Million Dollar Monday

Breaking the Cycle of Feeling Sick & Tired with Dr. Anya Szigeti

• Greg Muzzillo

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A life-changing diagnosis encouraged Dr. Anya Szigeti to embark on a lifestyle change that would reverse her symptoms. She shares her story and discusses practical steps for entrepreneurs and business people to have more energy and achieve optimal success. Listen as Szigeti and Host Greg Muzzillo discuss the “wealth of your health” in this episode of Million Dollar Monday.

Chapter Summaries:

  • 01:24 - Introducing Dr. Anya Szigeti
  • 04:56 - After The Coast Guard Academy
  • 07:52 - Lifestyle Change
  • 10:15 - Environmental Toxicity
  • 15:01 - Leaky Gut
  • 18:09 - You Can’t Outrun Your Fork
  • 21:19 - 5 Steps to a Healthy Lifestyle
  • 24:07 - Avoid Diet Culture

Notable Quotes:

  • Entrepreneurs need to be on top of their game. They want to have energy. They want to be able to focus and to be more engaged. The best way to do that is through being healthy.
  • Look at things in a holistic view.
  • There are five things that will nourish, heal, and fuel our bodies the best - fiber, healthy fats, protein, something green or colorful, and water.
  • Feeding your body the best fuel that money can buy is the best way to be the most productive, the best employee, the best boss, the best - fill in the blank.
  • This episode is about how to have a 'wealth of health' and how to be healthier and more energized every step, every day of the way, in building your success story.


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Dr. Anya Szigeti:

And especially if we think about correlating this on to maybe a lot of the people that are watching this, that are entrepreneurs that need to be on the top of their game, just like athletes as well. You want to be, you know, super clear of mind. You want to be able to manage your response to stress because of course, we're going to have stress every day, all day long. You don't want to go flying off the handlebars. You want to have energy. You want to be able to focus and just be really, really engaged. And the best way to do that is through being healthy. And so feeding your body the best fuel that money can buy is the best way to be the most productive, the best employee, the best boss, the best, you know, fill in the blank.

Greg Muzzillo:

Hello, and welcome to Million Dollar Monday. I'm your host, Greg Muzzillo bringing you real successful people with real useful advice for people with big dreams. I understand big dreams. I turned an investment of$200 and a lot of great advice from some really successful people into my big dream Proforma. That today is a half billion dollar company. I am very excited for all of us for today's session Million Dollar Monday. I know Million Dollar Monday sounds like it's about creating wealth, getting rich, right, acquiring more stuff. But I know after over 40 years of being an entrepreneur, none of that matters. If you don't have the wealth of your health to enjoy all of the success you're going to have, and to be able to be the most successful that you can be every step of the way. And so today's session is really about how to have the wealth of health and how to be more healthy and more energized every step, every day of the way in building your success story. I'm excited to introduce somebody who started their careers in study anyhow, in mechanical engineering. So we're talking about somebody who is very bright and methodical, and somehow she's going to share her story with us has now become a chiropractic internist. And I am excited to introduce to you, Dr. Anya, Dr. Anya is the author also of this best-selling book from Amazon. You can't outrun your Fork. I loved the book. I love the advice. I love the recipes. We'll talk more about that, Dr. Anya. Welcome.

Dr. Anya Szigeti:

Thank You so much, Greg. It's awesome to be here. Yeah.

Greg Muzzillo:

Excited to have you, my friend. All right. So let's just start at the beginning and tell us a little bit, if you would, about, your life experience, your growing up experience, those things that sort of led you to the education and then the path that you eventually got on, to write the book.

Dr. Anya Szigeti:

Absolutely. Greg. So it is a, it is an interesting path and it's not, not a straight line, which I think most people can say that they, you know, the path to where they are, is more of a zigzag. So I can say that I grew up relatively normal and if we think about nutrition, my, the family meals that we, that we had growing up were an expectation that we'd have family meals together, but the emphasis wasn't necessarily on nutrition, the way that I see and know it now, it was more on the gathering and more on, you know, sharing time together, which was fantastic. I was always very curious as a child and I recall, one evening laying under the family car with my dad and he's explaining to me how the engine worked. And, I'm sure I annoyed my parents with my constantly asking, why, why, what does this do? What does that do? And then if we fast forward a little bit to college, I went to the United States coast guard academy, and I originally planned to major in Marine biology. I love the water, which is another reason why I joined the coast guard but I attended a luncheon from one of the professors and she spoke about her dissertation on the heart as a pump and how she studied blood flow rates throughout the body and how they were different with different s ize vessels and different things. And I was absolutely fascinated by that. And I switched my major to mechanical engineering. And as you can imagine, I was the only girl i n the majority of my classes. And, I actually went on to be the first African-American female to graduate mechanical engineering from the coast guard academy. Well, congratulations. Yeah. So after graduation, I served six years active duty and loved the ability to serve our country and was stationed in some amazing places. And, I do share some of those stories in my book and we can definitely dive into some of those as well but there was always a part of me that was so curious about the medical field and the human body and physiology. And, I was, I was offered a, a position in surgical medical device sales when I left the military and I jumped at that opportunity. I was fascinated by just being able to be in the operating room and to, to see, you know, operations and the way that the devices work, that the body got a whole different level. Um, and this was in New England at the time. And then I was offered a regional sales director with a different company that covered the state of Florida. And I was super excited about that. So I took that position. And then after a few months, my territory grew and grew and I ended up covering about 11 states in the Southeast. So I was traveling overnight different locations about four nights a week. And I'm sure there's probably a few people listening that can relate to that amount of travel. And it, it does wear on you after some time. And I found myself making some poor decisions when it came to lifestyle and diets, nutrition opting for convenience foods that are in the airports and the hotels. And, you know, some, maybe not the best choices with some beverages and then couple that with a lot of stress and not getting enough sleep and lack of exercise, all of these things, it basically just wore my body down. And I was, you know, generally a very happy person. I was, I was exhausted. I was burned out. And so I went to my doctor because I could feel deep down that something wasn't. Right, and so my doctor ran some blood tests and the results of his blood test did reveal that my thyroid was underperforming and that I had the antibodies, which means that I had an auto-immune disease process in my body. My doctor told me that I wasn't sick enough yet and we'd wait until I was sicker. And then we would medicate me for the rest of my life. So I was absolutely shocked. I just could not believe that this was a solution. And that was it. That was their only solution. They were just like off you go, when you get worse, we'll, medicate you. So, you know, I frantically searched for alternatives. I just, I was flabbergasted that that was the solution they offered. And I was very lucky to be connected with a holistic doctor in Colorado who actually worked with me via telemedicine before telemedicine was the cool thing to do. And which everyone knows about it now, which is fantastic. So I don't have to explain to people what telemedicine is anymore. But we were able to modify my lifestyle, my diet, um, added in some supplementation. And after a few months, my symptoms started to improve and my labs started to normalize. So I went back to my original doctor, had her run my blood work, and she inquired as to what I was doing because I had refused the medication from her. And she was like, but your labs are getting better. So she was like, what are you doing? So I tried to explain it to her and I, I either she didn't fully comprehend or just kind of dismissed it. And she was like, well, whatever you're doing, just keep doing it because it's working. So I was like, wow, that's, you know, that's validation enough for me.

Greg Muzzillo:

I know you mentioned in your book that you like to usually start most investigations with asking why, why things happen. So, tell us about the journey to becoming a chiropractic internist.

Dr. Anya Szigeti:

Okay. Absolutely. So after I got my diagnosis and was working with the chiropractic internist holistic doctor to modify my lifestyle, and I saw that the changes, I actually quit my job. That was an epiphany for me. And I decided that that was, that was where I needed to focus my time and energy. That was my calling. So I quit, my job, took some prerequisites and was accepted into chiropractic school. And while I was in school, I also completed the additional post-doctorate training at the same time for all the holistic internal medicine nutrition, 300 hours certifications that I needed to on top of everything. Um, and you know, just with the main goal of just to help others who were struggling, like I was, I remember just feeling Greg I was, felt so overwhelmed, so frustrated, so helpless when I got the diagnosis and the only solution was to wait and then Medicate. Like that just didn't seem like a good, good answer to me.

Greg Muzzillo:

You Also talk about what really chiropractic internist deal with investigating is a lot more, like chronic pain and depression and anxiety and something, you call environmental toxicity. We're going to come back to that and insomnia and fatigue. So I know that you help people with all of those issues, but what is environmental toxicity?

Dr. Anya Szigeti:

Yes. Great question. So there are things in our environment that are toxic to our bodies. And so there's a lot of chemicals, especially used in the last 50 to 70 years that weren't around before. And our bodies really don't know how to process those. So if we think of a simple example, our pesticides on our foods, so everyone's like, oh, why what's the importance of eating organic? Well, organic means that there not using any pesticides or foreign chemicals on our food. And the interesting thing with organic is actually the, the plant itself has to fight off pests. And so it's actually like a stronger plant because it's built up its own defenses. So the nutritional content of that food is actually higher. And then, which is kind of fascinating. And then you don't have the pesticide residues on the produce itself or in the produce itself either. So these are toxins that our body has to do something with, and our body doesn't know how to break these down. And so often these can cause, additional issues inside the body like inflammation, the inflammation just in general can cause headaches, joint pains, all sorts of negative side effects, but it's also the foundation for just about every disease process that we know of. Yeah.

Greg Muzzillo:

I know that you mentioned in your book and I was flabbergasted by this, that six in 10 Americans suffer from at least one chronic disease. How horrible. Yes,

Dr. Anya Szigeti:

Absolutely. And then if we think about auto-immune disease, that's a, that's a whole, that's a category of chronic disease and unfortunately auto-immune disease just in general, is the body attacking itself for some reason. So that's what I have with my thyroid. So for some reason, my thyroid became the target and my body started to attack my thyroid. And the problem is because the typical solution is to just replace the thyroid hormone. It doesn't address the cause. So the fibroid would still be attacked. And since the cause is still there, if you have one autoimmune disease, you are much more susceptible to have two or three or four. So unfortunately I have a lot of patients that come to me and they know they have one and then we test them and we find out they actually have several, which is kind of, kind of terrifying when you think about those facts, because the symptoms of a lot of these are very vague. There's fatigue, exhaustion, just kind of feeling sluggish digestion's off. And, and these can be almost explained away. I had a rough day, I just need a second cup of coffee, you know, in the evening, I'll just have another glass of wine. It'll be fine. Like I told you, I have my biases as well. I'm not perfect. I'm human as well. But the issue is that a lot of these will have very, very vague symptoms. So it's not like, oh, I have symptom X, which means I have Y it's not that simple. That's, that's where looking at things in a holistic view. So looking at the entire body, all of the things that affect your body. So that's where the environmental toxins come in. So that can be also, anything we put on our skin in our hair. So women makeup, perfume, cologne, these all have chemicals in them and they are negatively affecting our bodies. Unfortunately, it's kind of

Greg Muzzillo:

With some of the other day that we're putting these deodorants on our body that are right next to our lymph glands. And, we don't even know what we're putting into our body right next to our lymph glands. So it's incredible now going on in the book, not only did you talk about these chronic pain, depression, anxiety, et cetera, but you also talk about some of the causes being of things like learning disabilities, ADHD/ADD autism and mental illness really is the whole nutritional world can even impact those issues.

Dr. Anya Szigeti:

Yes Absolutely. And I know that we touched on a little bit about auto-immune and I just want to kind of circle back to that because it ties into your question. One of the, potential links with auto-immune is something called leaky gut. And so if we think about nutrition, there are several substances and foods that are very hard for our bodies to process and digest. And then if we couple in stress, alcohol, even over the counter medications, this can cause the lining of our gut to actually open up and kind of separate out and then large particles will escape out into systemic circulation. So I'll try to keep this very, very high level and that,

Greg Muzzillo:

But what did what does that mean? What, what are some examples of these kinds of foods or whatever that can create leaky gut and then what is it that's leaking out and going to where I don't, I'm not sure I followed.

Dr. Anya Szigeti:

Okay, that's fine, one of the main ones is gluten. And so this is found in breads pastas, cookies, crackers, baked goods, um, and gluten is a very, very difficult protein for our bodies to break down. And so when this gluten protein actually escapes out of the leaky gut, our bodies will attack it. It makes an immune response, which is what it's supposed to do to something foreign. But the problem is if we think autoimmunity, the thyroid tissue is very similar in chemical composition to gluten protein. So when our body builds up an immune army to the gluten protein, it's actually building up an immune army to attack our thyroid tissue as well. And so if we think about that correlation, so I consumed a lot of gluten products back in the day, and I had a lot of digestive issues, as well. And so I definitely think that that was one of the causative factors into my developing an autoimmune disease. So some people

Greg Muzzillo:

Will say when it comes to gluten, well, you know, Jesus in the Bible, he, they ate a lot of bread. Can you tell us a little bit about if there was a difference between the breads of 2000 years ago and the breads and the other items with wheat today?

Dr. Anya Szigeti:

Right. There's a difference between bread in America and bread in Europe, really my husband's Hungarian. And when we traveled to Hungary, I am able to consume the breads and pastas in hungry and not have the digestive issues that I have here if I were to consume a similar product. So if we take the environmental toxicity discussion and bring that back in, a lot of the grains are genetically modified here in America and also treated with pesticides. So if you think about the processing of you, take a very difficult item, that's already challenging for our body. Add in some toxins, add in, a lot of processing, getting it further and further away from the natural state. This is going to make it very, very, very inflammatory to our bodies and very difficult to digest. So

Greg Muzzillo:

Tell me about you can't outrun your fork. Where does that title even come from from your best selling book?

Dr. Anya Szigeti:

Yes, absolutely. So Greg, the title comes from a few places. So my own experiences, because I, am an endurance athlete and I've completed two Ironman triathlons, which is 2.4 miles of swimming, 112 miles of cycling. And then you wrap it up with a 26.2 mile marathon, just for fun, just for fun. So we did, I did two of those and then I've done over 18 marathons and ultra marathon, the longest being 50 miles. And even after doing all of this, I still ended up with an autoimmune disease so that it just reiterated for me, it didn't matter how much I exercised because, you know, nutrition was just so important and such a foundation in our health. And then unfortunately, I, I also did it as a MythBuster because I hear this from my patients, friends, even complete strangers that I can eat, whatever I want, as long as they exercise.

Greg Muzzillo:

You Know, that car example though, your fascination with the car, with your father, you know, sitting underneath the car, you know, I had, you know, cause I've been talking about diet a lot. That's how you and I met in the first place is to just kind of live a full and healthy, life, through nutrition and, and, and wellness. And, somebody did explain to me, you know, you wouldn't put cheap gas in your car. You wouldn't put sugar water in your car, you'd put the best gasoline that it requires in the best oils that it required. And yet we treat our cars so much differently than we treat our own bodies.

Dr. Anya Szigeti:

Yes, exactly. And especially if we think about correlating this on to maybe a lot of the people that are watching this, that are entrepreneurs that need to be on the top of their game, just like athletes as well. You want to be, you know, super clear of mind. You want to be able to manage your response to stress because of course, we're going to have stress every day, all day long. You don't want to go flying off the handlebars. You want to have energy. You want to be able to focus and just be really, really engaged. And the best way to do that is through being healthy. And so feeding your body the best fuel that money can buy is the best way to be the most productive, the best employee, the best boss, the best, you know, fill in the blank. Right,

Greg Muzzillo:

Right. So I'm sure that we have many listeners who, maybe have even tried many different diets. And there's probably a lot of confusion out there. And maybe some of the people who listen in are sick and tired of being sick and tired, maybe some of the people are saying, you know what, you're right. I need to take care of this engine as I fuel my body to be the most successful person so that I can live a long and healthy life as, as long as I'm creating wealth, I want to do it healthfully wealth-fully kind of thing. What is the best diet for our listeners?

Dr. Anya Szigeti:

Absolutely. Craig. So I think you and I had this discussion too, that I disliked the word diet. I feel that diet is very restrictive and it builds up this kind of negative connotation with food because, oh, I'm not allowed to have those. I can only have these. So I like to look at it as what is going to nourish and heal and fuel our bodies the best. And so there's four things. Try to keep it really, really simple. Actually I will say five, but we'll talk about the four. So every meal, every snack, you want to make sure you have fiber healthy fats, protein and something green or colorful. And then the fifth one I'm going to add in is water because majority of people are chronically dehydrated. So we have to make sure that we were drinking water. So if we think about, um, when we're traveling, cause I know a lot of people are busy business people, they're in airports, they're staying in hotels. Uh, my main recommendation would be to even just get a salad and top it with like chicken or fish and skip the dressing because dressings are hidden with a lot of inflammatory things so that would be my recommendation there. And then only drink water. I know it sounds crazy, but we definitely need to hydrate, especially when we're traveling and then as far as setting yourself up for success, a lot of my patients will tell me that they make the worst decisions when it comes to nutrition when they're tired, stressed, and hungry. So we want to make sure that we have emergency snacks on hand. And I even when I was traveling, especially by car, I would keep these in my car and I would also pack a cooler with like fresh veggies and hummus and nut butters and things like that. So I had them on hand, but if we're traveling and we can't have a cooler, grass-fed beef jerky, if you eat meat, organic, raw, nuts, and small amounts of organic, dried fruit, but you want to make sure it does not have any added sugar on the label. So those are my top recommendations for emergency snacks to keep on hand.

Greg Muzzillo:

Great suggestions. I appreciate that. So there's a lot of confusion out there. There's of course we had the low, we had the low fat diet, you know, where that was in Vogue and then, and, and when people and people were talking about eating low carbohydrates and I know people that are saying, okay, I'm going to eat no fat so I can have jelly beans. And I'm thinking that doesn't make any sense. So there was low fat, there was low carbohydrates, there's KETO, there's the blue zone diet, or our eating plan or whatever you do want to call it. What do you think people, how should people respond to these things that almost seem like fads that come and go?

Dr. Anya Szigeti:

I think they should respond to them as fads that come and go and just kind of let them go. My recommendation is to try to eat food in the most natural state possible, closest to the earth as nature intended as possible. That's where we're going to have the highest nutrient content, and the best source of fuel for our bodies. When we start to get into a lot of these diets. Yes, it's convenient. Yes. It's, you know, people will have some results, but most people, when they go on a diet will actually gain back the weight that they intended to lose. And then oftentimes they'll actually gain more. So that's just showing that there's that negative connotation with food and the restrictive patterns. So yes, there are certain health conditions that definitely would benefit from like a ketogenic diet and yes, cause that will cut out a lot of, um, carbohydrates. And, but the bigger issue is we're eating a lot of processed carbohydrates. So if we just didn't eat the processed carbohydrates, we wouldn't necessarily need to follow a strict keto diet.

Greg Muzzillo:

What is just so that our listener, I don't just want to assume what is a processed carbohydrate and where do we find those in the grocery store,

Dr. Anya Szigeti:

Cereal, bread, pasta, cookies, crackers, basically anywhere that's not the perimeter of the grocery store. So all of the items, that's where all the processed food lives, they start to stick them in the, in the, in the outs outside. But yeah, if you just stay around the outside did then you have a much higher chance. I mean, I'll run down and grab something down an aisle and I run back but yes, those foods unfortunately are very inflammatory to our bodies. They're processed, highly, highly processed. They also contain a lot of sugar. Greg and sugar is, what was used when we went into this low-fat craze because once we took the fat out of the food, it tasted terrible. So they put sugar in it to make it taste better. But then now we know that sugar feeds infection, sugar feeds, cancer, sugar feeds all these disease processes and we are consuming so much sugar as a society. It is terrifying. So I challenge everybody to just take a, take a day and look at the labels of the food that you're consuming and see if you can stay under 30 grams of sugar in a day. That's my challenge.

Greg Muzzillo:

Sugar, not carbohydrates, but you mean sugar where it says sugars. There's like total carbohydrates and then fiber and then sugars. And you're talking about where it says sugars. So is there any good sugar? I hear people say maybe cane sugar, brown sugar, or raw sugar, or is all sugar, just sugar?

Dr. Anya Szigeti:

Well, there's actually about 60 different names for sugar now. So they like to change the names and hide it in there. So you don't know what you're looking for which is super fun. There are a couple o f forms of sugar that are, that have health benefits. And, those are like organic raw honey, l ike local honey. There's a lot of health benefits with that. Especially if you have like seasonal allergies, because the bees are going around and collecting little bits of different plants from your environment. And so, it's actually helping you with your allergies and then organic raw maple syrup actually h as a ton of B vitamins, which are very necessary for energy production and are washed out from our bodies every day. So we need to replace them all the time. And so it's nice that you, that you a sk that as well, because in my book, I only use those two sweeteners and occasionally I'll use a little bit of dried f ruit. So organic dates are, I'm like d ry dates are another great source of, o f sweetness. And I use those for some of my dessert recipes as well.

Greg Muzzillo:

Yeah. Thank you for that. And, and, and one more question. That was something that was completely foreign to me until I read through your book is alkaline foods and lacto fermentation. I never even heard those words before. Tell us a little bit about that.

Dr. Anya Szigeti:

Yes. So we were talking about inflammation and chronic disease and disease process. So alkalinity and acidity plays a role in that as well. So diseases love and acidic environment and acidic environment ties in with information when we drink alcohol and we're dehydrated and we're not consuming or what we are consuming like the processed foods, the, we have a very acidic environment. So when we talk about alkaline, what some of the most alkaline foods on the planet are vegetables and fresh vegetables. So the idea is if we focus on increasing our intake of fresh vegetables, we are transitioning our body into a more alkaline state and basically making it, a place where disease process doesn't like to live. That's what I, that's how I think about it. If you think about an acidic environment, oh, the cancer's like to live there and the chronic diseases like to live there. If we transition to an alkaline state, they don't like to live there. So that's just helping to prevent and reduce the risk of a lot of these diseases. So we think about digestion. We, know that we have a lot of bacteria and research is showing we have a lot of bacteria within our, our gut. And we actually have more bacteria cells in our gut than we do cells that make us what we consider a human, which is pretty fascinating. I thought that was fascinating. And so with lacto-fermented, it's actually, a preservation process that just uses the vegetable and salt. So if you think about like sauerkraut, for an example, you basically shred down some sour cream, some cabbage, put it with a salt water and then let it sit and it creates good bacteria. So then when you consume it, you're actually feeding so you're getting fiber from the cabbage, which is food for the back to the good bacteria. And you're adding in the lactobacillus, which are good bacteria into your digestive system. So this helps with digestion and it helps build our immune system too. So that's huge with focusing on optimal health as well, because the majority of our immune system is in our gut.

Greg Muzzillo:

Want to encourage everybody and, you know, I don't get paid for this, but I love your book, Dr. Anya, because it talks about how to take care of this machine, right? That is going to be able to be the machine that creates our million dollar and multi-million dollar success. So, I want to thank you very much for joining Me today. I want to thank you very much for the advice. And most importantly, thank you for the book. You can't Outrun your Fork. There's no doubt in my mind why it is an Amazon best seller. It's great advice for everybody, no matter where they're at in their life or their million dollar journey. Dr. Anya, thank you very much.

Dr. Anya Szigeti:

Thank you, Greg. It's a pleasure to be here. I really appreciate it.

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