How to Stay Out of the Healthcare System: Building Health One Day at a Time 🩺

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When patients come in for prevention, our goal is to keep them out of the healthcare system for as long as possible. Modern medicine can be lifesaving when it’s needed, but the healthiest outcome is needing it as little as possible. We want to minimize the physical, financial, and emotional stress that ongoing medical care can place on someone over time.

As a doctor, my goal is to de-diagnose you. Not to keep adding labels or managing symptoms indefinitely, but to help the body move back toward a state where those labels are no longer necessary. We don’t want to manage disease—we want to create the conditions for true health. Unfortunately, much of the current system is not built this way. It is more accurately a sick care system. It is not about creating or maintaining health. And once someone is in it, the focus often shifts to monitoring and managing problems rather than preventing them or addressing why they developed in the first place.

The real work of health happens long before someone is diagnosed or experiences a medical emergency. Health is an every day event. All of our choices are health choices. Our daily inputs—nutrition, sleep, stress, environment—shape how the body functions over time.

The goal is to create conditions where the body can do what it was designed to do: maintain health, adapt, and recover quickly from stressors.

We can’t control everything, but we are not powerless. The way we live each day either supports the body or works against it—and over time, that direction matters more than any single intervention.

🩸 Know Your Hormones

Hormones govern nearly every process in the body, so the right balance is essential for a healthy life. Levels of thyroid hormone, progesterone, testosterone, DHEA, pregnenolone, estrogen and cortisol can make a difference between health and disease. Hormone imbalances are linked to:

• Cancer

• Heart disease

• Metabolic disorders

• Infertility

• Autoimmune conditions

• Chronic infections

• Mental disorders

Understanding your hormone patterns—through symptoms, lab testing, and lifestyle awareness—can provide insight into processes that often develop years before disease is diagnosed. When these signals are addressed early, it becomes possible to shift physiology in a healthier direction.

Today there are many options for at-home hormone testing if your primary care provider won’t check hormones. Raena Health and Superpower (code: SUPERPOWERLEIGH) are good places to start.

🍊 Eat for Healthy Cells

Every bite we take casts a vote for either health or disease. The most important factor in our health is our diet. Our cells are literally comprised of the nutrients we give them.

Unfortunately, the world we live in is increasingly toxic and stressful, but we can outpace these stressors by providing cells with the raw materials they need to function and thrive. I always think in terms of nutrient density and quality.

• Grass fed milk

• Grass fed meat

• Fruit, oranges, mangos, cherries

• Vegetables

• Gelatin, bone broth

• Honey

• Cheese

• Oysters and shellfish

• Liver

• Coffee

A good rule of thumb is to not eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize. If it wasn’t around over 100 years ago, it’s best to avoid.

🌷 Make Peace With Every Aspect of Your Life

Research shows that 90% of doctor’s visits are related to stress.

Living without a backlog of unresolved emotional burdens is fundamental to a healthy body. When conflicts, worries, or unresolved traumas accumulate in our lives, they keep the nervous system in a constant state of alert. The body interprets this as a threat, raising cortisol and adrenaline and gradually wearing down our system. We cannot thrive when we’re perceiving constant threats.

Health requires a certain degree of peace in our relationships, our work, and our inner lives. I encourage patients to do whatever they need to make peace in their lives, regardless of how it may look to others. Sometimes that means leaving a job or moving to a more peaceful area, changing your mindset, learning to forgive others, etc. Creating a life that feels safe and aligned is highly protective for the body.

🌙 Protect Your Sleep

Sleep is how we repair. When we don’t get enough, stress hormones rise, we can become insulin resistant, inflammation increases, etc. Our cells cannot properly function without sufficient sleep. And unfortunately today, humans get 2-3 hours less on average compared to before the industrial revolution, modern technology, and lighting.

Our body is always telling us what it needs, but unfortunately many of us suppress those cues. Allowing yourself to sleep—or even nap—when your body is asking for rest can help restore energy, support hormone balance, and give the body time to repair.

Some tips:

• Eat enough calories throughout the day

• Get adequate sunlight during the day

• Use red light, candles, or incandescents at night

• Keep technology (phones, TV, laptops) out of the bedroom

• Turn WIFI off at night

• Supplement with magnesium and progesterone

• Sleep in total darkness

• Breathe through your nose at night

🌞 Embrace the Sun

Many modern problems stem from a disconnection with the natural world. We are designed to live under the sun and receive its inputs.

Sunlight is important for vitamin D production, but also for hormone balance, immune function, tissue repair, cancer prevention, and countless other processes in the body.

This topic is complicated because each person has their own biological makeup and risk factors for skin cancer. While it’s extremely important to avoid burns, the internal cancers that are associated with inadequate low sunlight exposure and vitamin D deficiency are more aggressive and have worse outcomes. For example, colon cancer has a 5-year survivability rate of 65%, while basal cell carcinomas have a s 5-year survivability of 100%.

Excessive sun avoidance is carcinogenic. In our efforts to avoid the sun (more so than any generation before us), rates of cancer continue to rise. We are designed to receive the sun’s inputs. Achieving a balance between safe sun exposure and protection from harmful UV rays is key to maintaining health and connection to nature. It’s important to make peace with our environment and find a healthy relationship with the sun.

Some tips:

• Get morning and evening light to maximize exposure to infrared light

• Avoid burns: wear cotton long sleeves, hats, use non-toxic SPF (code: CONNEALYMD), and spend time in the shade if you are going to be in the sun for a prolonged amount of time

• Avoid seed oils which contain fats that incorporate into cell membranes and oxidize under heat and light, increasing the risk of sunburn and skin cell damage

• Focus on sun exposure during the spring months to build a “sun callous”

• Avoid sporadic, intense sun exposure—consistent exposure is more protective and beneficial than occasional extremes

🧼 Keep Your Home Clean

Even though our environment is increasingly polluted, we can generally control what we’re exposed to inside of our homes. Filtering air and water, using organic bedding and towels, non-toxic detergents and cleaning products (code: CONNEALYMD), avoiding fragrances, vacuuming frequently, and turning off electronics and WIFI can all lower the toxin burden on our cells.

Small exposures over time make a difference, so everything counts. A few tips:

• Open windows for 10-15 min a day to filter air

• Limit screens and electronics, especially at night. No phones in the bed

• Invest in glass storage containers for food

• As personal care products run out, swap them for natural options

• Use beeswax or tallow candles

• Keep a few houseplants to filter air

• Invest in an air filter

• Vacuum frequently to remove exposure to microplastics and VOCs

• Take shoes off at the front door

• Look for 100% organic cotton bedding and sheets

👟 Move Often

Exercise is paramount. The body isn’t a machine—it’s a living system that depends on movement. It’s very much a “use it or lose it” situation. The trillions of cells that make up our body rely on consistent blood flow to receive oxygen, nutrients, and signals, and to clear waste. Movement improves circulation, increases lymph flow, and nourishes tissues. When we’re sedentary, everything slows—blood flow, energy production, repair.

Exercise also shapes how the body handles stress, regulates blood sugar, and maintains muscle. Muscle is highly metabolically protective and plays a major role in longevity. It doesn’t have to be extreme to be effective. But consistency matters. A few tips:

• Walk daily, ideally after meals

• Make it enjoyable—go for a swim, take a pilates class, ride bikes, take hikes, dance in the kitchen, run around the yard with your kids. It should be fun :)

• Strength train a few times per week to maintain muscle

• Get outside when you can (sunlight + movement)

• Break up long periods of sitting

• Keep it sustainable—although it’s normal to be a little sore, you shouldn’t feel consistently worse after

❤️ Stay Open to All That Life Has to Offer

One of the best ways to resist aging and disease is to stay curious. Let your curiosity be greater than your fear. Kids are naturally curious—they move through the world like sponges, absorbing, questioning, and exploring without needing certainty.

As we age, we tend to close ourselves off, draw conclusions more quickly. Staying curious keeps the mind flexible and the body adaptable. Curiosity encourages learning, creativity, and resilience, while fear pushes the nervous system into a defensive state that elevates stress hormones and gradually wears down the body.

Maintaining a positive outlook is one of the most powerful ways to protect health. Optimism is consistently associated with longer lifespans and better health outcomes (PMID: 35674052) (PMID: 35255123).

People who approach life with openness and possibility tend to experience lower levels of chronic stress, which supports healthier immune, hormonal, and cardiovascular function. There is always something good coming right around the corner!

Your health is in your hands! We often forget how much influence we actually have. And the formula for health is relatively simple. The body is an ever-changing organism, never the same as it was a moment before. It is always responding to what we give it.

Even if you are facing a health challenge or diagnosis, know that the body is still capable of adapting and shifting—it is never static. Even small changes, done consistently, can begin to move things in a different direction.

“It is never too late to start the corrective process.” - Dr. Ray Peat

If you are looking for personal guidance on prevention and health optimization you can contact the center at 949-680-1880. Our team takes the most comprehensive approach and looks at all the underlying metabolic, nutritional, emotional, and environmental factors that influence health. For a full list of services, please see below!

The Cancer Revolution is now available ❤️

This book is my guide to cancer prevention and treatment. In this fully updated second edition, I walk through how I approach cancer from an integrative, metabolic perspective.

I go deeper into:

• The lab markers I monitor

• Cancer-specific testing and early detection tools

• How metabolic dysfunction precedes tumor formation

• Hormone balance, inflammation, and mitochondrial health

• Updated nutrition guidance and structured food plans

• Practical lifestyle interventions that support cellular repair

• Emerging tools including immunotherapy and voltage/frequency medicine

This edition is designed for anyone who wants to understand cancer beyond genetics—and learn what can be done proactively, both for prevention and during treatment.

There’s so much we can do to support healing and live a full, cancer-free life. 💪

• Amazon 

• Hachette Book Group

• Barnes & Nobel 

• Books a Million

• Bookshop 

Talk soon ❤️,

Dr. C