PAIN-FREE & 

STRONG 
​THE SECRETS TO
REGAINING VITALITY, 
IMPROVING MOBILITY & RESTORING 
ENERGY

VERSION 1.00  

DR. TYNA MOORE, ND, DC 

#1 Bestselling Author 
 
 

 
Free Educational Videos  
  

This book includes information on the 

foundational pillars of health to help you live 
a more Pain-Free & Strong life!   
Visit the website for podcast episodes and 
interviews with many experts in the field​.  
Go to ​drtyna.com  
 
© 2018, Core Wellness Chiropractic and Naturopathic Clinic LLC, All 
Rights Reserved  
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner 
whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief 
quotations, embodied critical articles or reviews.  
This book is not intended as a substitute for the medical advice of 
physicians. The reader should regularly consult a physician in matters 
relating to their health and particularly with respect to any symptoms that 
may require diagnosis or medical attention.  
Although the author and publisher have made every effort to ensure that 
the information in this book was correct at press time, the author and 
publisher do not assume and hereby disclaim any liability to any party for 
any loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether 
such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other 
case.  
While all attempts have been made to verify information provided in this 
publication, the author does not assume any responsibility for errors, 
inaccuracies or omissions that may appear. Any slights on people or 
organizations are unintentional.   
This book offers health, wellness and fitness information, and is designed 
for educational purposes only. You should not rely on this information as 
a substitute for, nor does it replace, professional medical advice, diagnosis, 
or treatment. If you have any concerns or questions about your health, 
you should always consult with a physician or other healthcare 
professional. Do not disregard, avoid or delay obtaining medical or 
health-related advice from your healthcare professional because of 
something you may have read in this book. The use of any information 
provided in this book is solely at your own risk.  

 
 
   

1
  
 
 
A very special thank you to My Little Momma.  
She is the reason I began this journey to find answers for 
those in chronic pain. She also taught me how to be 
Wonder Woman.  
 
And to Dr. Rick Marinelli, my dear friend and mentor, 
who left this world too soon and made me promise to not 
forget Docere (Doctor as Teacher.)  
 
Lastly, thank you to all my patients who have taught me 
along the way. 
 
 
 
   

2
  
 
 
 
Disclaimer 
 
While I actually am a doctor, and I don’t just play one on TV, I 
am not your doctor, nor do I know your individual health history, 
anything about your specific pain, how you move, your orthopedic 
issues, and so on.  
 
Please always seek medical supervision before implementing any of 
the suggestions made in this book and ask your doctor for further 
clarification. 
   

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TABLE OF CONTENTS 
Who I Am and Why This is Person​al 5 

Welcome to ​Pain-Free & Strong 8 

Chapter 1: ​Mindset 9 

Chapter ​2: Sleep 16 

Chapter ​3: Movement Matters 22 

Chapter ​4: Food and Gut 33 

Chapter ​5: Hormones 51 

Chapter 6: Mindfulness, Meditation & Gratitude 72 

Final Thoughts 78 

Find Dr. Tyna 79 

About ​Dr. Tyna 80 

References 83 
   

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Who I Am and Why This is 
Personal 
 
Back when I was a kid, I was a crazy, fearless little 
monkey. I was an aspiring gymnast and I absolutely loved 
danger. If I could jump off it, flip off it, hang, swing or 
launch off it, then I was there and I was all in. Pain was 
common and familiar. Oddly, I even learned to like it. 
“Walking it off” was a sign of strength and endurance in my 
world. In fact, the more you hurt yourself and the worse your 
injury, the cooler you were. Essentially, I was a tough little 
girl, and I have the scars and injures to show for it.  
That’s the thing about danger. You are either all in or 
you’re in trouble. The minute you doubt yourself halfway 
through a tumbling sequence or mid-flip from the parallel 
bars, you end up on your head. I ended up on my head many, 
many times. Eventually, my mother pulled me from 
gymnastics as she could no longer afford my medical bills. 
Aside from all this, I was a sickly kid. I won’t bore 
you with the details, but let’s just say that I was familiar with 
the doctor’s office. All kinds of doctors, in fact, because no 
one could figure out what was actually wrong with me. I 
figured out many years later that what I’d been experiencing 
my entire life was the glimmer of developing autoimmune 
disease.  
I always knew that I was going to be a doctor. I’ve 
known that since I was a small child. At the age of 5, when 

5
nurses held me down forcefully as I thrashed and screamed, 
so the doctor could perform a medical procedure, I knew 
there had to be a better and gentler way of helping a child. By 
the age of 17, I was certain that medical practice had to 
change and I was going to be the one to change it. Because 
up until that point, aside from my awesome family 
chiropractor, most of the doctoring I had encountered was 
limited, neglectful and generally unhelpful, and I was over it. 
Flash forward several years and I had decided that 
sports were for jocks, and as an aspiring punk-rock girl, I was 
no longer interested in athletics. I wanted to wear Doc 
Martens and listen to Nine Inch Nails in my room all day. 
Living in Portland, Oregon, where rain and grey skies are the 
norm, warrants this type of behavior. Days were now spent 
chain-smoking in coffee shops and going to concerts.  
I went on to complete a BSc in General Science from 
one of the top 10 biology schools in the nation for my 
undergrad, and ended up working for an incredibly gifted 
healer, Dr. Rick Marinelli, straight out of college. Dr. Rick 
was a true healer and fantastic physician. He embodied 
everything I envisioned a good doctor would have: 
compassion, empathy, skill, unmatched depth and breadth of 
knowledge, with a strong sprinkling of Jedi mixed in. Rick 
taught me how to be the doctor I am today.  
 
The last three things to know about me are these:  
1) For the past 18 years, I have suffered with chronic 
pain that started in pregnancy. While my pain is now 
well-controlled, there is not a day that goes by that I don’t 
experience some pain in my body.  

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 2) My decade-plus in medicine has been dedicated to 
nothing but pain. My entire practice is dedicated to people 
with pain. I’m damn good at what I do.  
3) Strength and conditioning have been paramount to 
me overcoming my chronic pain and autoimmune disease. I 
practice what I preach and I walk the talk. Everything I am 
going to share with you in this book came not only from 
personal experience, but also from helping thousands of 
patients like yourself become Pain-Free & Strong.  
 
Thank you for reading this.  
 
In health,  
Dr. Tyna Moore 
 
 
 
 
   

7
Welcome to Pain-Free & Strong  

This book is all about taking your life back. It’s a 

manual really. While doctors and practitioners can apply 
treatments to you all day long, if you do not inherently 
understand some key concepts and learn how to modify your 
lifestyle to implement the foundational pillars of health laid 
out in this book, your battle with pain will likely persist. After 
over a decade in practice, dedicated 100% to helping people 
in pain, this is the definitive handbook on how to implement 
a Pain-Free & Strong life.  
How to use this book: 
You will see that each foundational pillar is laid out in 
a chapter format. As you read each chapter you will likely 
notice that the content ties back into other chapters. There is 
no exact flow or progression, as each idea is tied to the 
others. If one chapter pops out at you to read first, so be it. 
Do circle back and touch on all of the foundational pillars to 
get the whole picture. At the end of each chapter there will be 
some homework. It’s part quick review and part instructional. 
Think of it as the cheat sheet to the chapter.  
I hope you will read this book and then pass it along 
to someone you know suffering with pain.  
In health, 
Dr. Tyna Moore  
Portland, OR, USA 

8
CHAPTER 1: MINDSET 
 
Pain Changes People. 
―Dr. Tyna Moore 
 
Getting your head straight is step #1 to dealing with 
pain. Pain is a special kind of beast and it can wear a person 
out. It can ruin lives and ruin families. I’ve lived it. I’ve seen it 
in my own family and in countless of my patients’ lives.  
If you’ve seen any of the work I do online, you’ll 
know that I am a straight shooter. I don’t BS, I don’t coddle 
and I don’t beat around the bush. You can’t sugarcoat the 
situation when patients are needlessly suffering. You have to 
give it to them straight.  
Nothing works unless you do the work.​ I would 
say that roughly 85% of my patients over the years have been 
generally non-compliant with the sometimes challenging 
lifestyle changes needed to overcome their ailments. People 
often believe that a pill or cream or shot will fix their 
problems.  
What I have come to realize over that time is that 
without the very basics being addressed, your ability to reach 
success is low. These concepts are referred to as Basic 
Treatment Guidelines in naturopathic medicine.  
When dealing with pain, getting your head on straight 
is key. There is absolutely zero point in trying to muster up 
unlimited motivation, because “motivation” does not really 
exist. Motivation is not a magical well-spring from which to 
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draw. People either implement or they do not. What we really 
need is a mindset shift. Shifting to a mindset of being a 
person who can and will is critical to overcoming pain, versus 
the mindset of being someone who is a victim of their 
circumstance. That is more important than imaginary 
motivation. It is critical to have the stance that things will 
change and you will see it through.  
 
Where intention goes energy flows​.  
Getting clear and getting obsessed with a goal, that’s 
how you reach it. I recall clearly the day I decided I was no 
longer going to live in chronic pain. The downward spiral was 
no longer my path. My infant daughter did not deserve to see 
her mother suffer because I was not living a strong and 
healthy life. So I got my shit together.  
A willingness to implement change is most critical. 
The implementation is simply a practice. People can get 
complacent and comfortable in their misery, pain and 
depression. It’s like a comfortable, old, familiar blanket. Can 
you relate?  
I have lived with such severe chronic low back pain 
that when it’s gone, when I wake up and it’s not there, I 
almost miss it. I am so familiar with it being there, it’s such a 
constant in my life, and has been for so long, that my brain 
has wired itself to feel it. It’s almost like phantom pain. When 
it’s gone, I think: Where’s my pain?  
People simply don’t know what they don’t know 
when it comes to pain management. We have been led to 
believe in our society of illness, perpetuated by Big Pharma 
and Big Insurance, that there is nothing to be done. Or that 

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something must be done to the patient to help “cure” or 
“deal” with their pain. In pain management medicine, the 
choices are slim. So patients get procedures done to them and 
take the pills and wonder why they still hurt.  
People still hurt because managing their pain is an 
inside job. It’s up to the person themselves to understand 
certain key concepts and implement lifestyle changes to 
support these concepts.  
Giving reasons for why we can’t enact a change we 
need is common. These are called excuses. I make them, we 
all make them. I’m not judging anybody. I’m coming from a 
place of love; I understand that this is human nature. Most 
folks don’t even realize that they’re making these excuses 
because they’re so familiar with the tapes playing over in their 
head.  
Realize that when you start throwing excuses out 
there, it’s because you want to stay where you are. Change 
can be hard, it can daunting and overwhelming, but it is 
necessary to move forward.  
How do we snap out of it? The key for snapping out 
of these self-defeating cycles is rhythm and consistency. 
Routine and action. Action overrides anxiety every time.  
Start taking a few simple steps to turn your excuses 
into rhythm and consistency for yourself. Remember, this is a 
practice. Turn the steps to optimal health into a ritual that 
you implement every single day. When you start to implement 
the foundational pillars of health into your daily routine, 
when the small but steady changes begin to take place, you’ll 
likely gain clarity and start to see some of your derailing 
behaviors and excuses drop away.  

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 Habits are made and practiced. We hardwire circuits 
into our brains. The only way to make something a habit is to 
make it a habit, so that means doing it over and over, until it 
becomes part of what you do. These can be healthy or 
unhealthy habits. Take habit change in a stepwise fashion, 
one foot in front of the other.  
Grit, tenacity, perseverance, grind, badassery and 
steadfastness. These are the qualities to hone when dealing 
with chronic pain. Because pain can beat you down, weaken 
morale, cause depression, and tank adrenal and hormonal 
function.  
 
GRIT + GRIND = FEARLESSNESS  
 
Fearlessness is probably the best place to end up. 
Looking fear in the face and stepping forward anyway, not 
letting it rattle you, not letting it throw you off your game; 
your knees shaking, but doing it anyway. It doesn’t mean 
you’re not feeling the fear. It means you are feeling it, you are 
breathing through it, and you are handling it head-on anyway. 
That’s fearlessness. Execution overrides fear.  
This is what I’m going to ask of you in this book. I’m 
going to explain some simple factors that greatly influence 
your pain and I am going to ask you to step up to the 
challenge. It gets easier as you practice. Empowerment via 
knowledge is the key. When you know that you have 
developed the grit, plus learned to love the grind, the 
fearlessness and tenacity is a natural result.  
Identifying ourselves by our diseases, by our 
diagnoses and by our MRI reports is nonsense. I am not a 

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low back pain patient; I am a person experiencing pain in my 
back. I am not autoimmune disease and I am not 
Hashimoto’s; I happen to have some autoimmune processes 
going on in my body. You are not your MRI report. Discs 
heal and tissues heal. It is your nervous system and brain that 
get altered when you continue to experience pain. But in my 
experience, people love their objective findings. If I had a 
dollar for every time I heard someone start off their visit to 
me with “I’m bone on bone!” or “I have three herniated discs 
in my back!” I would be a rich woman.  
First off, welcome to the club. Most of us have 
horrid-looking low backs on MRI. And nearly everyone who 
walks into my office with knee issues has some cartilage loss 
in their knees. Yet, findings on MRI have been proven in 
multiple studies to not often correlate with pain, meaning you 
can have terrible MRI findings and no pain, or beautiful 
images and terrible pain.  
We identify ourselves through our injuries and our 
limitations. “Oh, I could never do that because of my 
_______ condition.” I am told this all the time in my practice 
and the biggest part of my job most days is talking people 
back into movement, because they are afraid to move, 
because they have been talked out of it by some other doctor. 
Usually an orthopod has told them, “That’s not a good idea; 
stop that activity.”  
Do you want to know what is really not a good idea? 
Becoming deconditioned and stagnant by not moving. 
Instead, move past the fear and do it anyway, thinking in 
terms of: What’s the worst possible thing that could happen 
here? I want you to think about this. What is the worst 

13
possible outcome that could happen if you decided to get 
strong? Of course, we can all potentially hurt ourselves, but 
being deconditioned and rotting away is a whole lot more 
dangerous than picking up a barbell.  
This is a long game. The long game is much like a 
marathon. That’s how I think of it. Pacing, training and being 
mentally adapted to the long game is step one. Knowing that 
it is a slow progression and knowing that you are in it to win 
it is part of the process.  
Healing takes time.​ Achieving optimal health and 
wellness takes time. Be kind to yourself. Be proud that you 
have committed to the long game. Be certain of doing 
everything you can​ to support the healing process.  
There is no such thing as a complete cure. You can 
reverse conditions. You can quell them, abate their 
progression and turn down the pain. Getting rid of a 
condition completely is not realistic, especially chronic pain 
that has been wired into the brain. Having a tolerable 
glimmer of pain and knowing how to control it is the goal. 
Being in terrible pain is a place of fear, but learning how to 
manage and modulate your pain is empowering.  
Your decisions dictate your level of pain. While we 
cannot change all aspects of our lives, we can impact those 
over which we have control. How we choose to live, choose 
to eat, choose to move, choose to sleep, the people we 
choose to surround us, the work we choose to do on a daily 
basis, the places we choose to go and where we choose to 
live, these are all factors in our pain.  
This is a guidebook​ on how to navigate your pain 
by learning to make better choices and understanding why it 

14
matters. First, you have to make the decision to implement 
change, then you can change your life.  
  Neurons that fire together wire together.  
―Dr. Norman Doidge  
✽✽✽  
Mindset Homework:  
1) Find purpose for your desire to make the changes 
necessary for a pain-free and strong life. Why must 
you make a change? Write it down! (Mine, initially, 
was my young daughter. I did not want her to grow 
up seeing her mother in chronic pain.)   
2) Find something mildly heavy in your house, pick it 
up, stand tall, and walk around. Put it down carefully. 
Do this once for each hand, twice a day 

Grab my Get Healthier Guide ​HERE​. 

15
CHAPTER 2: SLEEP 
 
Sleep is the best meditation. 
―The Dalai Lama 
 
Instead of telling you to go forth and make a ton of 
changes overnight, I would like to invite you to go get some 
sleep. I have found that most people who are in pain are 
sleep deprived and/or exhausted. They may be sleep deprived 
because they are in pain or they may be in pain because they 
are sleep deprived. It’s probably a bit of both and it is 
definitely a case of chicken and egg.  
I love sleep. Truly and deeply, I love little more than 
climbing into a soft, warm bed and passing out for 8+ hours. 
It is bliss. I was always a deep sleeper and had never suffered 
a single night of insomnia. Not until my first year in practice 
did I experience sleep disruption and it was a hellish 
experience. That first year or so of practice was so incredibly 
stressful, lonely and scary that I completely lost the ease with 
which I could sleep. I would not fall asleep and I would not 
stay asleep. The only other time I felt that level of hell was 
when I gave birth to my daughter and did not sleep for a year. 
That was such a terrible experience that I only ever had one 
child. Much of my reasoning for not having more children 
was that I could not endure the lack of sleep.  
Having since regained my ability to sleep, I can tell 
you with certainty that it is intimately related to pain. Couple 
that with over a decade in clinical practice and thousands of 

16
patients later, I can confirm that my patients who don’t sleep 
well have a terrible time getting a handle on their pain.  
While I wish I could tell you a surefire tip or magical 
supplement to cure insomnia, alas, I cannot. Helping people 
find their sleep again has proven to be one of my biggest 
clinical challenges.  
Like everything, insomnia is multi-faceted. And not 
being able to get to sleep is an entirely different beast than 
not being able to stay asleep. Waking all night versus waking 
between 3:00 and 5:00 AM are different issues. Hormones, 
food choices, stress levels and surroundings all impact our 
sleep.  
Of course, when someone loses their ability to sleep, 
there is the allure of quick fixes. Prescription sleeping pills 
commonly prescribed by doctors are dangerous and 
habit-forming. These drugs do not actually induce sleep; they 
induce sedation. Your body does not go through a normal, 
healthy sleep cycle. You are simply sedated when on them. 
Drugs such as Ambien are particularly dangerous as they 
induce anterograde amnesia. This type of amnesia is the 
inability to create new memories going forward, so the person 
on the drug does not actually know what they are doing in 
real time. This can lead to terrifying consequences, with the 
person having no recollection of events. Sleepwalking, car 
accidents, murders and suicides can all happen without the 
person knowing they are committing these acts.  
As for natural pills? There are some well-studied 
herbs and nutrients that have been shown to work. As is 
often the way with herbs, combination products may work 
better than solo ingredients. Be sure to consult with your 

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doctor before taking any sleep aids, whether natural or 
over-the-counter, and stay away from the prescription 
versions.  
So, what is an insomniac to do? One suggestion that 
is sure to help is exercise. Any type of movement and exercise 
will help a person with sleep issues. Exercise uses up the 
excess restless energy in the body and mind to help the 
person sleep more soundly. In fact, when someone tells me 
that they have sleep issues and they are not exercising, I tell 
them to start exercising and come back later. There is no way 
out of insomnia without some regular movement in my 
clinical opinion.  
Having your adrenal function and hormones tested by 
a skilled naturopathic physician or functional medicine doctor 
is the next step (after implementing a regular exercise 
routine). Hormonal imbalances are a monster destroyer of 
sleep for many. This is why women suffer from insomnia 
near their menstrual cycle and in menopause. As hormones 
shift and progesterone drops for many women, sleep can be 
hard won. Men, too, suffer from hormonal imbalances like 
low testosterone and high estrogen that disrupt sleep. I truly 
believe that sleep cannot be won back when your hormones 
are in disarray.  
More than anything, respecting your sleep is crucial. 
As a society, we Americans reward those who claim to need 
little sleep. Like my story of being a gymnast who could 
endure the worst injuries, it’s all about who can survive on 
the least amount of rest.  
Lack of sleep has been proven to lead to a whole host 
of unpleasant and serious conditions including heart disease, 

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psychosis, obesity, stroke, insulin resistance, diabetes, 
accidents, cancer, belly fat, visceral fat and more.  
If snoring is the problem, go have it checked out. 
Snoring is usually a sign of a deeper problem that needs to be 
addressed. Talk to your doctor and don’t ignore it because 
getting uninterrupted sleep is important. Snoring messes with 
your partner’s sleep as well, which is doubling the 
dysfunction.  
If you can, getting 7 to 8 hours sleep is best. When 
we do get proper sleep like this, a whole host of wonderful 
benefits happen! Our bodies recover from the stresses of the 
day, our brains detoxify, we make HGH (human growth 
hormone) for regeneration and cellular turnover, and we 
suffer from less depression, anxiety and pain.  
Give yourself permission to rest. We all go too hard, 
too long, with too little rest. Rest is where the magic happens. 
The concept of hormesis is what keeps all organisms thriving. 
Hormesis is the idea that microdoses of stress can actually be 
good for us as organisms. You mildly stress the body, as in 
strength training, then you rest and recover the body. The 
rest is where all the goodies of healing and regeneration take 
place. All the exercise in the world will not help you if you are 
not resting adequately in between. So if you need to lie down 
for a 20-minute nap in the middle of the day, I give you 
permission. In fact, I encourage it!  
Our young people are not sleeping well these days 
either. I have been approached by many of my teenage 
daughter’s friends, going back to middle school years, telling 
me that they sleep poorly. I can only imagine that poor food 

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choices, lack of exercise, cell phone and computer use are 
doing to affect them negatively as well.  
✽✽✽  
 
Sleep Homework:  
Learn the basics of sleep hygiene in…  
Sleep Hygiene 101  
1. The bedroom is for sleep and sex only. It is not for 
TV, disputes or computers.  
2. Keep the room temperature on the cool side. 
3. Keep the room as dark as a tomb when the lights are 
off. Blackout curtains are a must! No street light 
coming in. Duct tape on all LED lights, including 
alarm clocks. Your hormones will thank you.   
4. Pets and snoring partners can be a distraction. 
(Although I love sleeping with my dogs, because they 
are good for your microbiome and immune system 
too!) 
5. Ear plugs and a comfortable eye mask can be a game 
changer. I never travel without mine.  
6. Topical magnesium gel, lavender essential oil and 
other oils can be calming to the nervous system.   
7. Night-time tea formulas may be helpful and are 
generally quite safe. The ritual of a nightly tea can be 
soothing as well.  
8. Avoid alcohol before bed, especially (reportedly) red 
wine for women, particularly around menopause. This 
is real and it is a huge factor.  
9. Avoid blue light in the evening before going to bed. 
Blue blocker glasses are readily available, most 

20
 modern cell phones have a night time setting and 
apps on your computer, such as f.lux, can tone down 
the blue light on your screen. Simply avoiding the 
screens after 7:00 or 8:00 PM is a great idea.  
10. Turn off the wifi on your computer and phone at 
night if they are in the room with you and don’t sleep 
with your phone near your head. 
11. Avoiding big mirrors pointing at your bed is a must in 
feng shui.  
12. Getting 7 hours minimum, 8 if you can, is the goal. 
Studies have shown an increased risk of cancer with 
less than that.  
13. Give yourself permission to rest during the daytime 
when needed. Being tired and wired at night is a 
recipe for sleep disaster and waking feeling like a bear 
is chasing you.  
14. If your mind is racing during the night, get up, write 
down #allthethings, and go back to bed assured that 
you can deal with it in the morning. Nine times out of 
ten, you will laugh over the trivialities you were 
fretting about.  
15. Meditate daily, if only for 5-10 minutes, to learn to 
calm your nervous system.  
16. Move daily, sweat a bit and get the blood flowing. 
Strength training is my favorite, but walking is a 
wonderful adjunct when trying to calm the mind and 
body. 

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CHAPTER 3: MOVEMENT 
MATTERS 
 
Move your buns around. 
―Dr. Rick Marinelli 
 
Movement is the key to life. Without movement, your 
cells cannot do their thing. Your blood and lymph do not 
pump well. Your metabolism slows, your hormones suffer 
and your sleep becomes compromised. More than anything, 
you hurt. Motion is lotion and movement is medicine.  
I spent many years stagnant, skinny, deconditioned 
and in chronic pain. It was the worst decade of my life. Like 
the majority of Americans, I spent most of my time sitting 
because I was in school and required to spend long hours 
studying. Most Americans go from their bed, to the couch, to 
the car, to the office chair, back to the car, back to the couch, 
back to the bed. No wonder we are suffering with record 
levels of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and pain.  
Medical school did not help the situation, with hours 
upon hours of sitting in class. Throw in being hormonally and 
clinically post-menopausal (I had fried my endocrine system) 
with blown adrenals and Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and I was a 
hot mess of pain. From tip to toe, I felt like a Christmas tree 
that had been plugged in and lit up in a world of constant 
pain.  

22
 When you hurt, you are afraid to move. Fear leads the 
way to stagnancy. Chronic deconditioning follows. In fact, 
the main issue I see in practice is chronic deconditioning. 
This can also be more clinically defined as muscle wasting, 
muscle weakness or malaise, all leading to sarcopenia. 
Sarcopenia is the process of muscle wasting. The 
word itself is Greek for “poverty of flesh”. The process of 
muscle loss begins for most people in their 30s and 40s, with 
a loss of up to 8% per decade until their 70s, when the loss of 
muscle nearly doubles. Remember, the heart is a muscle and 
it is not spared in this process of sarcopenia. A man in his 70s 
may have up to 30% fewer heart cells than he did when he 
was young!  
Many Americans, adults and now children included, 
also suffer from insulin resistance, hormonal imbalance, Type 
2 diabetes, imbalanced cholesterol, high blood pressure, heart 
disease and increased obesity. All of these issues can be 
directly attributed to sarcopenia, or muscle loss, at a root 
cause level. Baseline fitness levels count when health crises 
strike. Having muscle on your body is protective from getting 
many chronic degenerative illnesses and also in surviving 
heart attacks and cancer.  
Deconditioning and lack of strength training exercises 
are at the core of sarcopenia. We have been taught as a 
society to do cardiovascular exercises, such as running, biking 
or walking as the core of our exercise routines. When I 
discuss exercise with my patients, I talk about “appropriate 
and strategic exercise” and what I’m referring to is strength 
training.  

23
 Walking is great. It is what all humans should do daily 
to keep their mind and hormones happy. Cardiovascular 
exercises are great at making you good at cardio. They 
definitely move the blood around and have their place in the 
grand picture of metabolism, blood sugar and heart health. 
This said, the most potent exercises for orthopedic 
health, improving metabolism, balancing hormones, 
decreasing inflammation, modulating immune function, 
reducing pain, lowering blood pressure, improving heart 
health and increasing resilience revolve around adding and 
maintaining healthy lean skeletal muscle mass to the body, 
and keeping it there as we age.  
Another hallmark of sarcopenia is marbling of the 
muscle with fatty infiltration. The muscles literally become 
marbled with fat, like a steak. While this muscle wasting and 
marbling is occurring, loss of bone or osteoporosis happens 
simultaneously. Whether this is a direct result of or 
contributor to muscular wasting is unknown, but we do know 
that they happen in near unison. Not only is bone being lost, 
but quality of bone is deteriorating.  
Muscular wasting is further perpetuated by declines in 
hormonal output and increases in overall inflammation as fat 
is pro-inflammatory.  
As we lose muscle with age, we see resting metabolic 
rate decrease. Your resting metabolic rate is simply the energy 
required to stay alive doing nothing. We do not want this 
metabolic rate to decrease. The lower it falls, the more 
inefficient our metabolism becomes, the more inactive we 
become and the more fat we pack on. We want our 

24
metabolism humming like a well-tuned engine. Muscle helps 
with this metabolic maintenance.  
Ultimately, all of this leads to frailty syndrome. 
Traditionally, frailty syndrome was reserved for the elderly, 
but I can tell you that I have seen this in teenagers up on 
through elderly patients, particularly in women who are often 
striving to be as thin as possible. I myself used to live in a 
constant state of frailty. In college, I had a doctor tell me that 
if I did not put on some weight, all it would require to take 
me out was one good flu. Looking back, I realize he was 
absolutely correct.  
Being skinny is not all it’s cracked up to be. I spent 
the bulk of my life skinny and it hurts. In fact, without 
adequate muscle on our frames, we run the risk of being 
metabolically unsound (because metabolic syndrome = 
prediabetes). Just because you can squeeze into size 2 jeans 
does not mean that you do not have a good portion of fat on 
your frame in relation to your muscle and bone mass. And 
just because you may wear a size 12 jeans does not mean that 
you are obese as you may have a good portion of muscle 
under a healthy layer of fat. It all comes down to body 
composition. Regardless of size, a high level of fatty tissue on 
the body is dangerous.  
The fatty infiltration of muscle is even more 
dangerous as this significantly decreases muscle strength and 
is associated with an increased risk of future mobility loss. 
Loss of lean muscle mass, strength and mobility are all critical 
factors in aging. And nobody has time for that! Bottom line? 
This loss of skeletal muscle mass leads to falls and fractures in 
the elderly. Sarcopenia has been shown to increase the risk of 

25
falls by up to three times. Regardless of the bone density, the 
degree of fatty infiltration in muscles has been found to 
increase the risk of hip fractures. Hip fractures are the kiss of 
death. The studies on surviving a hip fracture, even years 
later, are grim.  
We call this vicious triad of bone loss, muscle wasting, 
and fatty tissue infiltration and impairment osteosarcopenic 
obesity syndrome. This is a bad place to be and unfortunately 
it is all too common. To add insult to literal injury, this fatty 
tissue is pro-inflammatory, which further contributes to the 
wasting process.  
The simplest and fastest route to avoiding and 
reversing sarcopenia and wasting is to lift heavy objects and 
move them around on the regular. Strength training 
accomplishes this task beautifully.  
Some other benefits of muscle as medicine? Muscle 
secretes potent hormones like IGF-1, which regulates insulin 
metabolism, helping to balance blood sugars, and stimulates 
protein synthesis, aiding you to build more muscle. Skeletal 
muscle also secretes anti-inflammatory molecules called 
myokines. Fat secretes cytokines, which are 
pro-inflammatory, meaning they lead to and perpetuate 
inflammation. With so many people suffering from chronic 
inflammation, often due to excess body fat, being able to 
build your own anti-inflammation depot is pretty amazing. 
Especially when chronic inflammation directly impacts pain 
levels.  
Another amazing substance secreted by muscle is 
BDNF, or brain-derived neurotrophic factor. This molecule 
protects your brain and helps it regenerate.  

26
 Coming back to blood sugar — and I’ll talk about this 
more in Chapter 5 — know that elevated blood sugars are 
bad news. Not only does skeletal muscle potentiate insulin via 
the effects of IGF-1, mentioned above, but it also increases 
the uptake of excess glucose into the muscles so it stops 
wreaking havoc in the blood stream. It does this by 
upregulating glucose transporter receptors called GLUT4. 
This leads to better glucose homeostasis, and trust me, this is 
goal #1 for any human who wants to be healthy and live a 
long and happy life. Diabetes will wreck you in more ways 
than you ever want to know.  
Muscle also increases production of testosterone, 
HGH and cortisol. It is also a major target of thyroid 
hormone signaling. If you belong to the hypothyroid club like 
I do, strength training is a secret weapon.  
Strength training is easily the most potent medicine in 
the quest to slow aging, improve strength, mobility and 
stamina, and keep the hormones humming along beautifully. 
I have been accused of looking younger every year. It’s 
nothing special that I am doing, just the regular strength 
training. Consistency is key.  
When it comes to fat loss, strength training wins big 
time. First off, muscle eats fat. It is metabolically active. Not 
only does it burn your fat up while you’re exercising, but it 
gives you the gift of after burn. After burn is essentially a 
humming metabolism that burns fat while you sleep. Cardio 
only helps you out when you are actually doing the cardio. 
The studies on using cardio to lose weight are depressing and 
a subject for another time, but trust me when I tell you, it is 
the worst use of your time. Instead, 20 to 40 minutes of 

27
strength training, three times a week, will do all kinds of 
favors for your body composition.  
The goal is not to become a smaller version of 
yourself. It is to change your body composition so that you 
have metabolically humming muscle, less fat and a strong 
body that is resilient. I am not aiming for six-pack abs and 
12% body fat. I am aiming for curves, strength and a rocking 
immune system that does not attack me anymore. Be gone, 
autoimmune disease!  
That kind of change in body composition is available 
through strength training, which has further benefits by 
improving biomarkers like cholesterol, reducing inflammation 
and decreasing fatty liver. Fatty liver is a common condition 
and it is bad, bad news.  
The latest hot topic in health is mitochondria. I was 
obsessed with these little powerhouses of the cell way back 
when I was in high school. They are actually organisms that 
are more bacterial in nature than human and they power 
every one of our cells. Without mitochondria, we would die. 
Mitochondrial dysfunction is at the core of aging and disease. 
It is also a major contributor to sarcopenia.  
The best we can do to offset aging, wasting and 
disease is to take good care of the mitochondria that we have 
and try to make more of these little guys. And guess what... 
Strength training comes into play yet again! Strength training 
has been shown to stimulate muscular mitochondrial 
synthesis, meaning we can make more simply by adding more 
muscle to our frames. This is pretty epic in my book. 
Mitochondrial impairment is reversed with resistance training 

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and it also appears to reverse the aging process at the 
phenotypic genetic level. This is potent anti-aging medicine. 
Exercise and strength training have been shown in 
multiple studies to improve immune function markers. 
Improvement has been seen, molecularly, for autoimmune 
conditions as well as for immune function in the elderly. 
Specifically in the elderly, immune function has been shown 
to be more robustly preserved in those who were physically 
conditioned.  
What does exercise have to do with pain? This is a 
valid question, as most people in pain are afraid to move. I 
know I was. Movement seems like the one thing that, initially, 
will make pain worse. I won’t lie. It does tend to feel a bit 
worse in the beginning. A body in motion stays in motion, 
but a body at rest definitely likes to stay at rest. It is hard to 
get the body moving once stagnancy settles in.  
Perhaps the most notable and immediate response 
that my patients report when they start any exercise program 
is pain reduction. Simply moving the body is therapeutic as 
mechanoreceptors in the spinal cord override pain receptors. 
Learning to move properly, that is a different story. 
This is where I highly suggest hiring a professional. There is 
no substitute for a highly skilled strength and conditioning 
coach, physical therapist, Pilates instructor or personal 
trainer. Having professional eyeballs on you while you move 
is critical, especially when just starting out.  
Clinical studies in patients with fibromyalgia, neck 
pain, back pain and joint pain consistently support strength 
training as an effective pain reliever. Using joints and muscles 
appropriately usually always makes them feel better. A 

29
common and powerful side effect of gaining strength in a 
region is pain reduction. In the US, between 2% and 5% of 
all doctor’s visits are for low back pain. From $8 to over $100 
billion in healthcare costs are due to low back pain.   
Now, remember the concept of hormesis, where low 
doses of toxic substances have a beneficial effect? Well, this 
also supports the use of strength training. As we age, we lose 
these adaptive abilities and hormetic stressors can stimulate 
the necessary pathways of repair and regeneration. This 
means hormetic stressors are increasingly important as we get 
older, and turning to them for this repair and regeneration 
makes us less frail.  
Strength training induces a potent hormetic response. 
When followed by adequate rest, recovery and re-feeding, we 
thrive. The work is in the heavy lifting. The magic is in the 
rest and recovery.  
While building a stronger body is helpful for 
managing pain, good for the hormones, easy on the eye, and a 
potent sleep protector, keep in mind that the concept of 
strength itself may be more important than muscle size. 
Studies support that fewer repetitions with heavier weights 
may produce a more robust hormetic (adaptive) response. 
Compound lifts like squats and deadlifts can give us 
more bang for our buck metabolically, while also providing 
profound hormetic and hormonal benefits. Studies have also 
shown that free weights may be more potent than machines, 
and that machines put you into an unnatural position at 
times, which can lead to further injury. If machines are all you 
have access to, so be it. Just know that free weights are 

30
optimal and you need someone to show you how to use them 
safely.  
✽✽✽  
 
Disclaimer:​ As with any physical endeavor, let me repeat my 
warning that you really want professional eyeballs on you as 
you learn to move! The guidance of a properly trained 
strength and conditioning coach is the ideal way for any 
person to safely begin this sport. Big lifts like the deadlift and 
squat are king and the cornerstone to any strength and 
conditioning program, but these need to be taught and 
programmed by a professional when starting out. Trying to 
learn to lift weights safely from a book or video is like trying 
to learn to play hockey without first learning to skate. Even if 
you did know how to ice skate, you wouldn’t try to learn to 
play hockey safely without a coach, correct? You can get hurt 
and that is not the goal here. The goal is Pain-Free & Strong, 
not injured and worse off.  
 
Nothing happens until something moves. 
―Albert Einstein  
✽✽✽  
 
Movement Homework:  
1. Start walking every day. A 20-minute leisure walk is a 
great gift to give yourself. Better yet, take your dog!   
2. Pick up a jug of milk, stand up tall and strong, and 
walk around your house. Having a jug in each hand is 
even more potent. This is called a Farmer’s Carry and 

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 it will do great things for your nervous system and 
your body.  
3. Seriously consider budgeting for a good strength and 
conditioning coach, at least for a handful of sessions. 
This is not something where you say, “I’m going to a 
trainer once or twice, then I’ll know what to do.” This 
is a sport. At the very least, get into a good class 
setting or small group training.  
4. Remember, you have to put in the work if you want 
to have your pain decrease. This is “active care”. This 
is opposed to a practitioner doing something to you, 
or “passive care”.  
5. Nothing works if you don’t work. 
 
 

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CHAPTER 4: FOOD AND GUT 

Your mouth is not a garbage can.  

―Dr. Tyna Moore 
 
 
Being that every cell in our bodies is dependent on 
good nutrition to function properly, it is fair to say that what 
we eat has everything to do with our health outcomes. Food 
is fuel, food is information, food is hormesis, food is how we 
interact with our environments, and most importantly, food is 
medicine. The foods we choose to eat are either contributing 
to our health or slowly poisoning us.  
Notice I said “choose”. Let’s face it, no one is holding 
you down and force-feeding you junk. It is your choice what 
you put in your pie hole. You choose what you pick up, bite 
into, chew and swallow.  
I am told that I can sound harsh when I say this; 
however, I am not entirely sure where we went wrong as a 
society in that food became something emotional. My 
grandmother survived the Great Depression and was excited 
just to have food to eat. We have turned food choices into 
some deeply emotional event, when it actually is nothing to 
do with emotion. Food is medicine. It is the medicine we 
choose day in and day out to nourish our bodies, our brains, 
our hearts and our cells.  
I understand that food is a social thing for many. It 
can be cultural or emotional or even habitual. Read: an 
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addiction. I acknowledge all of these factors. Going back to 
Chapter 1 on mindset, I challenge you to begin to consider 
food as a wonderful and powerful fuel source and therapeutic 
medicine.  
Having gone through a lifetime of anorexia and gut 
issues, I am an admitted under-eater. I am in love with a man 
who is an over-eater. Interestingly, I spent the bulk of my life 
underweight and unhealthy and he spent the bulk of his life 
overweight, even severely obese at times. Two sides of a coin, 
we always say. Why do some people under-eat and some 
over-eat? This is a complicated subject and has a scientific 
basis. I propose that it has more to do with epigenetics and a 
person’s microbiome than it does emotion, though that is a 
subject for another book and another time.  
Nutritionally speaking, you are what you eat. You are 
what what-you-eat eats, meaning quality food starts higher up 
the food chain than what’s on your plate and that matters. 
You are what your food was sprayed with, what the soil was 
composed of where it was grown and what the seed was 
made up of genetically speaking, because many foods today 
are genetically modified.  
Our cellular makeup and quality is dependent on the 
foods we eat. Cells combine to form tissues, organs and 
organisms. Nothing will work well in your body if you are 
fueling that body with crap. Trust me, I spent the bulk of my 
life eating what I like to call the “Whatever Diet”. That means 
I ate whatever was there, and not in a good way.  
I have suffered with a multitude of autoimmune 
diseases and I do not fool myself. They were and are a direct 

34
result of how I chose to fuel my body, because 95% of it 
comes down to food.  

THE BIOME
Let’s talk about the microbiome for a minute. 
Naturopathic physicians have known for decades that the gut 
is the key to people’s health. Naturopathic medicine has six 
tenets, but I’d like to add one more: Treat the gut first.  
The microbiome is the bacterial wonderland that 
exists on the surface and inside of all of us. In particular, 
millions of microorganisms reside within our gut and they are 
calling the shots. Some of these buggers are good guys. Some 
are pathologic AKA disease-causing. It is truly survival of the 
fittest in there, with a classic “our gang is more plentiful and 
stronger than your gang” mentality. Your microbiome is a big 
deal to your health. Huge.  
These gut bugs are responsible for so much. They 
influence your gut health, obviously. They mitigate issues like 
inflammation in the gut and health of the gut lining, as well as 
integrity of the gut immune system. Called GALT for short, 
or gut-associated lymphoid tissue, it was one of the favorite 
topics I learned about in medical school. (The term initially 
excited me because it made me think of John Galt.) The gut 
biome transforms certain nutrients into other essential 
nutrients. It influences hormonal transformation as well as 
mitigating body-wide inflammation, immune function and 
brain function. Your emotions, food cravings and even 
circadian rhythms are influenced by your gut microbiome. 
For those of you Star Trek nerds out there — and 
you know who you are — think of The Borg. These bugs, 

35
while functioning in isolation, also function very much like 
The Borg. Resistance is futile, because they really are the ones 
in charge. They even group up to form super-colonies that 
secrete what’s called a biofilm to surround and protect them 
all. Not only that, but they communicate within this biofilm 
as almost a single organism. It sounds like some crazy sci-fi 
story line, but it is the amazing universe living within your 
gut.  
Here’s the clincher. Our biomes morph and change 
and exist in direct relationship to the foods we feed it. When 
I say you are what you eat, what I should really be saying is 
that you are what your biome eats. If you feed it refined 
carbohydrates, junk food, sugar and crap, you will literally be 
selecting for the bugs that thrive off of that substrate and 
inviting a super-gang of pathological and unfriendly 
organisms that will make you sick. I’m sure you’ll agree that’s 
not terribly helpful in contributing to your overall health. 
Conversely, if you eat a variety of nutritiously dense 
foods, full of color and fiber that make the beneficial bugs 
happy and interested, they will stick around and be plentiful. 
The “turf war” that exists in your gut — and ultimately exerts 
a powerful influence over your entire body’s health — will 
win in favor of the good guys only if you feed them what they 
want and need. Do you see now that what you eat is 
everything?  
Nutrition need not be complicated. If you are a regal 
older person, born before the Baby Boomer generation, you 
know how to eat. Maybe you have simply forgotten. If you 
are younger, I want you to eat how your grandmother ate. 
What do I mean by this?  

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 Eat ​whole foods​ that look like where they came 
from: plants, animal proteins (meat sources), healthy fats 
from animal and plant sources, colorful fruits and vegetables, 
lots of leafy greens. Eat many and varied fruits and 
vegetables. And take it easy on all the rest. What is all the 
rest? That’s the filler. The human kibble, if you will. What 
that looks like is: refined foods found in packages; refined 
and processed carbohydrates like cookies, crackers, muffins, 
cereal, chips; refined and processed meats that were not only 
sourced from commercially raised animals, but were highly 
processed with preservatives and chemicals; and fake and 
toxic fats. Oh and one last important one. Keep that sugar 
intake down.  

SUGAR IS SATAN  
Sugar jacks up your blood sugar and is the fastest way 
to a slow and painful death via diabetes. I’m talking about 
Type 2 diabetes, the lifestyle disease of modern man. I say 
lifestyle disease because the only real way to mitigate it is 
100% through lifestyle choices. Just know that sugar, 
especially refined table sugar, has zero place in your 
nutritional protocol for a Pain-Free and Strong life. While we 
all need some form of carbohydrate in our diets, straight 
sugar in the form of sodas, cookies, cakes and donuts are 
simply just poisonous filler.  
Think I’m exaggerating? I haven’t even started yet. 
While most street drugs “light up” or overstimulate portions 
of our brains, sugar overstimulates pretty much the entire 
brain. I will go so far as to say it is the ​most addictive drug 
of modern times​, yet it is completely legal. Worse yet, we 

37
give it to our loved ones, including our children, as a sign of 
affection and love.  
Getting off of sugar is a tough but necessary move if 
you want to decrease your pain levels and/or have a healthy 
body composition. I cannot think of a more inflammatory 
and addictive substance. As an aside, I can often tell when a 
patient is a sugar addict by visualizing bone spurs on their 
painful joints under ultrasound. They get swirly and jagged 
bone spurs off their knees, shoulders and often finger bones. 
This is something I have seen a multitude of times in my 
decade of clinical experience. I always look up from my 
ultrasound machine and say, “Do you have a sugar problem?” 
and they always reply, with big eyes like a kid caught with his 
hand in the cookie jar, “How did you know?!”  
Do not fool yourself into thinking that gorging on 
fruit is a good idea. This is a common mistake. Fruit sugars 
are fructose and fructose is handled in a wonky way in the 
body by the liver. It also affects your blood sugar levels. It is 
still sugar, after all. Keeping fruit intake in check and 
maintaining moderation is key. If you do consume fruit, be 
sure to consume the fruit itself with all of its fiber, not glasses 
of fruit juice. Would you really eat eight oranges in a sitting? 
No. But you can easily down a glass of fruit juice with the 
sugar content of eight juiced oranges, which will send your 
blood sugar levels and liver to an awful place.  

BAD FATS ARE BAD NEWS  

Fat is your friend. Healthy fats, that is. Up on the 
chopping block are bad fats. Bad fats are those fats that we 
were generally told since the 80s to embrace: Trans fats like 

38
margarine and highly processed fats like soybean oil and 
canola oil. These fats have been shown in studies not only to 
make us fat, but also to promote inflammation. Overall, they 
are terrible additions to the modern diet.  
I have watched this transition first hand. I recall 
eating butter and lard as a child. Then suddenly it was tubs of 
I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, spray-on Pam and canola oil. 
Yuck! Not only did it taste terrible but I watched my entire 
family balloon up. Of course, I mistakenly blamed all fats, as 
did most of America and the American Medical Association 
(AMA), but we now know better. It is not healthy fats that 
are the problem. It is bad fats.  
In an unprecedented move, that I never thought I 
would see in my lifetime, recent studies have come out 
saying that dietary fats are not the problem and are not a 
contributor to heart disease or pathological cholesterol issues. 
Holy smokes, vindication!  
All of your cell walls as well as your brain and nervous 
system are made of fat. The fat your put into your mouth 
ultimately make up these structures. Choose wisely.  

PROTEIN IS OFTEN UNDERAPPRECIATED  

Adequate amounts of healthy protein are the keystone 
to keeping pain levels low.  
Disclaimer:​ I am a recovering vegetarian. I have a hard 
time eating meat. Anyone who knows me will tell you I like 
animals way more than I like people.  
I spent a decade as a vegetarian, but it was not done 
right. By that I mean I was a mac-n-cheese-atarian. I 
accomplished little else in that decade but to secure my 

39
Bachelor of Science and make myself very sick. As a type O 
blood type, I do significantly better on animal sources of 
protein. Some folks do not and I have many colleagues and 
friends who do wonderfully on a vegetarian diet. Veganism, 
not so much. No judgement. I’m only telling you what I’ve 
seen in a decade of practice.  
How does this relate to pain? Your joints and the 
tissues that hold your joints together (tendons and ligaments) 
are made up of collagen. Your entire body is made up of 
collagen. If you don’t ingest collagen, from both personal and 
professional experience, I do not believe you can produce 
adequate collagen to hold yourself together optimally.  
A physician teacher, Dr. David Harshfield, once told 
me, “If you don’t eat collagen, you can’t make collagen.” 
Another mentor, Dr. Bjorn Eek, with several decades in the 
field, told me, “With all of your female chronic pain patients, 
increase their protein intake and watch their pain significantly 
decrease.” With a combined 100 years in the field of medicine 
between the three of us, I am now passing this information 
on to you.  
Before we go on to discuss quantity, I would stress 
the importance of speaking to your naturopathic or 
functional medicine practitioner if your kidneys are in any 
way compromised or you are concerned.  
How much protein should you eat? If you are 
strength training, a common suggestion is 1 gram per pound 
of body weight, at the low end. I realize that can sound 
incredibly high, but science suggests otherwise. In fact, the 
question of quantity isn’t quite the right question to be asking. 

40
 If you’re trying to build healthy muscle — and 
hopefully you are after reading the last chapter — more 
important than quantity of protein is leucine threshold. 
Leucine is an amino acid present in complete proteins that is 
responsible for muscle hypertrophy. We need to hit a certain 
leucine threshold to build muscle and this needs to occur 
within a time period.  
Quality counts here! Put your highest standards on 
your protein choices and where they were sourced. 
Remember, more important than what you eat is what 
what-you-eat eats. The higher up the food chain, the more 
critical it is to make quality choices. Commercially raised 
animals eat crappy feed, and are pumped full of hormones 
and antibiotics. They are often forced to live in terribly 
confined living conditions while being treated in a way that 
causes surges in stress and fear hormones like cortisol and 
adrenaline. This all ends up in the meat you consume. 
Budgeting for high quality, free-range, grass-fed meat, eggs 
and dairy, when it’s available, is in your best interest.  

A WORD ON DAIRY  
Pain and dairy consumption have a relationship and 
correlation for many. I have seen and lived with 
dairy-induced pain. I have seen it in my patients more times 
than I can count. It seems to be directly dose-dependent, 
meaning the more dairy a person consumes, the more their 
pain increases. Whether it’s a direct allergy, an allergy to 
casein, the protein found in dairy, or something else (like the 
fact that we are drinking another mammal’s mammary gland 
juice AKA baby calf growth formula), there is a correlation. 

41
 Consider this if you are suffering with pain. A simple 
fix for many is to remove dairy from the diet. Also note that 
dairy can set off opioid receptors in the brain for some 
people, so they are addicted to dairy. If this paragraph made 
you sweat a bit at the idea of giving up cheese, milk, and 
other dairy products, you may be in this camp. Best way to 
kick an addition, in my personal and clinical experience, is to 
quit cold turkey.  

EAT THE RAINBOW AND KEEP IT MOSTLY GREEN AND LEAFY  

Veggies are way underappreciated. They are also 
non-negotiable. Your biome needs you to eat a variety of 
nutrient-dense, mineral-dense and fiber-dense vegetables to 
keep the good guys happy and intact.  
Again, how much to eat? That depends on what your 
gut can handle. For some people, myself included, too many 
veggies can aggravate the gut and trigger IBS. Yet for most 
people, I don’t know how to say it otherwise; the studies are 
in and eating veggies, having muscle and sleeping are your 
most potent anti-aging, anti-cancer and anti-degenerative 
illness tools.  
Protein helps keep your tissues and immune system 
regenerating and intact. Healthy fats keep your immune and 
nervous system happy and functioning optimally, amongst 
other things. Vegetables provide critical nutrients and fiber 
while rocking the microbiome.  

CARBOHYDRATES: FRIEND OR FOE?  

If it’s not a protein or fat, it’s a carb. There are good 
carbs and bad carbs. Complex carbs versus refined carbs. If 

42
it’s hard to chew up and it’s got some grit to it, then you’re 
probably dealing with more of a complex carb. Refined carbs 
are puffy and doughy and yummy.  
Your carbohydrates must be earned​. Maybe you’re 
one of the people who can’t even look at a cupcake without 
having your insulin go crazy and your blood sugar go all over 
the map. How do you tell quickly if you have blood sugar 
issues and some carb intolerance? If you have persistent belly 
fat that won’t go away, this is a decent indicator that you have 
blood sugar issues.  
Generally, the more skeletal muscle mass you have, 
the more you can handle carbohydrates. This is why I say you 
have to earn your carbs. Many Americans have blood sugar 
handling issues, according to studies. The thousands of labs 
that I’ve run on patients over the years agree.  
 
Grab my Optimal Lab Values Cheat Sheet ​HERE​.  
 
Some “bad carbs” are soda, white pasta, white rice, 
sugary cereal, white crackers, white bread, sweets and baked 
goods. Refined and sweet foods that are neither protein nor 
fat and come in packages are likely bad carbs too.  
Good carbs are non-starchy vegetables and some 
starchy vegetables. The starchy vegetables come into play if 
you are strength training and getting adequate fat loss at a 
pace you like. Then you can play with starchy vegetables. 
Some level of carb intake is necessary for life. They 
are macromolecules that break down into sugars. They are 
straight up fuel for your body. If you are not creating a need 
for excess fuel, however, you don’t get to eat a lot of 

43
carbohydrates. If you sit around all day and don’t do any kind 
of exercise, you don’t get to eat lots of carbs. If you drink a 
ton of alcohol, you don’t get carbs. If you’re strength training 
and you have good, lean muscle mass, you get to eat some 
carbs. We are all different in our blood sugar handling 
abilities so be sure to get a full workup from your physician. 
Again, my go-to clue, outside of lab work, is stubborn belly 
fat. Read on to the next chapter to see how to measure 
objectively.  
I would also suggest you consider avoiding gluten and 
most grains if you’re having pain. The French word for bread 
is ​pain​. There is an immune response to grain ingestion that 
happens for some individuals. Gluten intolerance is real, so 
don’t go making fun of your friends. It’s not about celiac 
disease only. Gluten and other grains can flare joint pain 
significantly through an immunologic reaction happening in 
the bodies of certain people. Gluten also induces zonulin 
secretion, which causes transient intestinal permeability, 
temporary leaky gut. This happens to everyone. Some are 
simply more impacted by zonulin than others.  
Most of the gluten-free foods are just junk food in 
disguise. They are still highly-processed grains. They are often 
even more highly refined to make them yummy and doughy.  

HOW MUCH TO EAT?

Is it calories we need to worry about? Is it types of 
food? Is it quality of food source? The answer is yes to all of 
the above. Calories do matter to a degree. Types of foods 
eaten definitely matter. And the quality of your food is 
everything in my opinion. Assuming you are doing your best 

44
to access decent quality and clean foods, then it becomes 
pretty straight forward.  
The quick and easy is based on amounts measured by 
the size of your hands via Dr. John Berardi of Precision 
Nutrition. Your palm is a serving of protein (approximately 
30 grams). Your fist is a serving of vegetables. Your cupped 
hand is a serving of carbohydrates (around 20 to 30 grams). 
Your thumb is a serving of fats (butter, oil, etc).  
 
Women:​ For most meals, you want to eat 1 palm of protein, 
1 fist of vegetables, 1 cupped hand of carbohydrates and 1 
thumb of fat.  
 
Men:​ Double this for each meal.  
 
If you feel too full with these portions, have weight to 
lose or are not terribly active, start by decreasing your 
carbohydrate intake first. Try hard to get those healthy fats 
and proteins in, along with the veggies to rock that biome.  
 
For a great “What to Eat Cheat Sheet” that I give to 
patients, head ​HERE​. 
 
I’m not going to dive into the details of ketosis or 
intermittent fasting, because for now, I simply want you 
eating whole, nutrient-dense foods a few times a day. No 
need to complicate things here. If you have excess weight to 
lose or are suffering from intractable pain, these are good 
ideas to pursue, because they do work.  

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GUT HEALTH COUNTS  
Overall gut health and pain are intimately related to 
one another and having a healthy gut is one of the most 
critical steps to getting anyone’s pain in check. If you suffer 
with IBS and pain, you’ll know what I’m talking about, 
because when your IBS flares, you’ll notice how your pain 
levels respond. For myself and many of my patients, they go 
hand in hand.  
It comes down to several factors. The most obvious 
would be inflammation in the gut leading to inflammation 
throughout the body and particularly the joints. Intestinal 
permeability, AKA leaky gut, has been identified as a source 
of root cause illness for decades in the naturopathic 
community and is a known driver of many conditions.  
Some common conditions directly related to gut 
health: ​polyarthralgia (arthritis in several joints), 
inflammatory arthritis, boggy joints, skin issues (acne, 
psoriasis, eczema, and so on), dark circles under eyes, 
allergies, bloating, burping, flatulence, distended abdomen, 
depression, and autoimmune disease.  
Leaky gut leads to a vicious cycle within the body. 
Regardless of how it starts, let’s begin with the mucosa of the 
gut lining becoming inflamed. The inflammation of mucosa 
leads to the tight gap junctions of the cells becoming 
compromised — also known as the gut becoming leaky. Then 
large food particles absorb into the bloodstream where they 
do not belong. The body sees these particles as foreign and 
mounts an antibody/antigen complex; now the immune 
system is involved. Digestion also dulls and slows, and 

46
malabsorption ensues. The flora and biome shifts, becoming 
imbalanced. This leads to continued mucosal inflammation 
and all the rest. At any point in this cycle, one problem leads 
to the next.  
Contributing factors to intestinal permeability 
include:​ inflammatory diet, NSAID use (non-steroidal 
anti-inflammatories like ibuprofen), antibiotic use, excess 
alcohol consumption, infections, microbiome shift.  
The gut microbiome dictates several aspects of health, 
and can morph and change immediately in response to dietary 
changes. Aspects of your immune system, inflammation, 
brain function, neurotransmitters, adiposity, as well as genetic 
and phenomic expression are all impacted by the 
microbiome.  
Whatever affects the gut also affects the brain, and 
when the brain is on fire, pain is ramped up. If the gut is 
leaky, we assume the blood-brain barrier is also more 
permeable. When inflammation ignites within the body, there 
is a checks-and-balance system in place to keep things 
somewhat mitigated. Within the brain, there is no such 
system. When pro-inflammatory cytokines reach the brain, 
they ignite the immune system of the brain, known as 
microglial cells.  
Once the microglial cells become activated within the 
brain, they don’t turn off so well. Once on, they are on, and 
can stay activated for years. They maintain a functional 
memory and become primed, which basically leads to brain 
inflammation or what I refer to as a brain on fire. 
Interestingly, microglial cell activation is further spurred on 
by certain substances such as opioid drugs. So when doctors 

47
prescribe opioids for pain that is not acute, but more chronic 
in nature, they may very well be contributing to the 
generation of chronic pain via this mechanism.  
Neurotransmitters made in the gut, like serotonin, 
also have a direct impact on pain levels. A common 
prescription for people in chronic pain is the drug family of 
SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors). While we 
don’t entirely know how these drugs help pain, they do seem 
to help many patients, and they are likely doing so via a 
serotonin mechanism. With the bulk of serotonin being made 
in the gut, it makes sense that gut health will have a direct 
impact on pain via this mechanism as well.  
Hormones impact our gut too, which impacts pain. 
Estrogen dominance can contribute to pain and weight issues 
in a myriad of ways. If you are not pooping daily, you could 
well be re-absorbing your estrogen into your bloodstream, 
because pooping is one major way we clear estrogen 
metabolites. Again, just one mechanism, and we will address 
hormones further in the next chapter.  

A WORD ON GMOS AND GLYPHOSATE  

Genetically modified organisms and the chemical 
glyphosate are both modern-day health concerns. Whether 
you believe GMOs are an issue or not, we do know that they 
go hand in hand with glyphosate. Glyphosate is an herbicidal 
chemical and broad spectrum biocide developed by 
Monsanto and is the active chemical in Roundup Weed 
Killer. It is a known microbiome disruptor and a strong 
antibiotic against many of the symbiotic organisms that reside 
in a healthy gut biome. The far-reaching implications of 

48
GMOs and glyphosate are currently unfolding in the science 
and will continue to show their dark side to the health of us 
as individuals, as well as the health of our soils and our 
planet.  

OF MOOSE AND MEN  

Overall nutritional status affects joint health. In a 
50-year study, which began in 1958 on Isle Royale in Lake 
Superior, the skeletal remains of 4,000 moose were examined. 
The moose remains showed an identical form of 
osteoarthritis as humans. This study determined malnutrition 
in early life of the moose as the cause of their severe arthritis. 
Now, if you were to believe what I was taught in 
chiropractic college and what is a common concept in 
medicine, osteoarthritis is a condition of wear and tear. I’ve 
never believed this, of course. Rather, I believe osteoarthritis 
is a condition of metabolism and blood sugar issues, a 
“diabetes of the joints” if you will. Malnourishment is 
definitely part of the etiology of the joints’ demise. This 
correlates with my clinical findings.  
I’ll end this chapter with my favorite quote on 
nutrition from Thomas Plummer.  
“On food. Stop lying to yourself that you are so confused that 
you don’t know what to eat. If it’s in a box, or it came from a drive-up 
window, it isn’t food. It’s pretend food. Don’t eat it. Eat stuff that is 
fresh, mostly proteins, veggies and some fruit. Easy on the whole grains. 
If you can’t tell the difference between a Big Mac and a salad, you don’t 
need a coach. You have other issues to deal with in life.”  

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 Bottom line:​ If your gut is inflamed and your 
nutritional status is poor, your joints will suffer and 
degenerate.  
 
You can’t outrun your fork.  
―Unknown  
✽✽✽  
Nutrition Homework:  
1) Eat whole, nutritiously dense foods from now on. 
Follow the 80/20 Rule at the very least, meaning 80% 
of your meals are clean and nutritious, and 20% may 
fall short.  
2) Avoid refined carbohydrates, excess sugar and 
alcohol. Remember, gluten-free baked goods are 
refined, sometimes more so than gluten-rich foods. 
“Gluten-free” and “vegan” are not safe words for 
“okay to eat”.  
3) For general amounts of food, refer to hand 
measurement advice above and grab the infographic. 
4) If you suspect your gut health is off and is 
contributing to your pain, get with a good 
naturopathic doctor or functional medicine doctor 
and have it tested. Infections and inflammation in the 
gut can thwart even the best efforts. 
5) Avoid GMO foods. Anything commercially grown or 
raised will likely have glyphosate in it. 

 
 
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CHAPTER 5: HORMONES 
 
Addressing hormonal complaints in patients can feel like 
herding cats.  
―Dr. Carrie Jones 
 
Hormones control everything. Without happy and 
balanced hormones, it is almost impossible to achieve optimal 
health, sleep, weight or pain reduction. 
I want to give you an overview of how each of these 
hormones works in the body, what each one’s role is and 
what can go wrong. Dealing with hormones is like trying to 
hit a moving target, and this is amplified if the patient is not 
implementing #allthethings, as I like to say. By which I mean, 
all the things discussed in this book.  

ENDOCRINOLOGY 101  
All cells in the body have cellular receptors. They are 
little flags that poke out of a cell. These receptors are there to 
“hear” the hormones. Each receptor specifically binds a 
particular hormone. Some bind more than one. There are 
receptors for thyroid hormone and estrogen and 
progesterone and so on. They are cellular receptors that fit 
like a lock-and-key mechanism with a specific hormone. 
Once a hormone binds to that receptor, the hormone gets 
transported inside the cell.  
Most hormones travel around the body bound to 
proteins. When the hormone is in the bound format with 
protein, it is inactive and cannot bind to the receptor on a 

51
cell. In the unbound, or free state, it can sit on the receptor 
and do its job. A hormone will land and bind to its receptor 
in the free form. All hormones work on this lock-and-key 
mechanism.  
Once inside the cell, the hormone changes the 
expression of DNA, among other important jobs. Hormones 
are potent. They shift things at the genetic level. They are 
powerful communicators of information throughout the 
body.  
When hormones are run on lab work, they are 
generally done on blood levels. In these cases, they are most 
often measured in “total” form. The doctor will often tell you 
that all is well and everything is just fine. The problem here is 
they are measuring both the free and bound form of the 
hormone together, looking at a total level of hormone in the 
blood. This tells us very little because total levels do not 
communicate what is available for the body to use, so blood 
is not the best way to test. Without testing and measuring for 
free hormone levels, your doctor may be missing the point. 
Now, the cellular receptor binds the hormone and the 
hormone is then transported inside the cell to be processed 
and work its magic. When there is too much hormone in the 
body and bloodstream, when there is too much “noise” 
essentially, the cell will start to cleave off the receptors on the 
surface of the membrane so that the cell doesn’t get 
bombarded on the inside.  
Making fewer receptors available for use is the 
mechanism by which cells do this, when there is too much of 
a hormone in the body. The same thing happens with drugs; 
that’s why you get a tolerance to them. The cells literally stop 

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“hearing” the hormone, molecule or drug. It’s too noisy out 
there.  

INSULIN  
You have likely have heard the term “insulin 
resistance”. Perhaps you or someone you know has been 
diagnosed with it. It’s quite common. So what does it mean?  
Insulin is the hormone that regulates blood sugar and 
also growth, specifically cellular growth. Insulin is secreted in 
response to an elevating blood sugar which happens after a 
meal, and more specifically, a high carbohydrate or sugar 
meal. Insulin binds to its receptor on the surface of the cell 
where it acts as the key to open the lock that shuttles glucose 
across the cell membrane and inside the cell. Glucose is the 
main cellular fuel of all cells, also known as blood sugar.  
Insulin is also an important hormone for cellular 
growth and anabolic activity. As it contributes to growth, too 
much insulin can be too much of a good thing. Too much 
insulin leads to obesity, inflammation, diabetes and cancer 
growth. Glucose also feeds cancer, which really is a metabolic 
disease.  
Insulin resistance comes in when there is too much 
glucose in the bloodstream, i.e. elevated blood sugar. In this 
common scenario, the body pumps out an excess of insulin 
to meet the high glucose demand to transport it all inside the 
cells. Following a high carbohydrate meal, the body becomes 
flooded with high levels of glucose and responds by cranking 
out insulin to get all of this into the cells. Glucose sitting 
around in the blood and on the edge of your cells actually 
caramelizes. This process produces advanced glycation end 

53
products, AGEs for short. These age your cells, quite literally 
caramelizing, or oxidizing your cells like a rusting nail. Not 
good news. Ultimately, we do not want excess glucose 
floating around in the blood. We want it inside the cells being 
used for fuel.  
So to sum up, when elevated blood glucose causes the 
body to pump out excess insulin in an attempt to get all of it 
inside your cells, you end up in a mess. Cellular receptors get 
bombarded. They start down-regulating by cleaving off the 
surface of your cells and they stop hearing the insulin.  
Here is interesting part. With fewer receptors to hear 
and accept glucose, the cells start to get hungry. The body 
thinks it’s starving at a cellular level. Cellularly, the person is 
starving, but outside of the cells resides an excess of glucose. 
What then happens? The body pumps out more and more 
insulin to meet the demand to get that glucose inside of the 
cell. The person is also hungry for food, because their body is 
telling them that their cells need fuel. Do you see how this 
equates to a hot mess? This is insulin resistance.  
Insulin resistance is a huge worldwide problem. ​It is 
otherwise known as prediabetes​. I would gander that 
insulin resistance really is a Stage 1 diabetes. When I see it in 
patients, I try to drive home just how dangerous it is. Too 
many people take prediabetes as a casual diagnosis because 
it’s common or prevalent in their family, or because their 
primary doctor doesn’t seem concerned. Sitting on the edge 
of diabetes is nothing to take casually.  
Diabetes is just a number on a lab. 126 is the magic 
number. When a person’s fasting blood sugar hits 126, they 
are considered diabetic. The chances are high that their cells 

54
were “bathed in insulin”, as my friend Dr. Nasha Winters 
says, for a good decade prior to being diagnosed as having 
frank diabetes. All the while having just as many bad cellular 
changes happen as if they were diabetic.  
Elevated insulin makes you store fat. This is why 
people get stuck in a fat storage state. They cannot lose the 
fat if they continue to have insulin resistance. It is also 
responsible for cellular growth, and that’s not good when 
there are cancer cells around.  
A quick way to assess for insulin resistance is to look 
at belly fat. An objective way to assess, besides lab work, is to 
check your waist-to-height ratio, and you can do it in 
centimeters or inches. When you divide the waist 
measurement by the height measurement, that number 
should be below 0.5. If it is at or above 0.5, there’s a high 
likelihood that you have insulin resistance. This is a better 
tool than BMI.  
Elevated insulin likes to lock fat inside the adipose 
cells (fat cells) of the body, and it also puts them in a form 
that is not readily burned. It is a frustrating state for people to 
be in because they think they’re doing all the right things and 
still not losing weight. They can’t lose weight easily if insulin 
remains high.  
When insulin is elevated, it preferentially stores the 
food you eat as fat. I liken this to a bouncer at a nightclub, 
but instead of keeping people out, he’s actually locked 
everybody inside the nightclub and won’t let them out. The 
fat cells get locked in and there’s a guard at the door. None of 
that fat is going anywhere. None of the fat molecules are able 
to be burned for fuel. The cell thinks it’s starving, the body’s 

55
packing on fat, and the person’s got an appetite because 
they’re hungry.  
Evolutionarily, this is advantageous because we are 
nomadic as a species. We are hunter-gatherers. We are meant 
to move. Nomadic people didn’t find food that often, and 
when they did find it, they would gorge on it. The ability to 
take that food and those calories and turn it into fat storage 
was highly useful to be able to last through the famine. Being 
as I am a “hard gainer”, I joke that I would have been left on 
the savanna to perish. We are meant to move over a short 
period of time, get our food, and then rest and repeat. 
Problematically, modern society has us moving very little and 
there is gads of low quality of food around. Unfortunately, in 
the 80s, the nutritional advice of the day was to eat this high 
carb, low fat, low protein nonsense, which likely got everyone 
into this current pickle, amongst other factors. Trans fat, 
toxicity, excess cardio along with altered circadian rhythms 
from artificial light coming off computers, tablets and phones 
have all played a role as well.  
The only way to get fat off successfully is to become 
insulin sensitive. Your belly fat will tell you when you have 
become more insulin sensitive because it will start to go away. 
The quickest ticket to insulin sensitivity is through the dietary 
guidelines discussed in Chapter 4, the sleep hygiene discussed 
in Chapter 2, and the strength training discussed in Chapter 3. 
If you want to get rid of insulin resistance, the key is 
to add more insulin receptors by adding more muscle cells to 
your body, and to make the cells that you currently have more 
insulin sensitive. This will help sop up the excess blood 
glucose. To do this, the answer is simple. You’ve read it 

56
before and you’ll read it again: Lift weights and build muscle. 
In addition, cut back on the carbs and be sure to earn the 
carbs you do eat. When you decrease your blood sugars, the 
body doesn’t have to keep cranking out insulin, and you 
improve matters.  
Another quick ticket to improving insulin sensitivity is 
to train the big muscle groups like the legs and glutes. Even 
easier and more user-friendly is to go to bed at the same time 
every night and get 8+ hours of sleep. Nothing is as potent 
for hormonal balance than adequate sleep. Even with no 
other changes to your lifestyle, getting to bed at the same 
time and getting adequate sleep will see you losing the belly 
fat.  

THYROID  
The thyroid hormones are a fascinating and critically 
important family of hormones, as they govern metabolism. 
There is T4, T3 and reverse T3, in a nutshell. I will refer to all 
of them as simply “thyroid” from here on out.  
The thyroid gland, a butterfly-shaped gland in your 
throat, regulates all the metabolic processes in the body. 
Essentially, it makes everything go. It makes the churnings 
and turnings of the cells work better. Thyroid hormone is not 
necessarily anabolic (tissue-growing). However, it is 
metabolic. When there is a sluggish metabolic turnover 
because the thyroid function is low, you don’t heal optimally. 
And it’s difficult to have enough energy to get through your 
day when the thyroid gland is not working properly.  
The thyroid keeps your engine running, so to speak. 
When it’s low, it’s like having an eight-cylinder engine that is 

57
only running on four cylinders, and you don’t even realize it. 
Most people who suffer from subclinical hypothyroidism 
(low thyroid) walk around in a cellularly down-regulated state 
and have no clue.  
It’s tough to lose weight when the thyroid is sluggish. 
Thyroid also helps you optimize your healing potential and 
your regenerative potential. The list of low thyroid symptoms 
is hundreds long. Google it for yourself and you’ll see. The 
bottom line is that just about every symptom you can think of 
could be blamed on thyroid. Low and subclinical thyroid are 
also implicated in increased rates of death and sudden cardiac 
death.  
For pain reduction, it is a critical hormone. I have 
seen this clinically in practice in treating thousands of patients 
and have experienced it personally. I have seen it most closely 
related to headaches, migraines, chronic muscle tension, 
spasm and pain, cramping, numbness, chronic joint pain, 
frozen shoulders, plantar fasciitis and ingrown toenails, to 
name a few. In addition to pain, some other classic symptoms 
are stiffness, thinning hair, loss of outer third of eyebrow, 
constipation, weight gain, infertility, miscarriage, breast 
tenderness, fatigue, endometriosis, fibromyalgia, digestive 
issues, memory issues, dementia and even chronic itching.  
Look for puffy face, puff under or around the eyes 
and/or enlarged tongue. For me, it also presents as brain fog. 
My brain just farts out. It’s like the hourglass on the 
computer, “One moment please”. You know what you’re 
trying to say, but you can’t get it out. ​Depression is a huge 
symptom as well, and no antidepressant therapy touches 
it.  

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 These symptoms can be made worse with cold 
weather exposure. For me, the cold rainy weather of the 
Pacific NW where I reside is like Kryptonite. Dry, warm 
weather is my best friend.  
Over 90%, and maybe closer to 100%, of low thyroid 
cases are due to autoimmune thyroid issues, specifically 
Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. Oddly, Hashimoto’s is often 
overlooked or missed by most doctors because they simply 
are not testing for it. Doctors will run minimal labs and tell 
you that you are fine, and millions of people go on needlessly 
suffering. Most doctors do not even run the plethora of labs 
necessary to properly diagnose thyroid issues. They just run 
one marker called TSH, which is more a measurement of the 
brain’s reaction to thyroid hormone than the thyroid function 
itself. Commonly, they do not look for much else 
downstream.  
If only I had a dollar for every time a patient told me, 
“I had my thyroid checked and my doctor told me that it was 
fine” and after more extensive testing it was absolutely not 
fine.  
Speaking as someone who suffered with undiagnosed 
Hashimoto’s since puberty though her 30’s, this is worth 
investigating with a naturopathic or functional medicine 
doctor to have your thyroid fully worked up and assessed. If 
you are currently on thyroid hormone, particularly a T4-only 
drug such as Synthroid, talk to your doctor or find another 
doctor to help you. T4 is a pre-hormone, not the active 
hormone; T3 is the active hormone. Often conversion of T4 
to T3 is not happening successfully in the body so that T4 
never gets converted into the form that the cells can use. The 

59
labs come out looking totally normal, but the patient feels 
horrible. Find a doc who knows what they are doing.  
You will not get far in your goals of living a Pain-Free 
and Strong life if you have a sluggish and/or autoimmune 
thyroid. You will not get far with weight loss, good energy, 
strength training or decreasing your pain either. There is no 
reason to suffer needlessly.  
Interestingly, the enzymes that convert T4 into T3 
can be found in skeletal muscle, amongst other places. All the 
more reason to strength train and build healthy muscle.  
Thyroid hormone replacement is not the end-all, 
be-all of this story. As the bulk of thyroid issues are 
autoimmune, all of the concepts discussed in the previous 
chapters are absolutely critical for improving outcomes. I’ve 
seen many patients get on hormonal replacement, feel great 
for a few weeks to a month, then bonk because they are not 
making any other lifestyle changes. Or worse yet, they get no 
better at all.  

ADRENALS  
Perhaps I love the topic of adrenals more than 
thyroid. Hard to say. I can not ever forget how my friend and 
Naturopathic colleague, Dr. Julie Barter, diagnosed and 
treated me for severe adrenal fatigue in my early 30's. She 
literally saved my life with that. I have been obsessed ever 
since and helped thousands of patients similarly. 
The adrenal glands are your 
“run-away-from-the-tiger” glands. They’re little 
triangular-shaped glands that sit atop your kidneys. They 
secrete cortisol, adrenaline, testosterone and some other 

60
important substances. It’s the combination of cortisol and 
adrenaline that help you run away from that tiger. It helps you 
shunt the blood to the muscle so you can quickly get away. It 
also helps you vasoconstrict so you won’t bleed to death if 
the tiger bites you, as well as regulating blood sugar.  
Here is the clincher... Your body has absolutely no 
clue whether you are living a terribly stressful life or if you’re 
being chased by a tiger. It handles it all in the same way. Your 
body does not differentiate in how it handles the two 
chemically. It handles both the tiger and the stressful life by 
cranking out cortisol and adrenaline, both of which are not 
great for you in high doses.  
Pump out a lot of cortisol and you end up with 
abdominal obesity and all kinds of issues. Cortisol is 
catabolic; it chews up your tissues. Too high levels will make 
you fat and sick, and will make your tissues start to degrade. 
It actually starts to eat up your brain. It starts to chew up your 
memory center, the hippocampus.  
Cortisol is also anti-inflammatory in nature and 
necessary for life, especially if you have pain. Too little means 
you’ll hurt all the time and be chronically inflamed.  
Just like your other cells, your brain can have receptor 
resistance. Cortisol resistance is a real thing and when you do 
have too much being produced due to chronic stress, the 
brain and cells won’t know about it because the receptors 
have been cleaved off or down-regulated, just like in insulin 
resistance.  
If you have a really stressful life or job, a lifestyle or 
partner that you can’t stand, or if you have chronic pain, 
eventually your adrenals are going to fatigue and cortisol 

61
levels will diminish. The gland will essentially poop out, so to 
speak. This is a simplified version, of course, but once your 
adrenals slow cortisol output too low, you are left with an 
empty tank. I have been there and it is terrible. You feel tired 
and wired. You have short tolerance bands. Everything hurts. 
You’re exhausted. It’s a terrible state to be in. You wake up in 
the middle of the night thinking a tiger is chasing you because 
your adrenals are firing aberrantly. When you are depleted, if 
you’ve gone on too long with this chronic stress, you can end 
up in chronic pain. Because cortisol is anti-inflammatory by 
nature, you do need a bit to control pain. Again, it is worth 
having a good naturopath or functional medicine doctor to 
help you access and treat this.  
Doing chronic cardio may elevate cortisol levels. 
Often, people are exercising in this way to try to lose weight. 
A common scenario that I see with patients goes something 
like this, “I go to spin class. I run. I’m doing crossfit. I can’t 
lose the weight.” And it’s all because they are cranking up 
their cortisol. They are stressing out their body with the 
cardio, high metabolic, sustained exercise and the elevated 
cortisol is making them pack on belly fat. It’s self-defeating. 
This is why I am not a huge fan of excessive cardio.  
Stress can make you fat and then it can eventually kill 
you. Elevated cortisol is a main cause for heart disease and 
heart attacks. The inflammation and spasticity in the vessels is 
compounded by the elevated cortisol.  

PROGESTERONE  
Your body makes many of your hormones out of 
cholesterol. The pathway to the production of either cortisol 

62
or estrogen and testosterone can include progesterone. When 
a person is chronically stressed, the body can preferentially 
shunt to cortisol production and progesterone gets skipped, 
leaving low levels in the body.  
The hormone progesterone protects the uterus lining, 
hence the “pro” prefix, and it keeps you from bleeding 
heavily with menses. It protects pregnancies by keeping 
uterine lining intact and helps protect that lining from cancer 
later on.  
Men and women alike have the need of healthy levels 
of progesterone. One such reason is because progesterone 
has receptors in the brain so it keeps you happy and calm. I 
have seen this hormone low in most of the women that I 
have tested over the years. It is a safe and critical hormone, 
but commonly deficient in women of all ages.  
Some common symptoms of low progesterone 
include irregular and heavy periods, PMS, miscarriage, PCOS 
(polycystic ovarian syndrome), anxiety, insomnia, insulin 
sensitivity issues, symptoms of estrogen dominance (estrogen 
may be normal, but if progesterone is low it is effectively 
estrogen dominance), breast tenderness, fibrocystic breast 
changes, weight gain or loss, mood swings, depression, 
fibroids, endometriosis, worsening of autoimmune issues and 
thyroid dysfunction, to name a few. It is implicated in pain 
and joint laxity and it also regulates blood sugar and helps 
estrogen work better in the body.   
 
A clinical pearl I learned from my mentor Dr. Heidi Peterson: 
If a woman cannot stop crying and is prone to being teary, consider 
progesterone deficiency.  

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 In peri- and post-menopausal women, I most often 
see low progesterone contributing to anxiety, sleep 
disturbances, estrogen dominance and pain. In younger 
women, I see low progesterone contributing to heavy and/or 
irregular menses, teariness, PMS and mood swings. Heck, 
everyone with low progesterone seems to have mood swings. 
It can feel like you are losing your mind sometimes, when all 
it comes down to is a lack of this super safe and critical 
hormone.  
Remember, the body will preferentially shunt the 
hormone pathway to cortisol production and skip over 
progesterone production. Stressed women suffer, their 
partners and spouses suffer, their kids suffer, everybody 
suffers. This hormone is so safe that it is readily available 
over the counter in many states, though I would not go 
applying progesterone cream without the counsel and 
direction of a good naturopathic or functional medicine 
doctor, because symptoms of high progesterone are weight 
gain and other miserable effects.  

ESTROGEN  
Estrogen keeps you juicy and stretchy. At one point, 
when my estrogen took a dive due to extreme chronic stress, 
the only way I can describe it was “dried out and deflated”. I 
lost every curve on my body and felt like a chicken breast that 
had been overcooked and left out on the counter to dry out 
for a few days. All of my joints hurt and my connective 
tissues felt like they would snap and rip. I felt like I would 
shatter if I fell down.  

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 Lack of estrogen contributes to pain in many ways, 
but most notable is dried out joints and connective tissues. As 
my colleague and hormone expert Dr. Carrie Jones says, “No 
woman likes it when her joints and vagina are dry!” Estrogen 
makes a woman more womanly.  
Low estrogen, as seen in menopause, contributes to 
central obesity, also known as visceral obesity, the kind of fat 
that surrounds our organs and gives us bellies and makes us 
apple-shaped. This is not good news for our blood sugar as 
visceral fat drives insulin resistance. Low estrogen leads to 
more insulin resistance and more belly fat. Being that low 
estrogen and obesity both are chronic state of inflammation 
at their core and both drive metabolic syndrome, and being 
that low estrogen contributes to obesity, we can see how 
excessive drops in estrogen due to menopause can be a real 
problem. Shoot, even some of our immune cells have 
estrogen receptors on them. This is an important hormone. 
“Isn’t estrogen the hormone that protects my bones?” 
you ask. Sure is! So is progesterone and testosterone, and in 
many ways, all the rest of the hormones. We need these 
hormones in harmony, like a jazz band. We need all the 
players in balance. Estrogen basically keeps bones and hearts 
happy, but others come into play too.  
The highly common flipside is elevated estrogen or 
estrogen dominance. Estrogen and progesterone balance one 
another out like a teeter-totter. Even with normal estrogen 
levels, a person can be out of whack because low 
progesterone is so common. Estrogen dominance happens in 
abundance these days, particularly since most toxins act as 

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xenoestrogens and bind to the estrogen receptors in the body. 
In this way, xenoestrogens mimic estrogen.  
Excess estrogen in the body, whether natural or from 
xenoestrogens, commonly presents as puffiness and 
bogginess. Most often, I see women come into my clinic in a 
puffy, boggy and painful state. A problem with excess 
estrogen is that it binds up the thyroid receptors in the body. 
This means, even if you are on thyroid hormone replacement, 
if you are dealing with estrogen dominance, your thyroid 
hormone may not be making it to the receptor to do its job, 
and you remain symptomatically hypothyroid. Being estrogen 
dominant and insulin resistant is a common clinical picture in 
both men and women alike; it does not work to throw 
thyroid hormone alone at these people.  
Estrogen also ties into autoimmunity, so big surges of 
this hormone can bring on problems. Progesterone can be 
protective against this. A good example is when a young 
woman takes birth control pills or she gets pregnant. You’ll 
see those huge estrogen surges causing subsequent 
autoimmunity spring up. This all ties back into immune 
modulated pain.  

TESTOSTERONE
The last sex hormone worth discussing is 
testosterone. Modern society is not kind on men’s 
testosterone, as xenoestrogens found in toxins impact them 
too. Add obesity, insulin resistance and lack of conditioning 
to the picture and men’s testosterone levels don’t stand a 
chance.  

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 Testosterone is anabolic, meaning it grows tissues. It 
helps you build and heal your tissues. Women need some 
testosterone to heal, feel overall well and have a healthy 
libido, so testosterone is just as important to women as it is to 
men.  
Men with excess belly fat can convert their 
testosterone into estrogen more readily. This is done by an 
enzyme called aromatase, and it’s most abundant in the belly 
fat. When men are walking around with excess belly fat, they 
are more prone to this enzyme causing them hormonal 
problems.  
Men who are handed testosterone replacement 
therapy casually by their doctors, without having their 
estrogen levels, belly fat or lifestyle taken into consideration, 
could face problems down the line. This is also why 
testosterone replacement therapy has been implicated in 
strokes and heart disease. In the presence of excess aromatase 
enzyme, they could upset the delicate balance of estrogen to 
testosterone. These hormones are molecularly very similar 
and can be converted into one another readily.  
If a man is not doing all the lifestyle modifications 
that I’ve spoken of, such as cutting the dietary sugars and 
alcohol down or out, strength training, losing the belly fat and 
insulin resistance, getting adequate sleep and being on a good 
circadian rhythm, then the testosterone will more readily 
convert into estrogen.  
Some men will have adequate natural testosterone 
production and won’t necessarily need replacement, but 
lifestyle can still tank out their free testosterone levels. It’s 
either being bound up by SBHG (sex binding hormone 

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globulin, which elevates on higher carbohydrate diets) or 
being converted into estrogen by aromatase enzyme coming 
from belly fat.  
Men and women alike need testosterone for good 
muscle mass, muscle growth, tissue healing, libido, stamina 
and more. So it’s another hormone that has to be kept in the 
balance.  

HUMAN GROWTH HORMONE  

Human growth hormone is the ultimate anti-aging 
hormone. It is a naturally secreted hormone responsible for 
tissue growth and regeneration. It is high in your twenties and 
then starts to dip significantly as you get older. It is difficult 
to regenerate your tissues if your HGH is sapped, which is 
what happens to most people as they age.  
Not surprisingly, here comes our old friend sleep 
again. Having a solid sleep cycle increases your human 
growth hormone level significantly. REM sleep is when this 
hormone really starts to surge in the night. It is important 
that you get your 8 hours. It is also important that you keep a 
good circadian rhythm, not just for insulin sensitivity, but for 
healthy HGH levels. Human growth hormone improves all 
regenerative processes, including helping to heal a leaky gut. 
Supplementing human growth hormone is a bit dicey and not 
always okay with the FDA, plus it is expensive, so your best 
bet is definitely sleep.  
So many of the lifestyle modifications I’ve suggested 
will not only optimize your human growth hormone levels, 
but all of your hormone parameters. Sleep and strength 

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training are excellent ways to naturally improve your 
hormonal levels, HGH and testosterone levels in particular.  

A WORD ON CHOLESTEROL
All sex hormones are made from cholesterol, as I 
mentioned earlier. Cholesterol elevates in response to the 
need for hormones as people age. This is a naturally 
occurring phenomenon. As you age, your hormones start to 
decrease and your body responds by elevating your 
cholesterol. Dampening down your cholesterol levels with 
statin drugs from your doctor will do no favors for your 
hormones. Consider what your hormonal needs are before 
you submit to prescription medications to lower your 
cholesterol because statins are known to cause joint and 
muscle pain along with insulin resistance and diabetes.  

TOXINS
Toxins mimic estrogens and bind estrogen receptors. 
Things like pesticides, cosmetics, sunblock, cleaning 
solutions, these all are known xenoestrogens. They are fake, 
synthetic estrogens that are toxic, and they come from toxic 
chemicals. BPA is a good example. BPA, which is a 
plasticizer, was actually developed as an estrogen replacement 
drug. Later, they found out that it made plastic softer, so they 
put in all of our plastics. We’d been sucking down 
xenoestrogens from BPA for years, when a few years ago, 
people got savvy and companies decided they would start 
advertising BPA-free bottles. Sadly, plastic is plastic, so all of 
them are toxic. Your hormones would prefer it if you didn’t 
use plastic at all. If you do use plastic, be sure to never heat 

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your food in plastic containers or drink from water bottles 
that have been heated in the sun.  

A NOTE ON BEING TOO THIN

Losing too much body fat will tank out your 
hormones. I’ve done this to myself several times. You need 
fat, especially that little belly fat that women have. You need a 
touch of a “hormone depot” that some adipose tissue gives 
you. You can deplete your estrogen and rob yourself of it if 
you get too thin.  
A healthy body shape for women is one with a waist 
to hip ratio of 0.7-0.8. Societies across the globe back this up. 
The World Health Organization defines abdominal obesity 
above 0.9 in men and 0.85 in women. At those higher ends, 
you are looking at the glimmers of insulin resistance. 
Remember, an excess of belly fat is a sure sign of insulin 
resistance, so go back and check that waist-to-height ratio on 
yourself too. That will give you a more honest answer than 
perhaps even labs can.  
 
Get my Waist to Hip Quick Guide ​HERE​. 
 
Bottom line, you can be on all the fancy bioidentical 
hormone replacement you want, but if you’re not putting in 
the hard work, if you’re not getting off the sugar, if you’re not 
strength training, eating well, getting rid of that belly fat and 
sleeping adequately, none of this is going to work out 
optimally.  
 
✽✽✽  

70
  
Hormone Homework:  
1. Be sure to get around 8 hours of sleep a night in a 
dark room.  
2. Strength training two or three times a week is king.  
3. Avoiding and reversing insulin resistance by getting 
rid of belly fat will make your hormones happiest.   
4. Keep the sugar and alcohol intake low; hormones 
don’t like it.  
5. Avoiding stress helps the adrenal glands. And the 
adrenal glands are the lynchpin in the entire hormonal 
system. The next chapter will help you with just that. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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CHAPTER 6: MINDFULNESS, 
MEDITATION & GRATITUDE 
 
Never underestimate the power of stress.  
―Dr. Rick Marinelli 
 
Stress kills. While a small amount of stress followed 
by solid rest and relaxation is the key to cellular response, as 
in the case of hormesis, chronic and unremitting stress kills.  
Remember in the last chapter when we discussed 
cortisol as being catabolic? That means it chews up tissues. 
Chronic stress leads to chronic output of cortisol, which leads 
to tissue destruction throughout the body. Joints, soft tissues, 
organ systems, the heart, the brain and more are all impacted 
negatively.  
Stress can destroy bodies as much as it can destroy 
lifestyle. It tanks libido, disrupts sleep, thwarts physical efforts 
in training, makes us distracted, crabby and shadows of 
ourselves. Stress robs us of our joy and ruins relationships.  
We have much more control over our stress than we 
think we do. The world is not happening so much to us as we 
are allowing it to happen. Just as we choose the foods that we 
put into our mouths, we have a lot more choice over how 
and where we spend our time than we might realize.  
In a destructive relationship? Get out of it. Hate your 
job? Leave it. Surrounded by so-called friends who love 

72
misery and drag you down? Find new ones. There are many 
aspects of our lives that we have the power to change.  
I have a cardinal rule that if someone or something 
elevates my cortisol (you can feel it when you start paying 
attention), then I do whatever I can to get away from the 
person or situation. Nothing and no one is worth the 
destruction that elevated cortisol does to your body.  
Even more powerful is utilizing free tools like 
mindfulness, meditation and gratitude as daily practices to 
reduce stress and improve health.  
When we talk or think about stressful events, the 
same destructive chemical reaction is occurring inside of the 
body as if it was happening in real time. We know this. The 
cortisol surges and all of the damaging downstream chemical 
events occur. Conversely, when we talk about or imagine 
pleasant people, places or things, we get a surge of happy 
hormones and chemical messengers that are healthful and 
good for us. That’s where mindfulness, meditation and 
gratitude come in.  

MEDITATION  
Meditation is the practice of mindfulness. Buddhists 
call it a means for transforming the mind. It is a practice used 
for quieting the mind and calming the body. Some say it is the 
practice of turning your full attention to a single point of 
reference.  
Meditation is performed through a variety of means. 
Sitting quietly, focusing on breath, specialty breathing 
practices, humming, chanting, movement, music, dancing and 

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so on. As you can see, meditation comes in many forms. 
Some call it praying. Others find it through exercise.  
I do not believe that there is any one way or a single 
right way to meditate. So long as at least once a day, you take 
a few minutes to disconnect from the busy world around you, 
connect to your breath and quiet your mind, I believe that 
counts as coins in the health jar of life.  

MINDFULNESS  
Mindfulness can be achieved through meditation, but 
it can also be a state of being. It does require some practice, 
in my experience. Instead of reacting to a situation, it is in the 
moment of the pause that mindfulness happens. Sometimes 
simply taking one deep breath in and out can make all the 
difference in how a situation is approached and handled.  
We all have our triggers and for different reasons. 
Many are hardwired into us since we were in the womb. 
Some are likely epigenetic and stemming from stressful 
experiences that our great-grandparents had. Stopping for a 
moment to acknowledge that we have been triggered, then 
spending just another brief moment and a breath sitting with 
the feelings that come up in that trigger and contemplating 
them, that is mindfulness. ​The magic happens in the 
pause​. As we get better at this pause, we become more 
mindful.  
Recently, my father said something to me and I felt 
myself get riled right up inside. Within seconds, my blood 
was boiling. As I felt that cortisol rush and blood pressure 
and pulse increase — sure signs that you’re being triggered — 
I took a breath and paused. Why was I feeling this way? Why 

74
was I experiencing such profound anger? What did he say 
that sent this charge up my spine? Why did I feel like 
screaming at him and running away simultaneously, which 
was our lifelong pattern?  
It occurred to me, and rather quickly, that 1) this was 
indeed a pattern, my conditioning, and 2) these were my 
monkeys and they wanted to throw some poo at my dad. 
Another breath and brief moment of mindfulness brought 
the awareness that I was feeling fear. Not fear from my dad, 
but for my dad. I was fearful that he was not understanding 
what it was that I was trying to tell him and that his health 
was in jeopardy, because he was not hearing me. Now, none 
of this came with resolution. He was not hearing me and I 
was not going to continue trying to make my point. However, 
instead of us both losing our tempers and engaging in a 
screaming match, which was our MO, I stopped engaging.  
Not engaging is a powerful tool for inner peace. 
Disengaging and circling back another day, with another 
strategy, was perhaps my best bet. ​He can’t hear me right now and 
I’m going to get too worked up for my own good if I keep trying.​ That 
millisecond of mindfulness kept me from a destructive 
continued flood of cortisol.  
There are countless versions of meditation and 
mindfulness. It takes practice and it takes pause. These are 
skills that can be taught, however, which makes them 
powerful tools for decreasing inflammation, pain and even 
weight gain while improving overall health and wellness. 
Countless studies support the myriad benefits of meditation 
in day-to-day life, in schools and in prisons. These tools work 
and improve life for humans on this planet.  

75
Gratitude  
The ace in the pocket for good health is gratitude. 
The simple act of expressing gratitude is like a superpower to 
uplevel your health and life. Gratitude improves health, sleep, 
fortitude, relationships, empathy, self-esteem and so much 
more. Feeling gratitude for what you do have versus focusing 
on all that you do not have is a ticket to happiness and health. 
Personally, I express daily gratitude for my health and for a 
body that works and is strong, as I did not always have these. 
I treat people all day long who have pain and joint 
dysfunction and I am grateful to have the working parts I do 
have. Not everything works perfectly any longer, but it’s good 
enough for me.  
Having suffered with autoimmune disease since my 
early twenties, it didn’t dawn on me until around my 40th 
birthday that perhaps all of the self-loathing, cruel words 
directed at my body and self-criticism had something to do 
with my immune system turning on itself and attacking my 
own tissues. The mind is a mighty sword and I was using 
mine against myself, so much so that eventually my cells took 
notice and waged their own war. Interesting thought. I 
challenge you to look deeply at how you think and talk to 
your cells, especially if you struggle with weight or pain. We 
can be awfully hard on ourselves.  
 
✽✽✽  
 
It is not stress that kills us, but our reaction to it.  
―Hans Selye 

76
 
Meditation, Mindfulness and Gratitude Homework: 
1. Learn a preferred way of therapeutic breathing. I like 
Box Breathing​. Big belly breath: inhale for the count 
of 4, hold for 4, exhale for 4, and repeat the sequence. 
A few breaths like this can be the difference between 
calm and meltdown.  
2. Consider tools like EFT or tapping for quick 
resolution to the cortisol rushes. Search this technique 
online to learn more.  
3. Get regular exercise so that you are able to calm and 
quiet your body and mind.  
4. Sitting quietly for even 5 minutes a day, focusing on 
your breath and allowing thoughts to pass on by can 
be powerful.  
5. Walking, dancing, exercising, running, hula-hooping, 
playing music, these can all be considered 
mindfulness acts. Anything to take you out of your 
brain and pull you into your body for a few minutes.  
6. Start a gratitude journal and write down two or three 
thoughts every morning and every night about what 
makes you grateful in your life. Overlap is fine!   
7. Forgive yourself. For whatever it is that you are 
beating yourself up over. Know that you are doing 
the best you can right now with the tools you have 
been given. You can always learn more and do better. 
Life is for living. 
 
 
 

77
FINAL THOUGHTS 
 
You only live once.  
―Dr. Tyna Moore 
 
Take it from a woman who has lived over half of 
her life with chronic pain and a small collection of 
autoimmune conditions, and now has treated thousands of 
patients with pain. Take it from a woman who watched her 
mentor waste away and die a slow and painful death from 
cancer. 
You only live once. Life is short. Take care of this 
body and spirit that you were given; it’s a miraculous 
temple. Treat it with kindness and respect. Feed it well, 
move it often, speak to it kindly, swim it in water, tumble it 
in sand, roll it around naked with someone you love, hug 
it, laugh with it, love it, pet all the dogs with it, do 
#allthethings that make it happy. It’s yours and you are 
responsible for it. Use it to care for the people and animals 
on this planet.  
In this book, I’ve laid out the manual of the basic 
tools for a Pain-Free and Strong life. Mindset, adequate 
sleep, meaningful movement, good food, healthy gut, 
happy hormones, and a quiet and grateful mind.  
Let me add one more here. Get yourself a pet. 
Pets are great! Dogs may be best because they bring the 
biome from outside inside to make your biome more 
robust. They also help you secrete gads of oxytocin when 
they stare longingly into your eyes and you pet their nice 
fur. Oxytocin decreases pain and makes life better.  

78
  

FIND DR. TYNA MOORE 

Follow me for a deeper dive into all of these subjects and 
more, as well as lots of pictures of my super cute dogs.  

My Pain-Free & Strong Podcast is LIVE every Friday at 

10am PST at ​bit.ly/drtynapfs​. 

Listen later on iTunes. If you like it, please subscribe 

and leave a review! 

Website: ​www.drtyna.com 
Podcast:​ ​bit.ly/drtynpfs 
Facebook:​ ​www.facebook.com/DrTynaMoore 
Instagram & Twitter:​ @drtyna 
Youtube:​ ​www.youtube.com/c/DrTynaMoore 
 

79
ABOUT DR. TYNA MOORE 
 
Dr. Tyna Moore is the 
Owner of Core Wellness 
Clinic in Portland, OR.  
She specializes in the 
application of natural pain 
solutions and regenerative 
injection therapies to treat all 
varieties of musculoskeletal 
conditions.  
As both a board 
certified Naturopathic and 
Chiropractic physician, she 
brings a unique perspective 
and expertise to the diagnosis and treatment of pain and 
orthopedic conditions.  
Dr. Moore practices exclusively Regenerative 
Injection Therapies and non-surgical pain management for 
orthopedic and musculoskeletal conditions.  
Throughout her professional career Dr. Tyna Moore 
has focused on pain and musculoskeletal conditions. She is 
uniquely qualified to quickly diagnose and treat orthopedic 
ailments using a variety of regenerative non-surgical 
techniques. She strives to utilize the most effective and 

80
advanced treatments available to assist her patients in 
achieving their own level of optimal performance.  
Dr. Moore teaches regenerative medicine around the 
world and educates physicians as well as the general public 
online at ​www.drtyna.com​. 
 
She can be reached at ​www.drtyna.com 
Facebook:​ ​www.facebook.com/DrTynaMoore 
Instagram & Twitter:​ @drtyna 
Youtube:​ ​www.youtube.com/c/DrTynaMoore 
 
 

 
 

81
 
 
 

 
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82
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Dehghan, M, Diaz, R, et al. ​Associations of fats and 

carbohydrate intake with cardiovascular disease and 
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Phillips SM, Van Loon LJ. ​Dietary protein for athletes: 

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Haq MR., Kapila, R., Sharma, R. et al. ​Comparative 

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Hvatum M, Kanerud L, Hällgren R, Brandtzaeg P. ​The 

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Al-Sadi R, Ye D, Said HM, Thomas YM. ​IL-1β-Induced 

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Harris JA, Corsi M, Quartaroli M, Arban R, et al. 
Up-regulation of Spinal Glutamate Receptors in Chronic 
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Deleo JA, Tanga FY, Tawfik VL. ​Neuroimmune Activation 

and Neuroinflammation in Chronic Pain and Opioid 
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Hutchinson MR, Bland ST, Johnson KW, Rice KC, et al. 

Opioid-Induced Glial Activation: Mechanisms of 
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