121: From Suicidal Anorexic to Buff Naturopathic Doctor – with Paul Maximus

You, too, can have the healthy body and mind you deserve.

Transformation – a topic Dr. Paul Maximus knows well. He is a living, breathing case study of the hope that exercise and natural remedies offer. 

His story of transformation is remarkable.  

You see, in his early twenties, Dr. Paul was an anorexic, depressed marathon runner. He finally hit “rock bottom” while preparing for yet another half marathon. He crashed and burned that day after stepping off a treadmill. The depression seemingly won the battle – but its victory was short-lived. 

Through hard work, Dr. Paul won the war – remaking himself, step-by-step, from an antidepressant popping university dropout to the doctor, guide, and teacher he is today. 

This heavyweight bodybuilding champion, international body transformation coach, and naturopathic physician is now obsessed with helping others find the body, health, and mind they deserve. 

Because what you can be, you must be. 

In this podcast, we cover:

• Dr. Paul’s overarching journey from his lowest point to the highest
• How Dr. Paul defines “depression”
• The importance of writing down your principles for healing depression
• The five tests Dr. Paul uses to diagnose and treat his patients
• Dr. Paul’s ultimate guide to beating depression
• How Dr. Wayne Dyer played a role in Paul’s healing
• How depression serves a purpose according to evolutionary theory

When your coping strategy runs out of gas. 

Dr. Paul grew up in what he calls a “normal, regular” childhood. His father was a surgeon, and Dr. Paul inherited his hardworking, type-A nature. Growing up in Canada, young Paul played a lot of street hockey, and as an immigrant family, he learned how to speak Lithuanian as a second language. 

Paul left for university, which is when depression “kind of snuck up underneath me.” Paul describes depression as “a feeling of heaviness,’ and looking at the world with pessimism. 

His one seeming outlet or life preserver at that time was long-distance running. Young Paul was constantly running, at one point doing a half marathon every week for ten months. 

After a year, his coping strategy gave out. Depression fell on him like a ton of bricks, and Paul couldn’t run anymore.

Soon after, Paul dropped out of university. He began using antidepressants, and at 6’2”, his weight dropped to 133 pounds. Clinically anorexic and depressed, Paul hit rock bottom. 

Dr. Paul goes on to share his “4 D’s” warning signs someone is depressed. Be sure to tune in if you suspect someone you know might be depressed.

Does your doctor do this?

Today, many doctors get impatient, offended, or downright irritated with patients who do their research. A patient who prints off a few articles and brings some good questions to the appointment can cause some doctors to get their feathers ruffled. 

Not Dr. Paul. He celebrates patients who come in with questions after reading a ton of online material. Dr. Paul encourages his patients to do their homework. He is not threatened by that at all. 

So that is the difference between an “authoritative” doctor and a “collaborative” doctor. Dr. Paul is a collaborative doctor. And here’s some excellent news: he sees patients online! So you don’t have to live close to Dr.Paul to schedule an appointment with him if you are interested. 

Dr. Paul understands depression from first-hand experience. He’s become an authority on treating depression with a naturopathic approach, using natural remedies and not relying on Big Pharma. That’s how he works with all his patients, depressed or not. If you have any health issues, tune in and get to know Dr. Paul. He knows how to help people transform their life. 

Episode Resources: 
Dr. Maximus.com
THE 52-IN-52 CHALLENGE (free download): drmaximus.com/52
Dr. Paul Maximus on Instagram
Paul Maximus on Facebook
Dr. Paul Maximus on LinkedIn
Episode 025: The Five Health Tests You Need With Dr. Maximus
The Benefits of Kava with Cameron George

Read The Episode Transcript:

Wade Lightheart: For our listeners, as you can say, I'm talking with Dr. Paul Maximus is a naturopathic doctor. We've had a long, deep friendship for many, many years, and he's done a lot of work with me. You can check out episode number 25. We're just catching up here where he goes, the five tests that every man needs to have. I use that as my Bible every year. And Dr. Paul, for those who don't know is kinda the pitcher perfect person in my history of the guy that I admire the most, it's kind of done the most. Oh, he's kind of like, if you built a machine and you put in like the genetics and you put in the body structure and you put it in the brain structure and you put it in the personality and you kind of like took this perfect combination of ingredients to bake the personality of a human being, you're like my ideal standards. And it's like, God, man. I love that I have all these things faults and flaws, and I'm okay with that makes me feel good when I'm around someone such as yourself. So, what's new and exciting in Dr. Maximus' world,

 Paul Maximus: If only people knew well, when we first met it's because I was reaching out to the great Wade Lightheart for coaching and mentorship and seeing you in exactly that prism. So it's awesome to be able to give it back after many, many years to finally catch up and have something to give back.

 Wade Lightheart: So you've got a great clinic and you're dealing with high performance people that want to have the most of the life, that's dealing with an increasingly complex world. As I talk about all the time, there's these standards out there that we've gotta be like single digit body fats. We've got to be making millions of dollars a year. We've got to be a tantric sex god or goddess in the bedroom. We need to have some sort of creative expression, like, I do sculpting or art or I make like beautiful music on the side. I recite poetry and I've read the entire summation of the great books of the Western world and can debate with philosophers at the various Ted talks in order to put forth my ideas. And of course everyone comes short to that. So, your journey is pretty interesting. You had this, for those who didn't listen 25, you want to talk about your journey to be the person you are today and how you are helping people cope with the complexities of society from as a health practitioner, as a high performance,naturopathic doctor.

 Paul Maximus: It's been a long road. I think we all have sort of frameworks and tools and ways that we view the world, right. And, and you have a toolbox, we all have it. You're born with the toolbox. Your parents give you a couple of tools. You pick up a couple along the way something comes along, that's a stressor and you get tested. The tool kit gets tested for some people really early in childhood, whether there's some traumatic experience or, whenever it's some people might be late in life, you're not really tested until the death of a spouse or something. For me, I was first really tested when I moved off to university and I realized that my toolkits sucked. My main tool before…

 Wade Lightheart: What was like, How was the normal?

 Paul Maximus: I was a normal, regular kid. My dad's a surgeon. So I was like type A, hardworking played street hockey did my homework learned Lithuanian on the side, like, were we were a Lithuanian, you know, a Lithuanian immigrant ish kind of family very kind of traditional sort of secluded doing our own thing, like Lithuanian studies. And we were spoke Lithuanian at home as the first language growing up. We actually got in trouble speaking English when I was growing up until eventually my mom and dad couldn't contain it anymore. And then it was like, whatever. Now it's all English. It was a pretty like normal immigrant dish kind of upbringing. Right. You're maintaining this culture. That's not really here, but your, your what's it called entropy or entropy, which one's the one with the chaos?

 Wade Lightheart: Entropy is to enter into chaos and centropy is the reforming into a more complex systems.

 Paul Maximus: So you're trying to like maintain this complex system within this entropic or whatever environment, this Canadian culture that's pulling it out in every direction. So I grew up under that sort of an arc. AndI went off to university and depression hit, you know, and didn't hit initially abruptly. It kind of snuck up at crept up underneath me. And it was just this feeling of like heaviness, these thoughts that, that like these thoughts of heaviness and a pessimistic way of looking at the world and the stress that you just can't seem to get rationally. You can't get past. And one of the tools that I had, the only tool really that I had, that it was effective enough to abate. It was long distance running. So I ran and I ran, I ran and My dad was a marathon runner.

 Paul Maximus: I had done I think for 10 months. At one point I did a half marathon every week for 10 months just in training and keeping myself afloat in the first year. At the end of first year, my body gave out, basically I couldn't do my one coping strategy anymore. And depression hit me like a ton of bricks, just landed on me. And it was at that point that I had to drop out of school. I was putting on a bunch of antidepressants. I effectively was completely broken. I went down to 133 pounds. So I was clinically anorexic and depressed.

 Wade Lightheart: And how tall are you?

 Paul Maximus: Six foot, two, and I was a Bionicle. I was really thin. And, the one thing that I had the long distance running I didn't have anymore. And so suddenly I needed help. And, this is something I was hoping to touch on today. There's a looming wave of depression that either people have already started to feel, or that's coming, there's some world health organization stats suggesting that depression's continually on the rise, it's going to keep building. And so I went to the doctor. I was on anti-depressants.

 Wade Lightheart: I just want to interject here. How would you classify as a clinician? What is the definition of depression? I think there's a lot of misidentification or unidentification. I don't know if that's, that's a really a word or the lack thereof. Like when you gave me that description, I've just probably, I could probably say that almost all, everyone in the community that I grew up in small town, Canada was only suffering from the French, other than the odd church chore singing in the choir, like alleviated depression by getting liquored on Friday night.

 Paul Maximus: And there's the DSM has a set of criteria that somebody can go and check off. There's a Hamilton, depression inventory, a Deck depression inventory. If somebody is wondering, they can go and score themselves effectively on a continuum. It's everything at the extreme end that you would imagine to be unable to function, heaviness, persistent, pervasive, personal, permanent thoughts that are heavy and pessimistic. There's, utting aside the DSMs criteria, which is, which is very, mery well fleshed out. People can Google it. I like to look at situations like this under the four D's, the four D's of psychopathology. And this is not airtight. It's not like you can diagnose somebody walking down the street, put the four D's and see like warning signs. It's a framework. It's totally, it's a framework.

 Paul Maximus: And so the first D is danger. If you're either a danger to yourself, you're suicidal, or you're a danger to somebody else get help right away. You'll meet the criteria for psychopathology. D is danger. Second one is deviance. How weird are you compared to the average person? It's not diagnostic on its own. Weirdness can be a really good thing. We want weird creative artists. We want weird producers. We want, we can suffer from depression. Interesting. Totally. So it's not on its own. It's not a diagnosis. We want some weirdness, but how weird are you can be another, clue. Dysfunction is the third. And so if you can't get out of bed, you're not able to make enough money to sustain yourself.

 Paul Maximus: All your relationships are burning down. You're dysfunctional. So you'd meet that third D and the last one's distress. Are you stressed out about your situation? Obviously, if you are, whether it's a pathology, a diagnosable pathology, or not get help, you're going to feel better connecting with somebody, talking with somebody about it. So I'd like to apply the four D's when it comes to, is this a problem? Am I just sad having a regular emotion of kind of retreat and defensiveness and kind of self-soothing or, has this been protracted? It's been two or three months. Really Life's going down the toilet. I'm not functioning. I'm not getting out of bed. I haven't showered in three days. Like that's where you're starting to check more and more of those boxes. Right? So I was checking those boxes. I was not functioning. I couldn't hold a job, but I had forties initially on a part-time basis at school.

 Paul Maximus: And then I had to drop out even to that, cause it wasn't able to get out of bed. I got fired from two jobs and I got put on antidepressants initially thinking that those would be really helpful for me, those would lift me up. Those would do everything,

 Wade Lightheart: Take a pill and I'm good to go again. Right? Everything's going to be rainbows and unicorns.

 Paul Maximus: And obviously it didn't right. And so I floundered along for a little while I was put on a medication, swap the dose, swap, increase the dose, swap the medication. This happened for a couple of months. I just kinda kept floundering. And antidepressants they are more effective than placebo. Placebo studies have shown. Placebo has about a 35% success rate in depression and antidepressants have about a 55%. So you're looking at about 20% increase over placebo, right?

 Paul Maximus: So it's not earth shattering, but it is more effective. These are meta analyses. We have tons of them. Now that the mechanisms are, are in debate because could this be a serotonin deficiency? Could it be because some accessorize or anti-inflammatory at the same time? So it's masking a dietary insufficiency. This to me kind of puts us in the realm of the conversation of what are the theories of depression, which is a fascinating area to me because when I was depressed and I went to the doctor and I said, I'm depressed. I'm not getting a bed up crying, blah, blah, blah. Like it helped me. He said, Oh, do you have a serotonin deficiency? Your brain is effectively broken. You need to take this pill, it'll fix your deficiency. And you can talk to somebody if you want.

 Paul Maximus: And that was kind of it. So I went home and I remember crying, taking the first pill and my ex-girlfriend's driveway. Just that pill admitting to yourself that I'm broken. I don't know what the solution is. Nobody really knows except this pill is going to fix it. And so I remember just like, that's the ultimate you let go. And just I'm busted. Nobody really knows what to do. Hope this pill is a hail Mary, here we go. Kind of thing. And of course the pill didn't on its own 20% more than placebo. It didn't really lift me significantly to the point where I felt like, okay, job's done. Let's go get my life back together again. So in the depression theories, there's a serotonin hypothesis. There's micronutrient deficiencies. My diet at the time obviously sucks. Cause I was training so hard.

 Paul Maximus: There's cortisol to testosterone, imbalances, there's sleep irregularities, which obviously I had there's the psychological contribution, your frameworks, the way you see the world, the way you analyze things, the meaning you put on to things, your principles, your values, if they exist, if you have even explicated them, are maybe not heading in the direction you want them to go. You know, maybe one of the more interesting theories to me though, cause that's all, that's all the medical stuff somebody's listening and they're like, I'm depressed. I've scored myself and, or I just feel like I could feel a lot better. What should I do first go see your doctor, because even it's not to go get an antidepressant though, maybe it'll help 20. Remember but first rule out, make sure it's not a B12 deficiency or anemia, or, hypogonadism your testosterone is really low, it could be a chronic infection could be addiction. Pain could be anything else. And it's not just, you need an antidepressant, it's you fix the other thing and depression will fix itself. Right.

 Wade Lightheart: Right. And would you say that there's a pretty solid base to in today's world that there's a lot of contributing factors that lead to the end result classified as depression, because we've really altered human social structure, human agricultural use, like pretty much every aspect of human nature has been radically altered in the last 80 years.

 Paul Maximus: There's a ton of contributions. Right. And so if, somebody goes and sees the doctor and they're only getting an antidepressant it's like the story of the five blind guys in the elephant, right? Because you're only fixing the tail. You're only fixing the tail. Cause that's the only part the doctor has been trained to see, or that they have time to address, or maybe get a tail in the leg. If you get an antidepressant plus a pharmaceutic or plus a talk therapy, you go and talk to somebody. And so it's not the full elephant. You have to take a step back and work with somebody or read, learn, acquire the resources, to be able to figure out what exactly is going on. So serotonin hypothesis, underlying medical diagnoses, there's a whole bunch of tests we talked about in the past. In the past interview, we did. What episode was it, one more time?

 Wade Lightheart: Episode 25, the five tests that everybody needs to do. I do that all the time. And I think it's a great series,

 Paul Maximus: Dude. I saw this as well. I love this well, thanks. Fantastic.

 Wade Lightheart: Thanks. For those listening, that was the blue book. The biological blueprint book is basically how Matt and I go out figuring all kinds of weird stuff out.

 Paul Maximus: It is a Bible man. There's, it's really dense. It's fantastic. It's like the Holy Grail.

 Wade Lightheart: You should see if the next book or really it's out of control.

 Paul Maximus: That's amazing. I can't wait to see it. This is already like a Holy Grail. I was stoked to see it. So you've got the serotonin hypothesis, a bunch of medical hypotheses rule out all those tests. Another area that I think is interesting is the whole idea that we live in a sick society. What's that quote about? It's no accomplishment to be well adapted to a sick society. And so this is like, is your depression or your mood or your lack of high-performance, let's even take a step back. And when I say depression, somebody listening might be like, well, I'm not depressed to this. Doesn't apply to me. Well, it totally does because the flip side of depression is a liveliness, right? So Everything we're talking about here to fix depression, if you don't have all of this stuff fixed up, then you're not as fully alive as you could be.

 Wade Lightheart: I can remember listening to Dr. David Hawkins, discuss fame,going back to that thread again, because now, you know, Andy Warhol said it best when everybody was going to get to a point where they got their 15 minutes of fame and maybe it's 15 seconds on Instagram video now, but it was,he talked about how he was,interviewed on a famous television program. And he went to this big studio and they kind of cranked up the lights and there's millions of people watching. And it was like the stardom. And then after it was, it was gone. Like he couldn't even find his way out of the building, had to find a janitor to help him. Then he walked out on the street and he was just another dude on the street. And then he said in that moment, he grasped that the shift between say someone who is a rockstar with 50,000 or a hundred thousand people and stays.

 Wade Lightheart: And then you get, you get back to life. And you're just an ordinary guy that, has all the normal aspects. And you see how many people with super fame would struggle because such a peak, a liveliness there needs to be the oscillating Valley. But in your case, particularly you kind of outlined some of the things you're in this Valley, you've taken this pill under the prescription of a licensed professional. It doesn't get you kind of where you want to go because of maybe some of the associated factors or contributors that aren't being characterized, they're classified or addressed, whether that's out of ignorance or certainly not malevolence, what steps did you take? Because you made quite an incredible turnaround.

 Paul Maximus: And all of this ended up feeding into this program that I've built now called the ultimate guide to defeating depression. And it ultimately culminated in me going to naturopathic college and learning that there's a therapeutic approach. They should apply to every problem, start from the least invasive thing and work your way up to more and more invasives. And so at the base of the pyramid should be your beliefs, your psychology, right? What you do masterfully. And almost every, every time I chat with you, my beliefs are, are shifted and tweaked and improved. That's really the, the base of everything. Every treatment, no matter what the condition is, if it's diabetes, you have to learn about diabetes, have to become self-reflective about your emotions and your eating patterns. And before you can take a diet plan or an exercise plan, you have to look at what am I doing right now? There's no way you can go five steps forward and adopting the latest, greatest plan. If you have no idea what your current baseline is.

 Wade Lightheart: So we need to know, what part of the galaxy am I in? If I'm going to set the nav, the computer just somewhere else, it's kind of like that whole scene when Luke Skywalker and Han solo in the Millennium Falcon. And he's like, well, why don't we just hit the hyperdrive? He said, listen, going into hyper space. Isn't like, you know dusting crops, boy, you don't get the coordinates, right. You fly into a star, or into a asteroid belt or a supernova or go with it. Like you got to know your coordinates, decide where you're going to be. There's some computational time here. And just because the death star is on you're shooting at you, whatever your Travis [inaudible 39:13] life is, he still got to get to figure out all this parameters before you blast off to that next destination. I think a lot of people in today's kind of, Hey, press a button. Amazon delivers by this afternoon. It's kind of like, wait a minute. Well, we don't even know where your address is. We don't know. We haven't established where you actually are at. How did you do that?

 Paul Maximus: Yeah, so with psychology being the base, I immediately took to, I mean, Googling at the time, basically anything I could find about depression and, and this is to people's credit. Nowadays doctors are often, ruffled by a patient who comes in with XYZ articles and questions and stuff. I celebrate that. I think that's amazing if you're a patient who reads a ton online and you go to the doctor and the doctor gets mad at you for having read a bunch and have a bunch of questions. That's maybe an authoritative, not a collaborative doctor, find a collaborative doctor who loves your enthusiasm, who loves that. You're learning, who loves that. You're trying and just needs to shift and redirect you to better materials to read or do a better framework. But so celebrate if you've got that scrappiness where you're trying to take, take it in your own hands and learn about it and read about it.

 Paul Maximus: That's awesome. Don't bury that, celebrate that and dive in, learn good quality stuff about whatever your condition is. So I dove in, I started reading everything about depression, especially in the psychology realm. I read a ton of Wayne Dyer stuff. I know you're familiar with him, the biggest lesson. And I read a book called Your Erroneous Zones by Dr. Wayne Dyer, phenomenal. So pivotal change. I mean, there's probably five pounds of highlighter in there just because I, I highlighted every word, almost the biggest lesson that I got from that was that of self-responsibility fundamentally. I think that that a lot of us come into the world with the view of who can I blame? Where can I put the responsibility on somebody else and blame somebody else instead of saying, okay, there's a problem in front of me, 99%. I didn't have it. I didn't cause, but 1% of it, maybe I contributed to. So instead of saying, well, 99%, it was them. So right now, 99%, I did nothing. No look at own, fully own a hundred percent of that. 1% that you contributed.

 Wade Lightheart: Which is pervasive in world, somebody is responsible because I'm a victim of whatever society, my skin color, my economic status, my gender, where I am in the family by social set. Like, I mean, there is no stop. There is like, if you really want to investigate, you can be a victim really easy. There's always a reason and legitimately so, but it doesn't get you anywhere. That's the problem.

 Paul Maximus: It fundamentally takes power away from you instead of giving you power, right? And you only build momentum. You only gain power by taking self responsibility of whatever, little part of it you can. Right. So that was my battle cry. And I just took it on myself that if I'm going to get out of this, it's it looks like it's not going to be the antidepressants. It looks like the talk therapy is being really slow. What's that

 Wade Lightheart: You get to the, was there a moment where you got to that? Like, was there anything that triggered that event? Cause sometimes there's I think it was in that movie where the guy says, even an alcoholic has a moment of clarity. Like there's these moments in our worst places, maybe it's in a relationship. I remember in a bad relationship, there was a moment that happened that I was like, okay, I'm done with it. I'm like the suffering stops here. We need a new chart, a new path, even though it was a radical departure, what I was doing, was there a moment that triggered that?

 Paul Maximus: Not that I remember, no, that was, I just remember the book and how much I wrote in there and how much I underlined. And so there was not really one moment, but I remember that whole period of time being so revolutionary for self-responsibility as a concept, this is massive. And so that that was the base. That was the beginning. And the first therapist that I saw who was just the, the first one, I guess that my dad Googled or found was a Freudian psychoanalyst. Okay. And I'm I'm to this day, I'm really not a fan of Freud. He was, I think a Freudian psychology I'll get into, I'll get it. I'll caveat that. But it, the framework was effectively, one of, kind of the blind leading the blind, spinning me in circles in the dark of like, tell me more about your anger and your frustration.

 Paul Maximus: And the more I would vent, the more, it seemed like none of it was going anywhere. There was no direction. There was no framework. There was no positive. I like to look at therapists as trampolines. And so if you go to a therapist that can bring you down, which they should be able to bring you into stuff that you don't want to talk about. And then when you leave, you get a little bit of a lift, you get some lightness, you get a different perspective, you get something where you don't have to always leave happy, happy, happy, but they take you down. And then they spring you back up so that your life ends up generally being better. Your mood gets better over time. And this was a broken trampoline. This therapist, just every time I went felt worse, felt worse, more confused, no framework. So when I came across humanistic psychology Maslow's hierarchy of needs all of Maslow's stuff, basically some of young stuff as well. It really contrast it to me. How Freud was just this pessimist who just kept turning it back to, Oh, it's your childhood and blame your mom and dad and blame everybody else around you. And justify that to the …

 Wade Lightheart: Great Clarification of the subconscious and super consciousness, conscious melons. But there was like no escape from this realm.

 Paul Maximus: Yeah. And so it reinforcing it totally. And so it's just a spiral that keeps going down. And when I found humanistic psychology is a spiral going up. Right. Maslow's hierarchy of needs was, was huge. First in the psychology realm. I think finding it's so important to find a therapist that you like, if you go and find one, you don't jive with them the first time, or two hang in there, maybe another one or two sessions you get through three sessions, maybe four, you still not vibing with them. Go with somebody else. Don't, write off the whole field. This can be a therapist, a coach, a doctor of any stripes find somebody that you like, whose brain you want to resonate against because that's effectively what therapy is. You're marinating in each other's brains. So that you stole your mirror neurons of thinking slowly start to take on theirs.

 Wade Lightheart: Right. So that you can ideally take on some thought processes or an upgraded version of beliefs that will take you out of the debilitating components of whatever psychological condition that you're suffering from. So that the therapist's job is to kind of stair-step you out of the basement of your life, into, the main floor. So then you can decide, well, do I want to add some more additions, do move to a new house, but you got to get you up to a functionality level where you are now competent in society and have a foundational component to build a quality happy life.

 Paul Maximus: Yeah. A hundred percent. And there's, I ended up fast forward to will fill in the blank here, but fast forward about a year and a half, when I got everything under, all the blocks in a row, went back to school and I was getting nineties in psychology. And so I went back with a vengeance to study psychology, and that led me down this whole path. And one of the studies that we were taught in my fourth year of, I think it was a counseling psychology class was about the importance of the therapeutic Alliance. There had been for a long time, same in the diet world. I mean, there's so many analogies between therapy and between the psychology and the nutrition world where for decades therapists were fighting it out. Cognitive behavioral therapy is the best dialectical behavioral therapies.

 Paul Maximus: The best act is the best guest stall humanistic Friday. And they were just duking it out. Mine's better than yours. My Dick is longer than yours. And eventually some researchers, I forget their names came and put together all the studies they could find on the effect sizes of all these different means of doing therapy. And they found that the overwhelming predictor of if somebody got better was not the type of therapy they did. Although there are some that are better for some conditions than others. It was overwhelmingly something called the therapeutic Alliance. How connected did you feel to the person sitting across the coffee table? Right. Wow. And that was the number one, predictive variable. Doesn't matter what therapist, what their perspective, what their approach, personality differences, included in that it was the therapeutic Alliance. How, how well connected did you feel to them? How much did you feel seen and heard and validated and trusting?

 Wade Lightheart: It says a curiosity cause I'm, I'm an amateur student of neurochemistry and neurophysiology in the creation of new neural pathways. Our company, we now have Netopia, which is providing nutritional solutions for neurochemical optimization. And then I also am a student of neuro neurofeedback feedback where we're, repatterning new neural connections. And of course that's a big aspect of my background in exercise physiology and training, you're training, you know, highly refined motor skills or excitatory, motor neurons. Do you feel that connectivity that you have to the therapists, it creates a neurochemical kind of optimal environment where new patterning in a positive aspect is a key element to the development of what I would say cognitive capacities that allow you to function, as a person in society. Do you think that might be the reason why from us, if you want to get kind of a scientific theory kind of method,

 Paul Maximus: For sure. Yeah. There's something called neuroplasticity neurons that fire together, wire together, people in marketing will often say, Oh, so and so supplement or technology or gadget changes your brain. Everything changes your brain every minute of every day, your brain is changing. It's adapting. If I say the word blue or the word orange, your brain just changed because you've heard a set of patterns. You interpreted them. Your brain fundamentally is changing every second based on what it's taking in, not completely from the ground up, obviously, but it's constantly tweaking and adapting pruning neurons that haven't needed to touch in a while strengthening ones that are being used every day. It's adaptation it's evolution and in your brain every second. So yeah, a hundred percent. So you've got to find somebody who you want to be able to kind of like reintegrate your brain.

 Paul Maximus: And another theory in depression is that there can be trauma. There can be something that, that you struggled with or suffered with whatever it was that a part of brain got walled off. Almost like this hyperactive node got walled off and put over at the side. And, literally it's, it's a part of the brain that gets kind of walled off and is not in communication as far as neuro-plasticity is concerned with the other ones. And so a therapist can help you to, to ask questions, to ask you, how is your nervous system is your heart rate? What you just moved, what was that? They get you aware so that you can start to integrate that part of you. That doesn't want to be conscious. And doesn't want to realize that, Oh, my heart rate just went up or I just went uncomfortable and fidgeted, they help you reintegrate and see that it's okay. You can become aware of that, reintegrate it. And then you own it again. It's almost like having an attic in the house where you live and die in this house and you never check the attic. If you go up there, it's scary. There's cobwebs, there's unknown. You go up there with the right tools. You have a new man cave up there. It's awesome.

 Wade Lightheart: Funny. You should refer to that too, because if you even look at people who are like high stakes poker players, they're looking for tells associated with the hands that people are playing or the beds that they're placing. And of course the higher, the intensity of the betting or the bid or the ask or the pot or whatever it happens to be the more relative or the more set like these, the highest levels of people that are picking up these components, because the numbers at that level, everybody knows the numbers, right? Everybody's got the statistical stuff, but the real people are to be able to extract that, which is the art, I would say, from a professional in your field, as a medical, this is where the art of the particular practitioner comes in with the science. We know the numbers, we know the studies, we know the possible things, but now we need to finesse. If you will, the humanist, the human aspect of the, of the thing. And that's why having a therapist that correlates is really important. Would that be accurate

 Paul Maximus: A hundred percent, a hundred percent. Going back to theories, you know, theories of depression, why depression exists. I think one of the most powerful theories that people don't know is the Evolutionary Theory. Why does depression still exist? If evolution plucks off things that are not good for reproduction, why do we still have people not able to get out of bed, not able to pay their bills, brain busting down relationships? Why does it persist in our genes? And there's an answer because otherwise it wouldn't exist, right? So there's a quote. I forget the guys, it's some Russian guy. He said nothing in nothing in biology makes sense, except in light of evolution. And this is so true. If something doesn't make sense, but it's across a wide variety of people, you have to look back in time to say, how could this have been preserved as an adaptation, right?

 Paul Maximus: So if we look at depression, what is depression? Depression is fundamentally withdrawing from society, decreasing your activity level to conserve energy, right? And so what are you conserving energy from? There have been a number of these medical hypotheses published where we're looking at depression wrong. If we're just trying to hurry the person along and just kick start them to get out of this depression, you're not really fixing the adaptive mechanism here of why the person is their biology is responding to become depressed. You can either look at this and say, this is a dysfunction, and we need to fix it. The medical approach of, Oh, if it's down, just bring it, bring it up at all costs. Don't ask why, just bring it up. Okay. Why is it going down? Cause maybe it's, there's some intelligence there that, that we're not fully appreciating when we're trying to fight the current and this splinters off, depending on, on what your situation is, right?

 Paul Maximus: There's something called sickness behavior. And so if you are legitimately sick, what do you do? What do you do when you're low on B12 or iron or whatever it is, you're not going to go and run to your limit. You are going to conserve even within the limits that you have. So there's sickness behavior, that, that there may be something medically that your body's responding to saying, I need to conserve energy. I need to sit back. Second thing is that depressives tend to be pessimistic and pessimist studies have been done on this repeatedly. That if you give like a jar of jelly beans to an optimist than a pessimist, and you ask both of them to guess how many beans beans are in here, guess who's more likely to be right? The pessimist, the pessimist is more accurate. They're not happy, but they're accurate.

 Paul Maximus: The optimist says there's 3000 jelly beans because that's what they want to believe, right? They want to believe there's 3000. There's only a thousand in there, right? So pessimists tend to be more accurate when there is some ambiguity, right? They tend to be more analytical. They tend to be more protective, more defensive. So if there's a rustling Bush over there, the optimist is going to say, it must be a million dollars in brushes into the Bush that says there could be something that's going to kill me. I'm not going to go near that Bush. Right. And, lastly, evolution has given us this mechanism of depression so that when there are stressors happening, even social stressors, psychological stressors, let alone the biology to be able to step back and really focus. Uninterrupted. Don't pick up the phone.

 Paul Maximus: Nobody called me, nobody talked to me. I just want to sit and ruminate about my problem. Right? And, and if you don't have the right tools and the right frameworks, then you're ruminate forever ineffectively. The problem. Isn't the rumination. It's the effectiveness of the rumination, which is why psycho psychotherapy ruminating with somebody there, catalyzes it speeds it up. And you end up being a really empathic, really introspective, emotionally intelligent person at the end of it. It's a gift. It's a monster gift. But if you don't have that, if you're not journaling, if you're not meditating, you're not reflecting. You're not processing it. Of course, you're just going to ruminate and spin your wheels forever. And you're going to stay depressed for decades. Never fixing what evolution's trying to get you to focus on a fixed. The other thing is when people are depressed, what do they tend to eat? They tend to eat vegetables and healthy fats,

 Wade Lightheart: Or they're getting sugar because they pump up their neurochemicals.

 Paul Maximus: Exactly. So they're looking, not only maybe for the dopamine lift or the serotonin lift, they're also looking to conserve energy. So I know that I've got this big, husband cheated on wife, wife, withdraws. Now she's got to balance all these thoughts of I've got this kid. I got the husband. I got, what am I going to do? She's got to step back and think about it. And evolution gives you this mechanism to become depressed and withdrawn and to eat, to conserve, to eat hyper processed hyper palatable processed foods, just to give you that kind of like energy to be able to work out the problem.

 Wade Lightheart: [Inaudible]Of Energy From Its pure aspect is like, it's a short loop.

 Paul Maximus: And so if that continues forever, obviously you compound the problem because now you have magnesium deficiency and if you stay indoors now you've got a vitamin D deficiency. And if you're not eating any good Omega three is now you got an omega-3 fatty acid deficiency. So the longer it goes without the proper tools, the more it turns into our chronic disabling condition that now evolution's going to pluck you out of the gene pool because evolution didn't mean for this to last ongoing forever and ever, and ever.

 Paul Maximus: Come, Stay for a few days, few weeks, few months, and then leave when it's longer than a year, let's say I'm pulling that number out of nowhere when it's longer than a year, then it starts to become, okay, what's not being solved here because this is not what depression program.

 Wade Lightheart: Right. And I think there's a lot of people that are really suffering from that. And I think, it's important to recognize there are going to be times in your life where for good reason, you're kind of down and there's going to be times in your life for good reason, they're going to be up. Neither. One of those are a static situation or indicators of the vacillations of a life. You know, we kind of live like a sine wave. I've always been more of a physicist than I have been a chemist. And I see everything as, you know, vibrations waves and, is it, is it light? Is it matter? It's depends on, the observer and the intensity and the frequency and the mechanisms of observation. So as someone who has been in this situation and turned it around, what are the tools that a person can use or leverage to be in observance? Because I think like you were indicated early in the conversation that we're probably heading into an unprecedented level of mass depression in society, thanks to not the virus, the mitigation's instilled by the authority figures that we trust to run. Our society have implemented an activity that had consequences that weren't, I think thoroughly vetted by dealing with the COVID virus. So.

 Paul Maximus: Well, and it's called the it's, it's either a sick society or a weird world, this compounds depression, right? If, you are indoors, you're not able to go outside. You're not able to connect with loved ones. We're tribal. You have to connect and see people and be close to each other. It's where a Petri dish for depression. When we stack up these things where we have to stare at a screen and we're not getting real connection, just hitting these like buttons, you're not able to go and hug somebody and be face-to-face with somebody you can't just pick up and go running or go exercising, which I mean, caveman easily clocked eight kilometers a day, sometimes 15 kilometers a day on average. Now, what did we get? Maybe two on a treadmill three days a week. And so of course your body is inclined to be kind of lethargic and heavy and tired because you're not, you're in a weird world.

 Paul Maximus: You've created this weird world for your genes. That's not what they were used to. And this is not what evolution is asking you to do. Somebody who, if they exercise and the depression gets better, it wasn't a depressive. Like it, wasn't an adaptation by evolution telling you to go and lay on the couch for three weeks straight. It was that you were in a weird world where you weren't exercising. And that was a flaw in the system. Not a benefit that was in the feature that was built in. That was just, you didn't do the basic mechanics of your car. So your car broke down. And so I put all that stuff into practice immediately started learning about nutrition. Okay. I got to stop eating these processed foods. I got to eat more vegetables and proteins and healthy fats. And,instead of long distance running is very effective.

 Paul Maximus: As far as, an antidepressant effective. It's still, I think to my knowledge, the most effective exercise you can do. And I think endorphin production and part, if there's a pain condition underneath then that's going to give you the runner's high. It's going to give the serotonin. But I think from an evolutionary perspective, if you think about depression, being a ruminant thing, running gives you that repetitive ruminant, it gives you a place where you like a piston, you're going back and forth thinking about your thoughts. You're able to ping through problems in your unconscious. And so it's just a way of, it's another way of fixing the problem instead of journaling or talking to somebody you're working through it in your unconscious by moving, and it's this rhythmic motion. And that's where any exercise is great, right?

 Paul Maximus: Yoga, weightlifting, anything that's going to increase your sense of self-efficacy and grounded-ness, and self-awareness, but especially if you can add in a little bit of jogging, that's going to help you process anything that, is on your mind. So any kind of exercise is better than none. If you're depressed, go for a walk every single day around the block, and then slowly build up from there. You'll see. Even if it doesn't fix everything, your mood will go up because that's what humans were supposed to do. You just, weren't doing it.

 Wade Lightheart: Walking is my favorite form, by the way, for people. And years ago, when I ran into all that trouble in my own life, which you were instrumental in helping me identify with some of the tests, I had moved to a place where I couldn't walk on a daily basis because of the environment in the city. And number one, I gained a bunch of weight. Number two, I was chasing the extraneous components of success. I'm taking on more responsibility than I was capable of managing. And there was a lot, but then led to key nutritional deficiencies, which then had a correlated cascade effect on hormones and everything else. So, there was these progressions that I was able to kind of push to the side. But one of the things when I came back into the city is that I began to do is go for my walks again, because for me, that's my best management system. Something's bothering me. Something's not going on. Hey, you know what? Not going to take the car down the street. I'm going to go for a walk. So for me, living in a place where I could walk on a daily basis is really critical to my mental health.

 Paul Maximus: Right. And that also gets you sunlight. Another big factor for mood that also gets you out in nature. We have a ton of studies on seeing green and how it, I mean, for God's sake, seeing green, there are studies on it. How much more evidence do you need that we're supposed to be in nature. We're supposed to be surrounding ourselves with the elements that we've had for millions of years, not a screen, six inches away from your face in a, in a, four walled room, no windows, like it's just not normal. And so, getting outdoors with sea and green and smelling fight insides and forest bathing, all this kind of stuff, of course, that's going to lift your mood. So I started putting all that stuff into practice. That was the nutrition. The exercise sleep was another one. Instead of staying up late, watching South park or whatever, turned my brain off and, and eating hyper palatable stuff.

 Paul Maximus: Now I had to go to sleep cause I worked out really hard and I'm kind of tired. So then you start working on your sleep routines and Oh, red light and blue light and the circadian rhythms and magnesium tryptofan, you start adding glycine and all these other things and you sleep better. And the next day you wake up with more energy and it's just the momentum fuels itself. You start seeing that spiral going upwards. So fixed my nutrition, fixed my exercise, fixed my sleep. The psychology frameworks were massive. Obviously there was a lot of stuff there as far as looking at my principles. There's a couple of exercises that, that I did at the time that were really helpful. One was writing out my principles. Another one was looking at who are my board of advisors in your head, who are the people that five people, where if you could make up an imaginary board of advisors, and whenever you have a problem, you go it close the door. And you imagine that you're there with your five board of advisors. And you say, Winston Churchill. He's not one of mine, but Winston Churchill, what do you think about this problem? Okay. Barack Obama, what do you think about this? But whoever your board of advisors are, I'm just throwing names.

 Wade Lightheart: Which was the origination of the mastermind by Napoleon Hill Created a board of advisors in his mind. And he said, the character started to take on like personalities and everything else. They'd be fighting at the table of his boardroom in his mind.

 Paul Maximus: Yeah. And, from there I started started pulling people in that I wanted to, to emulate to some degree, Jack Lalaine, Tony Robbins, Kelly Starrett. There was a number of these people where, I mean, when Dyer was in there, there was a bunch of these people where I started seeing myself taking on pieces of them and adapting them into my personality. Like Jim Rowan says, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Those don't have to be real actual people. That could be the stuff you read, the movies, you watch, the music you listen to, your brain is always adapting. So what are you putting into it? Right. So the board of advisors was a huge thing. What else?

 Wade Lightheart: We started working out to start lifting weights.

 Paul Maximus: Oh yeah. So I put on 74 pounds in 13 months.

 Wade Lightheart: How much was it?

 Paul Maximus: 74 pounds in 13 months,

 Wade Lightheart: You almost doubled your body weight and you certainly doubled your muscle mass.

 Paul Maximus: It's just stupid. The photos are just stupid. And there were no drugs. Ronnie, I believe was the broker's right. That's right. It was a book written by Dr. John Berardi and that, that really catapulted the nutrition and the training side of things for me. The most out there thing I was using was Creotine there was no, there were no drugs involved. I started obviously ahead of the starting blocks because I was 133 pounds. I wasn't even normal body weight. So put another 30 on there. I maybe gained 40 pounds in a year. That's out there, but more reasonable. Still outrageous. But I hada Slingshot had basically pass normal, which brings me to another framework that Wayne Dyer has, which is called the extra mile. He says it's never crowded along the extra mile. And I imagine that there's kind of a slope between A, B and C, A is like death death's door.

 Paul Maximus: It's Hawkins, bottom of the scale of consciousness, shame and guilt and self-loathing and depression. You're withdrawn from the world as, as worse, as bad as it gets. You're close to death. A B if you imagine, is the average person, Joe average overweight, maybe a smoker drinks on the weekends. Not really close with his wife. If, he's in a relationship, he's just getting by surviving nothing really to complain about. You wouldn't look at him as the pinnacle or the inspiration for anything, but he's Joe average at the bar. Cheers. Yeah, he's a good guy. You have a good time with them, but you don't want to be him. And so that's a, to be most, most people and most frameworks with depression inspire you to, we're going to get rid of the not inspire you. They, frame it as, Oh, we're going to hope to get rid of this depression.

 Paul Maximus: In other words, we're going to hope to get you from A, where you feel like killing yourself to B just the average. And there's nothing beyond that. Like hopefully you stay at B and you don't slide back to A. Eventually that's our job to get you from A to B reading, Wayne Dyer and all this motivational stuff, humanistic stuff. He painted that there's, it's never crowded along the extra mile. Don't stop when your average, when you get to B keep pushing, because you keep going, there's something called, C there's there's self-actualization and that's where you become the best you're supposed to be. You're supposed to master things live, step into your gifts, your talents, your uniqueness, what your story is, why you went through that process in the first place, depression is such a monster gift, which is when I meet with a depressed client, one of the first conversations I have is men. You don't know how lucky you are. You don't know how lucky you are and people just that shakes them. Cause they're like, this makes no sense. This is rock bottom. This is the worst my life has ever been. You have no idea what a sword you have in your sheath right now, if you just learn how to use it.

 Wade Lightheart: So unpack that a little bit of what does that mean? So you're at the quote unquote rock bottom, you know, it's the part in the Rocky movie where he's like, Hey, I got nothing to lose. Like, he comes happy after he loses everything because now there's nothing to take away. So he's at base camp,

 Paul Maximus: That's it! And that's it. And sometimes you have to be willing to feel worse before you're going to get better.

 Wade Lightheart: That another thing I think is really important to kind of at like, you learn this in sport and if you look at great athletes, most of them have to learn how to lose before they become really good at winning on a consistent basis. They need to leverage the pain of losing, to kind of drive them to the next level, to rise above an extraordinary group of elite people. Right. and we see this I think it was Jim Rowan in the moment of disgust. We're never, again, will I deal with this situation? You know, leverage that negative emotion in a way to move away from in a rapid rate.

 Paul Maximus: That's exactly, and, and I view it,

 Wade Lightheart: That person is in that depressive state. You say, here's your sword. And then they're there. Okay. Now we're standing here at the deer in the headlights. Like, what are you talking about? You're not juicing my victimhood. How is this possibly a strength then? What?

 Paul Maximus: So there's an analogy I like to use, which is that when you hit rock bottom, you can either be a basketball or a rock rock when it hits rock bottom shatters, right? It's hard. It does. It's not yielding. It just impacts. And then just goes to pieces. Most of us approach our rock bottom like that. I refuse to go down or refuse to go down and refuse to go down. And you eventually hit and you have to be, you have to get broken before you let go. And you're relax. And I know, I hit rock bottom, like a rock. Obviously I did the long distance running thing. I was holding on tight. I'm not going to finish first year with an 83 average or something like I held on. I did it. And then at second year when I couldn't hold on anymore, and the rock hit that right after the 2004 waterfront marathon, I ran a half marathon a week later, just as self-medication soon as I got off the treadmill, I knew that rock had hit the ground.

 Paul Maximus: And I had shattered. That was the moment where I knew my one thing, my one coping mechanism is gone. I have nothing else. What happens now. And that was me as a rock. And it took all this psychology reading, all this consuming people that had frameworks more powerful than mine to realize that you can be a basketball. And what a basketball does is it hits rock bottom and it deforms, it absorbs the energy and then it lifts out and it goes way higher than it ever was before. And so you should almost want to be spiked against rock bottom because I'm sure a thousand percent sure almost anybody would relate to this, that the people in your life who have been through some real and come out on the other side of it. There's a groundedness to the nervous system that you can't fake. That's right. There's a centeredness, there's a presence. There's a big dog energy that you just can't whip up on the spot. You have to earn it. And that's what rock bottom is, is it's your earned, fundamental foundation for the rest of your life. And so it's a monster gift. If you can learn to see it that way and get the right tools and the people around you to take advantage of it instead of floundering at the bottom of it.

 Wade Lightheart: And so to kind of connect all the dots of the story, you transformed your physique, you got all these kinds of components. You stack the deck in your favor, you became a coach coaching, lots of people. Then you transcended that and went into naturopathic medicine, became a doctor, and now are here as someone. What were some of the going related to the depression side of things? Where are you now relative to that story, as you kind of move through all of those things,

 Paul Maximus: It's wild now to look, I mean, I often have to go and find photos of myself then, or diaries or something else to relate to who that person was, because it's not that I never have a sad day or an emotion that's down, or you're still a normal human, but depression is like, you're crying in bed. You can't hold a job. You're listless, you're heavy. It's entirely a different way of being. And so I'm fortunate that 15 years running now, I have not been anywhere near in a place like that since. And I think that barring, my parents unexpectedly dying or I get cancer at a young age or any age, probably really the next big trauma to hit in my life. I have a lot more tools now than I've ever had. And that's fundamentally the way people need to see their depression is if you don't have any tools, it's like sending a goalie.

 Paul Maximus: We're going to go a hockey analogy here. It's like sending a goalie two goalies, right? You got one on the left side of the ice. And one on the right side of the ice, you send the guy on the left out with all of the pads. He's got the best blocker, the best glove the, both the knee pads has got the big helmet, like people with flames on it. The guy's awesome. Right? Every, goal he wants to be here got technique. He's got, he's got everything. And you put the other guy and the other guy and the other crease, and he's got a player stick. He's got one skinny knee pad. He's missing his blocker. And he's got a baseball glove. Right. And he doesn't have a helmet. So he's scared, right? How well do you think he's going to stop the puck?

 Paul Maximus: He's not, and this is the way people approach depression is you're not eating. You're not eating well, you're not exercising. You're not moving at all. You're staying up until four o'clock in the morning. You're using a bunch of substances that are short term. Your relationships all kind of suck because you blame everybody. Instead of taking responsibility, you don't have a notebook and a pen you haven't journaled in months. Which goal we are you, of course, you're the goalie with none of the tools. How, how good are you going to be a hockey? You're going to suck at hockey. It's not that you're a goalie. You're forever going to be a goalie. It's that bro. You got to go to play it again, sports and pick up some equipment.

 Wade Lightheart: So, and now you're not on depressants, they're on antidepressants or whatever. You're the picture of health a year at the top of your field in your profession. And you're now coming, sharing kind of the tools and the methodology. You want to talk about what you're doing right now with the new course and the things that you're providing as, as a professional, for people who might be suffering from depression, because there's nobody in the world that would ever meet you on the street today and associate any of those things. I mean, like this just not as I gave that legitimate description of you from the time I've known you in all these 15 years, and you've just continued to build on those fundamental blocks that you've been able to assemble in your life and how you're in a position where you can give back and kind of share this for other people who would say, cause cause the first thing physical has got like, Oh, you don't understand. I love that awesomely via in that situation. Like you're like so perfect and everything so great for you. And you don't know what it's like to be little old, poor depressed down in the dumps. No river got a chance totally finished and screwed over by everybody and everything. My entire life, me.

 Paul Maximus: Dude. I love that. And some of my favorite clients when I was in clinic, some of my favorite patients would be the mid forties, overweight woman who's depressed and, and binge eating. And I would walk in the room with my clipboard and my stethoscope and they say, Oh God, here's this jock. What's he going to tell me, how's he going to relate to me? And I would immediately get into the nuance of motivational interviewing and making them feel seen and heard and talking about binge eating in a way that they'd be like, how does this guy know me so well? And they would just melt unexpectedly. They would have no idea how I fundamentally understand the state that you're in because I've been there. I don't look like it, but I've been there. And those would be my favorite people to work with because you could see them write you off.

 Paul Maximus: As soon as you came in the room. And then by the an hour later, they'd be like, wow, I feel more seen and more heard and more understood than the last 20 doctors. And so now having the naturopathic perspective, I've got all these other tools that at the time when I went and sought help, it was the antidepressants alone. Now I've got all these herbals, in this pyramid approach, we go psychology. We build up into the habits, which we talked a little bit about nutrition, exercise, sleep morning and evening routines. You start getting up into the natural realm. So this is making sure that your magnesium is actually, I should take a step back there's depending on the type of depression you have, you could either benefit from antidepressant, stimulants, or antidepressant [inaudible] or serotonergics as a third track. So you kind of have to play around with those three and figure which one is your neurochemistry needing. If you're needing a little bit more, and obviously I'm going to take a pause here to say, check this by your doctor. I'm not your doctor. I can't prescribe what you should do. Don't go monkeying around with stuff cause you cause serotonin syndrome.

 Paul Maximus: So check your doctor before you add any of this kind of stuff, or you'll wreck yourself. Yeah, but I mean, if you're looking to go down the serotonergic herbal route, you can add St. John's wort, make sure it's got hypericin and Hyperforin saffron is another one. That's a serotonergic. And then tryptofan everybody knows. Tryptophan becomes five HTP, serotonin melatonin, even from there. And so those are three separate Energix that I would use with people. If we're looking at more of the stimulant class of antidepressants and the herbal antidepressants I'd look at adaptogens things like ginseng Rhodiola, you can look even at ashwagandha, which is a mix depending on the dose and the person, it can either be a stimulant or a sedative. And then when it comes to the, the herbal antidepressant sedatives, I love cava. It's probably my favorite. My favorite one cava

 Wade Lightheart: One of the episodes of [inaudible] when it is, we'll put it in the show notes.

 Paul Maximus: Yes, it's so good. Cava there's malarian, California, poppy,upassion flower. That's where you can throw magnesium in there glycine. And so there's a whole number of these [inaudible] serotonergic and stimulants that you can add in the herbal realm for, for depression. If those are not working, we've done everything else. We're doing the psychology and meeting every single week with somebody they're limbic resonating and challenging them, motivational interviewing them, helping their frameworks along, e're doing all the habits so that they're doing, they're checking their habit, their, their habits every day. We've got a master habit list that we're slowly working on, checking everything off and building, rebuilding their life. We're doing that. We've got all the diet and exercise stuff. We're trying to go for a walk every day, trying to eat a little bit better as far as colors and nutrient density, tat's not working the antidepressants or the herbal antidepressants.

 Paul Maximus: Aren't helping on that. I won't hesitate. And especially if it's a severe situation, if the person is severely depressed, we'll add in. Cause we want the, that extra 20% buffer we'll add in the antidepressants from there. So this could be citalopram [inaudible] I'm in there. There's a very long list of them. And in the course, I'm going to go into the details on the half lives and the differences. So I want to expand on that here, but the, the antidepressant realm, it's more than placebo, 15 to 20% at least. And so it stack that on top and then just make sure to keep working things above that can be things like any kind of gadgets you might want to use for tracking,repeat testing, to make sure that, that your blood work all checks out, everything looks good. Your micronutrients are all replete.

 Paul Maximus: Your hormones look good. Your testosterone is in range. As a side fact, going back to evolution and how it programs us in, in weird ways. It programs us to feel depressed. Sometimes new dads get a drop in testosterone by about 33% for a few months. And this makes total sense by evolution, because if you're a caveman stomping around, you're a Silverback gorilla, you're the alpha male of the group. You're having sex with every baby. You can find, you're just putting your seeds in everywhere. And then a baby comes along and starts crying. That immediately. There's a, there's a kill switch in your brain where the evolution says, if you keep stomping around with your club and being alpha, you're going to kill your own kids and wife. You're going to go off the handle and you're not going to take care of them.

 Paul Maximus: You're going to go gallivanting and disappear for three weeks. They're going to die. And so evolution's programmed. We got to kick that. Guy's testosterone down by a third. And so new dads, if they're not expecting this will suddenly be like, I don't know what it is. I'm just feeling this heaviness. And I'm, I'm just not myself anymore. Since the kid was, I love the kid we're connecting. Like, I feel like I'm babbling. I'm like doing all these things that are amazing. They're filling up my heart, but I'm just not the guy that I was before. Great. Enjoy it. It's only going to happen for a few months, evolutions, programmed use so that that kid survives and has the best possible base of a relationship with his dad. So even then evolution works in these weird ways to trigger things that at first we think are a problem.

 Paul Maximus: Oh, I got to fix this. I got to go on TRT. I gotta do. I got to know all this stuff to lift my testosterone. It hasn't been the same since the kid was born. Maybe you're just supposed to be a dad for a little while, a good dad, and emotionally attentive, attuned, calm, chill, oxytocin, babbling dad. So don't always rush to fix whatever it is with the opposite. Sometimes there's a benefit. You've got to find what the benefit is and use that benefit. And also, make sure that it's, it's, that's what it is. It's not something else.

 Wade Lightheart: Basically what you've put together here is kind of systematically stacking the deck by dealing with set of principles and foundational components and putting in a methodology that you've leveraged yourself and then have now back-tested and ran across with all the associative performance parameters and the psychological literature and all the medical components. So what is this course? Why is it a board? Who's it for? How do we get it? Where do we find out about it? Because I know there's going to be a lot of people that would be very interested in learning more about this, because if there's anybody that I know that has done an amazing job of transformation that so much so that you can't even believe what you just described. You're the [inaudible] of that. So talk about that with our listeners.

 Paul Maximus: Well, thanks man. It's going to be available at Dr. Maximus.Com/Depression. If you just go to Dr. Maximus.Com, D R M a X I M U s.com. You'll find it when it's available. I'm working on it right now, night and day. So it's I don't have a timeline, I think spring 2021. So it should be done before the summer, but I don't have a hard date. It's going to be delivered as a course. There's probably going to be a five day free course so that people can sort of wet their appetite and see, is this the kind of guy that I want to limbic resonate with and understand this problem through. And then after that they can purchase the course. So it'll be ready at Dr. Maximus.Com/Depression when it's ready. But I don't know yet when that's going to be.

 Wade Lightheart: What about all the social media handles and things like that? Cause I know you put out a lot of cool stuff. Where can people reach you and find out more about you? And of course, for anybody in the Vancouver area, of course, or even you're offering now telemedicine, I believe,

 Paul Maximus: Yeah. Telemedicine I'm most active on Instagram, so people can find me there at Dr. Maximus. And,I'm posting there regularly. You're going to see a lot of stuff there, especially as the depression projects rolling out, you're going to see that,ualso building a meditation course, which,either, I mean, maybe we'll have to unpack that next summer really want to get your perspective on, on meditation as a tool, our experience and best practices and experiences over time. So that can be a whole other conversation, but, h'm going to be building out a meditation course as well. You're going to find out about everything either at my Instagram, at Dr. Maximus. Or if you go to Dr. Maximus.Com, you can add your email into the newsletter and we'll make sure to let you know, as soon as there's anything new, that's ready to rock.

 Wade Lightheart: Well, there you have it folks from minimus to Maximus, the epitome of what you can achieve and overcome, if you are experiencing the inevitable situation that all humans do, which is a little bit of depression, a little bit of anxiety, that sort of stuff, how you can leverage that as your sword of truth and rebound from, how life spiked you into the pavement to bounce back and hit new levels of productivity, happiness, joy, and enjoying this thing called the human condition. Thanks so much for joining us today. Really appreciate it. And for all our listeners out there on the awesome health podcast, I hope you love that. Of course, we went certainly a lot more informal today. As you know, Dr. Maxwell said, we've known each other for so long and it's such a great time. It's always a joy to hang out with him and spend time with him.

 Wade Lightheart: And we got a chance just a few months ago to hang out and we're hoping he's going to come down to the bio home, right where I can, school him on my pool game, which is getting pretty, pretty bad, pretty fast. So thanks so much for joining us. We'll see you on the next episode. Take care. Good morning. Good afternoon. And good evening. It's Wade T Lightheart with another edition of the awesome health podcast. And today we're going to talk with Dr. Paul Maximus and we were originally going to get into mood meditation and mental high performance, but we go right into it. And we've had a long historic relationship. He was on podcast number 25, where we talked about the five most important tests that people could do. And I refer to that all the time because I think it's great.

 Wade Lightheart: But today we're going to dive into Dr. Maximus' life particularly in his ability to transcend a dire state of depression as a young man, and to go off and become literally going from an anorexic depressed marathon runner, who turned into a heavyweight natural bodybuilding champion, an international bodybuilding transformation coach, and ultimately a naturopathic physician, Dr. Maximus knows transformation and through his philosophy soldiering rock bottom, Dr. Paul did the hard work of remaking himself. Step-By-Step from borderline suicidal. Max antidepressant university dropout to doctor guide and teacher is today his obsession delivering the same depth of transformation that rewrote his trajectory years ago, so that you too can have the body health and mind you deserve because what a man can be, he must be. And I have a great affinity for Dr. Maximus. We're been great friends for many years. I was able to help him at one critical stage of his life. He's been able to help me in the other stage of my life. And that's what the foundation of a great friendship is. And so I hope you enjoy this relatively informal fun and to the max conversation and something that's really real. And that is how to deal with depression. And what is the opportunity? Should you be feeling that today? I hope you love this episode. Take care.