Welcome to the Shaline show. Shaline is a New York Times best-selling author celebrity fitness trainer and obsessed with helping you live your dream life.

Hey there! It's Shaline coming to you from my car. Don't worry. I'm a passenger. Fred's driving.

So I wanted to record this message to you because on the top of my mind and I didn't want to wait to get into the podcasting room and set up my microphone.

I just wanted to speak to you directly from my heart and share with you. I guess, especially if you don't follow me, let's say on Snapchat or on Facebook and your main source of information is the podcast.

I just want to put some pieces together for you regarding all of the information and what probably seems like I'm session right now with the body, nutrition, overall health, gut health, the brain, etc.

and how this all comes together and why. So I think I just should start with a story about two and a half years ago after having Dr. Aiman on my podcast, I decided to go in at his suggestion and do a brain scan because I jumped with him that maybe I had adult ADD and I was literally joking.

But kind of not because after he went through his symptoms, I'm like, well, I have every one of those symptoms and then some. I went and did a brain scan and to my surprise, I was shocked to see the size of these two areas of my brain that there's like no activity.

In essence, what I was looking at was concussions, right, like brain trauma. So areas of my brain that just there was there was dead basically. And that was concerning. And then of course, because of the type of brain specs they do at the Aiman clinic, they were able to not only tell me that I had attention deficit disorder, but I probably had it all my life, which I now could see why or how that manifests itself.

And I see it as a positive because I didn't know I had attention deficit disorder. I just thought I wasn't smart. I just thought I had to figure out like unique creative ways to force myself to learn, to force myself to remember things, to force myself to stay focused. And I think that served me. I really believe that I wouldn't be where I am today had I not learned on my own without the use of any drugs or intervention.

I had to learn on my own how to focus. It was interesting though to see that I wasn't crazy and it didn't have anything to do with my intelligence and it did have to do with the way that my brain functions. So I was diagnosed with at that time in attentive ADD. And that's whatever I've had that all my life, whatever, right, like it hasn't held me back. So that didn't really concern me.

But it was more concerning and what was more alarming to the clinic and Dr. Aiman and Dr. Karen poor was this kind of weird bumpy lumpy look to my brain that appeared like as they asked me if I had maybe experienced years of drugs or had I done chemotherapy had I done some type of toxic intake that had created the look to my brain that really made me feel like I was going to be a doctor.

I've made my brain look much older than I am and you can only characterize it as a moderate level of brain damage. So that really freaked me out. And they said, you know, it looks like maybe you've done years of drugs or chemotherapy radiation, some type of damage to your brain.

The other thing it could be is done, done, done chronic sleep deprivation. I'm like, oh, shit busted. Like in that moment, I was still like kind of lying to myself and saying that the time at which I was in my bedroom, I would count that it was like my bedtime.

But I really knew that I wasn't sleeping. I was usually on my phone or on my laptop still doing work and not tired. I just was wired and I was never tired during the day even. I was never tired.

So I didn't have, you know, those feelings of chronic fatigue. However, when they asked me how quickly I could fall asleep if I wasn't doing something, I was like, oh, God, two seconds. Like if the light was red for too long, look out, you know, I had to pinch myself.

When I thought that was, it was easy for me to fall asleep. I didn't realize that was because I was chronically sleep deprived. So I didn't really tell the truth about how much sleep I was getting because I was embarrassed. And they sent me for a sleep study at the Newport, at Hoq Hospital.

And yeah, lo and behold, they found out, oh, yeah, you actually sleep just fine if you sleep. I had, I forget what they call it, they had me stay for a nap study too. Basically, I wasn't getting enough room sleep even when I was sleeping. But the bigger issue was the fact that I just wasn't allowing myself to sleep.

I wasn't just stopping to allow myself to sleep. Okay, so I started sleeping more. I immediately changed all of my habits. I took it very seriously. I want to live forever. I want to be sharp. I don't want to be foggy. I want to change this. I immediately, I mean, immediately, you can ask all of my students. I had taught 5.30 am fitness classes for 20 years. I gave them up. Like the next month, I gave them up.

So that a major lifestyle change I had to figure out now. Okay, when was it going to make my to-do list? Because all of my habits were centered and anchored around my morning activities.

So I really struggled with that for about, I'd say, six months, maybe even a year. I could figure out when to exercise. I just couldn't figure out how to make all of my other morning habits. What to hook them to?

What to anchor them to? Because so much of my anchors revolved around teaching at the gym. So I really struggled with that. And I got back into studying habits and figuring out how to anchor them and I figured that out.

And then, you know, also in treating the brain, I was following all of the protocols, getting additional sleep, changing my nutrition, meditation, doing hypervaric oxygen chamber treatment.

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