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Hi, my name is Chris Burris. I'm a longevity expert and the chief scientist at a lab focused on a longevity molecule. My primary focus is to help people live longer and better lives with science. Make sure to subscribe and share so you and your friends can live longer and better. Well, actually, so you and your friends can live beyond the norms.

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Hi, and welcome to the next episode of the Live Beyond the Norms Health and Longevity Podcast. Our next guest, Dr. Lauren Leiva, is here as a guide today. A little bit about Dr. Lauren. Dr. Lauren is a doctor of physical therapy with over 20 modality licenses and certifications. She is a contributing author to the HeartMap for Health and a monthly magazine called Lifespanning Magazine where she contributes to every single issue.

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Many know her as the queen of biohacking. Dr. Lauren combines advanced physical therapy, manual therapy, performance science, mind-body practices, and wellness technologies to help people recover, move better, and optimize their performance potential.

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Her work is powerful and impactful, and her mission is to spread the message of do no harm to the biohacking and wellness community. Hopefully, we can help her on this mission with this interview today. Dr. Lauren, thank you so much for joining us today.

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Hello, hello. Thanks for having me. Such a privilege. I have the queen of biohacking on my podcast. I'm ecstatic right now. And before we get to your area of expertise, I like to go back. I like to go much further back. What was it like growing up little Lauren? Where did you grow up? What were your parents like? And if there was some event or someone you could pinpoint as the reason you would ultimately become the queen of biohacking and champion of do no harm biohacking, what or who would that be?

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Wow. So there's been so many of these pinpoints. I will try to make that long, long, long, long, long story short. I grew up in South Florida. I am a born and raised Floridian. That's why I'm barefoot. And most often you'll see me running around conferences barefoot. So I'm the definition of the Florida girl. I grew up pretty much...

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I loved ice skating sports. My parents were divorced, very different from one another. My mom was a hippie, a barefoot hippie. She would go to drumming circles on the beach, which brought out that spiritual side of me, mantras, women's circles. So she was very spiritual and female oriented.

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My father was very tough, very strict, and always challenged me athletically, always put me against my brothers in competitions to balance in certain ways. You know, he was Romanian, so, you know, gymnast. He would have me L sit on the ground and hold my body off the ground just using my hands when I was little and, you know, holding those circle rings out like this and head-butting him. My mom thought I would get brain damage, but...

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You know, I can crack anything with my forehead. So all of these little things built me and shaped those foundations. Unfortunately, when I was 13, I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease.

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I didn't have the best insurance. I didn't have the best doctors. And I went through multiple, I felt like a human experiment. You know, like most people who have been diagnosed with something chronic, you learn that it's not perfecting medicine. It's truly practicing. It's truly guessing a lot out there, a lot of guesswork. And I took so many different medicines, acical, flagell, 6-mercaptopirine. I did infusion centers, Humira, Remicade, um...

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My hair was falling out. I became very skinny. I was breaking my bones as a figure skater. And before that, I was a little Miss Hawaiian Tropic model, you know, and my mom always was very proud of my beauty. And at least that's what she told me.

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You know, I had a lot of good tools that helped me moving along on the outside by ice skating, modeling, and being smart in school. But on the inside of my body, I was dying, you know. And also the doctors diagnosed me with the most extreme form of Crohn's disease. However, I also had some unhealthy things going on in my home environment. So all of these things shaped how I lead my practice along with, unfortunately, my mother...

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being killed from malpractice. So doing no harm, going beyond what someone is telling you, like what is the fishbowl you're returning this fish? Cause you could fix a fish, but if you keep returning it to the same fishbowl of water, it's gonna keep getting the same disease.

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So that's what took me beyond the physical part into spiritual and even more. And not saying that I even fix all parts of those things, but I create an amazing network, which is why I love the nickname of Cleanup Biohacking because...

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There's so many queens and, you know, addressing all of these things. I'm not a mental health counselor, you know, so I know many amazing mental health counselors because, you know, with my background, I might tell somebody to kill somebody, you know me. So it's not about being able to master everything. I think that's something going wrong with certain parts of the community that we're in and things that we're going to go over later in the podcast, but yeah.

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I do have 20 certifications, but most of them are bulked around doing the same thing, like neuromuscular physical therapy. I help people walk and talk again. That's when I got into becoming a brain tap practitioner and doing the meditations because it dealt with the brain. I love the NewFit from NewBee, and they have continuing education offerings for physical therapists that specialize on pelvic floor, muscular sclerosis, and...

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As you probably know, in the world of continuing education, there's a lot of BSing, and people can just play these courses in the background to make sure they keep their license. But I wanted to make sure, especially with my mom, unfortunately, passing from malpractice, is to always better myself, always to be in the place of learning and expansion. Because what I've noticed coaching some people is...

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especially if you're making a lot of money and you get stuck on a wheel. Some people don't want to learn new stuff. Some people don't want to learn about maybe your supplement and tell their patients because they're just doing something that works. But for me, I always want to know what is the best thing for my patient, even if it's outside of myself.

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So let's go back a little bit, kind of flesh this out a little bit. So 13, diagnosed with Crohn's disease. You're ice skating. By the way, I grew up – my mom loved ice skating. That's the one Olympic – winter Olympic sport I really kind of watched fairly religiously. And you broke a bone.

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Being on prednisone for a long time, also not having insurance and when you have something like Crohn's disease. Okay, so the prednisone, was that an outcropping of Crohn's disease in an attempt to kind of address that?

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Yes. So when I was a teenager and a lot of my pictures, my face was like very circular. They would call it moon face or, you know, prednisone face. And I was very, so like, you don't need filler. You just got to get on prednisone, right? And, but it inflames your joints and you really should not be on it for an extended amount of time. A big problem with my healthcare when I was younger due to bad insurance or no insurance is if it went to either the hospital or,

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like medical centers that were either free or low cost. And people were just checking in, checking out, what did the last doctor do? Let me repeat that. So I feel like I was on steroids for what seemed to be five years, a lot of steroids. And that caused me to have bone density issues.

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having pregnant zone. So when you're on the ice, you fall, ice is very hard, you know, and most people fall on an outstretched arm. They call that in physical therapy, a foosh, you know, fall on an outstretched arm. So I broke this wrist three times.

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You know, just through the, that's what happens when people just start taking medication. Maybe it was controlling the stomach symptoms I was talking about, but it ruined my bones. And maybe I should have been more than five, two, who knows? Maybe I should have been taller, but I am okay where I am. However, I also broke this wrist once.

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um when you're a figure skater and you practice they have a pulley and your instructor goes around with you so she'll like pull up so you could practice your doubles and your triples pulling in and it's very fun to practice and the first time I broke my wrist my instructor actually dropped it and so I was really high up and it was like an open spiral fracture it was pretty terrible and it just was really weak there but um

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When I had my first son before I opened my clinic, I put him in basketball and I would play basketball on the side all the time. And I reversed the bone density issues in my hands and my wrists by playing basketball all day, almost every day, because one thing that I think makes...

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me the queen of biohacking or things happen different at my center, which we'll get into before, is discipline and strength. But I really wanted to reverse what was going on. And I started doing handstands. That brought the yoga in me because I wanted to improve my bone density. So walk us through real quick, what is Crohn's disease? What did the medical community think these steroids were gonna do? They had this downstream impact and then we can kind of move on after that.

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Gotcha. So Crohn's disease is, if you go to the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation, there's a lot of information out there. And there's a lot of misdiagnosis. I was going to the bathroom probably 100 times a day. You're constipated and you have diarrhea, malnourished, losing weight. I have all of my teeth are implants, you know, because it wrecks havoc from the mouth all the way to...

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And I've had colorectal surgery. So, you know, because when you go to the bathroom a hundred times a day, there's things that happen throughout the whole digestive tract. And that's what they're trying to control with prednisone, which is like inflammation or acical or flagell or 6-mercaptoperine and all of these things caused other things like pseudosporiasis, pseudorheumatoid arthritis.

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Because I started, you know, as you can see my skin color and I'm Floridian, and I never burn now because I'm not on any medicine. But when I was on medicine, I realized I started hiding behind my hair, behind hats. My skin felt like it was burning. And then they diagnosed me with psoriasis. I fought that diagnosis, which is why they called it pseudosporiasis, because it was tied in with the medications.

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So it wasn't true psoriasis. It was a side effect, just like the rheumatoid arthritis. So, you know, this is what really encouraged me. How can I find another way to get off all of these medicines? And my mom would introduce me to nutritionists and holistic people, and they used to piss me off. I would cry, and I would be so angry because the doctors told me this is it. This is a diagnosis.

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Crohn's cannot be cured and there's no diet that can fix this it's it is what it is and all of my mom's healers and friends are like diet sleep all the things we talk about like you know it's not new this stuff has been out there and and they're like you know if you whenever you're ready to fix this let's fix this and I'm like are you can I curse on this podcast yes but I'm like I'm like