Episode #37 Weight Loss and Wellness with Dr. Reed Miloy (Part 1)

Episode #38:

Weight Loss and Wellness with Dr. Reed Miloy (Part 2)

In part one of this episode, Dr. Reed Miloy scratched the surface of a concept he calls the Table of Health. In this episode, we’re diving a little deeper into the four legs of the Table of Health: exercise, adequate sleep, emotional well-being, and nutrition.

Dr. Reed Miloy is a doctor of internal medicine and a life and wellness coach. He walks us through an amazing illustrative tool he uses called the Table of Health, showing us how to start working on the body as well as the mind, bringing weight loss and wellness together in ways we may never have considered before.

Tune in this week to discover the value of creating some space and stillness to support your Table of Health. Reed shares a story that changed everything in how he approaches integrative medicine for his patients, his coaching clients, and how he approaches his own life.

WHAT YOU’LL DISCOVER

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The 4 legs that make up Dr. Reed Miloy’s Table of Health.

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Why you can’t be in optimum health without taking care of all 4 legs.

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What Reed believes is missing from everything we do as physicians.

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A story from Reed about discovering the value of integrative medicine that accounts for emotional health and wellness.

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Why our profession needs the wisdom of the ages more than ever.

FEATURED ON THE SHOW

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Dr. Reed Miloy: Website | Instagram | Twitter

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Ep #37: Weight Loss and Wellness with Dr. Reed Miloy (Part 1)

TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Miloy: What we need and the world needs because we're all going to be a patient at one time or another it was we need healers. We don't need technicians so much. We need healers. How do you make somebody who's a healer? Well, you combined the knowledge and the teachings from medical school and residency and all that clinical stuff and then you integrate it with the wisdom of the ages. Our profession needs that more than ever, and so does the rest of the world.

Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa, the podcast with Dr. Susan Crockett. You're listening to episode number 38, Weight Loss and Wellness, part two of a two part interview with physician and life and wellness coach, Dr. Reed Miloy.

Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa, the podcast that encourages you to become your best virtuosa self. Each week Dr. Susan Crockett goes where the scalpel can't reach, exploring conversations about how to be, heal, love, give, grow, pray, and attune. For the first time ever, she's bringing the personal one on one teaching that she shares with individual patients to you on this broader platform. A weekly source of inspiration and encouragement designed to empower you.

By evolving ourselves as individuals. We influence and transform the world around us. Please help me welcome board certified OB-GYN specializing in minimally invasive GYN surgery, internationally in the top 1% of all GYN robotic surgeons, a certified life coach, and US News top doctor, your host Susan A. Crockett, MD.

Dr. Crockett: We are talking with my favorite guest today, Dr. Reed Miloy, and I want to welcome you back to the show.

Dr. Miloy: Glad to be here.

Dr. Crockett: This is part two of a series. For this part, I want to dig a little bit deeper into what you call the table of health and the legs.

Dr. Miloy: Yeah, those legs are basically describing our lifestyle. The first one would be exercise. Second one is adequate sleep, eight hours of adequate sleep for most of us.

Dr. Crockett: Which I'm a pro.

Dr. Miloy: Yeah, some people are World Champion sleepers, and some are not, and that's a huge problem. Then the third one would be emotional well-being, and then the fourth one is nutrition. So these four legs all are related to each other. They're connected, of course, by the surface of the table. So when you do something to one leg, it's going to influence the other legs.

Dr. Crockett: I see. All right, so which is your favorite leg?

Dr. Miloy: You know, I can't choose favorites because you can't have optimum health and be a complete human without all four of those nice and strong, but I will say this. When I first came out of training, I was all about three legs. I didn't have that construct of a table, that analogy, until I was having a conversation with a patient in the late 90s. It just kind of came to me during that conversation that that would be a good construct to work with.

The fourth leg was the emotional well-being component. That leg was painfully brought to my attention by a patient that I had. When I first came out of training, it was very unusual for doctors to be practicing what we now call lifestyle medicine or integrative medicine. But that just seemed like the logical choice or the logical strategy for the way that medicine should be practiced.

Dr. Crockett: So we were taught make a diagnosis, identify the disease, isolate the system pathway, write the prescription, give it to the patient, make sure they take it, follow them up, rinse and repeat.

Dr. Miloy: Yeah, it works to a point but it's a horrible, that is a disease based model, if you will.

Dr. Crockett: When you talk about integrative medicine, how is that different?

Dr. Miloy: Well, we're talking about reversing disease, preventing disease. So to do that, you have to take a look at the patient's lifestyle. So as a young, full of, shall we say, piss and vinegar doctor coming out of training, I was really high on exercise, the sleep, and nutrition.

One day we had a patient come into the clinic in a most dramatic fashion, and I’d never heard or seen this person before. I first met Walt when he was coming down the hallway. I could hear his breathing from basically the other side of the clinic. So I looked around the corner, and here comes this just mass of a human being, and every single step was sheer agony for this individual.

Dr. Crockett: Right. Are we talking 600 pound type person?

Dr. Miloy: Yeah, we found out later what Walt's weight was, but as he came down that hallway. So he had blue lips. I thought he was just, we're going to code him at any second. So when we got him into the exam room, the poor guy was just struggling to breathe. I turned to his wife, and I said, “Is this a good day or a bad day?” She said, “Well, today's a little bit worse than the days before.” Turned to Walt and basically said, “We need to put you in the hospital now.”

Dr. Crockett: How old was this?

Dr. Miloy: He was 36.

Dr. Crockett: Oh, my goodness.

Dr. Miloy: He refused that. So here, I'd been this guy high on all this lifestyle stuff. I've got a guy who's really acutely ill. I was just thinking to myself as he was coming down the hallway, broccoli is not going to help this cat.

Dr. Crockett: The sprouts. They just don't seem to.

Dr. Miloy: Yeah. We did an EKG on him. It was a bad looking EKG. He completely refused to be admitted to the hospital. I sat down for two hours where he and his wife and talked to them about broccoli, and a lifestyle of eating a whole food plant based diet. She took copious notes. When they left, I thought there's no way in the world that I'll see him again because we'd scheduled an appointment for the next week.

Our scale could not weigh him. So our office manager had found a Furniture Outlet nearby, and they agreed to weigh Walt. He went by, and it was about 650 pounds. So it was really one of those situations where you thought there's just no way he'll get through the week. I gave his wife my cell phone. I got a frantic phone call that night.

Dr. Crockett: You gave out your cell phone to patient?

Dr. Miloy: We just got new these new things called cell phones.

Dr. Crockett: Wow.

Dr. Miloy: So she calls me just frantic because Walt had collapsed the couch and was stuck in the couch.

Dr. Crockett: Oh my god.

Dr. Miloy: Because of his mass, he just couldn't breathe. He was having restrictive hypoxia.

Dr. Crockett: What’d they do? 
Dr. Miloy: So we call the fire department and explain to the fire department the predicament. Talk about going beyond the call of duty. These guys showed up. Not only did they get Walt out of the couch, but they brought their tools, their power tools, and they fixed and reinforced the couch on the spot.

Dr. Crockett: Oh, my goodness. That's amazing.

Dr. Miloy: Incredible acts of kindness and going way beyond what anybody would expect.

Dr. Crockett: It's really sweat.

Dr. Miloy: The week went by, and he came in, and he was down 12 pounds. Now that wasn't all adipose or fat tissue. A lot of fluid he was starting to diurese because he was eating healthier. We basically would have appointments every two weeks. Every time he came in the weight was down further. Then we went to once a month. At the end of the year, he was down over 100 pounds. Then on and on it went.

He got about 200 pounds down from that 650 mark. My ego became very attached to Walt. He was going to be my poster child, and it was going to be that look, here's my trophy and showing it to everybody that this is what a healthy lifestyle can do. That lifestyle medicine is worth the effort. Yeah, it's the right way to go.

But he came in, after all the success he came in one visit, and his weight was up about eight pounds. I said Walt, what happened? He said, “Oh, I got into some Cheetos.

Dr. Crockett: Eight pounds of Cheetos. You know, Cheetos are my weakness, right?

Dr. Miloy: Cheetos. Cheetos have taken out many.

Dr. Crockett: Cheetos, I like to say.

Dr. Miloy: Frito Lay, maybe we need to have a conversation with those guys. But he said, “Yeah, I'll get it corrected.” So it comes back the next month, and now he's up 12 pounds. I just knew something was up. So I finally just looked at him and said Walt, what's going on? He looked right through me. He said something that I was just not prepared for it. He said, “I feel more safe.” I didn't have the skill set at that time in my career to deal with what he was trying to tell me.

Dr. Crockett: So he felt safe when he had more weight on him.

Dr. Miloy: It was his armor. That was exactly how he described it. What he was saying is I'm an incredibly sensitive human being. This is my way of protecting shield self, my shield, from a cruel mean world. So I followed the textbook, the playbook that doctors are given, and made a psychiatry referral, and he died six months later.

Dr. Crockett: Oh my goodness. That’s tragic.

Dr. Miloy: It was one of the greatest failures of my career. He haunted me from the grave. I could hear his voice saying, “Young doctor, you know nothing about the source of suffering.” With what I like to call the Walt effect, I grabbed a torch of curiosity and looked under that third leg of the table of health.

Dr. Crockett: The emotional health.

Dr. Miloy: The emotional health, and went down into those catacombs and spent decades down there kind of plowing the sewers of the human mind to try and understand why is it?

Dr. Crockett: Why do we act that way?

Dr. Miloy: Why do we do this?

Dr. Crockett: So this is where we both became life coaches is we both came to that realization that the mind was at the base of the unhealthy habits that were causing the body to break down.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah, I know everybody's coaching experience and training is a little bit different. I had just a superb mentor, Dr. Pamela Rashard, who's been with the coaching movement from its inception in the late 80s. In the training that we received, there were basically nine principles they talk about at Coach U. These nine principles are just basically describing common principles that are found in all human beings.

But I really struggled with those principles because I felt like something was missing. I couldn't quite put my finger on it. I would have these at length discussions with Pamela for like a year and a half. Pamela, something's missing. I don't know what it is.

Then the story of Walt kind of percolated back into my consciousness again, and I realized what we were missing in medicine, in coaching, in everything is this thing I like to call stillness. So it's the stillness component that is really the, it's more like an umbrella that overarches all of this.

Dr. Crockett: All of the mental processes.

Dr. Miloy: Everything.

Dr. Crockett: It's ancient. It goes through all kinds of spiritual belief systems. It's the be still, be still and know that I am God.

Dr. Miloy: Yeah.

Dr. Crockett: Stillness theory.

Dr. Miloy: Every one of our cultures has tried to bridge the gap between the realm of form, our bodies, our suits, and this other realm of non-form. They all try in their way to get us there. So helping a person go from this crazy world that we live in that's demanding our time, that pulls us in, that easily seduces us to getting lost in our role playing, and getting people to create some space around that and build this connection between their bodies and their earthly life, if you will and this other place of non-form.

There's been a lot of different analogies used. You could call it space. You can call it emptiness. I believe the Buddhist monks like to use the phrase sunyata, the emptiness that knows all. Some people like to refer it to God or just the infinite or whatever.

Dr. Crockett: Or the universe.

Dr. Miloy: Just whatever. So building that, a bridge, a conduit if you will, a relationship between our form selves and this is what constitutes a complete human being. That's why we have so much disease, so much pathology, so much crazy behavior from our leaders. Because our culture worldwide, for the most part, there are some cultures that actually do encourage this more than others. But for Western society, there is a terrible disconnect between these two realms. Once that connection is made then a person can never go back to behaving like the primitive, shall we say, monkey that they were acting out in their previous life.

Dr. Crockett: Well, this is exactly what you take me through in your coaching. So your coaching program is, what, a six month, four month program?

Dr. Miloy: It's whatever it needs to be to help that individual.

Dr. Crockett: But the interesting thing to me about it is been that that's continued to practice and continue to grow, and it's continued to strengthen. I'm teaching it as attunement because I'm a musician, and I think it's becoming in sync with the vibrations and the energy around us, the energy of the spiritual to the energy of the form.

But I love how you taught us today about the table of life and how you are encouraging the stillness theory. I think you and I are on that edge of educating and helping create a world where there's a better awareness and a better wellness in all of our lives.

Dr. Miloy: Yeah, thank you for saying that. There's no profession that needs this more than the medical profession.

Dr. Crockett: You mean ourselves personally, yes.

Dr. Miloy: Absolutely.

Dr. Crockett: We’ve got horrible suicide rates and just horrible health habits in general.

Dr. Miloy: The very first day of medical school, the dean gets us all in the main auditorium. We're sitting there all bright eyed, bushy tailed, ready to go. He walks up to the podium, and he says, “Congratulations, you've now joined the most elite group of human beings on planet Earth. You are now part of a group of people that leads the world in depression, suicide, divorce, and substance abuse.”

He literally closed in this little notepad that he had, and he walked off the stage. He didn't say anything else. He really made his point clear to us. We all looked at each other around the rooms like well, should I get out of this gig now? They’ve already got my tuition for this year. I'm sure we all, to some degree, processed what he was saying differently. I know for myself it was just okay. You got my attention there, but I'm different, right? I'm gonna be okay.

Dr. Crockett: I’ll beat it.

Dr. Miloy: I'll beat it. Right. That's what the ego says. But he was really trying to make a point. We see that playing out throughout Western society for physicians. They are incredibly stressed. What we need and the world needs because we're all going to be a patient at one time or another, is we need healers. We don't need technicians so much. We need healers.

How do you make somebody who's a healer? Well, you combined the knowledge and the teachings from medical school and residency and all that clinical stuff and then you integrate it with the wisdom of the ages. Our profession needs that more than ever, and so does the rest of the world.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah. Well, that's what we're doing here, one little podcast at a time. Thank you so much for coming and meeting with us and chatting with us today.

Dr. Miloy: My pleasure.

Dr. Crockett: Wonderful content.

Dr. Miloy: Thank you.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Becoming Virtuosa. To learn more, come visit us at DrCrockett.com, or find us on YouTube for the Dr. Crockett Show. If you found this episode helpful or think it might help someone else, please like, subscribe, and share. This is how we grow together. Thanks, and I'll see you next week. Love always, Sue.

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