind of thing, they usually tend to have more vegetables. So, a protein type is, someone needs more protein fat than vegetables; a carbohydrates type is someone who needs to have more vegetables compared to protein.
I studied a book where a dentist went around the world and studied cultures that were not touched by man, and every culture that he came across, every village had some form of protein, some form of vegetables, and they were all organic.
Now, some cultures below the equator, have more carbohydrate because fruits and things are growing more basically below the equator versus, you know, Europe somewhere. So, after eating like this for a long time, just like the reason your eyes are the way they are, and I’m tall because of my genetics, there’s an argument by William Wilcock and other authors that say “Hey, look, your digestive system and your oxidation system – not your oxidation system, the way you break down food, also is a genetic thing as well”.
That’s why I want to say that some people, a lot of people I know don’t eat breakfast in the morning. You don’t need to feel guilty for not having breakfast.

[1:02:35] Sahara
Yes, I totally believe in ancestral eating. And I think it can sometimes get confusing because I’ve had different times in my life that I’m like “Yeah, intuitively, I want to just drink coconut water in the morning”, and there’s other times I’m like “Intuitively, I want to have coffee and intuitively, this”, and I’m like “Was it intuitive or was it just what I wanted and I convinced myself it was intuitive?” Then you make a change and you’re like “Yeah, this is totally what I want!” It’s like, sometimes, when you’re doing something that’s new, even if it’s good for you, it doesn’t feel like what you want and then you get used to it and then you want it.

[1:03:07] Nate
Exactly! Dr. Weston A. Price, that’s the first time I’ve ever forgotten about him while I was in a flow. Dr. Weston A. Price was the doctor, who was a dentist, that went around to study different parts of the world and how they ate.
But yeah, when you get up in the morning – but this is what I’m saying, one day I wake up, my body wants to be more meat, especially on days after breaking down muscle tissue, and then some days my body is craving a little more plant, some vegetables and some strawberries, that’s my go-to, I love my berries.
So, as long as you’ve got that, that’s a beautiful thing, you know what your body wants, that’s the most powerful thing, but we can get caught up on the internet and find some things and be manipulated, and like I said, that’s one of the hardest things about, you know, me making content is that I don’t have a side that I pick, so I’ll get both sides attack me.
And when I went on the internet, I have a video that’s, I think like 1.2 million views on TikTok, I’m like “Look, if you guys have digestive issues, try this for a week, take out nuts, grains, seeds, dairy”. Oh my God, if you go to that video on TikTok, you see a whole bunch of dietitians and people trying to destroy me.
Now, a lot of people don’t want to listen, not say don’t want to listen to me, but they second-think about not listening to me because there’s nobody that really looks like me, that talks like me. Tattoos, I rock my gold chain proudly, I have an accent like I’m from the Bronx, I look Spanish (and I’m not), and people are like “Who is this guy? He don’t really know what he’s talking about!” They call me a Google-ist or something like that, like I learn my information from Google, little do they know is that I’m pretty educated. But yeah, you can get caught up in belief systems, and if a person doesn’t want to change their diet after their body is disagreeing, there’s usually a huge culture/religion/belief system that’s holding my client back, and those are the most challenging clients to work with.

[1:05:03] Sahara
So good! And that’s the thing with nutrition, everyone’s going to have their own opinion, and if there was one diet for the whole world, we would’ve figured it out by now. Every single place around the world has a different type of eating which changes according to the season, which changes according to historical time periods, before the agricultural revolution, post-agricultural revolution, so how can we just say there’s one form of eating when it’s never been the same. That’s the beauty of it, it’s like, we get to choose and we get to, I think, at the end of the day, it’s your belief systems around it as well. If you believe that something you’re eating is toxic, it’s going to be toxic. If you believe something’s going to be healthy, it has a higher likelihood to be healthy. I mean, even just blessing your food is going to increase the nutritional value of it.

[1:05:46] Nate
Yes, absolutely! And I’ll give a little tip too. If you’re listening to somebody who has abs their whole life and doesn’t know what it’s like to be in your position, and is telling you that you can eat a particular way, and every time you eat that way, it’s not working for you, this person’s probably not that relatable to listen to, you know what I’m saying?
So, Jay-Z said “Everybody could tell you how to do it but they never did it”, that line was, like, everything to me growing up, because, you know, I’m pretty sure you got this same thing when you started your career, people telling you “Oh, you can’t do this” or “It’s not supposed to be like that”, I’m like “Yeah, show me!” “Everybody can tell you how to do it but they never did it”, it’s one of the strongest lines that, well, strongest lines I believe Jay-Z said, he has a lot of them. But yeah, it all depends.
And I’ll say this, we can be fair. In my humble opinion, if there’s some type of fermented vegetable, some type of fiber, meat, we’re going in a good direction. We all got the same enemy, it’s the processed food, it’s the junk, so I was like “Oh, you want to eat that way?” You know, one thing we learned is, when a client is “Oh, this diet works great for me”.
I had this one client that came here and she had a very bad fungal infection, it was all over her skin, every joint in her body, you know, the signs of fungal infections, pimples that don’t clear, joint cracking and popping, inability to control your joints, if you have a deep fungal infection, like your hips, for an example, you always have hip issues, stiffness, dandruff, stick your tongue out, see if there’s white coating at the back of the tongue, craving sugar before bed is a huge one. So, and she came in, she was like, I’m like “Yeah, maybe we need to take out eating that much of this particular food”, she’s like “No, that works for me”, I’m like “Yeah, sure, I guess, okay”, I said “Okay”. So, next week, she comes, still the same problems, still the same problems, and I say “Hey, look, can I ask you a question? Is it really working for you?” Like, let’s look at the facts behind it. A lot of us argue with ourselves or have issues controlling our mind because I call it facts vs. fiction, or facts vs. non-facts. I take a client, I say “Take a piece of paper for me real quick”, I’ve got the white board in my gym, the smart board, what I write on, and we drew a line right down the middle, and this goes for anything, belief systems, fear, on the left side I want you to write down what’s the facts about a situation and what’s the non-facts. And once you figure out, a lot of people stress over a lot of things that are actually now facts, you know what I’m saying?
And then we’ve got to see where that belief system, like I said at the beginning, came from. And usually, I told you, I work with a lot of women, if I worked with a woman that is molested at a young age, I talk to my clients, like, I come with nothing but love, because, number 1, the first thing I tell them is “Look, I’m a man, I don’t know exactly all the things that you’re feeling, that would be very ignorant for me to say, but I have empathy and compassion and my goal is to mentor you as best as I can, for you to be the best version of yourself”.
Okay, so, when you get a client that’s been molested at a young age, I can see that just by how they stand. I could tell you what’s wrong with somebody just by seeing you stand or how you look at me, or how you turn your shoulder, how you use your hands. And sometimes my girlfriend would have different hairstylists come to the house, like, she has to do for the show, she’s like “Babe, do it to her”, I’m like “Babe, you can’t do that, bro, that’s not nice”, she’s like “No, babe, do it, do it. Look, look, he’s going to show you what’s wrong with you”, and then, now, it’s like a thing in LA, like, all the hairstylists and make-up artists are like “Where’s your boyfriend? Where’s your boyfriend? Come on, read me!”, I’m like “Hey, you can’t just do that!” But what you’re looking for is not really hard, number 1 – eye contact. I learned the body language from living on the streets and learned how to survive, but then you connect that to, if a person is shifted to the left, watch this trick, it’s 80% accurate. If a person shifted to the left and a person has more pain on the left side of the body throughout their life, I want to know what happened to mom, growing up, and I want to know what’s going on with mom now. If it’s on the right side, I want to know what happened to dad growing up and what’s going on with dad right now.
So, if a person comes to me and had issues with dad, I don’t talk a lot, nothing, I can’t look at it as an authority because it can be a trigger. If I work with a client and they were molested at a young age, I don’t come – a client, like “How do I do this stretch with my hips?”, I don’t touch a client, I don’t get nowhere near them, I show them exactly how it’s done because I’m very respectful, and you know, the fitness industry, I have a certification in that as well, so, that can be, you know, there’s guys that may not (or people) move in that way, I want to make sure there is nothing, nobody’s uncomfortable in my facility. So, what I’ll so is, if a person was molested at a young age, you’ve got to, you talk to the inner child. And usually, this is the experience that I see, I call them ‘a zone two client’, women that were molested at a young age, hip issues, lower back issues, usually attracted to red, red lipstick…

[1:10:43] Sahara
Sacral chakra.

[1:10:45] Nate
Yes, it is, yes, it is. They’re very connected to that. As you know, they could be manipulated or they could be manipulators, they can be people who manipulate you.
Usually they put on a shell, I call it a shell. They put on this look, three things – they’re either funny, they’re either sarcastic (or they can be both), or if you see them at like a grocery store, they put this face on, they call the resting mean face we can say, the resting bee face, that you don’t even want to get near them, you think they’re tough, they’re really tough. Man, these people are the most loving people in the world! As soon as you get deep, it’s like a chocolate, as soon as you crack a chocolate, the caramel comes out, they’re like the sweetest people in the world, but usually they have to protect themselves. Usually that can create issues with zone five, the mask self, the third chakra, of pretending to be someone they’re not.
So, usually, when you get them to start, you get their trust, you talk to the inner child, they’re usually are in relationships with men who could be manipulators; a bad experience with men or bad experience with fathers. So, when I come in their life, they never had, the clients that I’m talking about, they never had someone who was a male, who is doing pretty cool things in their life, actually believe in them, I’m like “Yo, I’m about to show you everything I do, I’m no different than you! Here, here’s what we’re going to do”. And those are usually the most successful entrepreneurs. And those clients, those clients that I work with, in my experience, and I worked with probably 40 of them in the last 365 days, because when I take on a client, it’s a lot of work. I don’t want to take on a great amount of them, as much as I can. It takes me, for the paperwork alone, it takes me 5 hours, because I can’t go in and guess, you’ve got to go in and you need to know everything on how to, you know, help a client, but yeah.
So, I say all that to say, you know, with different clients, you have to change up your story, there’s not a one-way belief system with that either, you know.

[1:12:40] Sahara
Yes, thank you so much for sharing that, and the way that trauma creates these protection mechanisms in our bodies and our nervous systems, to keep us safe, and how, when we don’t heal from that, it can prevent us from really being seen and experiencing love, but if we can heal from that, we can even take that experience and use it to serve our greatest gifts. So, thank you so much for sharing that.
And you also made a video about why people often remember trauma later in life. Can you share a little bit about that?

[1:13:12] Nate
Yes, absolutely. So, like I said, I got into all this because this is me. Four autoimmune diseases, I have Phili aygo, if you can see through the camera, my hair started to turn white at 16, my skin started to turn white, I got white spots on my feet, my hips, rheumatoid arthritis, I couldn’t walk some days.
So, trauma shows up later is because, as we go through the trauma – so, I’ll give you an example. When we go through the trauma of being molested, and molesting too, it goes both ways, but let’s just say a person’s molested. There’s three reasons I find out, with my experience, that a client never told anybody, number one, it’s somebody usually close to their family. Number two, their scared nobody’s going to believe them. And number three, when they do tell their parents, the parents say “Don’t say anything because it’s an embarrassment”. So, that’s suppression, emotion, means energy emotion that’s why it’s called e-motion.
Energy emotion, if this is suppression of that e-motion, now, what connects that emotion, what’s connected to that? The nervous system of the hips? The nerves that connect the hips? So, the ovaries, to your lower back, you sacral. So, it’s all connected, so the more you suppress that feeling of expression, you depress it in to that particular, we call it, we don’t really call it, but let’s just say your memory card, that part of your body.
So, as we go on with life, you’ve got to figure out who’s your friends in school, you’ve got to figure out what sport you’re going to play, you’ve got to figure out if that boy likes you, you’ve got to figure out things about yourself as you continue to go. So, through 01-21 years old, we’re going through the ability to learn on how to survive, where to go. From 01-8 is the consciousness of safety/security, you learn about who’s your tribe, how to be safe, who’s your family, how to walk as a human being. From 08-14, you go through the sexuality, you learn about “Oh, what’s this? Oh, okay, it’s that time of the month”, or a man is like “Oh, what’s this?”, you learn about yourself. From 14-21, you go through the solar plex, you go through personal power, self-will, “Who am I? What am I going to do in this world?” This is when you learn how to say no to things you don’t want to do, but a lot of people, you know, you go to high school, you’ve got to learn who you’re hanging out with, the first person you’re going to date, sport you’re going to go to, and they you’ve got to focus on what college you’re going to go to in this time period, and then you’ve got to focus on what career you’re going to pick after and what career you start. So, it’s a lot in 14-21 that goes down.
And then, from 21-28, usually people experience the first real heart break because that’s the consciousness of the heart.

[1:15:50] Sahara
I’m like tick, tick, tick, tick, yeah.

[1:15:52] Nate
There you go, there you go! So, as we go through life, we’re trying our best to get to the next thing. And then you get that job, and then you’re making money, and then you’re sitting down one day, and then you’ve got all these self-destructive behavior things going on, and then you have all these bad habits. And then you find a skillful coach or therapist, and they make you aware of the trauma that you have is creating these things. The reason why it’s showing up now is because you never really had time to really think about it. Not everybody’s privileged to sit with a counsellor.
And when I was with my counsellor from 6-8th grade, I was playing ball, I was zoned out, I forgot what he was even talking, I was expressing everything because I was expressing energy, moving the body.
First thing I do with a client that’s experiencing low energy, depression, “Let’s go express! Let’s go walk!” I can’t tell you how many times I got down the first 30lbs just by fixing nutrition and doing 3-4 walks, I call it ‘a high energy walk’. What that means is, when you go on your walk, nobody with negative energy is allowed to go on that walk with you, you’re not allowed to walk in a negative neighborhood, I don’t care if you’ve got to get in your car, drive 15 minutes, go to the neighborhood you want to live in, look how they – I study people, what do they wear, how do they talk?
When I was at Westchester, all of these people, they had a lot of money, Westchester is very successful people. I studied everything, they wore Lu-Lu Lemon, they wore these shoes called cloud shoes, they all used an Amex card, they all had a luxury car, so, I studied everything. So, guess what? I started investing money in Lu-Lu Lemon. I was going to work with Lu-Lu Lemon on, the cloud shoes, all of that, because I want to feel that success – how do I feel that success? Well, before it actually comes physically, you can use your imagination. And as you use your imagination, you rise the vibration of your body and the Universe gives you exactly what your vibe is at – the people, the money, the circumstances, the opportunities.
So, what I say is, we go on that positive walk, positive music, positive podcasts, nobody negative is allowed to walk with you and you do it in a positive environment, and you visualize the person you’re going to become as you do it. And you do that every day, as you lose the weight, if there are no weight loss programs, or as you try and build the second business, or as you get through those heartbreaks.
So, we forget about our emotions when it comes down to the point of – we’re trying to survive But, as soon as we, all the way I was addicted to sugar my whole life, like bad. Like, if I were hanging out with you and we’re watching movies, I would probably eat your whole cabinet of cereal, Oreos, and didn’t think it was a problem. And you know, I was addicted, but it was a self-destructive behavior that I had, so I had to figure out why. And when I really figured out why, I also figured out, there were also times when I remember, when my father and my brother and I, when we got that room paid for, to stay in a hotel, it would be some scary things that went on in our life and we never talked about how scary it was. We’d go back to the room and we’d act like it never happened, and we got really, really good at doing that.
Man, when I got deep into this, and I’m obsessed with being honest with myself. If I’m honest about something, my girlfriend would be in the middle of a studying a strip, I’m like “I’ve got to tell you something”, she’s like “Oh, babe, can…”, I’m like “No, no, no, I’ve got to say it now!” I notice this about myself and I’ll go on for like 2 hours. Sometimes she’ll fall asleep, she’s like “I’m sorry, babe, I’m listening, please go on”. And, because I’m always honest with myself, I went, at 24, I got over my sugar addiction because I realized that my father and I never talked about some things that we went through growing up. And I went and I started telling him how important it was and he was like “Yeah”, and my dad started to see a therapist. So, it was, then I got my brother to start talking and then it brought me to a level of like a closure with that, but I no longer had those cravings for sugar anymore. It’s just connected, it’s a beautiful thing.
So, we start realizing our trauma when we actually are not racing towards life or we become aware of our subconscious behavior.

[1:20:05] Sahara
Beautiful!

[1:20:06] Nate
But, growing up, through 21 is like “It’s cool, let’s go get drunk, let’s turn it up!” So, it’s, you’re kind of numbing yourself over there, but we don’t know any better, we’re young, right? So, that’s why we go through the child archetype, then to the warrior archetype, then to the king and queen, and then to the wise men/wise woman. And today, we’re having a huge issue with a deficit of people who are actually wise men/wise woman, because now we have people competing for power, for manipulation. And to get to that wise man/wise woman, you have to be a practitioner, you have to be a practitioner and you have to have empathy for the child archetype. Because a lot of people right now in your family, in all families, that act like children still, they’re still in the child archetype.
Child archetype is people who don’t take personal responsibilities for themselves, who, you know, “Oh my God”, “What happened?”, “I failed my test”, “Oh, I’m so, sorry to hear that”, “It was because of you”, “Wow, because of me? What have I got to do with that? I didn’t do anything!” “Well, you know how you sleep at night? I couldn’t sleep last night”, I’m like “Oh, man”.
And then you have the warrior archetype, someone going out there fighting for a career, fighting for a way to find, a way to survive, but the warrior gets beaten up and gets worn out, and then the warrior’s getting, just, tired. And that’s usually where we can find ourselves working for somebody, for a long period of time, and still having to put the same performance on, from being 21, and then we’re like 35, still doing that same work. Now, one cup of coffee don’t do it, we need three, you see what I’m saying? So, it’s time for that warrior to get into the king or queen archetype.
King and queen archetype is owning, owning, ownership, right? But the dysfunctions that come with the king and queen, sometimes we try to get our hands into too many things, investments, you’re trying to do too much, where now, you’re losing the ability to keep everything balanced and flowing correctly. And then that’s when you need to understand, you need to simplify. And when you simplify, then you make it to the wise men/wise woman, and then when you come across a king, queen, warrior, child, you have empathy and compassion.
And usually, you can find those really, really in old souls, or you can find those in your grandparents. But like I said, in today’s world, it’s kind of hard to find those due to the fact of power. Sometimes people’s moms still compete to try to look hotter than them. And don’t judge a person, some souls are here, in my opinion, it’s how my imagination works, since I was like 4 – I looked at my mom as a young soul. My mom’s a young soul, she’s still getting used to earth, she’s still trying to live, figure out. So, I chose to come through here and I chose to come here, to show her how to do it the right way, and not only her, but my brothers. And after I went to college and did what I got to do, both of my little brothers went to college, got a degree, both of them got great careers, I changed the paradigm.
And when you change a habit or paradigm, just know that you’re fighting against 7 years of a paradigm, of generations.
Karl Jung says “Our job on earth is to overcome the things our parents could not or id not overcome”. So, addiction, being poor, addiction, being poor, stressing about money, I had to overcome that, and when I overcame it, then you say the 7 next generations, believe it or not, your DNA, your ancestors are rooting for you, because if you don’t overcome it, the DNA continues to just, you know, deteriorate, it’s not going to be here, you know, much longer.
So, that’s where, you know, you get those, you know, I’m pretty sure you’ve got the signs of spiritual animals and things like that. You’ll get signs of something greater happening for you, you know.

[1:23:52] Sahara
Yes, full body resonance with that! And definitely diving into soul ages was so helpful for me, and I believe that almost, always, children are older souls than their parents, because as we’re merging into the new paradigm, we are having these ancient souls coming back with all this knowledge to bring forth, like you, definitely were in Atlantis, 100%. I don’t know if you know this, but you’re, because you came with these codes all about merging spirituality and science, right? And you know, we’re coming forth and I think we chose, even, the microcosm of the macrocosm that we’re here to solve. So, you got front-row seats into what does addiction look like. I got front-row seats into female suppression from the Middle East. Like, people get front-row seats into these different experiences because that’s the only way you’re going to have compassion for it, right? I’m not going to know what it’s like from the outside, but if I know what it’s like from my mom and my dad and my siblings, and this whole dynamic, and love people, even while this is going on, then I’m going to be able to truly see what is at the root of these issues, and then be able to be that embodiment which then shows those people, someone like me, from where I’m from, from my own blood, was able to heal this, that means it’s possible for me. And at the same time, not doing it, because that’s amazing that your dad’s going to therapy.
And my question for you is, what if some people’s families don’t want to change, they’re not willing to go to therapy and do the work?

[1:25:19] Nate
That’s…and you never judge people. I tell my clients digest people, and they’re like “What do you mean?”, I’m like “Okay, figure out why they’re the way they are”, and then if you become – look, when you rise your consciousness, you don’t got time to bring your consciousness down to argue with people of lower levels of consciousness. It’s just, I literally can’t afford it, I have a lot of people that depend on me and they need me to be, I need me to be, at high level, at all times.
But here’s what I do. If I have a family or family member that doesn’t want to do that, and does not want to change, this is what I do and I teach my clients to do this: Say if you’ve got to go home for a family event, and I go back to Jersey, what I do is, I put these family members on a stopwatch, I always got a stopwatch on, I always rock the G-shock, rocking a G-shock is like rocking a Rollie for me.
Okay, when I was a kid, I went to high school, my friends used to have these G-shocks, I got like 10 of them over here. My friends used to have these G-shocks on, and I used to tell my dad, I never even had the gut to ask my dad to buy me one because this G-shock is about $120, that’s the same price of our hotel room. And I used to say to myself “When I get up and I grow up and I make my dreams come true, I’m rocking those G-shocks”, but I just want to shout out G-shock for that!
So, there’s a story behind everything with me, right? So, what I tell clients is “Hey, when you go, out a timestamp”, so, hey, you go, you go with your family at 6, you leave at 8 o’clock, you give them 2 hours. So, if they want to come to you and bring all this drama and talk bad and gossip, “Okay, that’s what you want to do with your 2 hours, okay, fine. But I’m telling you right now, when 8 o’clock comes around, I’m out!” And then, what you do is, I’m telling you right now, it works like magic, but you’ve got to really be about it though, you really got to leave. Like, when I go to Jersey and when I go to a cousin’s house, something like that, or my sister’s house, or whoever, not my sister or my cousin, you know, they’re great people, I’m talking about anybody who brings me bad energy or just doesn’t want to change, I’m like “Okay, 2 hours”, and then they know I’m leaving, because I did this since I was in college, when I came up from Delaware. What happens is, people start to respect your time a lot more and then they don’t want anything to get in between that, okay so they’re like “Argh, fine, he’s going to leave in 2 hours, let me not talk about that”, that’s number one.
Number two, you’ve got be the silent teacher. So, before you tell anybody how to do anything, a lot of people are usually triggered because they’re projecting a shadow. So, before you get triggered, figure out why you’re being triggered. If you have anxiety and mom has anxiety, and you’re going to mom and you tell mom, “Mom, you need therapy”, and then you say, and then she goes “Well, you need therapy”, and you guys argue about that, you’re not getting anywhere. Work on yourself and what’s going to happen is, you work on your shadow, your insecurity, and when you go, you no longer be triggered and you digest mom and see if mom still has any issues, and then mom will be like, when you guys are in the kitchen, cooking, she’ll come up to you, look around and go “Hey, what did you do for your anxiety?” And then she’s going to want to learn, little by little.
So, those are the two things that I do with my family is, I immediately – now, I always have empathy and compassion for my family. Like, my mom, for an example, my mom has, you know, she has multiple personality disorder and she also has a disorder where she lives another life. So, my mom would come up to me and, remember, I’m half black, half white, my mom’s white, my mom would come up to me “Hey, come here”, I’m like “What?”, she’s like “Look, everything’s be okay, I’ve got a lot of money, I can take care of you”, and I can’t say “Mom, go to therapy”, I play along, I have to go along with it, like “Hey, mom, look, okay, I got you, I don’t need it right now, thank you”.
So, if you have a family member who has mental issues, you have to have empathy for some of them too. So, there’s different ways to go about it.

[1:29:17] Sahara
Totally! And I think it’s how much we let them get into our energetic field, because sometimes we go back to, when we were children, where whatever our parents did was the authority. They had the right to choose, so if dad was mad, the household was going to be mad, or whatever going to happen. And I would notice when I would be back with my family, I would go back to that wounded child that was like “No, I don’t want to be here” and just had so much resistance because I was taking everything they said and letting it just go straight into my heart and straight to me.
And now, unfortunately, often, I have to stay with them because it’s considered rude to not, so I’m like “I wish I could do that 2-hour thing”, but I just have to be like “Don’t take it personally, that’s okay, and I’m not responsible for fixing them either”.

[1:29:58] Nate
That’s a perfect example, I’m happy you brought that up. I have empathy for you because that is something you would not be able to overcome with a mindset. And here’s the reason why I said that, if you read the book “The Body Keeps The Score”, okay, and when they did their research, any time a person is around a trigger of a trauma, immediately, your left brain, your broker brain, your broker’s brain turns off, right brain turns on, and your hormones, your adrenaline, your blood pressure, your heart rate increases as if you’re experiencing a trauma, as if you’re that little girl again.
So, for me, I’m sorry, my dad thinks it’s very rude when I come home and I don’t stay in the house, until one day I sat him down and explained the science of why I couldn’t stay. And that’s why I love my dad, my dad, I wouldn’t be the man I am today without my dad. My dad fought his life to make sure that my brothers and I survived, and all his dream was to see us get an education, take care of ourselves. And my dad, he did everything he can.
When I was a kid, my dad used to make me read out loud. I would never read out loud my whole life, until recently. You know, sometimes I do a TikTok Live and I’m showing them things and I read it out loud or I read out loud for clients and stuff. But when I was a kid, I couldn’t read and I had issues with speaking, and my dad would sit me down and he would coach me on how to talk and how to present, at like 4 years old. And as I got older, I’m like “Yo, my dad’s a wizard! He knew I was going to go what I’m doing today!” And I joke about it with him all the time, but my dad never raised me on a religion either. When I was raised, my family came from being Christians or, you know, my great grandfather was a very, notoriously-known priest, he owned multiple churches in New Jersey. When I grew up, I used to tell my dad like “Yo, dad…”, I was like 7 years old, I went up to my dad, they put me in to be in a choir and I was in a black community and I got bullied a lot, I didn’t share that until recently, but I got bullied a lot. Not all my black cousins bullied me, but I did get bullied a lot. So, I remember going to church one day, I’m like “Dad, do I have to be Christian?”, and he was like “No, you don’t have to be Christian”. And at a young age, my dad and I would have conversations about the world and we would sit down and we’d watch The History Channel with each other, and we studied all religions, all cultures, the science behind all of them, and when I grew up, I didn’t grow up with one belief system of a religion.
Now, a client told me the other day something about, I don’t want to go off topic, but it was pretty funny, because I read this in one of your comments and I’m like “Oh, maybe she can relate, I’m new to this”. New Age religion or something like that, I don’t know, somebody that I know of, told me that they are going to pray for me because I’m a New Age religion guy, I’m like “Look, I don’t know what you’re talking about, the things I speak about are from my heart and from experience, but a lot of things that I have are actually not new at all, they’ve been around longer than most religions have been”. But when I grew up, I didn’t really believe in belief systems, but when I go to my dad’s house, and he smokes those cigarettes, or if I go to my dad’s house, and I’m sleeping – and my dad lives in a very bad neighborhood in Jersey, the people get killed every day, so I’m like “Dad, I just made it out the hood, I am not trying to put my life at stake. I want to come here and visit you, but the longer I stay here, the higher chances I am of not making it out of this neighborhood here”.
So, those things trigger me because I am extremely – I have PTSD, very bad, that’s something I try to work on as much as I can. One of the PTSDs I have is, I really can’t have headphones on in the house. The only reason why I have it on right now is because I got my assistant here, my girlfriend’s in the living room. When I was a kid, we had the cops break down our door so much that I’m always ready for someone to break into my house, at all times.
So, when I was a kid, one day I had my headphones on and I was listening to music and I was falling asleep listening to music, and then my bedroom, we had a door that led you right to the main door, and I just remember falling asleep and then I couldn’t hear anything because I had the headphones in, and then I saw these lights, so then I opened my eyes and the whole house was dark. I opened my eyes and these lights were hitting me and then I had a gun to my head, I had like four guns on my head, and they were like “Get on your knees”, I get on my knees, I put my hands out, I’m like “I’m going to die, that’s it, it’s over for me, I’m dead!” But I didn’t know it was the SWAT team busting into my house, I thought it was just people robbing me because it happened in my neighborhood.
So, these traumas, when I go round my dad’s, the smell of a cigarette brings those memories up too, so, I’m really tensed. So, when I go to my dad’s house, I’m like “Dad, look…”, I open up a book if I have to, but my dad, you don’t need to do that with him but, I’m like “Dad, I can’t do this because of this, this, this and this. I want to be here with you but I can’t”, and he understands so he… You know, my brother understands as well.
And I say I have empathy for you because if you read the book, the science shows, they put you on the study, I’m having measurements on your brain, your hormones, your heart rate, etc., your body won’t move at all, but your body’s responding as if it’s experiencing a trauma for the first time.
So, what do you think, if the body’s not reacting when we know the body should be reacting, that’s when people start creating freeze. When a person is getting yelled at or a person is getting coached – when a coach used to yell at me, I used to freeze, I didn’t know why, I used to stutter after, why? Because the left brain is not working properly, the left brain helps you break down and be analytical and explain it how you feel, that’s why you can’t explain on how you feel.
So, when I was a kid, therapy wasn’t really my thing, I only could do it when I was moving my body because as I moved my body, expression helped me gather the words I wanted to say. So, when I go home, I love my dad, I’m going to buy him a house one day where I can go over every day, you know. But as of right now, and in the neighborhood he lives in, it’s just – I told you, my dad lives on one side of Jersey City and my mom lived on the other side. Now, if we lived in Jersey City Heights, it’s different, that’s, I mean, I could walk around, do whatever I want, I’m like a hero there. Greenfield on the other hand, is a little different, I’m known there as well but it’s a little different, it’s a little different.

[1:36:50] Sahara
Well, thank you for also sharing the positive memories because I think, sometimes, too, we, especially when we’re doing this trauma healing work, we only focus on the negative memories that we have of our childhood and our parents. And as you were sharing the story about your dad having you read out loud and watching The History Channel, and even not growing up with religion, it’s the exact same thing with my dad as well, so I was like “Oh wow, you’re saying this as a mirror”, you know, sometimes for us to also remember the positives and have compassion too, because it must be hard as a parent, you’re also doing the best that you can and you’re trying to do these things to help the child, and then are these things out of your control from your own childhood and traumas that you haven’t dealt with.
So, you know, there weren’t podcasts like this one when they were growing up, and I try to remember that.
So, so much beautiful wisdom here that you shared today! Thank you so much for your honesty, for your storytelling and for all of your scientific and spiritual information! And where can listeners connect with you further, book a session with you and learn more?

[1:37:51] Nate
So, everything will be on begreatwithnate.com My goal is to help you become great with me. Every day I’m trying to find a way to be great and I want you to join this journey with me. So, everything, my podcast is Be Great With Nate, my YouTube is Be Great With Nate, my TikTok @begreatwithnate. The only thing that’s not Be Great With, is my Instagram, some 7-year-old got my name and we’re trying to get it from him right now, so it’s @begreatwitnate and then yeah, begreatwithnate.com, you should find all the information there, as far as booking a session and the podcast and things like that.

[1:38:27] Sahara
Beautiful! Well, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom here today!

[1:38:31] Nate
Thank you for allowing me to do my thing, I appreciate that, I really do!

[1:38:35] End of Interview
_____________________________________________________________________

[1:38:36] Sahara
Wow! That was one of the most profound conversations I have had on this Podcast! Just the level of wisdom, the story, the example of someone really overcoming the greatest pains and turning it into their purpose is so beyond inspiring.

[1:38:52] Sahara
And of course, the fact that I have applied so many of his teachings and tools into my life, and been able to see the benefit, so I know you can too! So, be sure to follow him on his YouTube, on his Instagram, Be Great With Nate, he is amazing and I’ll definitely have him back on the Podcast.
So, leave a review for the Podcast and include any questions that you have and I will take those questions and have him back on so we can do another deep dive any form of any hormonal health, digestive mind-body-spirit related questions and have him back on the Podcast to dive into it.

[1:39:24] Sahara
So, thank you do much for tuning in! And again, feel free to leave a beautiful review, it really helps the Podcast be heard by new people, share your questions in there and as a gift, I will send you the first half of my unreleased book “Eat Right For Your Mind-Body Type”. So, all you’ve got to is leave a review for the book, email it over to me at [email protected] and I will send you the first half of my unreleased book, for writing a review for the Podcast. And if you missed that email, you can find it all in the show notes.

[1:40:03] Sahara
Thank you so much for tuning in and I’ll see on the next one! Namaste!

 Episode 442: Why You Have Digestive / Hormonal Issues – The Spiritual Causes with Nate
Ortiz
By Sahara Rose