Ella Magers, MSW:

And do you like to be called? Okay. When I just introduce you right now? Or do you like to be called Dr. Goldner?

Brooke Goldner:

Yep, that’s fine. Okay.

Ella Magers, MSW:

Dr. Goldner, I’m so excited to have you here.

Brooke Goldner:

Oh, thanks. I’m happy to be here.

Ella Magers, MSW:

Yes. I want to start with a bit of a different question.

Brooke Goldner:

Okay.

Ella Magers, MSW:

Okay. So behind or beyond your education, all the accolades, can you tell us who is Brooke?

Brooke Goldner:

Oh, is she? Okay. That’s an interesting question. So existential question, just to start it off, who am I? Goodness. Well, I’m a mother. I’m a caretaker, a born caretaker. I remember being three years old and collecting bugs so no one would step on them. So I’ve always had it in my heart that I wanted to protect the innocent and care for the wounded. And so I kind of was always driven to be in some way, a nurturer and a caretaker. So I’m also a scientist and I’m constantly curious. So I think the combination of just constantly wanting to learn and nurture led me to science, medicine, genetics, all the things that I do. I’m someone who really loves life. I really wake up every day just happy. I’m happy to be here. I’ve always been happy. My grandmother was very much that way. I have a personality and we both had been through things, she’d been through the Holocaust way worse than me. I’ve been through almost dying many times from chronic illness. But I just feel like life is such a gift and I’ve always felt that way. So yeah, so I’m just someone who’s just happy. I’m eager and happy to live this life, to nurture, to inspire, to serve, and I just want to give the gifts that I have to learn how to love life and to live well, and how to live in a place of purpose and passion. I’m driven to give that to other people every day.

Ella Magers, MSW:

Well, your energy and that joy that you bring to the world is really infectious, and I appreciated it, and that’s why I wanted to ask you that question. And I do want to kind of dig in a little more into that before we get into your personal story and do a dive deep dive on autoimmune diseases, which I actually have a personal interest because I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s disease about five years ago.

Brooke Goldner:

Very common.

Ella Magers, MSW:

Very common. So I had never heard of it until I got got the diagnosis. And then it was like, oh, you’ve got Hashi. Hashimotos is one of those things. Yes.

Brooke Goldner:

So most common autoimmune disease, and it’s not treated as autoimmune disease.

Ella Magers, MSW:

Interesting. Okay. Well, I do want to talk about that for personal reasons and because now probably many of our listeners like, yes, I have Hashimoto’s too. But before we get there, I do want, I’m really especially interested in your take on the importance of emotional health and resilience in recovery and how your family history also has helped you work more holistically with your clients. I was just wondering if we could dive into that a little bit before we get into the other stuff.

Brooke Goldner:

Absolutely. This is where I spend most of the time in my work. People want there to be a simple answer to things like, oh, just tell me the best diet and I’ll just do that and then I’ll be healthy. Oh, how much should I exercise? Okay, I’ll do that and I’ll be fit and I’ll be healthy. But it’s not really an information problem most of the time. I mean, yes, information’s important, there are better ways to live, eat, exercise. There are optimal ways, but for many people who are sedentary and living off fast food, it’s not because they don’t know that it’s bad. So why do we intentionally continuously choose the wrong way to live the wrong way to care for ourselves? It’s emotional, it’s irrational. So most folks who listen to podcasts, who go to conferences, they’ve been doing it for years. I just saw someone today for a wellness appointment, and she’s like, I’ve been following you online for five years, but she’s still not doing it.

So you feel good. You’re learning, I’m inspired, I’m learning, but you’re not taking action, then you’re not really doing anything. And so people will comfort themselves that they’re somehow doing good for themselves by listening and learning and watching, but you’re not doing it until you’re actually doing it. So the emotional work is essential for people who are generally happy and they like their work, they have good relationships in their life. Those folks do find it easy to change their diet or to start an exercise routine. They do. And they often are curious why everybody else is struggling. It’s just, yeah, no problem, because they’re already fulfilled. So food can then become a tool. But if you are stressed, depressed, anxious, traumatized, you’re not getting enough sleep, you don’t really have any, don’t exercise to get endorphins, then now you need food to be more, you need it to be fulfillment.

You need it to be excitement. You need it to be passion. You need it to be that drug that makes you feel happy. And if it’s all those for you, how can you just give that up? And that’s what happens is people, so oftentimes when people start a new routine, a new diet, it lasts about two weeks. Just like anything new. I always give the example of New Year’s. I used to go to a gym where there was the regulars every day. We all saw each other same time every day. And then January 1st through the 14th, you can’t get a machine, you can’t get weight. Everybody’s there New Year’s resolution. And then June 5th or January 15th, back to the regulars, maybe one person sticks around and all the rest are gone. Because motivation tends to last about that long that your brain will give you about two weeks, and then your addicted mind will say, and now I want to go back to all the comfort that I had before.

So it’s really difficult to make change without the emotional side of it. And so I found that out pretty early on that I would tell people, here, eat this. And you can have your lupus go away, your rheumatoid arthritis there, derma, Sjogrens, it’ll go away if you do this. And there were people who were generally happy, no problem. They did it and it worked. And then there were other people who just struggled to do it. They just wouldn’t do it. And I realized, wow, I have to use my experience in heal because I’m a trauma specialist as well. So I have to use my experience in helping people heal trauma and happiness in all the emotional strength to get them to do things. So what I learned is that in order for people to start doing something they don’t want to do, they need four things.

One, they need some kind of investment. If you pay an investment, suddenly you want to do it. So whether it’s getting a vitamin blender to start drinking smoothies because you go, oh, dang, I just spent all that money. I should turn it on. Or joining a program, I have a rapid recovery group where people work with me every day for six weeks. So there’s an investment. You need some kind of accountability, someone to make sure you’re doing it. How did you do today? Did you do what you’re supposed to do today? We need accountability. We need some kind of support system, some kind of community people usually end up giving into their environment. So you have to create an environment of support for yourself. And so all of these things are necessary. So support, accountability, investment coaching, although those things, that’s how people make themselves do something.

Because usually you don’t want to do something until you’ve been doing it every day for six weeks. Once you’ve done it every day for six weeks, suddenly you want to. So you have to have that emotional shift into order to create the habit. But for me, I find what usually drives people back is they, there’s so much negative coping, so much emotional trauma. And so that’s why even in my group, they think they’re coming for a diet. And every day we’re working on letting go of disease identity and releasing trauma and forgiveness work and what joy is. Most people don’t know how to be happy. I I’m really good at happy. So I teach people how to be happy and the habits of happy people. And then I keep ’em accountable every day. Did you do something to be happy yesterday? If you don’t do something to be happy, you actually are off plan for the day, even if you ate perfectly.

So all those overachievers who don’t value, they want a good grade, you’d better have some fun. So it’s like a change, but it’s difficult. And I remember when I was, was a keynote speaker at an event in the west coast, and there was a surgeon running the show who had learned that his patients with who were vegan happened to get injured. When he did surgery, there was no inflammation in their joints. But then everyone else, their joints were all inflamed and awful. And so he started to learn how diet could impact things, need pain and stuff. So he told me, I put my patients on plant-based diet and if they don’t follow it, I fire them for being non-compliant. I was like, you’re such a surgeon. You don’t want to talk to people, you just do it. But it is the talking that changes them.

And sometimes it takes months, years of people hearing that same message before they take action. Sometimes it takes for me, if I work with someone every day, I can get them to change in a matter of weeks. If people do something once a week, it could take years psychotherapy once a week or if you worked out once a week. Right. But it is, it’s an emotional journey. And I think that we need to pay more attention to treating the emotional reasons that people choose poor health and poor lifestyle, rather than just telling them, here’s what you should do, go do it. And then making them feel ashamed when they don’t.

Ella Magers, MSW:

And did you just come out of the womb happy and joyful, or did you learn that or Yeah,

Brooke Goldner:

What is that? Well, I think, yes. So my family exhibits something called trauma resilience. And so when there’s something traumatic happens, you don’t necessarily get traumatized. And it’s an important distinction. So you can experience something traumatic and not be traumatized. Traumatized is like you develop P ts D, you develop symptoms, emotional symptoms of sickness because of that trauma. What makes you emotionally resilient really has a lot to do with your upbringing. So for example, growing up feeling safe. So one of the most important milestones to emotional health is that you grow up feeling safe. The world is safe. And I grew up feeling the world was safe. I had parents who loved me. My grandparents helped raise me. They didn’t talk about stressful things in front of me. They didn’t talk about money issues, they didn’t talk about emotional stress. I felt like I was in a safe room.

My parents didn’t fight my dad my entire life. My dad never once yelled at me. We talked through problems. They treated me like my opinion mattered even as a child. So I grew up in a place where I wasn’t afraid of someone yelling. There was no, it was peaceful. So because I felt safe, even when scary things happen, I had a belief already in place that I would be safe. I would be okay. I have the power and ability to get through this because my opinion mattered As a child, I believed I could come up with answers and solutions that my opinion mattered, that my thoughts were important. And so many people don’t grow up like that. And so now we have to undo it. And so I actually have a lot of trauma. I used to mentor therapists. I would have therapy organization would have me come in once a week to help therapists with their difficult patients.

And so even though I’m a brain doctor, I’m a psychiatry neurology and the neuroscience I act, I love the therapy work. For me. It’s kind of like if you go to a back doctor for pain and they give you a medicine for pain, you still need the physical therapist to undo the reason you got hurt. I like to do the whole thing. So I would help people through this. And what I found is a lot of trauma therapists are traumatized themselves, wounded healers, and so they know how to endure and not harm themselves, but they don’t know how to be happy. And so I would bridge that gap because that’s a gift that I received. So even for my grandparents as Holocaust survivors, my grandmother, I still miss her. She lived in 99. She died a few years ago, but it’s like, oh, she was my best friend.

And she used to always tell me, I’m a lucky girl. Not many Holocaust survivors say stuff like that. But she meant it because she didn’t think about the war. So that’s the other thing that makes people resilient is the ability to be in the present. So for me, when the bad thing’s over, I want it to be over and I let it go because I want to be good. So in the moment you have stress, you have drama, you have trauma happening, you have to get through it, you have to survive it. It’s not like I’ve never had difficult things to live through. I have, but then when it’s gone, I have the ability to let it be in the past and embrace the fact that right now is good. And so a lot of times when people don’t know how to do that a lot, because they didn’t grow up feeling safe, they had anxious parents.

And so if your parents are anxious, then it might not be safe. And so maybe I need to be worried and maybe, well, what was going to happen? Something bad’s going to happen. And so if you’re already like that and then bad things do happen, it confirms what your brain suspected. And now I should be on guard forever. Don’t let your guard down and have fun because that’s when the lion’s coming, right? Versus we’re lucky. So no matter, the most terrible thing in the world could happen. We’re going to be okay because we’re lucky. So I’m allowed to let the thing go and be present and be happy, and then if something bad happens, I trust myself to get through it. So all of these are characteristics, but the way we handle stress, trauma, drama really is our training as children. And so I got really lucky with incredible family.

So I think I do, there is definitely a genetic component to mental health, but also the training is essential. And so I use a lot of the training I got from my family, my grandparents, more than probably the 20 different psychotherapies that I’m trained in because they never, they’re always about keeping people alive, keeping people from doing bad things. But there’s this missing link of how do you seek joy and true happiness? And so that’s a lot of the training I give my clients, and it just makes me so happy when they transfer over and go, I’m a happy person. I wake up happy. And they were so anxious in the beginning. And it’s just that to me, that’s a greater gift than even being pain free.

Ella Magers, MSW:

It is so powerful. I have chills because what a gift to be able to give people. Oh my gosh. Now this is interesting because you talk about how safe you are and what a amazing parents you had. And when you were just 14, I believe, or maybe even earlier, that you started having these symptoms. And so how did you deal with that? Can you kind of take us through that story? I know maybe a lot of our audience hasn’t heard it yet, and how your parents helped you continue to feel safe and in a time that you were diagnosed with something very scary.

Brooke Goldner:

So I started having pain at 14 through migraines. So they would last four to five days, and I would be throwing up from the pain, and it was really hard. And we went to the doctor, I come from family of immigrants. They were refugees from World War ii. My mom was born in Poland, so they were like immigrants, at least when I was a kid. You just trust the doctors. They just do what they say. And so we went to the doctors. I got all the brain scans and everything, but they said, oh, maybe it’s just genetic. Mom had migraines, other things. So okay, take medicine for pain and that’s all we can do. But over time started to have more problems. So by 16, I had joint pain throughout my body. I was getting rashes on my face. I was getting migraines all the time.

Sometimes the pain would be so bad, my mom would have to take me home from somewhere and I’d have to pull over so I could vomit in the road. I mean, it was really painful. And so we went to the doctors and they didn’t put it all together at first because with autoimmune diseases, especially, sometimes the symptoms seem very unrelated. Okay, you have headaches. Oh, well your joint hurts. But maybe because you started playing volleyball, which I am not an athlete. I mostly sat bench for volleyball, but whatever, which is I, I’m a nerd pretty much through and through, but they couldn’t figure it out at first. And then with autoimmune disease also, you can have sensitivity to the sun. And so I was out at the pool all day with my friend, and when we came back, I got a horrible migraine and I started throwing up.

And when I threw up, it made the rash that I’d been covering up, come out of my face. And when I came out of the bathroom, I just felt so sick. And my dad looked at me and he goes like, what’s going on with you? This is, something’s really wrong. And so we called up my doctor, she had us meet her in the er, and that’s when they finally diagnosed me with lupus. So when they diagnosed me, they also did full workup while I was in the er. And they said, not only do you have lupus that’s causing the rash, that’s causing the pains, but you also are in kidney failure, which was a surprise because kidney failure was painless. I had no kidney pain that I didn’t notice. And it’s amazing how if I hadn’t had other symptoms, I probably would’ve died of kidney failure.

I never known I had it. So I had to go to, they didn’t call it failure yet. They said, something’s wrong with the kidneys, you need to go get a kidney biopsy. So now I’m getting a biopsy. And then the next day I went in or I had to lay on my back a couple days and heal. And then we went in to see the nephrologist. And the nephrologist is the one who told me that I was in stage four kidney failure from lupus. And it’s an autoimmune disease that attacks your organs. So your antibodies, the thing with lupus is it, it attacks all the different organs in the body. Other ones are different. I just worked with someone with MS today where it’s the neurological system, your nerves, spinal cord brain, and rheumatoid arthritis is mostly joints, but lupus can be everywhere, anywhere. So there was just a recent article about someone who was catatonic or in a coma and they thought it was schizophrenia and it was brain lupus, neurogenic lupus, so it can be anywhere.

So it’s very common though, to choose the kidneys. And that’s what happened to me. And so he said that it was so severe that they expected my kidneys to fail within six months. So he said, I said, what does that mean? And he said, within six months, our best hope is dialysis or won’t make it. So it’s a lot. Yeah, thanks. I always like to take a moment here and say, I made it so nobody gets too upset. I’m here. I made it, but it was a lot. I don’t think I really absorbed it. We started with existential questions in the beginning of the interview. I never really absorbed the idea that I was dying. It was just, okay, what do we need to do? And that’s how my family is. Well, what do we need to do? We’re practical people, immigrants, what do we need to do?

And so they said, well, the current medicines that we usually use are not going to be enough. It’s not going to stop the kidney failure. But we do have some experimental treatments, which nobody wants to hear from their doctor that we can do an experiment. And so at the time, they’re experiment experimenting with cytoxin chemotherapy, which they currently use to, because chemo chemotherapy, one of the side effects is it suppresses your immune system. That’s why people with cancer often die of infections because the treatment that’s supposed to stop the cancer from growing now poisoned their immune system and now they die of a flu because they couldn’t fight it off. Scariest thing about being a doctor was being paged in the middle of the night when my residency, when I had to do my internal medicine rotations and they’d page me in the middle of the night, somebody on the cancer unit with no white count has a fever.

It was so scary because how are you supposed to treat them? What do they have? So they said, well, what if we do that on purpose with lupus, since your immune system and attacking your kidney, what if we just completely shut off your immune system? Now obviously there’s some risks to that because your immune system keeps you safe from colds and flus and worse, but it was really the only chance. And we trusted the doctor. And so we did it, but they didn’t know then how much to give a person and how often to give it. So every month I got increased dosage for two years. So I took chemotherapy from 16 to 18 and it, it worked. But what happened was they originally felt one year, and then when they tried to stop it, my kidney function started going back down again. So then we had to do another year.

And on top of that, I took seven different medicines by mouth. I was taking hormone pills to suppress puberty because the chemo drug could also cause infertility and ovarian cancer and all sorts of other things. So they suppressed the puberty. They gave me high dose steroids every day. So I just took, and then I had pills for side effects because then the steroids gave me gerd, and then steroids also melt your bones. And then I’d take calcium and it’s a mess. So one of the things I learned to manage was I didn’t like spending time thinking about being sick. I wanted to think about other things. So one thing that I taught myself how to do was to take all seven pills at once, because in the morning I had to take ’em every day. And so if I sat there swallowing one at a time, that might be five minutes of thinking about being sick.

So I learned how to put water in my mouth, take ’em and swallow ’em all at once. And then I only had to spend five seconds thinking about being sick. And so being present again, maybe I’m dying in six months, maybe I’m living to 105. But I have other things to be. Other things to do. And that’s what my family gave me too, was they never suggested that I stop going to school. If I had, I still took all AP classes and then it was like, oh, I have chemo on Monday. No, I always had chemo on Fridays, but I have a test on Monday, so I’m going to have to study the week before so that I can throw up over the weekend and then take my tests. It was just planning game plans, game plans. That’s what I always teach my clients, just game plans.

So it kept me though very focused that you will be someone, you are going to have a future. This is just something you got to get through. And we all have stuff to get through. Grandparents had something to get through. Everybody has something to get through. It’s just how you attack it. So I minimized time thinking about being sick. I did everything I had to do. I didn’t know that diet had an impact. My parents owned a pizza shop, so I ate lots of pizza to comfort myself through chemo. But I took my medicines, I did whatever my doctor said, and then I went to school and I focused on the things that made me happy. Science makes me happy, writing makes me happy. So that reminded me who I was. I went and spent time with friends. I did things that made me feel like myself so I could minimize the time that I had to think of anything else.

So the only days that were my bad days, my grumpy days was chemo days because I hated chemo. And so it was interesting. I used to wake up feeling sick the morning of chemo. I would already wake up nauseous, even though they didn’t give me it yet because, cause I already knew it was coming. And so I’d wake up feeling that way. And I know a lot of my clients now wake up that way too. They anticipate illness and they wake up sick. I just had a client who was doing the diet perfectly and still in pain. And I said, you’ve got to go have fun. You’re not listening to me. So she went and had fun and she came home pain free. It was the missing link. So the more you focus on happiness, the more you can be grateful for your life, even if you’re sick.

And it accelerates recovery. So it’s like there’s a win-win, win. So that’s how I managed it. But there was even times that got scary in medical school. I developed lymphocyte and attacked my clotting factors. So I started getting blood clots and I was getting double vision and blood clots in my brain. And I didn’t know at the time, I just knew something was wrong. And I went into my doctor and I had the M R I and all the tests done, but I was supposed to go on a trip with my grandma because my grandma was my best friend. So even in medical school, college, whenever I had spring break, anything, I always went to my grandma and we would go on a cruise or something. So we were going on a cruise. And so I didn’t get my test results. I did all the tests, and then I went on the cruise with my grandma.

I didn’t even tell her that I was sick because I didn’t want her to worry. And for that week, I didn’t even think about it. I just had fun. I did all the events. I swam at the pool. I enjoyed myself, and I didn’t think about it. And then when I got home, I got the results and you’re having mini strokes and you need to be on injectable blood thinners for the rest of your life, and you’ll never be able to have children because you’ll have a major stroke and I’m one step closer to disability and blah, blah, blah. And it’s like, okay. But I’ve always had the ability to stay in the moment where it’s like whatever the tests are going to say they’re going to say. But right now I’m on a cruise. So that’s the other thing I try to teach people is being in the moment that if you wake up, it’s a good day.

What is going to make today a good day? So you’re going to eat well, you’re going to drink your water, you’re going to do all these other things. You’re going to find something that makes you feel good and happy and whatever else you need to do for your health. But a lot of times when people are sick, they want to put life on hold and say, when I am better, I will go to school When I am better, I will try a job. When I am better, I’ll go out and be social. And it keeps them sick because what’s the reason I, the man I met with Ms Today, he started on his own and then he, now he’s off plan. And it’s not that he’s not afraid of ms, but I said, you know what? And that is what I said to him. I said, it’s really hard to stick with a diet that might prolong your life when you don’t enjoy your life and don’t even want to be here.

And he just started crying because in a wheelchair. And he’s like, I used to be strong. I used to be physical. I used to be active, and I’m not that person anymore. And so I said, you have to learn how to enjoy your life in that chair, and then it will be easier to do the things you need to do to get out of it. But you are still here. You have a family, you have your wife, you have community. You can still have a good life in that chair, and you have to want your life enough to fight for it.

Ella Magers, MSW:

It’s amazing. Totally amazing. So here you are going through all that. Now you’ve gotten to the place where you have been basically saved, your life has been saved by Western medicine

Brooke Goldner:

At the time. Yeah, at

Ella Magers, MSW:

That time. And then

Brooke Goldner:

There was more moments, but yeah, I almost died many times. I used to call myself the comeback kid because I’d really scare everybody, get super sick. And then I’d come back and I’d be like, okay, now let’s, I’m the trauma I put my mother through.

Ella Magers, MSW:

Thank goodness your whole family was resilient. My goodness.

Brooke Goldner:

She still has, I got to say she still has some anxiety. I think the one thing that could break me of that resilience would be if my kids were sick, I can handle anything. But yeah, my mom, yeah, I’m an only child. See, that made me cry. And yeah, my mom went through it. I mean, both my parents did, but my mom was the one who was usually with me on all my appointments and stuff. And so I asked her recently, cause I’m 46, this was, it’s exactly 30 years ago, they gave me six months to live, so I’m still here. I’m doing it right. But she said she still sometimes feels that fear. So that did traumatize her to see me going through chemo to see me so sick. That was a lot. Yeah, I think that,

Ella Magers, MSW:

So again,

Brooke Goldner:

Good, she’s happy. But it definitely changed her for sure. She said that’s when she realized she didn’t care anymore about personal success, money, anything. She just needed me to be okay.

Ella Magers, MSW:

Got it. So let’s continue this story because I’m really interested. I mean, you turned vegetarian when you were 12, right? Yes. But that didn’t have anything to do with healthy food really until much later. Tell us about that journey into the whole plant-based world that leading up to this hyper nourishment protocol.

Brooke Goldner:

So my progression from being weird to really, really weird. So in the eighties, my neighbor was the president of the Vegetarian Society of Long Island. And so he came over to our house with these books and things, and one of them was John Robbins book Diet for New America. And my whole family read it. My dad read it first and he became vegetarian. And then my mom read it and they gave it to me and we went, all right, well, and like I said, I’d always been very empathic and wanted to save everyone. And so I had never knew what factory farming was. And a lot of people grow up not really thinking about the suffering of the animals on their plate. We think about the suffering. I couldn’t kill a fly, but I was eating burgers, not because I wasn’t empathic, I just was not taught to look at that.

And once you look, it’s hard to look away, especially as an empathic person. So my whole family became vegetarian. Now we weren’t vegan, but this was the eighties. So being vegetarian, nobody even knew what that was. I mean, even at a restaurant, they thought we were naming our religious preference like Presbyterian, what? At school, if I got a salad, they would not let me have the salad without meat on top because it had to be balanced. So I’d have to get the salad and then peel the ham off of it so that I could just eat the salad. So we were vegetarian, but we weren’t health eaters. I always liked salad. Actually, I’ve never been a fruit person. I would take a pepper and bite into it and eat it. I love tomatoes. I would eat that way. We liked salad, things like that. But lots of dairy on everything.

So eggs sometimes twice a day because breakfast for dinner was one of my favorite things. And then my parents bought a pizza franchise, and then they started making the school lunch for the school. So I would have pizza for lunch and pizza for dinner. And because I was a thin kid, so my mom back then again, eighties, if you were skinny, you didn’t have to think about what you ate, right? There was no real thought about nutrition. If you were chubby, you need to eat healthy, but if you’re skinny, you can eat whatever you want. And so even at lunchtime, I would have pizza with chips or french fries and then ice cream, but I was skinny, so no problem. Right? Except lupus by 16.

Yeah, it wasn’t really a thought of that. And I didn’t know better. And even when I was diagnosed, there was no understanding that there was a link between diet and disease, especially autoimmune disease. I mean, maybe if you had a heart attack, they’d go, you should maybe change don eat butter or something. But really not much else. And when I got sick, also, this pre-internet, my kids say I was born in the dark ages because there was no wifi, but there was no internet. I got my first email address in college, so I couldn’t Google, which also helps you stay present. I didn’t think about my disease, but I didn’t have to, right? The gentleman I was just talking about who with ms, he told me that he spends a lot of his day doing research, which means watching YouTube videos about health. And so what does that do?

It keeps you thinking about, I’m sick, I’m sick, I’m sick, I’m sick, and then your life sucks. Versus I’m present. Let me go see that game with my kid in it. Let me go see. Let me get a poker game going with my friends, right? It’s just this focus. So I was blissfully able to just focus on other things. But even in medical school, we learned, the only thing I learned about food really was the calorie model, which is total bunk. That if you want to lose weight, you eat less than you burn. And if you want to gain weight, then you eat more than you burn no attention to content of food. And you’ll still see Dr. Ju that, oh, you’re thin, drink this processed dairy shake with sugar. Oh, now you’re fat. Perfect. So I learned that and I learned that diabetics shouldn’t have sugar.

And I learned that people with heart disease shouldn’t have butter. And that was it. And this was in the early two thousands. So I never had any sense that food had an impact. And it’s funny because I always compliment my clients when they’ll tell me, I just knew there’s a better way. I knew that probably nature would work better than medicine. I said, really? Because I never knew that and I never thought of it. I never, never crossed my mind. Probably also cause I’d been sick since a kid, and medicines did keep me alive. I mean, any blood test would show I had lupus. I still had chronic kidney problems, but they were stable. So medicine saved me over and over again, but I was never healthy. It was just holding me till the next thing, right? But it never crossed my mind. And the only reason that I changed my diet was because I met Thomas Tabla, who became my husband, and his obsession was metabolism actually.

And so that’s his book is Miracle Metabolism, and it was all about the research. He was coming from a background of computer science and technology, mathematics, and he was trying to then understand the fitness world, which was his passion. He loved it. And he felt, well, there must be an optimal way for humans to eat for metabolism. He wanted everyone to have a six pack. So there must be, so all I have to do is get a master’s degree in exercise science, health promotion, and they’ll teach me that. And then his PhD professors would go, we don’t know what people are supposed to eat. Maybe high carb, low carb, high protein, low protein, high fat, nobody. And he’d go, how is this science in computer science and mathematics? There is a best solve that. He calls it an elegant solution. There’s an elegant solution, which is the fastest way to get to that result where you’re not wasting any time.

This is the correct answer. And then they got into biology and it’s a mess. Nobody knows. But if you ask us any other species, we know I did evolutionary biology. I mean, I’m a biology, I did all the kinds of biology. And for every species, we know what they’re supposed to eat except for humans, we’ve forgotten. We don’t know anymore. But every other species, you ask them, what’s a kangaroo supposed to eat? Right? What’s a panda bear supposed to eat? What’s a rabbit supposed to eat? We know exactly, but we have totally forgotten what humans are supposed to eat because we’ve turned food into a drug, we no longer use it for nutrition. And now, and then we turn it into parts of foods, proteins, carbs, fat. I hate when people say I’m eating a protein. I say, no, you’re not. There’s no protein. That’s a food.

And it has lots of things in it. So what is it that you’re eating? Right? Tell me the name of the food. Name it. So we have done, and then we calories that just how much heat does it release when you set it on fire? What does that have to do with what it’s doing to your body? So we’ve totally mucked it up badly. And so he needed to clear this up. He is both a computer scientist and a Virgo. He needed it to be systematic, logical, reproducible. And it drove him mad. So he went back to the drawing board. He said, I’m going to look at cellular biology. I’m going to talk to cellular biologists. What does nutrition do that impacts cellular function, fat loss? What are the hormones involved? And he figured out that there were certain nutrients that accelerated your metabolic rate, which could make you burn fat faster, build muscle faster.

And so when I met him, that’s what he did. He was actually working for MTV at the time where they would bring him to New York to train people who had to do a music video, a, and they needed a six pack and he could do it. So he learned the right combination of exercise and nutrition where you’d get that elegant solution where everybody could get a six pack no matter how old they are. So when we met, I wanted that because he wanted to marry me knowing about my illness. I mean, I was very upfront that we were 28 and I said, I’m going to become disabled. You’re going to have to take care of me when I become disabled. I’m not going to live a long life. So at some point I’m going to die and I can’t even have your children because that would kill me.

So it’s not exactly an exciting thing to look forward to at 28. And he’s amazing. I mean, just, I’m so lucky. I mean, he is gorgeous and brilliant and compassionate. He’s just all the things. If every person’s checklist he’s at, I’m telling you, amazing. So just his famous words or that he’d rather have a short life with me than a lifetime with anybody else. And he is like, I just wanted to make it the best life you could ever have. And I said, yeah, cause I want to be happy. And that’s another thing, people with chronic illness often feel guilty you that they’re burdening their partner. And I’m like, no, you get to let people love you. You don’t choose who loves who. I would’ve hurt my husband by not letting him love me. So what happened was he, so we decided to get married, and I wanted to look amazing at our wedding.

And I was eating the perfect diet to be overweight and sick, which is hospital food because I was a medical student. And so I gained weight and I was not the white coat covers, but I was going from Pittsburgh for my medical training to Los Angeles for my residency. And I was not Los Angeles ready. That was a whole nother level. So I did his diet for that reason. But his diet at the time, he had already figured out omega-3 fatty acids and water and high levels of cruciferous vegetables. He’d figured all that out already. But he still thought that you needed meat for protein. He now, he knows better. He’s been vegan for over 12 years, but at the time, he didn’t know. And so I said, I don’t eat meat. And he’d never met a vegetarian before. So he said, okay, we’ll do everything the same. And then you eat soybeans and tofu since that’s the only plant food that’s primarily protein, not beans, people, just soybeans and tofu. Those are primarily protein.

And he said, the dairy, that’s pure fat. You’re not going to lose fat doing that. So I had to get rid of the dairy, I had to get rid of the eggs. And so I was accidentally a mostly raw vegan without knowing it. I didn’t even know that that’s what it was. I just did what he said. I went from drinking nothing but diet Coke and coffee, gallon of water a day overnight. And again, that transition wasn’t hard for me because I had support. I had a passion I, so I was the happiest intern you ever saw. Since we start out talking about this, my chairman of my residency program for psychiatry pulled me aside because he thought might be having a problem be manic, because I was the only happy intern. All the other interns were appropriately depressed. And I showed up every day, what are we seeing today?

And he’s like, are you all right? I said, are you kidding? It was my dream to be a doctor and I’m here. There couldn’t be anything better. And they’re like, all right. And then by the end, I was the first solo chief resident they ever had at the UCLA Harbor program. I did the job with two people by myself. They got used to me, but I was so happy. So I was happy, I had good support. I had purpose and passion in my life. So it was easy to just switch out my food. And within three months, I had lost all the weight. I’d lost over 20 pounds. I went from a size 11 to a size three. I was ripped. But for the first time, so I was now 28, I’d had lupus for 12 years. And for the first time in my life, I had no pain.

I had no rashes. I had incredible energy. So you thought I was annoyingly happy before, and now I’m happy, energized, and feeling amazing. And at the end of the three months, we got my blood test done. And it was the first time in 12 years I was negative for lupus. My kidney function had turned to normal, the blood clots were gone. And these were the things that had been killing me for 12 years. And so now in October, it’ll be 18 years since that first negative blood test. And I’ve never relapsed. I’ve had two healthy children. I Solomon’s 14 and Alex is 10 who are brilliant, amazing, wonderful kids that I get to take care of every day. And I feel good. I’m 46 years old and I feel amazing. And it’s just such a beautiful gift. So that’s why I’m so passionate about giving it back every day. I’m like, you can do this. You can be amazing too. But yeah, it was an amazing voyage. And there are so many things along the way. I mean, if I had not fallen in love with Thomas, had he not been brave enough to marry me because his best friend died of cancer in his twenties, and then the person he falls in love with tells him that she’s dying too. And he still had the courage to love me back. And it’s just been a beautiful, amazing wild ride this life.

Ella Magers, MSW:

Incredible. I’m going to turn the light. I’m the creepy one in the dark here. Lemme just turn the light on. It’s the ridiculous thing.

Brooke Goldner:

And I said, that could happen to me because of the power outage.

Ella Magers, MSW:

I didn’t realize the storm had rolled in and we just

Brooke Goldner:

See, I said, that was going to happen to us,

To you. But yeah, I didn’t teach this right away because I didn’t know why I was better. And again, I’d never was taught the power of nutrition. So I didn’t even think of it when they said, we don’t know why you’re better. I didn’t know either. Is it love? But I’d been in love for six months with Thomas, and I still was sick until I changed my diet, but we didn’t think of it. Then I had Solomon, and that was scary for everyone else. I felt like, listen, my labs are normal. I have no lupus for four years now. I think I’m okay. And then when he was born, that’s when we realized, okay, I really am healthy. Because all of the doctors were just like, you’re going to relapse. Because birth is often when women get diagnosed, hormone changes are very powerful. And I was fine.

I had to get a C-section because he was breech. I felt fine. The next day I was walking around feeling good. And when I got home within nine days, all the baby weight was gone. I was back in my pregnancy gene. So my husband did a full photo shoot, we have the pictures. He said, my metabolism theory is correct. I was pregnant, 40 pounds not pregnant, came right off and I wasn’t working out. I was just nursing and sleeping with the baby, not pregnant came off. I had enough breast milk to feed my baby and donate to breast milk for people who didn’t. Nurse and lupus never came back. And that’s when we decided to turn our minds to not just the cellular impact of nutritional and metabolism, but what does metabolism have to do with health? And so what we realized is that we really accidentally created the optimal nutrition for cellular repair and immune function. And when cellular repair and cellular interaction, cellular communication, cellular function. And so if all of that is optimal, then yes, every workout you’ll get maximum benefit. And if you get sick, you can get better, which is more normal. You don’t see animals walking around with lupus, but they’re also not eating pizza. So we can get injured, but we can recover. We create chronic disease for our lifestyle, and when we change our lifestyle, we can get healthy again. And it’s been the most profound thing that I’ve ever learned in my lifetime.

Ella Magers, MSW:

And to clarify, when it comes to autoimmune disorders, the medical community does say that this is an incurable type of illness.

Brooke Goldner:

Well, yes, it, what’s really interesting about it though is that if it’s going to be considered a cure, then it has to be a medication. It can’t be diet. Diets are not, you can’t patent them, right? I have a lot of doctors that follow me or get coaching from me. I speak a lot of conferences for doctors, and there’s this one doctor who called me who wanted my help with the project, and he said, ideally, you should have the Nobel Prize. I, I’ve published getting people off the transplant list for kidney failure where their kidneys come back and you said, this should be a Nobel Prize, but there is no Nobel Prize for nutrition. Now, I don’t care about Nobel Prize. I care about nutrition and not even nutrition. I care about people and them getting to live their lives. But in medicine is kind of already set up that the only thing that’s really valued is medications, procedures, surgeries, but not natural things.

And it’s not even doctor’s fault because we’re not taught that it matters. So why would you spend 12, 14 years of your life in training to become an expert at something and then someone goes, oh, broccoli will do it better. You go, what? Talk about if someone had told me that I would’ve laughed in their face, there’s no way I would’ve come to it on my own. It happened. It just happened. And then I had to go, huh, this is weird. What happened to me? And so I remember meeting my first vegan in college and I thought he was an extremist and he was weird. And he had tattoos everywhere and he had a ring in his nose and I thought, that’s what vegans are, right? And I was a vegetarian. I thought, that guy’s weird. Now I’m teaching people to eat raw. I I’m surpassed the weirdness. No face fearing yet, but they’re fine. I don’t care. But it’s just interesting how your judgments changed too, where things that you thought were strange suddenly make perfect sense. And that’s our evolution, I guess.

Ella Magers, MSW:

Totally. And I’ve talked, heard you talk about studies that recently or maybe in the last few years came out that talked about how the increase of rates of autoimmune diseases across the globe are just going up so quickly. And

Brooke Goldner:

Over the past decade, autoimmune diseases have risen over 40% and they’ve spread to countries that never had them before, like irritable bowel disease in the Middle East, for example. And the geneticists who did this research, they were trying to figure out if there was a genetic change because these are supposed to be genetic diseases. You didn’t eat your way here. It just was a gene that turned on. So they thought maybe genetics is changing. And so they did the research and what they found was human genetics has not changed at all. And they found that the rise and spread of autoimmune disease exactly mirrors the rise and spread of the western diet. Of course, their conclusion was that we need to make more medicines to target what the diet’s doing and that.

But even if you ask doctors, there’s been studies even for heart disease, they’ve known a long time plant-based diet is better for heart disease. Ote overwhelmingly, that is considered. So when they poll cardiologists around the country, they say plant-based diet is better for your heart. And then they poll the same doctors and say, do you teach your patients to eat plant-based? And they say, no, because we don’t think they’ll do it right. And I’m like, give them a chance. Right? Got to give people a chance. So for me, I’ve kind of bypassed a lot of that. I mean, I do submit to articles. There’s one article that literally we’ve been shopping around for three years. Finally someone’s taking it. That’s disease reversal for people with Sjogren’s and lupus who’ve been symptom free for five years or more. But nobody wants nutrition stuff in the mainstream journals.

The reason it took us so long is I don’t want to be in some journal. No one’s going to read just so I can say I’m published. I want it to be in the mainstream. But it doesn’t really change much because even when I was in my medical school training, my attending taught me, don’t bother reading any journal besides the New England Journal of Medicine. And if you don’t have time to read it, just read the front page. They weren’t saying read the Journal of Nutrition and Pathology or that I’m making that name up. But you know what I mean? So doctors don’t know to look. But it is getting better because of stuff like this, because of the internet. And also because when doctors get sick, they don’t like to take medicine either. I have three doctors in my current rapid recovery group three because when they get sick, suddenly they are interested in Google and what what’s going on?

And one, there’s one man in my group who’s a scientist. He’s not a doctor, but he is a scientist. And he said, the reason I’m with you is because when I hear you talk about the pathways, I know that you’re a real scientist. And I understand. So a lot of doctors and nurses and even pharmaceutical scientists I have who come to me for help because they actually know when they listen to me talk science that it’s real. Whereas a lot of people, it’s not scientific, it’s just it sounds like woo to them. And if you’re a scientist and it sounds too magical, not going to listen.

Ella Magers, MSW:

Right. Can you talk to for a moment about Hashimoto’s and why you said that’s different?

Brooke Goldner:

Yes. So Hashimoto’s is the most common autoimmune disease. And for a lot of folks, they don’t even realize they have autoimmune. It’s not talked about. And when I see people with rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, scleroderma, I’ve helped people reverse all of these and get healthy. Many times when I say, when did this start? They’ll say the day they got pain. And I go, well, when did the Hashimoto start? Oh, 20 years ago. Said, no, that’s when it started. It’s just your autoimmune disease has moved on from your thyroid and now is in your joints, but it’s the same disease. So the reason it’s not treated as autoimmune disease, and this is really just matter of fact, is because in the medical world, the thyroid’s considered disposable because we can replace it with a pill. So if you have autoimmune disease attacking your thyroid, are they going to put you on immunosuppression like other autoimmune diseases, which then have the side effects of making you more vulnerable to illness?

Even cancer, I mean, your immune system helps fight cancer too. And a lot of the medicines that we use to suppress makes you more likely to get other diseases. Even when I got the chemo, it’s like this will get rid of the lupus for now, but might be cancer later. Right. So it’s always about what’s the best thing for now, right? Well, with the thyroid, because we have a pill Synthroid that will do it, just thyroid hormone. So rather than put people through immunosuppression, we just give them the thyroid hormone. And when your immune system is done killing your thyroid, then you’ll just replace it. The problem is that it’s not that effective overall because when people have autoimmune disease, they usually don’t feel well, even with thyroid hormone. Some people, especially if it’s early on, a little bit of thyroid hormone, they feel back to normal.

But what I’ve found, or maybe just those are the people that come to me w is that people will take that and their numbers look good on their labs, but they still feel like garbage. They can’t lose weight. They have poor energy, they have brain fog. They can’t think clearly solve problems. They’re forgetting things. They just over feel unwell. And then over time, because they still have autoimmune disease, they often then develop arthritis and other things later. So it’s, it’s actually one of those things where probably the thing I’ve helped people recover from the most is Hashimoto’s and Graves Disease as well. We have a free Facebook community called Smoothie Shred for people who are forties or older who actually on Facebook who want to be there, and people who just follow me online for free and they post their results. And this one, a guy who actually has worked with me privately, he also posted there recently where he has disease, where it causes hyperthyroid.

And he never took medicine, which I don’t tell people not to do that medicines can be lifesaving, so I don’t do that. But he refused to take the medicine. And one of the things Graves disease does that causes your eyes to protrude. So one of his eyes protruded and rotated. So he was stuck with double vision and it looks terrible. You have this one eye sticking out, and we’ve worked together over the past year and his eye rotated back and went in and he posted the pictures. Yeah, it’s pretty cool. I hope he lets me share them publicly. So it came back in on just, and he’s only ever done the goodbye lupus protocol. That’s the only thing he did. And that is not medically ever seen, ever. The only thing we do in Grave’s Disease is either use radiation or surgery to remove the thyroid, and then they’re hypothyroid and they take medicine.

So if we can get rid of the antibodies by getting rid of the autoimmune disease, then health comes back. Now with Hashimoto’s, it depends how long you’ve been sick. You might still need to take Synthroid if some of your thyroid’s already dead. But I just had someone, she’s so funny. I worked with her on her illness and then she stayed working with me to work through her traumas. So she’s actually learning to be happy now and doing really well, actually. But her Hashimoto’s, it was like eight months ago, her antibodies were gone, so we celebrated goodbye. You don’t have antibodies. You don’t have Hashimoto’s, but she still needed thyroid medicine because she’s been taking it for 30 years. Yeah, that’s fine. Now, eight months ago. So we kind of forgot about it. Hashimoto’s passed. So a couple months ago she started getting sick and we thought she had a flu because she was just diarrhea and just feeling terrible all the time.

Goes to the doctor, and her T s H was 0.3, which if you have thyroid, t s h, it means it’s suppressed. It means your body’s like, no more thyroid hormone, too much stop thyroid hormone. Her thyroid just came back online suddenly. So she just stopped the medicine and now she feels amazing. So I kind of picture it like the machine where it’s like flat line. And so normally in my programs that happens at the same time that that antibodies goes away. So like three, four weeks in, suddenly they feel jittery and we go, okay, talk to your doctor. It’s time to lower your medicine. But this was out of the blue months later and it just came back to life. It was the coolest thing. It’s like zombie thyroid. I don’t know. It just came back online, which is just really, really cool. Even after decades of it being offline.

Ella Magers, MSW:

Oh, it’s so phenomenal. These stories are just so cool.

Brooke Goldner:

I’m the best. I’ve just thing ever.

Ella Magers, MSW:

Well, I mean, at one point I was going to ask you how you don’t burn out, but it’s like you No, I

Brooke Goldner:

Like today, today I just got a text. My phone just fell off my, I just had a text from someone that she had lupus and kidney failure, and she just texted me her labs and her antibodies are negative for the first time ever. She doesn’t have lupus antibodies anymore. So it’s exciting. My life is exciting, my work is exciting, and I love taking care of people. I live for it, but I also take really good care of myself. I have a great relationship with my husband. We redesigned our whole lives that we can both work from home so we can be together all the time and raise our kids together. My kids have incredible lives that I love being a part of. They’re doing really cool stuff. I mean, if I had to choose only one thing I could do, it’d just be their mom. They’re just the coolest people. I made all my family move nearby, so all the grandparents are here because grandparents are the best thing ever, and I want my kids to have their grandparents. So it was just, it’s just good. Life is good and I, I enjoy it. But no, this work doesn’t burn me out. It gives me happiness

Ella Magers, MSW:

That’s obvious. And I mean, we could talk for hours. I know we’re coming to the end time, you’re together, and we really didn’t even get to talk about smoothies and all of that. But the good thing is you really make all this information, all your protocols, everything so accessible between the free resources on your website, goodbye lupus.com, your books, you got the newer one, the goodbye autoimmune disease come, that’s out. All these things are on your website. So thank you for making that accessible. How do people, if they’re like, okay, this what you’re saying is resonates, whatever part of this, I mean, this is also about prevention. Not just treating people once they are in pain and sick, but really boosting their immune system and their metabolism and all of that. For that person who’s like, oh, this got me. What do I do? How do you recommend people get

Brooke Goldner:

Started? Okay, well, there’s so many things. As you said, my husband, I made a decision a long time ago to give the protocol away. We thought, I always say, you have to save your life. And he says, you have to save your life. But we just believe that this should be just common knowledge for the public. And so yes, there’s tons of resources. Goodbye lupus.com, there’s free gifts and resources. And even if you’re on social media with me, I post every day and to sometimes on the weekend, I don’t cause I’m having fun with my family, but during the week, I post every day to keep people motivated and inspired because I feel like that’s the most important part for most people is not what to do. But how do I do it today and how do I do it again today? And so I do that every day and I’ll post segments of me coaching to try in case that helps somebody else.

And so Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, if you look up goodbye lupus at Goodbye lupus, you’ll find me there every week on Wednesdays, I do live q and as for the public, and people come from all over the world and I stream them on all three of those, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. And so I can answer questions and help people stay focused, stay motivated. So I’ve gotten a lot of good feedback there for people, just needed that. Then sometimes people will even put in the comments, just coming to the Q and listening to you, I’m lupus free, my rheumatoid is gone, my diabetes is gone. It’s just makes me happy. And then if people actually still need me, then goodbye lupus.com. You can either make appointments with me, they’re all 75 minutes for intakes because I like to get to know people. And also I have programs.

People work with me every day. So if you know, listen to this and go, I wish I could hear that every day, then that’s really what rapid recovery is. So I work with people for six weeks every day to not only make sure they get the diet, but to make sure that they change their mindset so that they stick with it forever and they have a way to find happiness and joy in their life, in their relationships as well. So it’s kind of a lifestyle makeover and it’s pretty extreme, but people tell me now we’re in the fifth week and people are saying in the meetings, I hear your voice in my head now. And I go, good, download. Complete, just yes. But they start thinking in a new way and seeing things in a new way. And so that’s what my rapid recovery programs are for. But all that’s like goodbye lupus.com and people can reach me that way.

Ella Magers, MSW:

Brooke, thank you for being so open, for sharing, for everything that you do to gift this world, make it a happier, healthier place. I appreciate you so much.

Brooke Goldner:

Oh, you’re so welcome. It’s my favorite thing to do, and thanks for having me on so I could spread the word.

Ella Magers, MSW:

Absolutely.