Ep. 106: The Health Benefits of Infrared Sauna with Robyn Openshaw

Hey everyone. It’s Robyn Openshaw and Welcome back to the Vibe show. And today I’m talking to you. I’m not doing an interview. I’m going to chat with you a little bit about the concept of Hormesis, which is the good kind of stress. It’s also referred to as eustress e, u, s, t, r, e, s, s,  and just the whole idea that stress can be good for us. And talking about the energies from the sun and how we can harness those exact energies year round for the sake of healing and anti-aging and optimizing our detoxification pathways, in the form of an infrared sauna.

Now an infrared sauna in your house isn’t for everyone. I realize that it costs a couple thousand dollars even with the wholesale pricing that we negotiate every year from my favorite infrared sauna company. Sometimes we educate our followers about it and it takes them a couple of years before they have the cash for it. We have been teaching people about the health benefits of infrared for 10 years now and we find that sometimes people kind of percolate on it. It’s a major purchase.

And you need some space for it, maybe five feet by five feet, something like that, depending on which model you get. And if it doesn’t fit in your home, then you’re going to have to find space for it in your garage or on your patio. So if a sauna isn’t in this year’s budget as cold weather’s upon many of us, it’s a time we naturally think about how nice it would be to have one or we start getting in ours in the evenings or it might be a time that we’re thinking about buying ourselves at Christmas gift. That’s how I got mine. I bought myself a Christmas gift.

But I want you to learn about it, whether or not this is your year to buy one, you may be able to get access to one, even if you don’t have one in your home. Obviously it’s really convenient to have in your home where you just push a button and 45 minutes later jump in. But you might have a friend who has one or there might be one available at a local spa or a gym that you can use fairly inexpensively.

But this year I want to let you know that we learned that like all of our other partner friends, the air filtration company that I really like Air Doctor, the water filtration company that I really like, Life Ionizer, due to changing laws, specifically some taxes, Health Mate Sauna too, just like the others who makes us this great deal every year is about to get nailed with some serious tariffs. And of course they have to pass those along to anybody doing business that brings in from other countries has to pay these tariffs. And so we’ve been warned that Health Mates Sauna won’t be able to do this incredibly deep discount for us. Not as deep as it has been, past this year’s Group Buy. So, in November we’re kicking it off November 15th and I am recording this episode, um, in November of 2018.

[Editor’s Note, November 2019: GreenSmoothieGirl has a new partnership with Influence Sauna, for an improved sauna experience, while still getting our readers the best prices.]

I want to talk to you today about why you might want to have an infrared sauna in your home, but they say that in 2019 the prices will go up significantly. So I wanted to let you know that in case this year could possibly be the year you get one in your home. Of all the things that we might talk about in the course of a year, all of our partnerships, all of the products that I’ve invested in my own home, if I talk about them and other people follow suit, this one, the Health Mates Sauna, is the one that we just universally hear rave reviews, just everybody loves theirs.

And my own infrared sauna is my favorite tool in my small arsenal of tools I’ve invested in over the years as I’ve spent lots of years decoding how to age well and how to stay healthy despite the fact that not all of my choices are perfect. Some of my choices are more social than perfect and the fact that there’s toxicity everywhere in this strange, you know, I call it the post Dow and DuPont years, where we were in love with chemicals and now it’s hard to put that genie back in the bottle. We have thousands of toxic chemicals. It took decades of using them and putting them in all kinds of products that we’re eating, drinking, breathing, can’t really get away from them very well. In the age where DuPont’s motto was “a better life through chemicals”.  Now they wouldn’t go out there now in 2018 with that as a slogan, that wouldn’t go over so big in 2018 because we’re in the years of backlash against that.

But the fact is, the reason I say this is that we all just have a lot of exposure to toxins and some of those end up instead of going through and being eliminated by our various organs of elimination, some of them end up lodged in our organs and our tissues sometimes for years. And it’s not just the exposure that is the problem. How much input of toxicity we have, some of us have open, optimized, healthy detoxification pathways. Maybe we have some genetic snips that are useful to keeping those pathways open and moving chemicals out, but others of us have blocked detoxification pathways and due to our genetics, and various blockages, you might have a problem with elimination, not just an exposure problem.

Some people have a significant chemical or energetic or heavy metals exposure, but your body eliminates them well. When we stop eliminating well, in my opinion, that’s an even bigger problem than unmanaged or unmitigated exposure levels. You might have heard of Phase One and Phase Two liver detox. And if you’ve done the GreenSmoothieGirl Detox, you may know that we conduct our 26 day cleanse in phases because you don’t want to go hard core into a major cleanse protocol if you’re super toxic until you’ve done the prep work and are opening up your organs of elimination and doing first things first.

Well, an infrared sauna is a beautiful way to do that. It’s helping really keep a major, actually several different systems of elimination open. So ideally, I would love for anybody who’s doing our 26 Day Detox program to get in an infrared sauna every day during that program if possible, or as many days as possible. By the way, side note that 26 Day Full Support Detox is coming right up. We’re going to start talking about it in mid-December and then we will be supporting thousands of people, all of us doing it together in January. As we all undertake the program together, there’s so much power in community. If you want to learn about it early, you’re welcome to go to greensmoothiegirl.com/detox and jump into my free video masterclass.

If you’re thinking about something you want to do the first of the year that gives your health a fantastic reboot, dozens of ways that your health will be served by a really optimizing output through the liver, kidneys, gallbladder, colon, skin, and more. Check that out at greensmoothiegirl.com/detox.

Okay, so just a little bit about infrared versus sort of old school saunas. Some of you have been in the old kind of sauna in the gym where steam is used to open the pores and heat the surface of the skin. Infrared has far more power than some of these types of saunas using heat or steam to heat the surface of the skin. Infrared uses the same type of radiant energy that the sun produces that gives life to the entire plant kingdom and the human kingdom. It’s the wavelengths that allow plants to make energy. It’s not ultraviolet radiation. You want to keep these two things distinct. It’s the positives of the sun without the dangerous effects of solar radiation. In fact, interestingly, there’s quite a bit of evidence showing that infrared waves actually can heal sun damage on the skin, including diminishing wrinkles and fine lines.

I’m particularly interested in the far infrared band of energy, although my Health Mate Sauna has all the spectrum. It has the full spectrum. Right now, I seem to see in the escalating war of the different sauna companies where they’ll say, we have more near infrared and we have more far infrared. Well, there’s not just one that is specifically useful, but I don’t want to use an infrared sauna that doesn’t have really strong far infrared band because these are the rays that can penetrate up to three inches deep. So when these healing rays can penetrate so deeply, you’re actually getting detoxification at an organ level and in the cardiovascular system.

[Editor’s Note, November 2019: GreenSmoothieGirl has a new partnership with Influence Sauna, for an improved sauna experience, while still getting our readers the best prices.]

So what happens when you have some significant exposure to far infrared is you’re increasing blood flow. Imagine the benefits for your cardiovascular system. You are able to regenerate damaged tissues so your healing is much better and activating immune cells. We could all use some strong functioning in our immune cells, right? So who needs a sauna? I’ve got three classes of people and if you fall in one of these, then you might want to consider this investment for some corner of your home or garage.

First of all, anyone who wants to avoid antibiotics and other drug approaches when they get sick, people who want to get well quickly using the systems and the resources of your own body. Because the best way to deal with a virus or a bacterial infection is a few things. Juices, drinking alkaline, high fiber, plant based diet. Okay. As soon as you get sick we should be doing that. And maybe taking some supplements. We will put in the show notes one of our most popular free gifts. It’s a wallet card of the seven supplements that I use to keep my kids off of antibiotics.

I have not given any of my four children antibiotics in the last 25 years. And when I was in Europe with my older daughter last month, my youngest son got strep. Now I’m glad to say that none of my children had ever had strep before. I had strep about every three months when I was a kid and my mom just put me on antibiotics every single time. And of course I paid a price for that in my health. Well, while I was in Europe, my youngest son who is a college freshman, got very sick with strep.

He did miss several days of school, but I’m pleased to say that because I didn’t ever want to make that mistake again of having one of my children living away from home and not having these supplements, which I know work. He had a care package. They were all in a big gallon Ziploc bag. He immediately started taking them as soon as he had symptoms and I’m pleased to say that we got him through strep with no antibiotics and in fact no hospital or ER visit.

So we will put that link to the Wallet Card in the show notes for this episode. We’ll put it right up at the top because I think it’s one of the most useful things you can do for anyone you care about who you are responsible for, if they live away from home to have those supplements. And so they know that if they start to feel sick, see that’s how we end up in a doctor’s office, that’s how we end up on a gut wrecking antibiotic, is that we aren’t prepared in advance. Well guess what? We live in the real world. Every one of us is probably at some point gonna get some virus, some bacterial infection, and getting on it early is a huge deal, and I’m sorry if you’ve heard me say this in other episodes, but I’m really passionate about you getting prepared in advance.

And then the third thing, besides quickly getting on an all plant based soothing juices and alkaline, all plant based diet and getting on the right supplements to kill that bacteria and not have your body be a hospitable climate for bacteria, Candida fungus to overgrow, the third thing that you can do that’s super powerful to burn out toxins, this will mobilize your white blood cells, is to get in your sauna for 20 to 30 minutes every day until you’re better. Super, super powerful because bacterial cells do not do well in higher temperatures.

There’s a really interesting medical doctor. His name is Nobuhiro Yoshimizu. And he did some research that showed that a two percent increase in body temperature results in a 40 percent increase in immunity. So that’s why I suggest that the second you feel sick, you get in your sauna. You are going to have with the two percent increase in body temperature, you’re going to have a 40 percent increase in immunity. That’s very, very powerful. At 109 degrees Fahrenheit, cancer cells die. Now you getting up to 109 degrees, not easy, but guess what? Some of them die at a normal human fever level, which is like 103, 104 degrees.

So when you have repeated sauna treatments, Dr. Yoshimizu found that the resistance of cancer cells becomes weaker and weaker and immune function gets stronger as more tumor cells die away from the heat. He wrote a book called “The Fourth Treatment for Medical Refugees” and it’s about his work in helping cancer patients who had failed traditional medical treatment. So basically, usually their oncologist had written them off and said you’ve had lots of chemo and there’s nothing more we can do for you, Dr. Yoshimizu talks about these advantages of using heat treatment.

First of all, the body defense mechanisms are strengthened. Second, the immune functions improve against infection and aberrant cells like cancer. Number three, blood flow is improved, which aids the efficacy of drugs that you might be using. Four, your physical capacity, improves. Five, your body temperature increases, which improves your metabolism and helps you create healthier cells and helps you break down fatty acids. And six, increased detoxification as waste materials are secreted with sweat. Number seven, heat causes endorphins to be produced at a higher rate. There’s a lot of stimulation of the system that produces endorphins. So you just feel amazing at the end of it. And eight, it’s a great natural pain reliever.

Um, let’s see, I think we’re on number nine, it prevents rapid aging and number ten, far infrared heat, like we said, penetrates deeply into the body, which doesn’t just affect the skin, but also affects organs, blood vessels, lymphatic vessels, the nervous system and more. So in that book about medical refugees, Dr. Yoshimizu talks about cancers that are cured after high fevers as well as he talks about research that a third of people whose cancer is cured, naturally showed symptoms of high fever.

Okay. So that’s the body’s sign that it wants to use its own resources to burn out cancer cells. Cancer does not thrive at 102 to 104 degrees. So all that reminds me of how my grandmother used to say, “give me a good enough fever and there’s no illness, I can’t cure”. And I took that into my own parenting and when my children were little, if they got a fever, this might sound strange, but I would give them a little enema and they’d generally release whatever was in their colon and the fever came down. It was the body trying to burn out something foreign. I found that over and over again. And besides that, I did not ever give my children Tylenol and Ibuprofen.

My daughter and I, when we were in, Switzerland last month, we were there to treat a tick borne illness that she acquired by getting bitten by four ticks several years ago. And so it’s kind of preventative more than anything. She’s, you know, she’s pretty much healthy and happy, but because I know the progression of these things, I wanted to get on top of it. And I sort of bribed her. The clinic, there in Switzerland, I don’t know if you’re coming with us. At the end, I’ll give you a link to come with us to Switzerland. I will be doing a Webinar on the Swiss retreat in the beginning of December and assuming that the retreat is as popular as it was last year, it will sell out in a week. So listen for the link. Oh, you know what? I think the link is actually just: greensmoothiegirl.com/retreat. So put your deposit down. Come with us. Any of the three weeks that I’m leading a liver detox week in Switzerland. If you can come for two weeks all the better. I highly encourage you to come for two weeks if you can.

Pick any of the two weeks that you want to come. I also have six colleagues leading two weeks each, including Dr Tom O’Bryan, Dr Jill Carnahan, Magdalena Schlocky, the women’s hormone expert. Katie Wells and Heather Dessinger, who run the very popular wellness websites: Mommypotomus and wellnessmamma.com. And Ben Greenfield, my biohacker friend. His two weeks are already sold out because he talked about it on his podcast. You’re welcome to go to Ben Greenfield fitness podcast and listen to my interview with him, or I guess he interviewed me on what Swiss biological medicine has to offer.

So anyways, we are doing that Swiss retreat. That’s a little side note. That’s next June 2019. And right now you can go ahead and sign up and you can get your place. But when we do a webinar about it and we tell half a million people about it, I promise it’ll sell out really, really fast. If you can’t come with me, if they already sell out by the time you get your deposit together, some of my colleagues will probably still have openings in their weeks, if you would be just as happy going with them.

So, Emma and I just got back a couple of weeks ago and because she was the one being treated, I was concerned about her being in the hyperthermia machine, which is kind of like infrared sauna but on steroids, and it leaves your head out. Because to do your sauna you want to be in there for 30 to 45 minutes, you don’t want to be in there for hours because cooking your head, right? And there’s no problem with your brain being in there, you have a nice hard skull around it, but you don’t want to raise your temperature of your brain by as much as your body benefits by.

So she did hyperthermia where she has a nutrient IV’s for the fluid loss that she’s going to experience for a couple of hours while she’s in there. Um, so her head is out of the Pod, but the pod is, I don’t even know how many degrees Fahrenheit it is, but let me tell you, it is hot as heck in there. And because I kind of struggle with that treatment, I’ve done it a few times, I actually bribed her. Okay. I know I’ve talked about bribes for my children in other places on this show. So if you hate that as a parenting tactic, feel free to completely disregard that I did this. But I told her I’d give her 100 bucks if she could get to 103.3 degrees Fahrenheit. And she did that.

And what’s really interesting, this is kind of a fun little psychological commentary here, she got to 103.3 Fahrenheit, which is no small task. I’ve never gotten that high. Maybe once I did and she quit. She was done. Well, she had another treatment several days later. And this time I didn’t bribe her and she set her own goal that she wanted to hit 104. And guess what, with no bribe on the table, she did it.

One really cool thing about sauna as well, as hyperthermia, which hyperthermia is like $500 in the Swiss Mountain Clinic where we take people, because you’ve got to have a nurse tending to you if you lose fluids too fast, you’ll probably get a headache and they’re having to administer magnesium to you orally. They’re giving you water every 10 or 20 minutes, whenever you get thirsty, you’re being monitored by rectal thermometer. So there’s quite a bit of technology involved and some skilled help overseeing it. But, sauna is something that you can do on your own and if you can raise your core body temperature by a degree or two on the regular, you’re creating that hormesis, that mild stress that we’ll get into in just a minute.

But so we don’t all have access to hyperthermia, which is artificially creating a fever, which seems kind of crazy when you think about the fact that most American parents, if their child gets a fever of any kind, low fever, any fever at all, they’re completely panicked that the body cannot control a fever and it will run out of control, plus, they don’t want their child to suffer any discomfort, so they give them Tylenol or Ibuprofen. Both of those drugs, Ibuprofen is super toxic to the gut and Tylenol is really devastating to the liver, tens of thousands of ER visits based on Tylenol use every year.

So hyperthermia and sauna both working on the same principle, but Sauna is something that we can do at home. There’s nothing wrong with a fever of 104 or even 105 or 106. You don’t want to get above that for a long period of time at all. But what is so nice about it is that your body is, you know that your cells are optimized at 98.6. However, your immune cells are optimized at 104. So the closer you can get to 104 so that your white blood cells, your killer t-cells are just running around gobbling up bad guys, you are going to see a die off of bacteria, fungus, cancer, virus, yeast. So it’s so therapeutic. It’s not all that fun to do hyperthermia where you’re trapped in that tiny chamber, but very powerful therapeutically.

So second category, besides people who want an improved immune system, who else might want to consider getting a sauna, is anybody with significant exposure to toxic chemicals. Okay. I’m talking about people who grew up near a farm where they have a lot of exposure to pesticides and herbicides. People who in their work got a lot of exposure to industrial chemicals. People who live in places with lots of air pollution, people who’ve been drinking tap water or other polluted water sources for years. I’m amazed at how many people are still drinking tap water.

People who have had heavy metals exposures in the many ways there are to get that, like eating a lot of canned tuna or Sushi, um, people who have a lot of metal fillings in their mouth or any metal fillings really. All of us have had exposure to those. But some of us, you know, can be measured and have high levels, which means either higher exposure or lower ability to eliminate it or both.

And third, the other group of people that I think might really want to consider investing in a home infrared sauna is people who want to strengthen their cardiovascular system. Not everybody is working out five or more days a week like we know we’re supposed to. I was surprised when we interviewed Mimi Kirk, the sexiest Vegan over the age of 50 I think is the award that made her famous. And Mimi admitted to us a few weeks ago, she’s about 80, that she never worked out until she was about 69. And when she did it was Pilates, I believe she said, and maybe some yoga more than anything.

I’m in a phase myself where I’m doing less cardio. I’m pushing much less hard and I’m doing a lot more yoga, probably about six days a week I’ve been doing yoga when I’m not traveling and my body loves the shift. So if you’re not getting the five days a week of suggested cardiovascular exercise or if you just want to add to that, the sauna is a great way to get some of those benefits passively. When I get in my sauna, my blood pressure in the course of 30 minutes goes from below 50, I have a very low resting heart rate, to up around 90, so that’s pretty amazing for just 30 minutes. Some people might get closer to 100 or even 110 if they don’t have really low blood pressure naturally, like I do.

Most common question I’m asked when I’m talking about infrared sauna, what temperature do I set it at and for how long? Answer is. It depends. If I tell you how high the temperature is that I use, you might be frustrated because if you’re a beginner or you have a low tolerance for high heat, that might be too hot for you. I always have mine between 155 and 165, but many people when they start out, they do about a 140 to 145 and that’s fine. If you have it at that temperature, you’ll probably be able to stay in there longer.

So as with so many other things, your body will develop a tolerance over time. In my case, my body before I owned a sauna, didn’t seem to know how to sweat. I didn’t even sweat when I ran a 10k and the sauna has literally opened up some detoxification pathways, my sweat glands, and I’m really glad for that. When I go to hot yoga across the street, both my daughters, when they come with me, will say, “oh, I’m so embarrassed about how much I sweat in there”, and I say, “well, why would you be embarrassed about that? It’s a completely normal bodily function and you need it and sweating more is better. I always wished that I sweat more.”

And now I sweat like crazy. I get in my sauna for 25 minutes, that’s the answer for me is I’m in there for 25 minutes, but because I get in there at high heat, I struggle to go longer than that. I consider it a big accomplishment if I gut it out and I stay in there for 30 minutes, so that’s me. I use it at a pretty high heat to get the job done and get out. But there is no shame in putting the heat lower and then maybe you could stay in a longer time.

So the second part of the answer to what temperature and for how long besides it depends. Okay. Or on, you know, whether you’re new to infrared therapy and what your tolerance is, is that you should not do longer than about 45 minutes in a session. Okay. It’s great for your body for longer periods of time, but it’s not necessarily great for your brain. So 30 minutes to 45 minutes is totally fine. Staying well within the safety zone.

So, I get questions all the time about other gadgets and gizmos that are being marketed as the cheap way to get the effects of an infrared sauna. And I’ve tried them. I’ve tried out the bag that you get in where it’s like a kind of Mylar on the outside of it and you get inside and you sweat like crazy. Um, I found it to be really uncomfortable and I think it’s one of those things, you know, that you’ll invest in it and not get in it, whereas everybody I know who owns an infrared sauna loves it and gets in it all the time. It’s a really positive, pleasant experience when you have a little bit of space to move around in, you’ve got music in there, you’ve got color therapy in the ceiling so you can put on some basically light nutrition in the ceiling. I like to put it on red at night because it’s calming, relaxing.

I also have used a half sauna. I tried that and I did not love it. Um, the idea is, oh, it keeps your head out, but you know what, it did not get my core body temperature up as promised. And I found that it just sat in my bedroom and I never used it. So I haven’t seen sort of the cheap replacement for your little in-home sanctuary measure up to the claims. You can always try it, they probably won’t hurt you.

But I really love my Health Mate sauna. And I’ll tell you why I worked with them. First of all, I bought mine just like anybody else, but the way I decided which one to buy is that I took my Tri-field meter and I measured, I heated up and measured the electromagnetic frequencies in every sauna that I could get my hands on. And the Health Mates sauna was the lowest in EMFs. Some of them are quite high and I won’t name names, but one of the brands literally went out there and its marketing was, “We are the low EMF sauna” and would you believe it was actually the highest. It was sort of moderate level of EMF, but we don’t want to get in there to sweat and do something good for our body and then be exposing ourselves to energetic toxins that creates negative stresses for ourselves. Those are not eustress. Those are not hormesis.

The other thing is that I wanted a company I could trust that I could investigate their sourcing and that they were using cedar wood because it will never mold that wood does not do that. And has not been treated with any chemicals because of course we don’t want to get into this small space and then be dealing with chemical off gassing again, it’d be kind of counterproductive. And then third, after I bought my own and I fell in love with mine, and it was reliable, and it got up to the heat that they promised, I went to them and said, “If I tell people about your product, will you give them a huge discount like retailers buy your product and resell for?” And they said they would as long as we do it for a short time every year because if we were advertising that front facing on the GreenSmoothieGirl website year round, that would undercut their dealers and I said, “no problem.”

I will do a Webinar and we will offer this huge discount for a short period of time and then we get them to throw in some really cool freebies. This year the freebies include free shipping, which that’s going to save you about $300. They’re giving you an aroma stone foot sauna that is also worth $300. They’re giving you a ceramic essential oils cup for inside your sauna and a cedar backrest and those two add up to being worth about $120. So there’s over $700 in freebies in this year’s package. I think most importantly though is I’m not exactly sure yet what the effect on the price will be when they have to implement tariffs and our prices go up in 2019. So I hope that you can jump in on the deal. I’ll give you a link in a minute if you want to check it out or join the class that I’m teaching with Health Mate Sauna, which allows you to ask live questions at the end.

[Editor’s Note, November 2019: GreenSmoothieGirl has a new partnership with Influence Sauna, for an improved sauna experience, while still getting our readers the best prices.]

But infrared therapy is in part, it’s acting on a principle that scientists are calling hormesis. And that is the reaction of a cell when it is put under mild stress or not necessarily a cell, an entire organ system. What happens when it is put under stress? You obviously wouldn’t want to be in an infrared sauna at 155 degrees Fahrenheit for 24 hours a day, right? That would be in fact, stress. However, that short term intense stress provokes a response by the body that marshals the forces, so to speak. It’s like the good stress that we’re talking about. It stimulates the activity of killer t-cells and several types of lymphocytes or our white blood cells so that you are stronger not just during the sauna session but after as well. You’re stronger and more adaptive overall and you are actively burning out aberrant cells like again, bacteria, fungus, cancer, viruses, yeasts.

So this podcast episode isn’t a deep dive into good stress versus bad stress and maybe we’ll do a whole episode on that later, but think about one obvious application of hormesis being exercise that you do. If you lift weights, there’s actually damage to the muscle. You are on purpose damaging the muscle. You’re tearing tiny muscle fibers when you lift heavy weights and that forces the body into a stress response that rebuilds the muscle. Over time, the idea is that, that muscle becomes bigger and stronger in response to that minor stress. Okay, so that is an example of hormesis or eustress. Very similarly, when you do cardiovascular exercise, like running, it makes the bones stronger with impact, that mild stress on the bones and it makes the heart and vascular system stronger as a result of stressing the whole vascular system, putting it through something rather difficult.

Now though in 2018, which we really didn’t understand 20 years ago, it’s becoming more well known that too much of a good thing is a bad thing. Uh, one example is Jim Fixx, dying in his forties of a heart attack, for instance. He’s kind of the father of modern day running as a sport. So marathoners, it turns out, are at high risk for quite a few health problems and even early death. Whereas someone doing more moderate exercise has much lower risk of death. So a person doing moderate exercise is in that eustress or hormesis zone. If you’re doing no exercise, you’ve got a lot of oxidative stress, basically you’re rusting from the inside out. Or if you’re doing too much, that too is bad.

So, as it turns out, the science has become pretty clear that the body likes a minor to moderate amount of stress. And so does the neurological system, right? We learn and we grow and we become resilient and resourceful only in response to difficult situations and stresses and learning to problem solve in those climates. It’s like my yoga teacher said this morning, “if you want to stay in your comfort zone in a pose, that’s fine, but you will grow only as you push outside that comfort zone at least a little bit.”

So if this is a year for you, if you’re hearing this in mid-November, I’m going to give you a link to sign up for my two free webinars that I do with Health Mate Sauna where we talk about the health benefits and they talk about the promotion and the different models that you can choose from and what all the freebies are. You can sign up for them on November 15th, we’re doing one Thursday night at 7:00 PM, November 15th, and then Friday, November 16th, we’re doing it at noon. And you can sign up for that at greensmoothiegirl.com/saunawebinar.

If you want to skip the webinar because you just got this little mini class on the podcast, you can go to greensmoothiegirl.com/sauna and you can see the page, some of the same data and more then what I talked about today in this episode. And you can see the recording that we did of the live webinar most recently. The new recording for 2018 won’t be up until a couple days after we launch this podcast episode.

Another link that I mentioned today in this episode is the GreenSmoothieGirl Detox. If you want to learn about human detoxification and what we’re doing starting beginning of January 2019. It’s an annual event. People love it. You’re gonna lose an average of a little over 12 pounds. That’s just an average. We’ve also had quite a few people lose up to 25 pounds. And you’re losing fat and you are getting rid of a lot of toxic chemicals in the process, decreasing inflammation, decreasing joint pain, increasing your cognitive flexibility, and a lot more clear thinking, evening out your mood. So many things happen when we get rid of a lot of chemical toxins in this 26 day process. If you want to learn about it early, like I said, we start talking about it in December, but the link to sign up for my free video masterclass about the detox is at greensmoothiegirl.com/detox.

And finally, the other thing that I’ve mentioned in this episode is the retreat in Switzerland where we are doing a liver detox. There’ll be about 25 to 30 of us there in each week. I highly recommend, if you can stay for two weeks, then stay for two weeks, you will have a much more restful experience. The second week they’re able to go deeper with you with more significant treatments outside the 20 diagnostics and treatments you get with the liver detox week itself.

So I really like the two weeks because then you don’t have, you know, jet lag on either end kind of bothering you. And you get $500 off your second week and you get a free Oligoscan, which is going to give you an assessment of your heavy metals levels and the levels of, um, your nutrients specifically all of your minerals. The Oligoscan also tells you how blocked your detoxification pathways are. That treatment is several hundred dollars and you get it for free, if you stay a second week.

And that’s going on next summer June 2nd, 9th, and 16th. You can pick one or two of those weeks. And I would love to have you there. We have a very relaxed time. We eat three meals a day together. You’re outside a lot. We’re hiking, if you’re into that. We do a little bit of sightseeing. Have an amazing Friday night Gala dinner, classic European four course meal. Everything is beautifully plated. The food is fantastic. You stay right onsite in the clinic. We have our own rooms. You can choose a single or a double. You could be matched up with someone of the same gender who isn’t bringing a spouse or a friend, but I highly recommend you bring someone you enjoy spending time with. That’d be great.

So the Sauna promotion, Our 2018 Group Buy with the wholesale pricing and over $700 in freebies goes from November 15th to the 24th. That’s when we can guarantee the pricing and the freebies. The freebies for sure go away after November 24th. After that, it’s just up to them whether they honor our 2018 promotional price. So join us for the Webinar. If you want more education and to learn about the different models. We’ll be taking your questions live. I’ll answer them, mostly Health Mate will answer them.

So I hope that this has been useful for you. I hope you think about metaphysical as well as physical examples of whether the stresses in your life are helpful, useful, training, cross training, rebuilding, resilience, exercises in your life, or whether stress is something chronic and toxic that you need to problem solve. I like to think about this a lot because there really is good stress and of course there really is bad stress that really depresses the immune system.

So I am super excited to get in my own sauna tonight. I’m about to turn it on at the end of my workday here and get in. It is my absolute favorite thing to do on a winter night. I hope an infrared sauna at wholesale prices is in your immediate future. We’ll see you next time.