The Rhythms of Life: How Daily, Seasonal, and Hormonal Cycles Shape Health

Discover how ancient Chinese medicine mapped organ activity, sleep cycles, and energy rhythms thousands of years ago—and why modern science now confirms those same biological patterns.
Understand how eating, exercising, sleeping, and working against circadian and seasonal rhythms disrupts hormones, metabolism, weight regulation, and long-term vitality.
Learn how to apply seasonal living—adjusting food, rest, movement, and mental focus throughout the year—to support resilience, hormonal balance, and sustainable health.

About the Expert

John Nieters, LAc, DAOM, CFMP

Dr John Nieters

Dr John Nieters has been teaching and practicing the combination of Functional Medicine paired with Traditional Chinese Medicine for several decades. He has been practicing Tai Qi, Qi Gong and meditation for 50 years.

He has hosted over 500 call-in talk radio shows on "The Balancing Point." He currently lives in Alameda, CA with his wife, Jenny and son, Johnny. His wife, Jenny, is the acupuncturist for the 49ers football and St Mary's Rugby team.

He has authored the book "The Sweet Spot," on how to read your blood work and plans to have two additional books published this year.

Dr John's patients, staff and listeners call me the "Story-teller".

Every organ in your body has a most active period. The Chinese map those out 2,500 years ago. Western medicine has now mapped those out also. We know what times of the day, uh, is it's most effective to do weightlifting. We know what times of day it's most effective to do stretching. Uh, we know at what times of day it's most effective to do breathing. And not surprisingly, the Western medicine timetable completely overlaps with. the Chinese maps of 2,500 years oh ago. Hi, and welcome to The Balancing Point. I'm Dr. John Needers, and I'm here to make traditional Chinese medicine, functional medicine, and integrative health simple, practical, and fun, so you can restore balance, boost vitality, and enjoy a healthier life every single day. Hi there. This is Dr. John, back to talk to you about Rhythms of Life, and this is our Doctors Talk series that shows up on many, many different sites, including thebalancingpoint.net, which is our primary teaching site. And today I'm going talk, as I said, about Rhythms of Life, a common sense integrated lifestyle approach to wellness.

Now, most people understand the importance of these things, although particularly younger people tend to ignore it. They don't need sleep. They don't need to eat in a coordinated way, et cetera. As you get older, you start to realize that, whoa, this is really, really, really important. And so before you get to that point, or if you're already at that point, we want to help you to live a happier, healthier life. And so first I'm going to talk a little bit about traditional Chinese medicine. And there really five major branches of Chinese medicine.

Now, acupuncture and moxibustion. are seen in many ways as kind of the core of traditional Chinese medicine. However, that's not actually accurate. In China, herbal formulations are the primary treatment methodology. Acupuncture and moxibustion are seen as adjunct treatments.

So we don't know how old these theories are and the discoveries of these channels. They've been discovered in many, different cultures. The Mayans called it the wind in the, in the wind in the channels. was it. And the Incas called it the rivers of life. I love that one.

Cause that is more what I resonate with is this rivers of light, these channels running through my body. But we do know that the basic understanding of this goes back at least 6,000 years. Did a Commonwealth club talk in October of 2019, which I've repeated for doctors talks. But in that, I talked about Uzi the Iceman. And so Uzi was a guy that was discovered when the snowmelt was disappearing in the Alps up between France, Italy in that area. And suddenly people saw an arm sticking out of the ice and they brought, you know, a recovery team in and they pulled this guy out and they pull him out to examine him from deep freeze every few months. And one of the things they discovered is he had these lines, these tattoos all over his body. Now I saw actually, I took my son to see a exhibition at the Smithsonian where they had this actual information out there and it showed the tattoos, cetera. And they brought in an acupuncturist and some other people and they said, yes, these are absolutely the acupuncture channels. These tattoos are really lining them up. quite effectively and accurately.

They also said that there are certain areas that had different markings indicating kind of a target on them and that those were the acupuncture points that would be used to treat the ailments that Utsi had. One of the things he had was Lyme disease. So this is 6,000 years ago. He was in his forties, running through the Alps, trying to get away from people. He was murdered, shot with an arrow in the back. So you can see that Lyme disease is much more virulent now than it was 6,000 years ago. So acupuncture and boxobustion, the accurate placing of very, very, very fine needles in certain points on the body. Now, my wife is the acupuncturist for the San Francisco 49ers and other sports teams. And she will, and some of those major athletes have to use like six inch long needles to get through their gluteus muscles. For sciatica, they don't feel her at all. They're stunned, but with accuracy, acupuncture is not painful. So, you know, the only problem with it, I warn people that once you get a treatment, you want to come back every day. If I would treat patients for free, I would have a lion around my block every single day. It is so wonderful. So, then we have herbal formulations, which again, as I mentioned, forms the primary emphasis in hospitals in China.

In fact, they have huge, I don't know what you would call them, but I don't know if you remember in the old, if you're old, they used to have these vacuum tubes in department stores so they could send things around. And you'll see in some factories where they have moving conveyor belts overhead to move parts around. Well, in the Chinese hospitals, they will have those that go down to the herbal area where they're making the formulations in the basement and they send them up to the appropriate room. So it's a really, really advanced treatment principle actually. There are over 10,000 formulas, billions of treatments. The president of one of the major herb companies was supplying the herbs to the Cleveland Clinic who had an herbal dispensary. And he said out of 400 and 99,000 doses. They had three side effects. They couldn't be more minor. One headache, one case of diarrhea, and one person got some itching and hives.

That's out of 499,000 doses. If you give that many people aspirin, several of them will die. So this is such an advanced treatment. I have documents, 10, 20 page, 30 page documents.

showing precisely what different herbs, different herbal formulas will do for your hormone system. This one upregulates progesterone. This one upregulates DHEA. This one downregulates estrogen, et cetera. And literally pages and pages of this. So they know this is their national treasure and they really, really study it. Third branch, this is tweena massage and bone setting. Now in the US, we don't do bone setting. We leave that to the chiropractors. But in Chinese medicine, in China, the Tweenaw massage people often do bone setting. Now Tweenaw is really the basis for the most of the massage systems taught around the world. So Tweenaw is talking about using your hands to push and pull on the body. Very, very highly developed. And then along with that are cupping. which is a placement of small suction devices, which will pull the extra vasated blood and other tissues to the surface if you have an injury so that you can get fresh blood in. And then gua sha, which is scraping the skin. And I've seen micro, micro photography done under the skin. There's a, a what would, a clinic, I guess. in Germany where they have amazingly expensive equipment and they can actually see beneath the skin and see the vortexes that are caused by doing Gua Sha. Very powerful.

And then you have energy work and exercise. So Ne Gong, which means internal training. And these are breathing exercises, meditations, contemplation, et cetera. And then Qi Gong, which most of you are probably familiar with, which is the external form. where you're moving your body to increase your energy, to open up your energy channels, et cetera. uh Very, very powerful stuff. And then of course, nutrition, proper food preparation, seasonal eating, really, really important seasonal eating. And I'm going to talk about that a minute. So those are the five major branches and there are many kind of sub branches, but I just want you to be aware of these as I go into the rhythms. so the Huangdi Nei Jing, that translates as the yellow emperor's classic of medicine. And so by the time this was written, most of the ideas of acupuncture, moxibustion were fully developed. It's over 2000 years ago and they are still accurate now. I mean, they are what they are. It was true then, so it's true now.

Now they didn't make it up. And that's one of the things that people confuse. They think that the Chinese made up a system. No. they discovered a system. Again, these were people that were deep into contemplation. They had medical systems that were very advanced, and they had the advantage that they were family systems. So you might have seven or eight generations of doctors passing the information down one to another. And one of the values of that is they had a very long look to see what the actual effects of their nutrition, their herbal medicine, and their acupuncture was. And often, and so in this book, as in many of the books of Chinese medicine, there's a question and answer format. And it's between the emperor and his minister, Chibo. It begins with chapter one, the universal truth. Huang Bi, I've heard that in days of old, people live to be a hundred years old without showing any signs of aging.

In our time, people age prematurely, living only 50 years. Is this due to a change in the environment or is it because people have lost the correct way to live? Chibo. In the past, people practiced the Dao, the way of life. They understood the principles of balance of yin and yang. Thus they formulated practices such as Dao-in, which again is one of those energetic practice and exercise combining stretching, massage and breathing to promote energy flow.

and meditation to help maintain and harmonize themselves with the universe. Now, obviously this is much like yogic principles and Ayurvedic medicine and Chinese medicine were exchanging ideas, you know, for centuries. stretching, massage, breathing, meditation to harmonize.

They ate a balanced diet at regular times, arose and retired at regular hours. avoided overstressing their bodies and their minds and refrained from overindulgence at all times. They lived in harmony with the seasons. So daily, every organ in your body has a most active period. Now the Chinese mapped those out 2,500 years ago. Western medicine has now mapped those out also.

We know what times of the day oh It's most effective to do weightlifting. We know what times of day it's most effective to do stretching. We know at what times of day it's most effective to do breathing. And not surprisingly, the Western medicine timetable completely overlaps with the Chinese maps of 2,500 years ago. Now, those are the daily rhythms. And then of course, monthly rhythms. And these are easiest to see in women with menstruation and hormones that are most obvious. Men are cycling hormones also. Women that have ceased menstruation are cycling hormones also. But it's easier to see if women are having a monthly period. But during the day, for example, we have tests in functional medicine where we have people urinate and then collect uh that uh on a piece of cloth. And then dry that and send it in and they'll do it five times a day so that they can map out your daily rhythms. Okay. It'll all show up in the urine as you're, you know, in the, night, you're going to have higher levels of melatonin in the morning, you're to have higher levels of cortisol, which are going to plunge during the day. So the daily and monthly are fairly obvious, but annually. Very few people really follow this in the United States. So seasonal eating. What do you eat at different times of the year that most support your health? Now, most people, that's not true. Many people in the U. S. who are health conscious will grab one diet and then stick to it all year. Eh, really not the best thing to do. Your energy requirements are very different at different times of the season. And then seasonal sleeping. Men and women are on different cycles. Most of you realize that women tend to mature faster than men. And so the Chinese put women on seven-year cycles and men on eight-year cycles. And by those seven-year cycles, they track through puberty, absolute vibrant health and reproductive health into the slowing of the paramenopause and eventually menopause. And so here I'm showing a picture for those of you that are listening to the audio and it's called circadian rhythms in humans. And it's just a 12 hour, I'm sorry, 24 hour clock. And it shows deepest sleep at 2 a.m. lowest body temperature, 430 a.m. sharpest blood pressure rise at 6 45 a.m. And that is critical because that's heart attack time.

The blood pressure can shoot up. And if you're getting an overactive cortisol release at that time, then you're going to get too high of a blood pressure increase and it can lead to strokes and heart attacks. And then we go through 2.30 in the afternoon is your best coordination, but 3.30 is your fastest reaction time. Great. Amazing, huh? Five o'clock is your greatest cardiovascular efficiency and muscle strength and so on and so on. Melatonin secretions should start around nine o'clock if you're living a healthy lifestyle. And I'm showing another picture on circadian rhythms. And it's really then deepening this as we're looking at when your insulin needs are really the highest. You're using the more hormones or less and looking at myocardial and cerebral infarction is the highest. Okay. And that's it around nine, eight to nine in the morning. So this is really, really good stuff to understand.

Now you can go online and find circadian rhythm charts. And I promise you, the more you live accurately with that, the happier you're going to be and healthier. Growth hormone. Again, I'm looking at another chart and you get about 2000 units at 10 years old, know, rapid, rapid growth. That has dropped to about 400, okay? That's one fifth by about 25 to 30 years old.

And it continues down until at my age in the 70s, I'm down to 200. So I'm at 10 % of the growth hormone production that I had at 10 years old. So I actually do take some supplements to help with my growth hormone. And there are many, many herbs that can help with growth hormone. I don't want to overdo it. I mean, there's a reason it declines, but in our culture, it declines too fast and too far. So I do some things to help support that. Endocrine glands.

I'm going to look at some definitions. Endocrine, they produce chemicals, hormones that travel to distant locations and control body functions. Okay. So. Thyroid hormone is produced by the thyroid and it travels through the body and it helps produce energy when it goes into the receptor sites. Adrenal hormones, same thing. All of those. And so it's, it's not local.

These are traveling through the bloodstream and they're controlled by feedback loops and circadian rhythms. So looking at another diagram here of the hypothalamus. the anterior pituitary and the adrenal cortex. And this is often called the HPA axis. And it is run on a negative feedback system. Okay. So as cortisol is produced, for example, in the adrenal cortex, there's a feedback loop to the anterior pituitary to shut things down, slow it down. There's also a negative feedback loop to the hypothalamus telling it to release less corticotropic hormone to stimulate these things. all are almost all hormones work on feedback loops and the majority work on negative feedback loops. And by the way, this is where we can run into a lot of problems and people that have been stressed and overstressed and anxious for too long a period of time. The body gets, it's like, okay, we're all going to always going to be stressed.

Let's just keep those stress hormones rolling all the time. So the negative feedback loops become diminished. And that's a really important thing. So when people come in, it's not just a matter of give them something to make them have more energy. It's a matter long-term of changing these negative feedback loops. The hypothalamus and the pituitary, very, very important. The hypothalamus is the control center. It's reading all of your blood pressure and your temperature and all your hormone levels. It's kind of like the control room in a nuclear facility. And then when it detects that a change needs to be made, it sends a closed loop signal to the pituitary. And the pituitary then sends out what are called tropic hormones. So, adrenocorticotropic thyroid stimulating hormone. luteinizing hormone, et cetera, that cause the body to do something.

And basically the anterior pituitary will affect the kidneys, the breast, the uterus, I'm sorry, that's posterior, will affect the kidney, breast and uterus. It affects urine collection, et cetera. And then the anterior pituitary, bone and tissues, adrenal glands, thyroid glands, the testes in men, the ovaries in women. And again, has a role in breast development, maintenance.

So the pineal gland, I'm not going to talk about much right now, but I have an incredible picture here and you can find it online. Look up pineal gland on fluoride. And it's showing that fluoride will calcify the pineal gland. And there are many people who feel that the reason that humanity now does not have as much touch or is not as in touch with many, many things that the ancients were is that we've done many things to calcify and detoxify the pineal gland. The pineal gland is the seat of the third eye. And if you look this up, pineal gland on fluoride, will see a, uh, an old carving from the Egyptians. And then it's next to and an anatomic picture of the pineal gland and they look identical. So the ancient Egyptians knew exactly what they were dealing with and they knew they had to activate the pineal gland to develop full spiritual and intellectual capacity. Melatonin again should kick in around nine o'clock.

And by three in the morning, it should be very, very low. It should hit about 75 milligrams in the evening plasma concentration, and it should drop to about 30 by 30 by about two in the morning and should pretty much completely be gone by six in the morning so that you can be awake. Okay. Living seasonally with the five elements. Winter. Rest. Hibernate. Don't do too many Christmas parties. This is a time to be with your friends and family quietly. Time for contraction. Don't start new projects in the winter. It's about love and family gatherings, et cetera, introspection. And dietarily, you want to eat hearty root vegetables. Those bring more heat into the body. If you eat meat, this is a time to eat meat, stews, soups, etc. Some greens, some beans, but everything well cooked. Absolutely no raw vegetables. Cut down the smoothies in the winter. The smoothies have a place. The raw vegetables can have a place, but in the winter everything has to be well cooked. Otherwise it takes too much body energy to break it down. We don't have the enzymes to break down raw vegetables. We have some bacteria in our guts that can help and break those down, but really it takes a huge amount of energy. So tea, and if you're going to be a tea drinker, in the winter you want to drink black tea with interior warming spices like Earl Grey, right? Why do you think Earl Grey was created? It was created for the cold, damp environmental conditions in London and England.

So during this, during the winter, that's when you want to eat it. I'm sorry, drink it. A moderate light exercise. This is not the time to start a new intense cardiovascular system.

And here's the important thing. If you look at the circadian rhythms or read the Wangdini Jing, they're very clear that one should go to bed about an hour after sunrise and get up about an hour before sunrise. Now in the winter, you might have 13 or 14 hours of darkness.

So you should be in bed, maybe not asleep that whole time, but you should be in bed 11 to 12 hours a day. And I find that's when I feel the best by far in the winter. I had trained myself when I was younger and even stupider than I am now to get by in three, three and a half hours of sleep a night and I could function, but who knows how many, you know, decades of life that may have cost me. But now I'm very clear. I have to be there. for 10 to 12 hours a night. Okay, spring. Now this is the time that you expand. This is the time to grow.

Everything around you is growing. So this is the time to start new projects. You've got all the energy of the earth behind you. You've got the energy of the atmosphere behind you.

So this is a time for green, for growth, cleansing vegetables. Now, That winter diet that I talked about is very heavy and you need to cleanse a lot of that. And this is where you eat a lot of vegetables. You need high antioxidant and high fiber. This is a time for green tea, green tea. It's cooling and it will get things moving and detoxify. Again, early to bed, early to rise, probably about eight hours during the spring. And now you can increase exercise and particularly Move, just move, stretch, yoga, Tai Chi, get out there early in the morning and really stretch and expand. And this is where you want to really practice equanimity.

The tendency here, it's the time of the liver, which is very emotional and it's easy for us to lose our center. So you need to practice equanimity. have a breathing practice, a meditation practice, et cetera, particularly important in the spring. Then summer. Now is when you bring those projects to the forefront. This is high growth. You can work for more hours.

You'll have more energy because really during the winter, if you're outside, you are warming all of the air around you. In the summer, you're collecting huge amounts of energy from the sun and from the atmosphere around you. This is the time for new friends and projects. Take a class, get out, have some fun. But in the summer, you want to eat lightly and have minimal, minimal alcohol. You could easily become overheated if you eat too much or have too much alcohol.

This is where you might try white tea. It's even more cooling than green. Doesn't have as much caffeine. If you're going to, if you like spicy thing, this is the time to use chilies and spices. I'm like more of a Mexican spice in my mind because it'll make you perspire.

You want something that's going to release the exterior in the winter. You want something that's going to bring the energy internally here. It's time for late to bed, early to rise, minimal sleep time. Maybe you can get by on five to eight hours. Now summer is really the time of the heart. So this is the time to really open your heart, reach out, give, above all practice. joy, give blessing for all the wonderful things that are happening and have happened in your life and the wonderful people in your life. Fall, now here we go, getting ready to move into winter. So you begin to gather and prepare. And this is true for every culture, everything I'm saying here, every culture in the world, unless you live at the equator, follows these practices. This is the time of the harvest, the fall. Finish the projects.

Don't start new ones. This is when you wrap it up. If you have a year long project, this is when you want to be ready to put it to bed. You might monitor it during the winter, but you want to pretty much be done with it by fall. The seasonal eating here is red, yellow, orange vegetables and food. High in antioxidants, high in beta carotenoids. And those are the things that are going to help protect you from colds, flu. infection, et cetera. So you want to get as many of those red, yellow, and orange foods into you. Now we want to start warming the interior a little more. So this is where you might drink oolong or Pu'er teas. These are partially fermented and so they're not as intense and heating as a black tea, but they're more warming than a white tea or a green tea. Now here you want to retire more near sunset and rise with dawn. Fall is a season of the lungs, so you gotta care for them very carefully.

The lungs are very, very sensitive. In fact, in Chinese medicine, you see lots of different expressions for the lungs being where you get most exposed. Also, the lungs are called the repository of grief. So if you find a little grief welling up during the fall, that's normal.

Just be able to release it and move on. This is a time to really do a lot of breathing exercises and starting to get centered and grounded for the winter. Now I get called this oh many times a week. People say, well, what's the best diet, Dr. John? There is no best diet. Everyone's different. Are you an infant? A child? Are you menstruating? Are you elder? For example, in children and menstruating women, I'm constantly trying to push up their iron levels, right?

Women are bleeding it out. Children tend to be picky eaters. So we need to get that iron up so we avoid anemia. But In menopausal women and in men in general, we want to keep iron levels in better control. We want it lower because iron oxidizes. You've all seen a rusted nail or some piece of metal that's rusted. That's oxidation. Well, the same thing would happen in your body and that is very damaging. What's the sex? What are the hormonal differences?

What's your gut health? Can you actually metabolize it? When we're treating leaky gut problems, and particularly severe leaky gut problems and SIBO and CFO. We start people off on incredibly simple, simple diets and then build it up. Because if they can't metabolize it, bad things happen, right? Gas, bloating, other problems. And then genetics. We all, you know, came from somewhere and we came from stock, tribal stock, that maybe they lived eating meat.

Maybe they lived as vegetarians. Maybe they lived drinking dairy. Maybe they never saw dairy. And they would have developed genetic traits that would allow them to live in whatever their niche was. And so we need to take that into effect. And then allergens, either genetic or acquired. So I hope you get it. There is no best diet, although, you know, every few months there'll be a big study where they will compare different diets, paleo, carnivore.

vegetarian, Mediterranean. And I'm going to tell you almost every time that they do that, the best diet overall is still the Mediterranean diet. And I just saw a new research study showing that the best diet for IBS is the Mediterranean diet. And I've had patients come, patients come in that were on these horrible FODMAP diets where they basically could eat like two or three foods. And this showed this proved that the Mediterranean diet was actually more effective than the FODMAP diet. Thank God. I was so happy to see that because that's what I've been telling people for years. So it's nice to see the research validation. There are a couple of things that almost nobody should eat. We eat, there are 28 different problems with the wheat that we grow in this country. Plus, plus most of it is sprayed with glyphosate, which is absolutely a poison. If you're not s- Thurton look up some of the papers by Alessio and about transient leaky gut. And he says that 100 % of people when they eat the wheat that we have in the United States will develop transient leaky gut. And he goes into depth in the mechanism. There are products, glutens, glutinens, gliadens, et cetera, in the newer wheat, which has 28 chromosomes to produce those. versus 14 chromosomes in the old einkorn wheat that is still used in most of Europe. And so our bodies have never become used to these.

And when you eat something that your body doesn't know if it's a poison or not, it activates a group of receptors called toe-like receptors for, which throw open the junctions between the cells in your gut, in your intestine. And the purpose of that is to bring water in to wash out this poison. Well, when it comes in, the inflammatory chemicals go out. So Alessio, who's the primary researcher of this, says that a hundred percent of the time you get transient leaky gut. Now, does it remain transient? Does it last for 10 minutes or does it last forever? That depends on other factors, but it's not a good thing. Hippocrates, you know, he talked about wheat problems thousands of years ago. Li Dongyan, who is My revered great, great, great, great, great, great grand teacher wrote the treatise of the spleen and stomach and pretty much everything that we're now seeing about the microbiome and SIBO and CIFO. Lee Dong-Yen knew about in 1243 AD, at least that's when he wrote his book and he gave treatments to treat it, thank goodness. And then we've got grain, brain and wheat belly, which have been written recently. There are a few things that most people should not eat. Dairy. Fermented is fine if it's a really good quality ferment fermentation, yogurt, kefir, et cetera. But the pasteurized homogenized dairy that we have mostly in the United States, really not a good product. It's also A1 milk rather than A2. So dairy, you know, a little bit's fine. tell people, if you're going to have cheese, get cheese from Italy or France because it's it's a different type of. animal they're collecting it from. If it's cows, it's A2 cows or it's goat or sheep and those are much safer. High lectin foods, I'm sure you've all seen our buddy Dr. Gundry and while I think there's a little bit of over emphasis there, still, high lectin foods are a problem. You can get rid of most of the lectins by using a pressure cooker. These are things that most people should eat are vegetables. Some do better on a carnivore diet. We've had a few people that when they went carnivore, it changed their life. We have a few people that did better on vegetarian diets. Again, it's about you. It's about you as an individual. There are many, many levels that we look at in nutrition. There's primal nutrition, right? This is kind of what do you need to keep you satisfied really? And then there's ortho nutrition, ortho meaning upright. And it's to the problems and diseases caused by our very, very toxic environment. I mean, kids are born with 200 cancer-causing chemicals in their cord blood. So they have not even been exposed to the outside world, but at the moment of birth, they already have those toxins in their bloodstream. So yes, this is important.

And then ultra-nutrition. And so that's looking at specific performance areas. above and beyond kind of what nature intended. Are you going to run a 5K? Are you going to run a marathon?

Are you going to be a weightlifter, et cetera? And so then you're going to look at what I call ultra nutrition, where you're going to really specialize. And then telonutrition, talking about the telomeres, right? And this is using nutrition and supplements to actually alter the biology and influence of the telomeres and gene expression. And so this is a fascinating area of medicine, looking at telon nutrition. And by the way, one of the top things in telon nutrition is a Chinese herb that's been used for basically that. They didn't call it telon nutrition, but for increasing lifespan for a couple thousand years. Okay. So the Chinese were pretty clear on this. They just didn't know about telomeres. Okay. Steps to precision.

You need to have someone, a doctor, chiropractor, acupuncturist, a functional medical doctor is preferable. And again, in our case, Katherine and I meet with every new patient, so we're both there. And we do a combination of traditional Chinese medicine and functional medicine, which I think is the most brilliant type of practice. You've got the ancient wisdom of traditional Chinese medicine. and the brilliant testing of functional medicine. And so you want a functional review of the CBC, the complete blood count and a Chem 14. Those are just basics. And then you might do an organic acids test and there's tons of genetic testing and so many stool tests now for functional activity of the GI tract. But the main thing is you need to study or start with a very good history and a very complete exam. That's where you start. Most important factors in weight gain, because people always ask this, wrong personal diet, right? You're eating a diet that you think is good, but you've never been tested or worked with someone to determine if it's the right diet for you. Like I have many, many patients who had cut way back on fats, were skipping breakfast. And for some people that's fine, but they couldn't lose weight. And that's because there's a hormone called Lactin and lectin is what tells you that it's safe to burn fat. So if you don't get fat coming in, the body says, Hey, we can't afford to burn fat. So sometimes you want to front load your day with some fat and the earlier in the day, the better. But again, it depends on you individually. Other weight gain issues are failure to sleep with circadian rhythms. This has been well proven. People that don't get enough sleep have problems with weight. People that have Problems with sleep apnea, a lot of problems with weight. So failure to eat with circadian rhythms. These are all important factors in weight gain. It's not just calories in, calories out. It's not just exercise. It's all of these. Excess stress leading to hormonal disruption. And in my observation, particularly around menopause, perimenopause, et cetera, this is the primary problem. You get physical stress, overwork. emotional stress, mental stress, and you need to develop very effective ways to deal with all of these problems. Okay. To kind of take a little closer look, thyroid hormones. uh High cortisol binds to T4. Now T4 is the primary hormone that your thyroid gland produces. When you need energy, T4 converts to T3. But if you have high cortisol, it doesn't allow the T4 to convert to T3, so you don't get the benefits. So you need an increase in reverse T, it'll create an increase in reverse T3 that fools the body even further. The body's saying, oh, we've got plenty of T3, but it doesn't. It has the reverse form so that it can protect you. And as I mentioned, leptin and ghrelin, or I mentioned leptin, cortisol binds to leptin.

Right? I mentioned you have to have some fat so that your body feels safe, but cortisol will bind to the leptin and then you can't utilize it and it won't tell you that you're satiated and it won't tell you it's safe to burn fat. So once again, stress, stress, stress and yeah, stress. Okay. Perhaps to nap. I'm looking at a picture of a guy, obviously with the three o'clock blues with his head in an open file cabinet drawer. And I know many of my patients when they came in, that's kind of how they describe their life. So the normal ranges of cortisol should be between about 12 and 22 units first thing in the morning. That drops down to about four to seven by noon. That's why most of your serious work, your thinking activity, all of that should be done before noon. Now all cultures in the world knew that.

hunter-gathers, they were done by, you know, 8, 10 in the morning, either hunting or gathering. And then they chilled out and relaxed. And this was true with most cultures. By afternoon, and you see these commercials for Red Bull and the other high caffeine products and sugar products, and they talk about the three o'clock crash. Well, that's because normally in healthy people, the cortisol drops to four to six units. And then at night between eight and 12, it should go down to one to three. But if you're under stress, it'll kick up over three and then you can't go to sleep. And if you don't have high levels in the morning, you don't want to get out of bed. So monitoring cortisol, very important and very easy to do now. So I want to thank you. This is Dr. John Needers, LACDAOM, certified and functional medicine.

And you can… see our educational programs. That's the word. You can go to any of your favorite sites, Spotify, etc. Apple. um If you want to come to our site, it's thebalancingpoint.net.

If you want to find more about our educational systems and talk to Katherine or you can email Katherine at alamedaacupuncture.com. All right. If you want a PDF of this, it will be available to you. I want to thank you for listening. Live with the Seasons. Live in rhythm. We are animals of rhythm. Thank you. Thank you for joining me on The Balancing Point. If you enjoyed today's episode, please follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review.

Feeling out of balance? Most approaches just manage symptoms. Here we get to the root. So real healing, real clarity, and balance can begin. Visit AlamedaAcupuncture.com, that's AlamedaAcupuncture.com, to learn more, explore our supplements, or book a call. We'd love to hear from you.

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Alameda Acupuncture

Ancient medicine for our modern world

The Rhythms of Life: How Daily, Seasonal, and Hormonal Cycles Shape Health

About the Expert

Recent Posts

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Interested in knowing if we are the right fit for you and your condition?