The Illusion of Health-Maxxing

As a child in the late 1900s, I spent long summers in Spain. There, I often woke up late, ate late, stayed up late and walked a TON. My friends, family and I also danced together, played games together, bathed together, ate lots of bread and sugar together, hiked together, swam together and sang together. There was a ubiquitous affinity for simply living a good life, not an obsession with “optimizing” it.

Today, in the United States wellness has taken quite the departure with mitochondrial cell vitality tests, orgasm enhancement for female billionaires, antiaging longevity drinks for male billionaires, nootropics, vagus nerve stimulators, peptide therapies, brain training EEG headsets and twenty supplements before breakfast. Every heartbeat, blood sugar fluctuation, orgasm, telomere length, and cell’s health can now be meticulously tracked in pursuit of “optimal” health. Bryan Johnson, the tech entrepreneur and longevity investor who creeps me OUT is a key player in this field.

Welcome to the era of healthmaxxing.

This viral internet trend treats the human body like a machine that can be endlessly optimized. The goal isn’t simply to be a healthy human—it’s to maximize every measurable biological process. Ugh I’m overwhelmed already. Ironically, it’s often marketed under another trendy buzzword that I can’t stand: biohacking. There is no such thing as biohacking. So here’s the question: what exactly is being hacked? Most “biohacks” aren’t hacking the biological “main frame” at all. They’re simply presenting instagram viewers with methods on how to access NORMAL human physiology. It’s physics, mathematics and chemistry. Like the Atkins diet or, oh, I don’t know, how nasal breathing breathing produces nitric oxide which is a vasodilator, enhances O2 uptake, is a natural anti-inflammatory, aids in creating new bone and won molecule of the year in 1992. Nitric oxide is OLD news, but it’s having a shiny resurgence among biohackers. Often, “biohacking” is just old wisdom or normal run-of-the-mill biophysiology wrapped in new marketing.

The irony is that many healthmaxxing practices are rooted in good intentions. Sleep matters. Protein matters. Exercise matters. Fiber matters. (Remember Family Matters? What a great show.) And of course, tracking necessary health metrics for a patient can be very helpful. The problem isn’t the habits—it’s the obsession and new expectation. When wellness becomes another performance metric, health can quietly become anxiety. One reason healthmaxxing resonates with so many people, especially the wealthy, is that our healthcare system is often reactive instead of proactive. Too many patients don’t receive meaningful medical guidance until disease has already developed.

Centuries ago, Chinese physician, Dr. Zhang Zhongjing, emphasized recognizing imbalance early and intervening before illness progressed. Across East Asian medicine and Ayurveda, health has traditionally been viewed not simply as treating disease, but preventing it in the first place. Don’t get me wrong, modern medicine has achieved extraordinary things, but we’re forgetting our traditions THAT WORK. As someone who experienced metastatic thyroid cancer and underwent a six-hour radical neck dissection in 2021, my recovery taught me healing doesn’t have to be either Western medicine or traditional medicine. It can—and often should—be both.

The therapies and activities that supported my post-cancer recovery were:

• Dr. Peggy Huddleston’s mind-body technique, Prepare for Surgery Heal Faster

• Joy and positivity in absolute supported by a tight selective circle of friends and family

• Functional Medicine and nutrition (Montserrat Corsino, LAc)

• Daily walking with my dog, 5-10 miles per day all throughout Brooklyn

• Massage weekly (Charles Michener, BC Massage)

• Meditation

• A Course in Miracles

• Dating

• Hobbies like ceramics, gentle skateboarding, volleyball, TONS of reading in coffee shops and journaling

• Acupuncture and herbs weekly (Sally Rappeport, LAc)

• Buteyko breathing & myofunctional therapy to help facial, neck and shoulder nerve damage

• Red light therapy

• Energy healing (Charles Michener, Victoria Dennis, RN)

• Psychotherapy & spiritual counseling with a gay rabbi, weekly

and all with qualified traditional and modern practitioners, including a shaman alongside my medical team. This isn’t about rejecting science. It’s about embracing evidence-based practice in its MOST COMPLETE sense. Evidence-based medicine was never meant to rely solely on randomized controlled trials. It combines the best available research with clinical expertise and the individual needs of the patient. And let’s be real, sometimes we can’t (and shouldn’t) wait a decade for the perfect study before helping someone with a therapy that has demonstrated undeniable benefits in clinical practice and carries an appropriate risk profile. Research should continue to grow, but thoughtful clinical judgment and acceptance should never be dismissed simply because the evidence is still evolving. This is what cutting edge healthcare is about.

Functional or holistic therapies such as orofacial myofunctional therapy, Buteyko Breathing Method and traditional Chinese medicine, along with routine preventive health screenings all have roles to play when used appropriately and integrated into comprehensive dental and medical care. The future of healthcare isn’t choosing between East and West. It’s recognizing that prevention, lifestyle medicine, and conventional medicine are strongest when they work together. There is a Chinese proverb by philosopher Zhu Xi over 800 years ago imploring, “Don't wait until you're thirsty to dig a well”, meaning, don’t wait until you’re sick to start taking care of yourself.

Health isn’t built through forcing perfection, concierge healthcare, or chasing the latest wellness trend. It’s built through consistent simple habits, proactive prevention, self-edifying exploration, and a willingness to care for your body long before it asks for help. So RELAX, eat well, dance, sleep, explore, love someone and HAVE FUN. And hey, when it’s appropriate bathe together too.

Dinner for Breakfast: A Trend or a Tenet of Traditional Medicine?

Each of us has countless dietary decisions to make per day, and lately my social media feed is bombarded with fast paced Instagram reels about how people have maintained their glucose levels, stopped bloating or have managed to lose weight by having “dinner for breakfast”. I feel inundated with celebrity doctors, nutritionists or actual celebrities preaching from their instagram or podcast pulpits almost vehemently about enzymes, intermittent fasting, probiotics, prebiotics, soil, hormones, vagus nerve vibrators, glutathione, colostrum, creatine, CoQ10, raw milk, sun light, red light, blue light, magnesium and the interminable list goes on and on. It’s enough to make anyone feel like they’re failing at life. These aggressive bursts of informative shaming are usually prefaced with a condescending, “If you’re not doing this…” or “Did you know that if you…”, which hooks your delicate ego right in, of course. Without taking any of these ads seriously, I already have supplement and “bio hacking” fatigue. I know I sound like a hater. I’m not. I love this stuff, but there’s a time and place for these dietary changes and supplements (which I’ve done), but what Westerners don’t seem to know is that the in Vogue concept of having “dinner for breakfast” has been around for eons, and is a tenet of traditional medicine that can help you get many of these important nutrients on your own when you eat at the right times and in the right amounts.

So what if we did eat like the ancient teachers in harmony with the cycles of nature? Maybe we wouldn’t need all these extra things because the imbalance in the organism would have never occurred in the first place. In traditional medicine prevention is paramount. In my doctorate program on traditional Chinese medicine and herbology, one of the first things they taught us in Fundamentals 101 was the clock of the flow of qi (primordial energy or life energy). It is a clock that is used for telling at which time any given organ is at its optimum energetic peak, or maximum level of qi. It just so happens to be that the stomach functions at its peak between the hours of 7AM and 9AM, and the last thing we should do is pour cold food and drink onto the stomach’s digestive furnace first thing in the morning which needs to stay hot to burn up our foods for the rest of the day. The ancient Chinese practice of eating warm savory foods in the morning is aimed at preventing disease and promoting health by working in rhythm the body’s natural energy cycles.

https://www.healthline.com/health/chinese-body-clock

And what time do most of us eat dinner, dessert AND SNACK (that dreadful American word)? At exactly the opposite time of the stomach’s peak performance and often while watching obnoxious amounts of television. As healthcare provides we wonder why people in the U.S. are getting sick and depressed. To me the reason seems so intuitively obvious that these preventable epidemics are inextricably linked and directly proportional to our drifting away from the cycles of nature. At night most of us indulge in fatty fast foods, eat alone, doom scroll, and probably imbibe a beer or two, increasing the workload on the stomach and the intestines just as the body should be going into rest and repair for an opportunity to get some good autophagy time, the true time of intermittent fasting.

-Also, I don’t get everyone’s obsession with intermittent fasting. When you sleep you are not eating. That is fasting, and that’s why it’s called break-FAST-

Anyway, we wonder why we have cavities, acid reflux, obesity, insomnia and poor gut health. We’re not working with the body, we’re working against it. In the morning, smelling food initiates digestion creating a cascade of activation that primes the GI pump for the rest of the day. First, saliva laden with amylase (the enzyme that breaks down carbohydrates) begins digestion in the mouth, and ample amounts of chewing triggers the vagus nerve to tell the stomach to secrete hydrochloric acid and then the chime enters the small intestine which then begins the bulk of the absorption, and so on. Myofunctionally speaking, the chewing and swallowing drives fluid throughout the head, face and neck and decompresses cranial strain patterns helping to clear the ears and sinuses, move lymph and cerebral spinal fluid in glymphatics. Needless to say, it’s a lot of work! So why on earth would we start this process at 7pm?

So one can gather that consuming cold raw smoothies for breakfast followed by a heavy late dinner is completely antithetical to what the ancients considered a healthy way of eating.

Boiled eggs for the win!

Here are some examples of what I eat for my GF breakfast:
Boiled eggs, nuts and room temperature fruit
Sardines with roasted sweet potato and purple onion
Home made chicken or shrimp congee
Trader joe’s bibimbap with roasted chicken or fish
Butter on a GF Norwegian cracker
Left over Chicken tiki masala or Palak paneer
Sautéed vegetables on the iron skillet with a poached egg on top
Cubed soft tofu soaked in GF soy sauce and steamed or sautéed with spring onion
Miso soup with tofu and spring onion (especially after a cold surf or ski session)
A fat slice of homemade almond flour bread enriched with bone broth protein powder

Here are foods I avoid for breakfast:
Gluten
Cold yogurt
Cold Smoothies
Cold cereal
Cold fruit (let it get to room temp)
Iced coffee
“Power bars”
Frozen berries
Cold chia pudding
Any highly processed packaged foods
“Fasting”

So yeah, I say follow the old adage that goes, “In the morning eat like a king, in the afternoon eat like a prince, and in the evening eat like a pauper”. And if you start having dinner for breakfast, good for you, and maybe skip the wine.

REDEFINING READINESS

Confidence doesn’t always arrive with a bold entrance. Sometimes, it builds quietly, step by dehydrated step, as we show up for patients and ourselves day after day, over caffeinated and tired, but still smiling. It grows when we choose to try, even when we’re unsure of the outcome. Every time you take action despite self-doubt, you reinforce the belief that you’re capable. Confidence isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about trusting that you can figure it out along the way -my particular specialty.

Speaking at the ALF Educational Institute last November, 2025 was nerve wracking, exhilarating and fun. Behind the scenes, I got a text from Dr. Jim Bronson (founder of AEI) about two weeks before the Level 1 ALF mini residency asking me if I wanted to present over the weekend. I immediately gasped and wasn’t sure I was ready to do something like this, however, I also know that you are ultimately the one who decides when you’re ready and that there’s no such thing as perfect. Also, if Dr. Jim Bronson was asking me to present, I must have been READY, RIGHT? My full time doctorate program for traditional medicine had me completing projects, studying for midterms, doing clinic shifts, and I was still settling into my new apartment in San Diego after moving cross country from Brooklyn. In my life, when it rains it pours, and now this formidable and exciting opportunity presented itself to me. I paused, took it as a good omen, accepted the invitation, changed some exams dates with my professors, and immediately arranged travel to Washington, DC (with no presentation topic in existence). 

Later Jim asked me what I wanted to talk about. I thought to myself, what could I possibly teach or show these seasoned functional dentists that they didn’t already know? Some of them were MY teachers for god’s sake. I mulled this over for hours and finally realized the only thing I am an expert in is my own experience and that none of those dentists or doctors were both myofunctional therapists and Buteyko Breathing instructors. Bingo! I told Jim I’d speak on my experience in “Cranial Balance: recognizing the power of the tongue” by demonstrating remarkable craniofacial-respiratory changes I had witnessed throughout my numerous case studies since 2019. He approved. A very good start! I spent the last few nights before the residency eating late dinners while studying for my Herbs 3 midterm and piecing together a slide show that not only included diagnostic images, but also ones of Patti Smith, Simone Biles and Eric Cartman from South Park to help get my points across. I gotta be me.

In the conference room there were dentists from all over. Some were from California, New York, New Jersey, Virginia and even a surgeon from Germany was present who now runs a massive surgical center in the Boston area. I was nervous to say the least, especially because I was following the legendary duo of Dr. Tasha Turzo, cranial osteopath and the “OG” myofunctional therapist and Buteyko instructor, Kathy Winslow. I sat in the back of the conference room starving and dehydrated while furiously editing my slides up to the last minute. When it was my turn, I kept it snappy, honest, and even though one of my main slides had a colossal typo, the presentation was a “home run”, as Jim put it. The German surgeon raved for hours about my timing and powerpoint, Drs Jim and Blanca Bronson were beside themselves with excitement about my thorough data collection and presentation style, and I got fed very well that night at a local steak house. 

I was truly honored to have been included among such esteemed professionals and leaders in the field of functional dentistry and myofunctional sciences whose guests speakers have included Patrick McKeown, Dr. Kevin Boyd, Michelle Emanuel, Beth Lambert and Dr. Zach Bush. It’s true that simplicity can be profound. That weekend I learned that one’s honest good work when combined with the persistence of continuously showing up can accumulate to hold much value especially when presented to the right audience, even when you might doubt your readiness.