Ep 574: Unlocking Your Metabolic Type for Energy, Weight & Hormone Balance with Martin Pytela

What if the reason you’re struggling with low energy, stubborn weight, or digestive issues isn’t about willpower — but your Metabolic Type?

In this episode of the Health Fix Podcast, I sit down with Martin Pytela, functional medicine expert and metabolic typing coach, to explore how your unique biology shapes the foods, supplements, and lifestyle choices that actually work for you.

We each inherit strengths and weaknesses in three key systems:
✅ Autonomic Nervous System – Are you sympathetic dominant (anxious, wired, stuck in fight-or-flight) or parasympathetic dominant (burned out, chronically fatigued)?
✅ Oxidation Rate – Is your metabolism burning fuel fast or slow? (Think paper vs. logs on a campfire!)
✅ Endocrine System – Thyroid, adrenal, pituitary, and ovarian dominance all shape your body type, hormone balance & weight patterns.

When you understand which system dominates — and which needs support — you can use personalized nutrition and lifestyle strategies to restore balance, energy, and vitality.

Martin’s story is inspiring — after healing himself from mercury toxicity, he’s helped over 12,000 clients uncover the hidden causes of their health struggles. His message is clear: true healing is possible, even for long-standing conditions.

🎧 Tune in now and discover your metabolic type. 

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Resources from The Show:

• Martin Pytela’s Website – Life Enthusiast
• William Wolcott’s Book – The Metabolic Typing Diet

Our Partners

Podcast Transcript

Chapters

00:00 Understanding Metabolic Typing
02:51 The Importance of pH Balance
05:30 The Impact of pH on Emotions
08:42 Identifying Oxidizer and Autonomic Types
11:12 Endocrine Dominance and Weight Management
14:14 Exploring Hormonal Influences on Body Types
17:17 The Role of Macronutrients in Health
19:49 Customization in Nutrition for Individual Needs
22:52 The Connection Between pH and Nervous System Regulation
25:23 Cultural Influences on Dietary Choices
26:26 Understanding Dietary Choices and Metabolic Types
29:59 The Impact of Toxins on Health
33:54 Four Pillars of Health: Toxicity, Malnutrition, Stagnation, and Trauma
36:41 Addressing Emotional Trauma and Its Effects
39:44 The Importance of the Lymphatic System
40:33 Metabolic Typing and Personalized Nutrition
41:43 Longevity: Basics vs. Biohacking
46:27 The Difference Between Cause and Symptom
49:22 Navigating Hormonal Changes and Diet
53:10 Life Enthusiast: A Resource for Personalized Health

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Martin Pytela (00:00.142)
cameras.

Jannine Krause (00:01.229)
Yeah, I’m gonna stop now. It’s just from touching the thing. We will make sure I don’t do that anymore. All right, here we go. Martin Pytela welcome to the Health Fix Podcast.

Martin Pytela (00:14.156)
It’s an honor, I think.

Jannine Krause (00:17.447)
we’re gonna have some fun. I already am incredibly curious, of course, from when I was pitched to have you on the podcast about the metabolic typing, because I don’t think a lot of people are aware of this. And, you know, like you mentioned much on your website and what I see, you know, having been there and made the mistakes, learning as a doc that we chase symptoms, but we’re not looking at…

Martin Pytela (00:19.373)
Yeah.

Jannine Krause (00:44.257)
physiology, our chemistry, what makes us and what combinations make us. So give us a little background on metabolic typing so that folks can kind of be up to speed as to like what what is this phenomenon here?

Martin Pytela (00:59.052)
Right, yeah, we’re talking about biological individuality here. We’re talking about us humans being not all made from the same mold, in the sense as you can be left-handed or right-handed, you can have curly hair or straight, you can be light-skinned or quite a lot of melanin, are differences. And this has been noticed from antiquity, back when in India you had people talking about doshas.

vata pitakafa. In China they talk about the five elements and in more modern times you have people talking about the ectomorph mesomorph or you have people talking about blood type and how that affects the lectins, how that affects your ability to interact with foods. Some will support you, some will not. All of that is mashed together into understanding the biological individuality.

And importantly, they started out by measuring the venous blood pH, the alkalinity versus acidity. So when you take in some foods, what will happen to you after? And you can see that with a glucometer. If you take a reading at the time you eat and then 30, 30, 30, 30 minutes later, you will see a certain path. And some of us will spike with

glucose going up high and then maybe crashing afterwards or whatever. So that’s the glucose management. But there also is the other thing and that’s the pH management. And we should get into that, what that does and what that means and why that is.

Jannine Krause (02:44.933)
Let’s talk about it because I’ve never talked about pH balance on the podcast and I give people pH strips to test in the office, but I’ve never actually brought it on the podcast. So let’s dive into it.

Martin Pytela (02:56.0)
Right. Yeah. And so over time, people have been measuring pH of their saliva and of the urine. And the really smart ones also measure the pH of their poop. And so I’ll start from there. The feces is supposed to be quite acidic because your colon should be quite acidic. So if you put a pH strip in your poop and if it’s more alkaline, that’s 6.0.

Jannine Krause (03:11.268)
Yeah.

Martin Pytela (03:24.482)
than 6.5, which is actually acidic, you will have dysregulation in the colon, for sure. That’s an alarm.

Jannine Krause (03:37.721)
Yeah.

Martin Pytela (03:37.782)
In fact, there’s a cascade of pH inside of your body, right? Alkaline saliva, acidic stomach, alkaline small intestine, acidic colon. And there are these internal processes that regulate.

Martin Pytela (03:54.895)
And so the next thing that you measure, if you measure urine, you will see the reflection of what your body is getting rid of. That’s a dumping station. If you’re dumping acid things, well, you’re dumping acidity. If your urine is alkaline, well, you’re dumping alkaline minerals. It’s only telling you what you have too much of that your body is getting rid of. People assign a lot of importance to it, but I think it’s just…

you’re measuring what your body doesn’t want.

Jannine Krause (04:28.549)
trash.

Martin Pytela (04:30.286)
Well, or the best homeopathic you could ever put back in, right? Depends. Urine therapy all the way back to India is a feedback loop. If you feed back into your body what it’s dumping, it’s going to actually self-correct.

Jannine Krause (04:38.339)
Yes. Yes.

Jannine Krause (04:51.062)
I’ve read the books, I’ve seen the info, I haven’t been able to conquer that yet.

Martin Pytela (04:57.622)
Yeah, I have cultural issues with it. also, of course, when I take supplements, and I do, they affect the taste and smell of things. And I get a gag reflex.

Jannine Krause (05:14.661)
Yeah. Yeah.

Martin Pytela (05:15.37)
Anyway, so let’s go there. Okay, and so then there’s the saliva, right? And your saliva will have the pH of your inner terrain first thing in the morning, right? Like when you just wake up, the pH of your saliva will be close to the pH of what your lymphatic system is. So that’s kind of important because in the human, the midline…

Jannine Krause (05:18.009)
Fair enough.

Martin Pytela (05:45.315)
your blood is always maintained in a really narrow area between 7.3 and 7.4 on the pH scale, which is slightly alkaline. And I think this is where the, you’ve got to alkalize comes from. But you don’t want to over alkalize. So let me just explain what really happens, which is this. When you drift

out of balance toward acidity, you wake up early, you will be highly energized, highly motivated, but impatient, and as you drift further out toward acidity, you lose your social graces, like you start interrupting others. And then it is easy to anger, elbows up, get out of my way, I’ll do it myself. And then…

just being really harsh, like speaking to people unkindly. Loss of social graces. And then further on out comes rage. If it’s externally expressed, it’s raging. Road rage is a perfect example of being acidic, out of control. But if you have it inward directed, then you are self-loathing and you’re recriminating and you’re…

either reliving your past with regrets or you’re catastrophizing your future with expectations of disasters and doom.

Martin Pytela (07:24.664)
Beyond that, further on out, lives schizophrenia, paranoia, and crazy. So you do not really want to be too acidic, for sure.

Now on the alkaline side, if you over alkalize, you start with emotional intelligence, like you’re more pleasant, less confrontational. You rise later in the morning rather than early. And then you procrastinate. And then if you push it on out, you get despondent. And if you push it on out further, further, you end up in depression, just dark.

I’m not getting out of bed. I’m not dealing with the world today.

Jannine Krause (08:13.061)
Okay.

Martin Pytela (08:14.296)
So you can see that pushing out into either extreme has its advantages and disadvantages.

Jannine Krause (08:24.037)
Absolutely.

Martin Pytela (08:25.676)
So now how, right? How do I get to being dysregulated with either over acid or over alkaline?

Jannine Krause (08:34.053)
Great.

Martin Pytela (08:35.81)
That, that comes with the two models. We have two types and this was discovered only recently. Bill Walcott came up with it in 1987, put out a book and is teaching it to people. But for I don’t know what reason it’s just not been well understood or perhaps people are too lazy to bother. Because it’s so helpful. Wouldn’t that be clever?

for me to tell you, well, if you do such and such with your food, you’re going to make yourself nervous or you will not be able to sleep. actually, let me describe it this way. People who drink alcohol go to a cocktail party and they will notice that one type will with the more they drink, the louder they get and the more confrontational they get. They become mean drunks. They will say awful things to one another.

And if they keep going, they will even pick a fight. And those are the oxidizers. We call that the oxidizer. They are made more acidic by carbohydrates. And the other ones, they become less controlled, more, well, to alkaline. You know, the emotional intelligence. They will be more pleasant, but then they will start oversharing.

Jannine Krause (09:57.637)
Hmm.

Martin Pytela (10:03.2)
and then after that they will regret oversharing and start crying about it. And then they fall asleep.

Jannine Krause (10:10.693)
I’ve seen both directions. Okay. I think a lot of people have.

Martin Pytela (10:13.93)
Exactly right and those are the autonomics. Carbohydrate makes you more alkaline.

So now we have the three macronutrients. Starch or carbohydrate, fat and protein. And the fats and proteins are on one side and the carbs are on the other and they counterbalance one another.

Jannine Krause (10:39.557)
Yes, yes.

Martin Pytela (10:41.208)
So we can ask you, what happens when you take too much carbohydrate? Do you fall apart and go to sleep? Or do you activate and become ornery or bitchy?

Jannine Krause (10:58.405)
Yeah, yeah, I’m activated and sometimes can end up bitchy for sure. Yes, I’ll give myself up.

Martin Pytela (11:00.622)
Right?

Martin Pytela (11:06.008)
Yeah. And so, and that’s the oxidizer model. Right. And so we sort people out like you’re left-handed or right-handed, you’re oxidizer or you’re the autonomic. So if you are overly activated, right, overly acidic, it’s not good because you’re going to say things you will later regret or you will just be unkind at times.

and not understand why you were so abrasive.

Jannine Krause (11:38.511)
Mm-hmm.

Martin Pytela (11:39.278)
and can control that with food. So for you, you as an oxidizer, the antidote is fats and proteins.

So for you to take a potato, which is a high carb, is okay only if you load it with fats. So for you it’s butter and sour cream and bacon bits. Right? That’s what your genetics call for. Do not eat carbs without fats.

Jannine Krause (12:13.541)
Yep, can totally see that for myself. Yes, yes.

Martin Pytela (12:17.036)
Right. And so when we speak to a client who is confused and wondering, why am I so this or that? Once we map it, we can easily offer guidance.

Jannine Krause (12:32.389)
Okay, okay. Now something of course you intrigued me with before we hit record was the gaining weight and losing weight. And most women over 35, if not over eight years old have obsessed over all of this and wondered, how does this work? And so I’m seeing a pattern here.

Martin Pytela (12:49.622)
Right. Yeah.

Yes. So part of the metabolic typing test that we offer is getting answers to two things. One is the answer to the pH balance, as in how will I become depressed or how will I become unpleasantly angry. The other one is how do I gain weight or lose weight? And we call that the endocrine dominance. And for that we have four for women, but they lose the fourth one.

after menopause anyway.

Jannine Krause (13:26.18)
Interesting.

Martin Pytela (13:26.808)
So they are, we call it thyroid, adrenal, pituitary, and in women we also have gonadal or ovarian. All men are simple, are all testosterone-driven.

in women only some have the overpowering effect of the high estrogen which we should mention so that is triggered by spicy food like chilies and hot sauce and that sort of thing and there are some women who really love hot food and when they overdo it it stimulates the ovaries so that more estrogen is pushed especially during the

affirmative ears, puberty. And so you end up with accentuated feminine characteristics. So you’ll have wider hips and you’ll have the free version of the Kardashian plastic surgery. You’ll get it for free. Just feed your girl a lot of hot food when she’s just growing up.

Jannine Krause (14:37.231)
Hey.

Martin Pytela (14:37.708)
Anyway, so you’ll end up with say size two from waist up and size six from waist down.

Jannine Krause (14:44.121)
This, I can see some patterns in you know, in cultures that feed a lot of spicy foods, the Latino population in particular. Okay.

Martin Pytela (14:51.33)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, the hot African, the hot Caribbean, the hot whatever. Yep, those are them. And so they will end up with these wider hips. The secondary feminine characteristics are accentuated.

Jannine Krause (14:56.823)
Yes. Okay.

Jannine Krause (15:08.321)
Okay, okay, so we got the hot folks. What about us folks that don’t like the spicy stuff like me? I’m very boring.

Martin Pytela (15:14.286)
what they are. Okay, so let’s talk about the other ones. So we have the pituitary. Their temptation foods are usually creamy and they tend to grow into a body type that’s kind of straight. However, the fat distribution is even and in an overweight version of that person,

Jannine Krause (15:19.843)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Martin Pytela (15:43.053)
you will see the Pillsbury Doughboy or the Cabbage Patch Doll where the ankle is thicker and the fat distribution is like on the leg all the way up and it’s all over everywhere. Anyway, Cabbage Patch Doll, you when you see one you say, yeah, that’s the pituitary type. Anyway, their temptation foods are creamy like whipping cream and yogurt and that sort of thing.

Jannine Krause (16:04.344)
Okay.

Jannine Krause (16:13.369)
lots of dairy.

Martin Pytela (16:13.73)
But their health food are actually the ancestral, the organ meats, the high purine. So liver, heart, tongue, red meat, that’s their health food.

Jannine Krause (16:29.541)
Okay,

Martin Pytela (16:31.704)
So that’s the pituitary. And they’re the smartest of the folks. Their head tends to be larger to the proportion of the, to the body than you would expect. And they usually are the intellectuals.

Jannine Krause (16:45.253)
Alright.

Martin Pytela (16:46.882)
So that’s one. The other one being adrenal type. The dominant gland is the adrenals. They tend to be very resilient. Their temptation foods will be savory.

They will gain weight with fats and lose weight on salads and fruit. They tend to be the stocky farmer type or the weightlifter or the gymnast. The thing that comes to mind is like Simone Biles, if you remember what she looked like. Shorter, easily building muscle mass, very explosive strength.

huge endurance.

Jannine Krause (17:35.875)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay.

Martin Pytela (17:37.665)
In men, you will see them as linebackers on the football team. They tend to be built like a brick house, stocky, strong, and huge endurance. Like you can give them a pick and a shovel and say, dig me a trench. They’ll come back in 10 hours saying, I’m done. And they will not stop, right? Like they can just go.

Jannine Krause (17:42.435)
Okay.

Jannine Krause (18:05.029)
Okay.

Martin Pytela (18:07.175)
and their meal preferences. So I should say in the pituitary, the people like to eat larger breakfasts and very scant.

In the adrenal types, those people usually enjoy zero breakfast and main meal as a dinner.

Jannine Krause (18:25.189)
Hmm.

Martin Pytela (18:26.562)
They do best that way. So a cup of coffee for breakfast, a little bit of something for lunch and a large dinner. And they will tell you, I love steak and stuff. But that’s puts weight on them if they overdo it, right? So the typical football player, if he continues eating his dinners that he used when he was a young guy working out and putting out 4,000 calories, he’ll just blow out into an oversize.

They put weights on here, shoulders, chest, they’re massive. their limbs are thick.

And then the last one, the thyroid dominant, that’s probably the one that’s the least well served by the American nutritional advice. Because they are tempted by starchy foods. They are the ones looking for cookies after dinner. And their weight gain food is starch and weight loss food is protein. Or fat, actually, I should say.

fat more than protein. And so the keto diet is the slim diet for the thyroid type, where you dial back the carbohydrates as hard as you can. But that, for the thyroid type, is the temptation food, so they crave it the most.

Jannine Krause (19:49.061)
Mm-hmm.

Martin Pytela (19:57.695)
and they will be the… well, all the Victoria’s Secret models are the thyroid types. Slender, longer limbs.

wider hips rather than not.

that’s the folks. They would be on the volleyball team, the basketball team, the sprinters, the quarterbacks, those are all the thyroid types. They are quick but with limited endurance. So they need to take breaks between things. They can do a sprint but the pituitary are the long distance runners.

Jannine Krause (20:32.761)
mix.

Martin Pytela (20:44.078)
Adrenals are the weightlifters, the hard workers, the bulls of the world.

Jannine Krause (20:51.087)
can put this all together for a lot of different people. You know, I’m thinking through different people. I’m thinking through myself, of course. I think I’m more of an adrenal type since the weight lifting and…

Martin Pytela (20:59.35)
Yeah, yeah, you look, I mean, the parts of you that I see, I would expect that you would be somewhat thyroid, but mostly adrenal.

Jannine Krause (21:10.681)
Yeah, so I hear you say you can overlap a little bit between the two. Okay.

Martin Pytela (21:14.532)
yeah, yeah. Yeah. So if you could visualize a space that so you have the adrenal thyroid pituitary, whatever, and then you have your circle, it’s going to be somewhere within that space. So you’ll, you’ll have a preference. Like you look at me, this is a thyroid model. My, my wrist is not that thick.

Jannine Krause (21:18.031)
Mm-hmm.

Martin Pytela (21:38.838)
other hand around it. My ankles are not that strong. Yeah. Yeah, you’re somewhat stronger built than I am, right? Like you have that Eastern European farmer stock in you, right? I don’t.

Jannine Krause (21:43.205)
Alright, so yeah, I can see how you’re…

Jannine Krause (21:54.853)
Mm-hmm.

It’s… Yeah.

Martin Pytela (21:58.179)
Well, anyway, that’s the dominances. And so if you find a thyroid person who says I’m overweight, they will gain weight on the belly. It starts right around the belly button and they will start putting on a fat pad until they have a beer.

Jannine Krause (22:13.829)
Yeah, and we’ve all seen it. And definitely at midlife, this is what happens. Yeah.

Martin Pytela (22:19.392)
Yeah. Yeah. And so that’s that’s the thyroid type most of all.

Jannine Krause (22:25.387)
Okay, okay, this-

Martin Pytela (22:27.126)
So for example, their slimming herb is going to be red raspberry leaf. So red raspberry leaf tea is going to be the hormonal correction that will help them gain less around that. But most of all, they need to control their urge to eat card.

Jannine Krause (22:33.317)
Yeah.

Jannine Krause (22:45.785)
Yes, yes, that’s that. And I can see, you know, just to kind of bring it for full circle for folks who are listening, like this is why, you know, keto doesn’t work for everybody. Carnivore doesn’t work for everybody. You know, all these different things don’t work. We’re not putting the customization here on it as as it stands. And the other interesting thing you mentioned, which I think a lot of people are stuck in fight or flight mode at this stage of life.

Martin Pytela (23:02.818)
Yes, exactly that.

Jannine Krause (23:14.181)
and how this ties in.

Martin Pytela (23:16.758)
Yeah, yeah, this is super important because it’s the internal pH that regulates the autonomic nervous system. There are two branches to it. The fight or flight sympathetic or rest, repair, digest the parasympathetic and the sympathetic is on the acidic side and the parasympathetics on the alkaline side. So when you alkalize, you’re shutting down your nervousness. You’re lowering your blood pressure. You’re improving your ability to sleep.

all of that. Like you cannot go to sleep stuck in a sympathetic. You’ll be sitting there with eyes this wide, regardless of how tired you are. So you need to shift your pH out of acidic to alkaline in order to shift out into the parasympathetic in order so you can actually go to sleep.

Jannine Krause (24:10.085)
Makes sense.

Martin Pytela (24:10.616)
So if you’re the oxidizer, that requires fats. If you’re the autonomic, that requires starches. That’s why a nightcap, a sherry after dinner, works for autonomics to put them to sleep. If you’re an oxidizer and do it, you say, let’s go to town.

Jannine Krause (24:19.845)
Hmm.

Jannine Krause (24:34.777)
You’re on fire, you’re ready to go. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so, you know, a lot of people will be reaching for all the different herbal supplements out there to try to help sleep. And oftentimes it’s more looking at pH foods first.

Martin Pytela (24:36.247)
Yeah, that’s party.

Martin Pytela (24:51.468)
Yeah, yeah, this is the important thing to understand what’s what’s important, right? The spiritual over emotional over mental over air over water. And now finally, level six, we’re at macronutrients, the calories.

It all comes in order. And so the macronutrients, you need to manage those. Because if you mismanage your macronutrients, that’s carb, fat, protein, if you mismanage that, no matter how you fiddle with the micronutrients, you’re not going to get it right.

Jannine Krause (25:35.813)
100 % sense. mean, I’ve worked with a lot of people that we just weren’t able to get any, you they’ve tried 4,000 sleep supplements come in and then we’re like, well, why don’t we work on energetics? Now spiritual, going back to the higher level and coming all the way down, I’m guessing there are connections here as well in the metabolic typing.

Martin Pytela (25:55.5)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Martin Pytela (26:00.111)
I suppose, yes. Well, your emotions will be affected by your inner pH.

Jannine Krause (26:05.871)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Martin Pytela (26:07.502)
If you’re overly acidic, no amount of meditation is going to bring you back into centeredness. You’re just going to be sitting there stewing and hating the fact that you just can’t calm down.

Jannine Krause (26:17.167)
This is what I was.

Jannine Krause (26:25.923)
heard that a couple times huh? Now what’s fascinating about this because a lot of people will tell me Martin that they’re like I’ve done all the things to try to work on my nervous system. I’ve meditated, I’ve done sound baths.

Martin Pytela (26:36.227)
Yeah.

Jannine Krause (26:40.387)
we’re missing some components here.

Martin Pytela (26:42.668)
You may be missing the absolute basics, which is your culture, which is the people who taught you to cook or eat may have it incorrect based on what you should be doing.

Jannine Krause (26:58.627)
It makes sense. mean, most Americans have 12 meals. 14 if they’re lucky that they rotate through.

Martin Pytela (27:06.163)
you mean like the ham cheese sandwich and peanut butter and jelly and those kind of things?

Jannine Krause (27:12.079)
Taco Tuesday, Pizza Friday. Yeah, and so it’s one of those things where a lot of people struggle.

Martin Pytela (27:13.944)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, so even within that, even if you go out to a fast food restaurant, you still can control the ratios of starch or carbohydrate, fat and protein.

Jannine Krause (27:31.557)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Martin Pytela (27:33.049)
You can still figure that out. Now, what’s really important is that raw food is loaded with enzymes and is supporting your health. So yes, I would like you to be eating an organic salad rather than some crappy food, but raw uncooked vegetable stuff is awesome because it helps you stay healthy, surprise you with fiber and pigments and whatever else, right? All important.

But that is a zero on the fat versus curd. What are you going to do next? Are you gonna put rice with it or a piece of chicken?

Jannine Krause (28:09.807)
Yeah.

Jannine Krause (28:16.046)
Yeah.

Martin Pytela (28:16.334)
And are you going to try and go lean when you’re supposed to go fat? One of the stupidest things that they have invented was low fat.

it absolutely kills the thyroid dominant.

It just does terrible disservice to

Jannine Krause (28:39.652)
Yeah.

Martin Pytela (28:39.97)
That’s why the keto diet craze is so popular, right? Because you discover keto diet and say, my gosh, it’s so easy. Okay, so let me just explain. So some of us are lucky and have an endocrine dominance that’s a good match to the metabolic dominance. Some not so much, right? So if I’m an oxidizer, I’m made more peaceful with fats.

If I’m thyroid dominant, now I’m going to be peaceful skinning.

But if I’m the autonomic dominant, I’m going to be nervous skin.

Martin Pytela (29:25.55)
I have to walk a much narrower path between just enough starches to keep me calm, but not so many that I would get fat from.

Jannine Krause (29:37.007)
which comes down to people kind of sleuthing that out and going, okay, Martin, how do we sleut this out? Because most people are gonna think it’s based on macros and your actual grams of these things. But I’m guessing you’re gonna tell me it’s based on the pairing of things.

Martin Pytela (29:53.293)
Yeah, it’s the ratios. The total quantity is less important than it is the what the combination, the ratios for sure. Yeah.

Jannine Krause (30:02.725)
Okay, okay. So let’s do a hypothetical, especially since the thyroid type of personality or type is not the personality, but the thyroid type is underserved. Let’s do a little case study on someone. Let’s say that we’ve got somebody who, you know, maybe they were a model or a volleyball player when they were younger. Now they’ve had some kids, the weight’s coming on the belly.

where do they start in terms of looking at diet and how do they start working on ratio?

Martin Pytela (30:31.15)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look at me. I’ll give you me as a study, right? I was, I was 30 something, 32, four, five, and I decided to go the healthiest route. I went vegetarian.

Jannine Krause (30:36.024)
Okay.

Jannine Krause (30:48.421)
Okay.

Martin Pytela (30:49.74)
my cholesterol went through the roof and I was putting on weight like crazy. Because I was overeating starches and under eating fats and proteins. So I had horrible cholesterol levels and I was putting on weight. So I had to admit that I have to give up this dream of being a yoga vegetarian. And I was going to have to

be eating fats. And so my salad now had an whole ounce of olive oil on it and a piece of fish or a piece of chicken with it, which served me just fine. And so the weight came off. But only then, only when I admitted that the addiction to starchy foods is wrong.

Jannine Krause (31:45.177)
Hmm. Got it.

Martin Pytela (31:46.698)
That’s how it worked. And it didn’t take long. Like as soon as I switched, it came off within say three, four months.

Jannine Krause (31:49.327)
Hey.

Jannine Krause (31:59.173)
Okay, wow, that’s pretty quick. That’s pretty quick. And you know what I’m thinking about, because I read up on you a little bit on your history with the mercury poisoning and things of that nature, a lot of people right now are convinced they have to detox their bodies and kill all the microbiome imbalances and clear all the heavy metals and et cetera, et cetera, before they can achieve other balance in the body. How does that work?

Martin Pytela (32:01.71)
Yeah.

Martin Pytela (32:09.443)
Mm.

Martin Pytela (32:24.29)
Yeah, yeah, this is a difficult point for sure, because of course, you’re trying to fix the bicycle while you’re riding it. In that sense, and so the toxicity is a terrible thing. The industrial age toxins are disrupting all function, especially mercury is awful because it it destroys our connective tissue. So you’ll have back pain and migraine and

Jannine Krause (32:35.674)
yet.

Martin Pytela (32:54.254)
plantar fasciitis or carpal tunnel syndrome or all kinds of physical dysregulations or health problems, most of which are caused by the presence of mercury. It will also give you the neurological trouble like the, they will call it MS, multiple sclerosis, that’s highly associated with mercury in the body. So you get that out and the symptoms go away. Go figure.

Jannine Krause (33:25.029)
So definitely something that I hear often kind of tied into this, like you’re mentioning, get into the personalized detox, get into the personalized nutrition here, and then build layers. So I’d love to hear kind of how you’re consulting folks. How does it work on your end?

Martin Pytela (33:36.684)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, you said you said what comes before what I say. Well, there are these four things toxicity, malnutrition, stagnation and trauma. Trauma being the emotional dysregulation that we store in our soft tissues to traumatic events. And they could be minor, but when you stack a pile of them on, it will still cause you trouble.

and stagnation that’s from being sedentary and not physically engaged enough, not enough stress on your body. By that I mean positive exercise type of stress. And the malnutrition that’s eating the industrial food-like objects that this…

modern food industry is presenting us with, there are five things that you should never eat. Refined sugar, refined flour, refined plant seed oils, refined salt or minerals, and pasteurized dairy. Those are no good for anyone. And yet, those are the ones that were presented because when you treat food that way, you end up with longer shelf life.

which means that it’s going to be cheaper. So that incentivizes the manufacturer to do it that way, because they will have to throw away less, and incentivizes the consumer to buy it that way because it’s cheaper. But it’s the wrong thing. It malnourishes you. So that’s the malnutrition. And the last one is the toxicity, which is again, industrial age.

Martin Pytela (35:29.304)
That’s the heavy metals, that’s the plastics like the phthalates and the PFOAs and BPAs and all of that stuff that comes with plastic utensils, plastic containers, hot food, hot drink in plastic stuff. All of that is, yeah, and the fragrances, know, the glades and all of that volatile organic stuff that…

just dysregulates. They are endocrine disruptors like you would…

Jannine Krause (36:02.021)
Hmm.

Martin Pytela (36:02.264)
So all that, right? So I have these four things that I have just named. And so when you say to me, well, which one is the important one? My query to you is, which is the most important wheel on your

Jannine Krause (36:18.277)
All of them.

Martin Pytela (36:20.494)
That’s the point. You cannot move it with one of them missing. You cannot move it with one of them flat and so on, right? Like you need to maintain it well enough that all four of these things are functioning. And so when you say, well, what do I do first? Well, you run in circles or a spiral, fixing all of it all the time. You can always upgrade any one of them. You detoxify, you get better food, you…

exercise more, move more, and you do emotional healing by clearing the stuff that you picked up along the

Jannine Krause (36:59.077)
Hmm. The stuff that you pick up along the way is a very fascinating subject, especially for a lot of people, because I do believe that that’s heavily involved in why we hold on to certain things, why, you know, and definitely the food choices and weight gain for a lot of people is related to that trauma and things we pick up. What kind of things are you working with, folks, in terms of your protocols for working on trauma?

Martin Pytela (37:27.424)
Right. Yeah. So there are these two types of memories, right? There are the memories that are conscious, that you control, and then there are the programs that are stored not in the surface of your brain folds, they’re actually stored on the inside, and they’re also stored in the soft tissues of your body. The water of your fascia and of your lymph remembers things. That’s the nature’s memory device.

And so talk therapy doesn’t help you. Because when you do talk therapy, you talk about something and by doing that you’re reliving the experience. So let’s just say that you were assaulted and you’re now traumatized and you’re now afraid to go out. Well, if you talk to me about it, you’re just going to re-traumatize yourself by remembering the whole thing. That’s not helping.

So we need to find some way to reach your unconscious, the part of you that’s storing the fear without dealing with the memory of it. And there are methods like EFT, emotion freedom technique, or it’s also known as tapping, or body talk, quantum healing, neuro-linguistic programming, even hypnosis and other related things, and body work of many sorts.

kinesiology, those sort of things. Those are the ones that work out the stored emotional concepts. don’t have a picture content to it. They just have the emotion content to it. And that can be released.

Jannine Krause (39:13.079)
sense. How do you approach the lymphatic system as it connects into parasympathetic-sympathetic?

Martin Pytela (39:22.574)
yeah, that’s the other underappreciated world, right? So one, it only moves when you move. There’s no vascular driver in the lymphatic system. It only moves when you move. So up-down movements, there are these channels, they start at the feet and run through the lymphatic.

Jannine Krause (39:25.765)
Yes.

Martin Pytela (39:48.035)
nodes, lymph nodes, and the lymph nodes are always on the inside of joints. So for example, the inside of my elbow up here, there’s one. Inside of my armpit, there’s one. Inside of my groin, it’s hard to show here on the podcast, the back of your knee, the top of your ankle, and just below your belly button, those are the places where the lymph gathers. And so when you move, I’m just showing it to you here, I’m pumping.

this thing by compressing, decompressing. And so we can volitionally pump it, right? So the pumping would be something, let’s just demonstrate it up here. So this here, up here just above your clavicle, is the most important point of your lymphatic system. Because the part that’s pumping from below up ends up up here. This is where the lymphatic system connects with the cardiovascular system.

Anyway, so the pumping. It’s like dancing waltz. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. And this is the pumping. And you don’t punch it. You just press, release, press, release. press, release. So that’s what a skilled lymphatic massage will do. The other things that you want to do is you want to walk.

Jannine Krause (40:58.733)
turn it.

Martin Pytela (41:17.826)
run jump bounce you also want to possibly do skin brushing dry skin brushing that’ll move things along

Jannine Krause (41:29.093)
Is there any connection with the lymphatic system and the different types of metabolic types like between thyroid or adrenal or whatnot? Is there anyone that’s more bogged down?

Martin Pytela (41:41.752)
Yeah, I think the pituitary have the biggest issues with it. They tend to swell. They tend to be puffy.

Jannine Krause (41:51.705)
Mm-hmm.

Martin Pytela (41:52.78)
That’s as much as I know about it.

Jannine Krause (41:55.717)
That’s okay. It’s just something that I’m very fascinated with lymphatic because it’s one of the things that…

Martin Pytela (42:01.4)
Yeah.

Yeah, it’s so important, right? Like if you allow it to fester, you will notice that you get smelly. Smelly feet, smelly groin, smelly armpits. That’s a sign of sluggishness and decay. Like you’re like a swamp. You’re putrefying.

Jannine Krause (42:26.233)
Wow, but completely, completely real. And I think a lot of people, we think that we’re supposed to stink in certain areas, but the less stinky we may be means the better lymph movement is what I’m gathering. Okay, okay. Now I’m imagining that your intake for clients is quite extensive in terms of asking questions. No. No.

Martin Pytela (42:27.382)
Yeah.

Martin Pytela (42:39.744)
Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that’s good.

Martin Pytela (42:52.43)
Actually, you know, it’s not that horrendous. We present this thing called the metabolic typing test, which really is a quiz. It’s about 120 multiple choice questions done online where we’ll ask you things like when I eat high protein breakfast, I feel or my ears are more pink than the rest of my face or my shoulders are narrow relative to my hips, stuff like that. So some of it is

Jannine Krause (43:10.319)
Yeah.

Martin Pytela (43:23.04)
physiology and some of it is the response to what you eat and when you eat it.

Jannine Krause (43:29.413)
Okay, okay. So, I mean, I’m fascinating, just even 120 questions. That’s a lot more than you’ll get in an average doctor’s office, let’s put it that way, for sure, for sure. And in terms of longevity, this is a hot topic. A lot of folks are thinking, rethinking aging, longevity. There’s this concept of all the fancy biohacking tools and whatnot, but it seems…

Martin Pytela (43:37.259)
yeah.

Martin Pytela (43:52.162)
Hmm.

Jannine Krause (43:53.358)
And this is my opinion, I’m curious on yours. It seems that we’ve maybe gone a little bit beyond the basics. We’ve forgotten the basics and went to the fancy stuff like the IV therapies and all those things.

Martin Pytela (44:02.464)
Yeah. Okay. Well, I guess what you want to compare is the time versus the function, right? Like we talk, we talk about how long can I keep good health versus time, right? Some people will go at decent level and then finally at the end they hit the wall and yeah. Let me die at 96 in my snowboarding accident.

Jannine Krause (44:09.573)
Mm-hmm.

Jannine Krause (44:16.719)
Mm-hmm.

Jannine Krause (44:28.909)
Absolutely.

Martin Pytela (44:29.346)
I’ll be fine with that, As opposed to my last 20 years were spent in a wheelchair looking at a TV screen that I couldn’t comprehend while drooling. Right? Nobody does. And yet, so that’s the metabolic decline, right? Like if we dysregulate at the metabolic level, we will toxify, malnourish, stagnate.

Jannine Krause (44:32.302)
Yes.

Jannine Krause (44:43.065)
Yeah, no one wants that.

Jannine Krause (44:49.956)
Yes.

Martin Pytela (44:58.462)
and traumatize ourselves into this subsistence rather than we exist but we don’t thrive at that level. So you’re asking how do I not do that? How do I maintain or attain the longest possible? And I would say it’s the opposite, right? Detoxify, nourish well, don’t stagnate, exercise, stress your body in a healthy way and

get rid of your emotional garbage.

Jannine Krause (45:31.397)
Well said, well said. All the things that I definitely want for folks, myself included, to work with over time. And it sounds like you’re definitely doing that over at Life Enthusiast.

Martin Pytela (45:43.247)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so then there are, of course, there’s this wonderful story. The professor in front of a class with a large jar, filling the jar with golf balls and asking the students, is this jar full? And they say, well, it looks full. He holds out a bunch of marbles and shakes a whole bunch of marbles into that jar and says, well, okay, is this full?

Well, now he pulls a whole bunch of BBs, pea-sized stuff, and pours it in that, and it still finds space among the golf balls and the marbles because there still is some space. And then finally some sand, and finally two cups of coffee. And what’s the wisdom here? You have to start with the golf balls.

And that’s what we talk about here when we say macronutrients. What are the most important…

Yeah, you don’t need to major in minors, getting yourself into the weeds, wondering whether you should take NAD or NMN or this or that or whatever. Should I take more zinc or more copper? Yeah, they’re not unimportant. But if you screw up the macronutrients, the micronutrients will not even get you anywhere.

Jannine Krause (47:10.981)
Yeah, no, I agree, I agree. And on that same lines, it seems that when we’re looking at reversal of symptoms, reversal of degradation of health and putting ourselves back into balance, it’s also key to go back to basics again and start there.

Martin Pytela (47:29.42)
Yes, yes, yes, yeah. Understand what’s off and then fix it. Sure. I mean, with your naturopathic education and understanding and all of that, right? Like there are these basics of life versus death.

Jannine Krause (47:44.965)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Martin Pytela (47:48.207)
Chemicals are dead foods, right? Eat something that’s been processed by a plant. think of it. Rocks need to be treated by the microbes that are taking them apart so that the plant takes it from the mineral form into the phosphate form. That’s how it ends up in a plant. That’s how you end up eating it and being able to actually use it because it needs to be chelated.

before you can actually utilize it. So eating rocks as a human is not very effective because you need to have the microbes that are going to do the work for

Jannine Krause (48:31.855)
Yeah, yeah. I think we’ve got really far out of what, we’ve taken health, let’s put it this way, we’ve taken health and the naturopathic medicine curriculum and turned it into the modern medicine and unfortunately a lot of, myself included, I’ll call myself out too, and we tried to fit into the Western model and ended up treating a lot of symptoms and not going back.

Martin Pytela (48:51.118)
So we have two and five days.

Jannine Krause (49:00.887)
and going, how do we work on the basics? And this is where, of course, I’m coming back to, a lot of folks are coming back to this, but I really want to, this is why I wanted to have you on, because of the highlight of where we’ve gotta look at this step to the next foundation.

Martin Pytela (49:09.112)
So.

Martin Pytela (49:16.332)
Yeah. Yeah, you just said the magical words, which is this. difference between cause and symptom, between strategic and opportunistic, which is this. The pharmaceutical industry, which is dominant in our culture because they own the media, they own the internet, they own the Senate, they own the government, they control the whole thing.

and their way of thinking is find a symptom and apply a treatment to the symptom.

Martin Pytela (49:55.679)
In our world, we talk about biological individuality, treating the person, not the illness. I don’t care about your labs, I care about your symptoms. Yet the labs are not irrelevant, they are important because they show us where you’re out of balance. But I don’t want to treat your numbers, I want to treat you and help you have better health. And so…

What we seek is the treatment of the root cause, asking why is that? My headache is never caused by deficiency, etc.

Jannine Krause (50:37.773)
is true. This is true.

Martin Pytela (50:42.466)
So expand that into every possible thing. Your blood pressure issue is not a deficiency in a beta channel blocker or whatever the prescription is that you think you need.

Jannine Krause (50:56.025)
Yeah. And I would venture to say that we’re also, and this is what happens in my industry, is that your blood pressure issue isn’t a deficiency of Hawthornberry, you know, or Indian snake root. Because we also have that kind of thing going on. I don’t, you know, this is my opinion, I’m curious on yours. Right now we’re very heavy in hormone replacement therapy. And it seems to be the panacea for every single thing. And while I do recommend in certain cases,

Martin Pytela (51:07.756)
Very well put, Yeah.

Jannine Krause (51:26.423)
I find that sometimes it’s not the end all be all, it’s not magic, it’s icing on the cake.

Martin Pytela (51:33.527)
Yeah, well, so the two major ones or the three major ones for women, right? As the perimenopause arrives, the progesterone level starts falling and you start losing your cool and you’re less stable and your sleep is less easy to come by and so on, So yeah, you need to figure out how to naturally support all of that. Most of it is liver function, gut function, whatever else.

Jannine Krause (51:53.381)
You

Martin Pytela (52:02.424)
When you support that, you will see that the hormonal levels stabilize and improve.

Jannine Krause (52:09.509)
And do you figure, because this is kind of where I see what you’re doing with the metabolic typing, a lot of us compensate, especially in perimenopause, for the symptoms of the progesterone dropping, we change our diet. Some people compensate by changing their diet because they’re gaining weight, but sometimes I feel it’s a coping mechanism where a lot of people go towards more fat or more carb or more savory, like food soothing. And that…

Martin Pytela (52:35.498)
Yeah.

Jannine Krause (52:37.029)
creates more of a disease in the body too.

Martin Pytela (52:39.394)
Yeah, the self-amplifying loop, right? And if you understand what you’re doing, then you have more control over

Jannine Krause (52:43.183)
Mm-hmm.

Jannine Krause (52:49.573)
And this is why we’re here, to help kind of plant the seed in folks because this is exactly what I was hoping that we would talk about today is really get that idea out there of like you mentioned the different foods, the different types of folks and then how that impacts.

Martin Pytela (53:08.056)
Right. And of course, I mean, we do have tools, right? Like, for example, speak of stress, right? Stress is what happens out there. Your sensory inputs and your brain interprets it and you react. And if you react, you fire off your adrenals and they release cortisol and cortisol will flood or release glucose out of storage. And if you’re sedentary and just sitting there stewing with your…

stress spinning, the only solution your body has is to send in insulin and convert it into belly fat.

Jannine Krause (53:47.237)
Absolutely.

Martin Pytela (53:48.099)
So that’s the natural consequence. So you have now tools. Do you work it off by physical activity or do you take a herbal supplement as we have? We have something called cortisol ease, which will naturally diminish the circulating cortisol, which will drop the glucose level, which will drop the requirement for the insulin, which will naturally prevent this stress.

induced belly fat.

Jannine Krause (54:21.029)
There’s patterns. There’s patterns everywhere. We just have to open up and see them. I’m a fan of having people take notes on themselves. Do you recommend folks to take notes and kind of chart like what’s going on?

Martin Pytela (54:32.856)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, with the metabolic typing test, you get something called the DCR daily check record, which has three slots on it, breakfast, lunch, dinner. And in it, you will have questions such as after I ate, I was hungry within an hour or I was stable. I was satiated. I was not. I was nervous or I was calm. I was sad. I was joyful, whatever. Whole bunch of questions. Not long. It takes you about

minutes to tick the 10 boxes and with that you will be able to essentially diarize of I ate this like a burger fries in a tiny salad or I had a huge stir-fry with chicken and rice or whatever it is that you did and the response how your body

and you come back to me with like 14 of these sheets and we just blitz through it and before you know it you have very clear pattern about what will work and what will not.

Jannine Krause (55:40.889)
That’s good stuff. That’s good stuff for folks. Gosh, Martin, so many fascinating things here, especially, you know, looking at the metabolic typing. And I think folks are gonna be fascinated to look into that further. So let’s tell them a little bit more about life enthusiast, how they can take their quiz, get to know you, get to know more about how you can help.

Martin Pytela (56:02.454)
Right, yeah. Well, the website is life-enthusiast.com. You’ll find links to all of it. There are lots of podcasts with information explaining this in even greater detail. There is the metabolic typing test itself. Currently, we charge $97 for it. It will probably take you an hour or so to do. And then it will take you about an hour with me to understand.

how to implement all of that in your life. We also do a guided tour for people who like to do it in a group. yeah, full retrain, re-educate. It’s sort of like going to an exercise class as opposed to doing it alone.

Jannine Krause (56:53.177)
sense.

Martin Pytela (56:53.774)
So that’s there. And plus, of course, we have a lot of supplementation. Life Enthusiast, such, is about a 35-year-old business, 25 of them online. And what we do is find and source products that are still made by companies owned by the inventors. There’s something really weird that happens, is when a person creates a product,

that they’re passionate about, usually invest themselves into the result. As in the physical benefit, the outcome. Once that business gets bought by some investment company, they start managing the business for the bottom line as opposed to the impact on the customer. And there’s just subtle, maybe not so subtle drift toward

Jannine Krause (57:27.333)
Mm-hmm.

Jannine Krause (57:32.101)
Mm-hmm.

Martin Pytela (57:53.401)
mediocre results. So we still hunt down products that are made by these small businesses where you will actually get real decent.

Jannine Krause (57:55.461)
Mm-hmm.

Jannine Krause (58:06.693)
It’s huge, it’s huge because if anyone wants to do the research on who owns some of the top supplement companies, you’re gonna find it’s Big Pharma. That’s behind a lot of it.

Martin Pytela (58:15.84)
Actually, it’s a big tobacco and big food. You see, what happened is Philip Morris, when they saw the writing on the wall, they went out and bought Kraft and Heinz. I’m just making it up. I don’t know the exact names, but that’s what happened is the tobacco. When they realized that they could addict people to food, they went and bought food and then they made food addictive. And now the result is this incredible disaster.

Jannine Krause (58:17.945)
Yeah, that’s true.

Martin Pytela (58:45.782)
obesity and heart disease and cancer, all of that, those are all the logical outcomes of addicting people to the wrong stuff.

Jannine Krause (59:00.975)
So sad. So sad. We’re waking up. One podcast at a time. We will help folks to wake up here. Just slowly but surely. Well, I’ve enjoyed our conversation today, Martin. Thank you so much for coming on, sharing all about life enthusiasts, but also about the metabolic typing. I think folks are really gonna like this one and really find some way to kind of demystify this thing that is our body and what it does and why it does what it does.

Martin Pytela (59:08.238)
Yeah.

Martin Pytela (59:30.03)
I so appreciate you too. Such a bright light in the world of mostly hopeless zero benefits. You deliver so much. All you have to do is just go on your website and read the testimonials. We didn’t hit on that. I’ll just throw in just a little tidbit. The thyroid type.

especially fast oxidizer needs to have about 10 if not 20 times more iodine in circulation in order to function well. And a deficiency of iodine is causing deficiency in the mucosal barriers, which will cause you problem in planting your egg in your tubes. And it will also diminish your chance of carrying your pregnancy to term.

So if you have the thyroid type on not enough iodine, eating wheat, you have a disaster waiting to happen. You will lose seven out of 10 pregnancies trying to live a life like that without understanding. Right? Just a little thing like that. Know thyself.

Jannine Krause (01:00:42.885)
That is so huge. That is so huge. And I see, you know, I see this often with women. So such an important thing. Thanks for sharing that. I’m sure you have other little tidbits too like this and we’ll have to send folks over to your website and take the quiz and get in connection with you so they can learn more. Such good stuff. Thank you.

Martin Pytela (01:01:04.665)
Thank you. Thank you.