Supplements and Best Health Practices with Dr. Jay Calvert MD, FACS

Dr. Jay Calvert is a Board Certified Plastic Surgeon with practices in Beverly Hills and Newport Beach, California, and he is a huge hockey fan.  He joins friend and host, Chris Donovan, on this episode to discuss his health regimen, discussing which supplements he takes and suggests and why liquid sugar is the worst thing for you.

TREATMENTS MENTIONED

• Vitamin B12
• Glutathione
• CoQ10

TIMESTAMPS

• 00:00 Start
• 00:30 – Intro
• 00:50 – Why are you Dr Hockey and how did that come about?
• 02:27 – Tell us a little bit about your other podcast the Beverly Hills Plastic Surgery Podcast?
• 04:27 – Why did you open the Rox spa when you knew you had your bread and butter in Augmentations and Rhinoplasty.  
• 05:05 – A facelift is probably the most powerful thing I’ve seen in plastic surgery.
• 08:35 – What supplements do you recommend your patients take before a procedure?
• 11:01 – Who are some of the hockey players you have worked on?
• 12:14 – What is the most gruesome thing you have seen in your years of medicine?
• 14:29 – Why are you a plastic surgeon and not a hockey player?
• 17:20 – What in your opinion are some good supplements for people to take to feel better?
• 21:17 – Here at Invigor Medical, all supplements are measured out for you and you are given instructions.
• 23:16 – Do you have men that come in and get augmentations?
• 24:22 – Legal Marijuana has really increased the number of men who have man boobs.
• 24:57 – If you had one bit of advice for people to help them feel better, what would it be?
• 26:53 – Liquid sugar is the worst.
• 33:27 – Where can people get a hold of you?

Jay: Sugar is abused in this culture. Sugar is in everything. If you really want to radically alter your existence. Sugar and alcohol in this country. Sugar and alcohol are like they’re ubiquitous. They’re everywhere.

Chris: Yeah. They’re the two ailing diseases in this country.

Jay: They are. Yeah. I don’t know. They’re just addictions. I mean, if you want to feel great. Try, like, not drinking alcohol for three weeks and cutting the sugar to 30 carbs a day. 30 grams of carbs a day. Your life will be different. I promise you that.

Narrator: Welcome to the Invigor Medical Podcast, where our mission is to provide personalized medical care through scientifically backed education and wellness solutions.

Chris: Dr. Jay, thank you for joining the Invigor Medical Podcast today. How the hell are you man?

Jay: I’m doing great. It’s great to be here. Great to talk to you. It’s been a while.

Chris: Yeah, we’ve known each other for about 4 to 5 years now. We met when I was the director of production at a podcast company in Beverly Hills, and you, being a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills, wanted to start a hockey podcast because that makes total sense. Can you elaborate why you’re Dr. Hockey a little bit?

Jay: Yeah. So the Dr. Hockey podcast, first of all, I’m a huge hockey fan, but I helped the Maloof brothers write their pitch to the NHL to get the Vegas Golden Knights. And after doing that and they got the team, they pretty much used, you know, everything I said to, you know, talk to Batman and the crew.

And they said, “It’s a great pitch. You guys got the team.” And, you know, Joe called me and said, you know, you’ve got to do something with your hockey knowledge. How do you know what to say to the NHL to get a hockey team? He goes, “If we’d used what we were planning, it wouldn’t have it wouldn’t have hit. And you knew exactly what to say.”

I said, “Because everything in Hockey’s about the Stanley Cup, Joe.”

Chris: That’s it?

Jays: That’s it. And so it went well and he said, “Do something.” So I started a podcast and I basically was me when I was driving between Beverly Hills and Newport Beach, talking about hockey into my voice recorder on my cell phone. And then I put it up on a podcast site.

Chris: I remember listening to some of those when we first were introduced to each other when we brought you over to the platform. That was was fun. I mean, you were so passionate about it. We love to have you around. We loved having you there. Your podcast is still going good. The Doctor Hockey one.

But you also have the Beverly Hills plastic surgeon pod, which is really, really big. So can you tell us a little bit about that?

Jay: Yeah, well, that’s, so after I start this podcast in hockey, I was like, you know, I probably should take some real estate in Beverly Hills and the podcast world. So we started the Beverly Hills Plastic Surgery podcast, and I do it with my associate, Dr. Millicent Rebello, who’s an incredible plastic surgeon. But, also, I find that, you know, most of the people listening to the podcast are women, and they like to listen to Dr. Rebello.

She’s very brilliant, knowledgeable, and she comes at plastic surgery from a woman’s perspective, obviously, and it’s really helpful. And people get sort of the point counterpoint from the two of us. We both look at it a little bit differently, but it’s, you know, we’re over three years in now and we’ve got a pretty decent following. And our patients love it because they can listen to us talk about topics that they’re coming to see us about, like if they’re coming in for a revision rhinoplasty, which is a big thing that I do or facelift.

Those are kind of my my bread and butter. Then they can already know, like, what they’re in for and who’s going to be talking to them and how we behave and, you know, sort of our attitude. And it makes it very comfortable and very, like, a lot of the questions are already answered. So the podcast has been a real key portion of my information transfer in my practice.

Chris: Well, and that is why we’re doing this podcast and having people like you on is because a lot of people don’t necessarily want to talk about supplements that, you know, help ED or help your libido or some guy might be losing his hair since he was five years old. Doesn’t necessarily want to bring that up.

So, we try to help men and women feel better by having supplements in you being a plastic surgeon, do the exact same thing just on a scale of a thousand times more. You just get to the point, cut it out and fix it.

Jay: It’s all connected.

Chris: It is. And that’s why I was going to say you have this ROXSpa that you created. And it’s not just plastic surgery, rhinoplasty or any of that stuff. It’s everything, LED light treatments, microblading. Why did you open this ROXSpa when you just, when, you know, you had your bread and butter in augmentations and rhinoplasty?

Jay: You know, plastic surgery is like, it’s one aspect of looking great and feeling great. And so the ROXSpa was sort of the supporting business for my plastic surgical operation. So you have a facelift, which is a very effective anti-aging. I mean, it’s an incredible endeavor because, it, the confidence boost of a facelift.

I mean, it’s almost it’s probably the most powerful thing that I see in plastic surgery. It really, the patients don’t even understand how effective it is because they just kind of live their life after they get their facelift and they look great, but they don’t realize that most of them lose 10 pounds and they don’t diet. Most of them make more money and they don’t do anything except just they are who they are.

And this is something I actually wanted to study at the University of California Irvine, when I was on staff there. And the IRB basically looked at me and said, “Are you trying to say that facelifts are good for you?” I was like, “No, I just want to show the effect of what a facelift does in terms of confidence and how it affects their health.” They’re like, “So if that’s true, then you’re saying that this should be a covered benefit of insurance.” I said, “I didn’t say that. I just want to look at the data.”

And the data from my, you know, kind of pulling it from my practice was that, if you feel confident, you look great and you look at yourself in the mirror, you exercise more, you travel more and more social interactions, all the things that make you a more, you know, like a healthier individual.

Chris: And that’s what we’re all about here. Now, I’m guessing that a lot of the procedures aren’t just a one and done. You got to kind of keep the maintenance and the ROXSpa helps that with all these different types of procedures and in, I mean, you have injections, fillers, but all that stuff, just to help keep it in place in a sense, but also keep the confidence there, you know, like you’re continuing to grow that new lifestyle of yours in the facelift was your taking off point in the sense.

Jay: 100% or people come in through the ROXSpa to get, you know, treatments and they stay with us. I mean, I’ve been here in Beverly Hills now since 2005. I was at UC Irvine before that.

You know, I finished my training, went to Cornell Med and then University of Pittsburgh for seven years for my residency training program and then out to UCI as a tenured track faculty. Left and came to Beverly Hills in 2005. ROXSpa opened in 2006. And literally, like the patients that were our first patients are still with us.

Chris: Still there.

Jay: And it’s great because you learn about your patients so much so that, like, when it’s time for them to do something, then they come over to the surgical site, like when it’s time for them to get their Botox fillers and lasers.

And we did a whole podcast, I think it was called like Red Carpet Ready. But it basically was about like, how do you make an aesthetics plan for your life? And, you know, you have to look at, you know, your confidence in looking great is almost like, you know, you look at how are you going to take care of your heart or your liver or your pancreas.

I mean, these things are all about maintenance and checking in with yourself. And supplements are a big part of it, too. You have to diet, exercise, the proper supplements to support, kind of, whatever it is that you do. This is all part of the package of looking great, feeling great and living healthy, because the last thing you want to do is be nursing some ailment, you know, early on in life.

And like I see a lot of people in their forties and fifties, type two diabetes, hypertension, that’s like crazy out of control, obesity. Things that really stop you from having a full and, you know, expressed act of life which are avoidable and they can be and you can make interventions but you have to pay attention. You need somebody to guide you and you have to get the knowledge that can help you be the best that you can be.

Chris: And you can always get something to help kickstart you. Not as drastic as a facelift, but supplements you were talking about. What supplements do you recommend for your patients before they go into a procedure?

Jay: Well, this is the thing, is that a lot of people who are on a lot of supplements that are not good for surgery. They’re great supplements, but they cause a lot of bleeding. Vitamin E oil, there’s like St John’s Wort, turmeric, these things, which I think are really great to take, they can cause bleeding. One of the big ones is saw palmetto, which a lot of guys take for prostate health.

And, you know, I do a lot of Silicon Valley facelifts to keep the guys in the game. They, and a lot of them, are on saw palmetto because they have benign prostatic hypertrophy. The saw palmetto really helps you, you know, not get up in the middle of the night to pee so many times.

Chris: There you go.

Jay: But it is a potent anti-platelet medication, you know, supplement. And, you know, the medications, by the way, are just, you know, these compounds that have been sort of packaged up and bottled up and dosed to do what they do. But, you know, like, there’s a lot of medications that are just, you know, supplements that have been, you know, really distilled down and turned into, you know, a dose dependent FDA cleared medication. But saw palmetto is one that I know a lot of guys take.

Definitely causes bleeding. You got to get off it before surgery. The supplements I like for surgery are bromelain and Arnica. Bromelain is an enzyme from pineapple juice and Arnica montana is it’s full herb, that taken together, really reduce bruising and swelling and they’re very good for you. I also tell patients to take some zinc, some vitamin C. These things help with wound healing. Magnesium, calcium, those things are all very helpful for surgery and they don’t cause additional bleeding.

Chris: Shortens the recovery time a little bit.

Jay: It does. And especially the, I think, the bromelain and arnica for bruising are really important. You know, we use hyperbaric oxygen after surgery. There’s a whole bunch of things that we do to really shorten the recovery time, because that’s the key. You know, after you get these operations, you want to get back to your life and feel good as soon as possible.

And we have loads of protocols depending on the operation and the patient’s age and what they need.

Chris: Now, you’ve done plastic surgery for tons of people from Beverly Hills, but you also work with hockey players, right?

Jay: We do.

Chris: Yeah. You do a lot of, “I’m done with hockey. I need my teeth back surgeries.” Who are some of the hockey players you’ve worked on?

Jay: I couldn’t possibly say who they are.

Chris: Aww, dang it, I tried.

Jay: Let me think who would say anything if they have. Well, I will tell you that one of the things that happens is a lot of times after I do work on the patients, then they’ll agree to do a little, you know, podcast time. So, you might be able to extrapolate some of that. But I can’t say who’s had what or who’s done what or anything because it’s really a HIPAA issue.

But the hockey players that I do see, I don’t see as many hockey players as I see their families, the moms, the wives, the girlfriends. They tend to come in a lot and do a lot of surgery with us. Just because they know me from, you know, the podcast and being around the NHL, which is great, you know, and it’s a great, you know, the NHL crew is a great group of people.

You know, they’re really amazing. They, the players are nice. Their families are amazing. I really enjoy working with, you know, the people in the profession of hockey.

Chris: Okay. So without naming names, you didn’t just do, you haven’t just fixed teeth for hockey players. You’ve done other things like broken bones or stuff like that. What’s probably the most gruesome thing you’ve seen.

Jay: The most gruesome thing I’ve seen. This is a, you know, not just hockey, just in general?

Chris: Okay. Yeah let’s go that way.

Jay: Most gruesome thing I’ve seen, was way back in my residency. A deer, a 12-point buck jumped out through the windshield of this guy’s truck and just demolished him. And he lived, the guy lived. The deer died, but his face was just smashed and had fur, like in every little bit of it. It’s just, it was the most awful situation.

And we took him to the O.R. and fixed him up. And I mean, I just remember us kind of looking at this guy go like, how is he going to survive this?

Chris: And that was where?

Jay: That was when I was at the University of Pittsburgh and this guy was out, you know, in Westmoreland County somewhere. For those of you from Pennsylvania, you know, it’s like, there is way more deer than people out there.

Chris: That’s gnarly. I didn’t think it was going to be a deer involved with that story. I’ll tell you that for sure.

Jay: I mean, some of the hockey stuff that I’ve seen, because I do get get those calls, but they’re usually just run of the mill facial lacerations. I think one of the most brutal injuries was a slap shot by Phil Kessel in the playoffs when they were playing the Blue Jackets and Zach Werenski put out his stick to stop the puck and the puck skipped off his stick and went right and gave him like a nasty orbit fracture.

You know, bones, the eye socket. I mean, it was pretty routine, but it was a bad injury. I mean, Zach did fine. He healed up great, you know, And those things look awful when you see him and it really looked bad. But it was pretty, it was a powerful slap.

I mean, Phil Kessel’s no, he’s no slouch. He hits a slapshot. That thing’s moving probably 90 miles per hour into your eye socket. And that is bad day.

Chris: That’s like getting hit by a fastball from Randy Johnson. You don’t want that at all. You know, it’ll knock you out. So, you, I’ve always wondered this. I don’t think I’ve ever asked you this, even though I’ve known you for a while. Why are you a plastic surgeon and not a hockey player?

Jay: Well, the truth is what I was. So, I’m very old, and back in the day, hockey was not like, it wasn’t the big rage, you know? And there is the real reason I couldn’t go to the next level with my hockey was my mom did not drive and my dad worked all the time and he was away a lot and I could not get to the rink.

And my mom, she didn’t drive because when my mom drove, things got crushed and people lost lives.

Chris: And maybe that’s why you became a doctor.

Jay: And she was just the worst driver and at some point, like, my dad just said, “You need to not drive cars. It’s just too scary.” Oh, you know, like, I think on one of their driving day lessons, she put the car through the living room of somebody’s home. And, you know, the people, like, invited them in for tea.

And my dad was sitting there bleeding with, you know, with a scalp laceration.

Chris: And that’s why you got into plastic surgery and became a doctor. You’re like, my mom’s probably going to end up hitting something else, I gotta take care of her.

Jay: So, that was really it. To play hockey, you need parental involvement of epic levels. And I love skating. I loved hockey. I still do. I just, you know, I just can’t, you know, I can’t sustain those injuries now as a plastic surgeon, an injury for me just takes me out of action.

Chris: Yeah. That’s your livelihood and everything.

Jay: It is. And I got to stay healthy. I don’t jump out of planes. I ski still. My wife just cringes every time she sees me on the slopes. But, you know, you can’t, you know, you can’t be a Faberge egg. But at the same time, you know.

Chris: You went from jumping out of a plane to skiing. I mean, that’s a big drastic, I mean, jumping out of a plane, you know, hitting the ground only once.

Jay: I think there’s something wrong with, jumping out of a plane seems, really, like, not like the…

Chris: Like not supposed to do it.

Jay: Like it’s unnatural.

Chris: Unless the plane’s going down.

Jay: They’re not for me. Not for me. I’m cool with it. I’m going to miss the whole skydiving thing. I have a, maybe when I’m like 90 or something. I’m like, you know, so…

Chris: You’re like, I’m not doing surgery anymore. Let’s go! I’ve done bungee jumping, but I haven’t been skydiving yet.

Jay: Oh, I don’t know if I could do that either. Looks like a back injury to me.

Chris: I was younger. It’d probably be a back injury, maybe, maybe a knee injury or something too, nowadays.

Jay: Right? Exactly.

Chris: So you do the surgeries, do those procedures stuff. Do you have any suggestions for supplements for people that can’t necessarily afford some of these surgeries to help them feel better? I know we have some of them here, but I want to get your opinions.

Jay: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, in general, people take, people who take supplements tend to over supplement and I think that’s actually a danger. You want to be smart about how you, you know, as Hippocrates said you know, “Let thy food be thy medicine.” You want to be, maybe it was Plato, one of those guys, but they, but that is the way that I look at it. Let thy food be thy medicine.

So don’t overdo it because too much of anything is bad for you. Being smart about, like, what might be missing in your diet. Well, you know, like diets today or like processed foods are a little washed out of like, you know, things like, you know, heavy metals that you need to get a little bit of that you would get if you were, you know, back in the, you know…

Chris: Way before eating dirt, basically.

Jay: Yeah. Yeah. If you were eating dirt and needing, you know, animals that they dirt and eating whatever, like whatever came off the trees or whatever, you’d get those heavy metals in your diet. So those kind of things where you, if you think about it, they, they are very helpful. Things that if you’re, if you’re a person that works out, well, then you start thinking about like, well, how do I support that?

Do you need, you know, glutathione? Do you need Coenzyme Q? You need zinc, things that are going to make you better, that are going to supplement the biochemical pathways in your body that you’re going to rely on to do what you do.

I don’t take a whole lot of supplements. I take a b-complex. I actually take prenatal vitamins because I figure if it’s good enough for moms who are going to have a baby. Probably good enough for me, too.

Chris: That’s probably pretty smart. My wife never took them when she was pregnant.

Jay: Really?

Chris: She just couldn’t do it, just something with the pills, she couldn’t swallow. And I’m like, man, she was yellow when she gave birth to her last child. She had so much, or so little, iron in her body.

Jay: Oh, wow. No way!

Chris: Yeah.

Jay: So, like, prenatal vitamins are, like, designed like, it makes it really easy to get the stuff that she need because they’re like somebody started through. And so I buy a prenatal. I take a b-complex. I take vitamin C and that makes it real easy. And I’ll take some zinc, maybe a couple of times a week and some coenzyme Q. But, you know, that really helps a lot.

And, you know, I’m 54 years old and I work out and I can run and I do everything that I want to do, and I don’t really have physical limitations, you know, other than my total fear of, you know, death from jumping out of an airplane.

But other than that, you know, I’m good. I can swim and do all the things that I, and I do have some, you know, joint aches from all the rugby I played.

But I find that if you do those things and if you do get those joint aches, you know, then you’ll look at whether some glucosamine is good for you. But be smart, don’t like, the over supplementation can really make you sick. And I’ve seen that and I’ve seen it in a lot of my, I have a humungous practice of fitness models. Like my breast augmentation and breast reconstruction and breast redo practice has gotten into the fitness community.

And so, I have a lot of these, like, very major league Instagram, you know, fitness models that come in to me to give them cleavage because they’re so thin and they’re like, “Oh, my breast implants are too wide apart. And, you know, they’re under the muscle and I need them to do this.” And so I learn about their physiology by operating on them.

And I think that, you know, they too feel that supplements are important, but, you know, a lot of them have supplement lines. You know, I can, you know, if you go on my Instagram, you’ll see all these folks and you can kind of look at their stuff. But, you know, and I don’t endorse any one over the other.

But I, you know, I have bought some of their products and they’re good. You know, they’ve thought it through and they work out like crazy and they look like that. So people go, “Well, I want to look like that. I better take these supplements.” So but just don’t take everything.

Chris: Don’t over supplement. Like here with Invigor Medical we have a doctor call you. They only give you a certain amount per week. It’s very critical and, like, everything’s set out for you. It’s already predosed and everything. So, you get the instructions, you get once a week, whatever, whether it will be a Wegovy shot or Sermorelin, or whatever you take, it’s all broken down for you, so you can’t, I mean, you could if you legitimately overdosed yourself, but it’s set up so you can’t.

Jay: Right. And that’s key. You need that guidance, you know, and that’s how you should do it, you know? And if you can, you know, be clear about your goals, this is really important. I mean, if you’re going to supplement your, you know, your workout, your workout regimen or like I’m training to do a marathon or I’m trying to lose weight, like, that’s when you want to get guidance on that and you want to go to an expert because you need somebody to evaluate where you are and where you’re trying to go.

And then you can come up with those programs because again, if you try to do it on like, it’s anything, it’s like anything. You try to do it on your own and without guidance, you’re going to be really disappointed in the results. But I find the supplements are key and they’re important. I’ve taken supplements since I was probably in high school, and it’s made a difference I’m sure.

Chris: Supplements, people hear the word supplements and some people will go off the deep end and think crazy things. But supplements are simple things like B12, fish oil.

Jay: B12 is great for you! Fish oil is great for you.

Chris: Yeah. All these things that are super simple and some of them are over the counter, it’s just you weren’t necessarily prone to doing it when you were younger, so why did you do it when you’re older? So yeah, these podcasts, like, Invigor Medical podcast and the, you know, the Beverly Hills Plastic Surgeon podcast are places to go to get some of this information if you’re going to have a procedure or if you need some supplements.

So we do a lot here and now this is just for me, this question. You do plastic surgery on women, you do augmentations. Do you do the men part?

Jay: Oh, yeah. No, it’s very common. 20% of men need some sort of, you know, work in the, you know, not just in the trunk, but in the chest. And a lot of men have, you know, a lot of, you know, breast tissue. If you go to most guys over 30, they’ll have something that they’re not happy with.

You know, you can bust your ass all you want. Try to lose weight, try to diet. But if it’s actual breast tissue, it’s not going away. And so with that operation and there’s sort of a spectrum, do you just need liposuction? Do you need an actual formal excision? Do you actually need skin taken off? I mean…

Chris: Yeah, if you lost a lot of weight.

Jay: Yeah. Well, the advent of legal marijuana has made the man boobs much more common now. So there is a boom in, in gynecomastia, which is the technical term for it because marijuana is very good at getting your breasts to grow.

Chris: Wow. Only in men?

Jay: Only in men.

Chris: Wow, why not the other way around?

Jay: Other way around, right.

Chris: Yeah. Like how how come that doesn’t work? Like, I mean, I don’t even want to get into the technical reasons why, but I did not know that. That’s something I learned today. So I’ll write that down on my list of things I learned.

Jay: Yeah the marijuana and then, but gynecomastia has always been common. It’s 20% of men.

Chris: Yeah. If you had one bit of advice to someone that’s trying to get themselves to feel better, have a little more confidence, but they don’t have a whole lot of money. What are some simple things that somebody could do to help make themselves feel better? Like I said, there’s fish oils and B12 and stuff like that, that you can get over the counter. But is there anything that I’m missing?

Jay: Well, altering your diet. I would tell you that sugar is abused in this culture. Sugar is in everything. And if you really want to make a change and feel better, cut the sugar. Cut the complex carbohydrates, the starches, you know, the breads. You can radically alter the way that you look and feel by getting down to 30 grams of carbohydrates a day.

Chris: Wow. So it’s a more keto driven diet.

Jay: 100%. I mean, that is a no brainer. It’s very hard to do, because our world is set up to take cheap stuff, package it and sell it for a lot of money. So, you know, if you’re, you know, you don’t have a garden and you’re not working on a farm, you’re buying stuff that’s set up to cost you a lot more than it costs the people who make it.

That’s how you make money. So, the sugar is very cheap. It’s very easy to make stuff with sugar. There’s sugar in everything.

Chris: Everything.

Jay: You got to realize that, you know, you want to, if you really want to radically alter your existence. Sugar and alcohol in this country, sugar and alcohol are, like, they’re like ubiquitous. They’re everywhere.

Chris: Yeah. They’re the two ailing diseases in this country. And they are.

Jay: So yeah, I don’t know. They’re just addictions. I mean, and if you want to feel great try, like, not drinking alcohol for three weeks and cutting the sugar to 30 carbs a day, 30 grams of carbs a day, your life will be different. I promise you that. And it’s very hard to do, especially around like the holiday times.

People make excuses. I tend to go after it the most at the holiday, at the holiday times, just because I’m, I know that if I don’t, then I’m going to wind up looking at 10 pounds extra that, you know, on January 2nd, I’ll be like, all right, got to get back. And no, it got to started. So I actually attack the health kick during the holiday without making excuses because you still wind up cheating on you still wind up going to parties, you still wind up having stuff.

But at least if you’re conscious choice, if you’re making conscious choices that like today, I’m going to really buckle down. I’m having chicken and salad and I’m having, you know, egg whites and avocado for breakfast, you know. And then if you have to go to that cocktail party because, you know, it’s a work thing or whatever, fine.

So you have your glass of wine or glass of champagne. You lay off because you’re now conscious, you’re now thinking. And health is about choices. It’s about active engagement with your own health. And this is a big part of it. I mean, you could take all the supplements in the world and try and do this or do that.

But if you’re not actively engaged in putting out the activation energy to take control of your health, it isn’t going to work. And you don’t even have to ask why it’s not working. You know why it’s not working. You just have to look yourself in the mirror and say, “You know, okay, I suck.” Recommit, get back on the horse and go forward again.

And that’s really the secret. But I mean, I just, I hear every excuse in the book, and I’m sure you do, too.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, in baby steps, too. I tell people all the time, don’t go and try to stop eating meat, stop drinking soda, stop drinking beer, stop going out. Don’t do it all at once. Just next time you go out, don’t have the beer. Next time you go out, get the bun off the bread or off the burger or whatnot.

Just take the baby steps to get going, because that’s the hardest part, is getting into that rhythm, getting into that routine and trying to get yourself into a better place in life. Now the supplements help, but if you don’t dedicate yourself, you’re not going to complete anything.

Jay: Active engagement. You’ve got to, you have to be actively seeking that health part. It has to come from you. No one can make you do it. You know, it’s like people wonder, “Oh, I don’t know why it doesn’t work for me.” I go, “I’ll give you 20 reasons right now. You want me to name them or do you just want to know them, to know that I don’t have to say them,” because they know what it is. Everybody does.

Chris: You’ve got to look at it and go, “Okay, you tell me what it is, because, you know, I know what it is.” For me, I like beer. I’ll go out and I’ll have a beer and I’ll watch the game. And that’s bad.

Jay: Oh, I love beer. I do. And it’s just really hard for me to go. You know, I go to hockey games all the time and I’m just like…

Chris: You have to have a beer. And it’s a human state law. You have to have a beer.

Jay: Yeah, but I’ll have one. I used to go, I’m like, I was like, you know, one a period kind of guy. But now if I go, if I have one, I’ll have one. I rarely have beer now because I just can’t at my age and with my family history, I can’t do that stuff. And I recognize, you know, my mom and my great aunt, they all fought diabetes, wicked hypertension.

So, you know, if you know your family history, you know where this is going. So if you want to not go there, actively engage, get it, get it on, recognize that you got to do it. And it’s only you that’s going to be able to do it. Nobody can do it for you.

Chris: And that’s a good piece of advice to look back at your parents, look back at your grandparents, you know? Some of these, a lot of these, like diabetes and stuff, can be cured just by changing your diet and things that we’ve been talking about. So look back there and kind of use that is where you don’t want to be in and then, you know, find the things that help you not get there in a sense.

Jay: Yeah. I check my blood glucose. I do not have diabetes, but I’m already doing finger sticks. And what I’m doing, is I’m gathering data. I’m not trying to, you know, treat diabetes. I don’t have diabetes, but I’m gathering data. What happens when I work out. And then I, you know, eat, you know, meat and vegetables and then what does that do to my blood glucose?

And what happens when I do cheat and have a glass of wine with dinner and a dessert? And believe me, I’m learning, I see it.

Chris: Does that increase your insulin resistance or what? You know, like, you don’t, all that stuff. But it’s really good to monitor your glucose levels, especially if you have a family history. I should probably be doing that. So I’ll probably step on to get going on that over here very, very soon.

Jay: Yeah, I bought it. I bought a blood glucose monitor for like 26 bucks, you know, at one of the local pharmacy stores. And it was, like, it’s a no brainer now, like, the data that I’m learning because, like, what I see, what it does and it, the immediate feedback is like, “Ooh, I need to do this.”

Oh, you know, even though the numbers aren’t bad, but you see, they’re different.

Chris: You get the reaction to it.

Jay: Yeah. When I go through a keto day where I’m doing like, just, you know, proteins and no sugar. I mean, my blood glucose is, you know, 82, 90, you know, after I eat, they are 110 or 140. Now if I have wine and dessert and all that and I see the 127’s, the 135’s, those are numbers that, you know, that’s normal. But, like, it’s really different than if I did, like, the keto diet.

Chris: Yeah, exactly. Everything affects your body in one way or another that you put into it or put on it. So just be conscious of that. That’s all I could say, right?

Jay: Absolutely. But make a plan. Understand that it’s about taking the bull by the horns for yourself. You know, nobody’s going to do it. Your doc’s not going to do it. Your doc will give you, you know, when you go to your doctor. And this happens for me, too. I go to, you go to my doctor, looks at my numbers.

I don’t really like this. This looks good. You know, your cholesterol is that, it’s very protective. You got a high, you know, HDL, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then she doesn’t ever think about me again. But I do. And so it’s my job. Then to what, the next time I show up there, have things be better. And, so I have to actively engage to do that.

If I don’t, it’s going to hell in a handbasket and your life gets cut short for, you know, all the reasons we know. And if you want to extend life and, you know, keep your DNA intact and not get cancer and all those things that you’re trying to avoid. So you have a good life and a good lifestyle, then you got to actively engage.

Chris: And those are some of the best words of wisdom I could give to anyone. Dr. J, you have the Beverly Hills Plastic Surgery podcast, you have the Dr. Hockey podcast, you have the ROXSpa. Where’s the easiest place people can get a hold of you?

Jay: Best things, my website is drcalvert.com. D-R-C-A-L-V-E-R-T dot com. That’s easiest. The website’s got everything on it. It’s got all my social media stuff on Instagram, you know, Dr. Jay Calvert and that’s, you know, I’ve started in on Tik Tok, believe it or not. So that’s a Dr. J. Calvert also. But there is a doc, D-R period Calvert. Because somebody had stolen my name and actually put up pictures of me.

Chris: Tried to be you, right? I think I…

Jay: Kind of interesting.

Chris: Yeah, well, could they dance worth a damn? I mean, that’s what Tik Tok’s about, right?

Jay: Definitely not that. But they’ve used all my photos, so it’s actually an ad for me, so I’ll take it.

Chris: Yeah, right?

Jay: Yeah, drcalvert.com, and we’re in Beverly Hills, Newport Beach. All the phone numbers are there and everything. Love to hear from you.

Chris: All right, Dr. J, thank you so much for joining the show today, and I will be in touch very soon, man. Take care.

Jay: Thanks, Chris. I’ll see you.

Chris: Bye.

Narrator: Thank you for joining the Invigor Medical podcast. For more information on the show, Invigor Medical, or to get a hold of Chris: Go to invigormedical.com.