Meet Roberto Tostado of The IBODY in San Marino

Today we’d like to introduce you to Roberto Tostado.

Roberto, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
Our story begins with an end. I left family practice when I became disillusioned with being part of a disease care system enmeshed with pharmaceuticals rather than healing. Disease is a commodity that keeps this sick model going in perpetuity. I no longer wanted to contribute to anyone’s disease but wanted to help people live free from it. I told my wife what I was feeling intuitively and she encouraged me to help people my way. The problem was I didn’t know what my way was other than believing that health started with nutrition. This wasn’t in my medical school curriculum, seriously.

Over the years, this concept has been reaffirmed over and over that health begins in the kitchen not the doctor’s office. It has not been more clearly displayed than now in this pandemic with statistics indicating those dying from this virus are those inflicted with chronic disease, the real pandemic, But as mentioned, it’s what keeps this disease care model going…and going. Spoiler alert: this model is not changing. Bad food plus bad medicine equates to chronic disease and profits the medical and drug industries. The IBODy was created to give people the confidence that they do not have to live in tired, broken down, overweight bodies with chronic disease for the rest of their life. Besides, living with chronic disease sucks. My wife Teresa, a nurse practitioner and culinary graduate, and I have evolved our wellness center to focus on reversing disease through liver detoxification, nutrition and hormone balancing.

We have accepted deterioration as a natural part of aging, disease as normal and abnormal as normal. This simply isn’t true. We have created certified organic detox programs/kits that have dramatically improved the lives of our clients by eliminating toxins, reducing toxic fat and weight and increasing liver function to produce more energy and increase deep restorative sleep. Sleep is perhaps the best anti-aging medicine and many people suffer from insomnia from having toxic bodies from all the processed foods. We have helped patients over the years reverse diabetes, obesity, hypertension, chronic pain and fatigue by understanding root causes of conditions, not masking symptoms or controlling disease with drugs. Why control disease when you can live without it? Health is a choice, at IBODy we decided disease wasn’t.

Has it been a smooth road?
The road has been filled with potholes, detours and blockages but its the ability to navigate through these struggles that has reinforced our commitment to stay the course and help people live happy quality lives. The biggest challenge really is the paradigm shift that we deal with daily with our clients living in a society obsessed with pills over plants, prescriptions over grocery lists and managing disease not healing. Everyone that comes to our wellness center is faced with the question, Do you want to be well? Sounds almost absurd, but the reality is that this model of disease care has distorted our mindset into thinking that it’s ok to have a little bit of disease and medication because most people do and therefore it’s normal–Not. Now I know how Moses must have felt when he yelled in his baritone voice to cross the Red Sea to get to salvation, but not many listened. Health is a choice, as I said a few lines ago, and it begins as a mindset. The mindset of our current medical society is to take care of health with prescriptions, not healing foods.

Food as medicine is old school, like 2000 years old (thanks Hippocrates), but it’s been ignored and disregarded and replaced by pharmaceuticals. Fresh foods taste a whole lot better than a mouthful of pills. And this is the concept that we have ingrained in our patients of eliminating processed foods and replacing them with wholesome fresh foods to start healing the body. We have accelerated this process by helping patients remove accumulated toxins like pesticides, GMO’s, medication, hormones, antibiotics and chemical preservatives with our liver cleanse detox programs. When our body is exposed to dense nutrients without any chemicals, we are rewarded with more energy, better sleep, weight loss and physiological balance. This is how I was able to help myself when I was overweight, tired and had abnormal cholesterol levels. Once your mind is made up that you want to be healthy, shift happens!

So let’s switch gears a bit and go into The IBODY story. Tell us more about the business.
The IBODy was created out of frustration and anger of our medical system determined to compromise our health and immunity by valuing disease over wellness. If our health care model truly cared about our health, the priority in medical schools, clinics and hospitals would be to eliminate chronic disease. Who is dying in the current pandemic? Immunity is compromised having a chronic illness. If nutrition, detoxification, plant-based hormones and stem cell therapies were taught in medical training, chronic disease would be a thing of the past. Our clinic has provided these treatments for years allowing us to specialize in reversing metabolic disease, giving people the tools to take control of their health, quality of life and increase smiles. We are known and most proud of our patient transformations from chronically ill to disease-free and happy. We love our proprietary certified organic detox product lines that have reproduced over the years the healing power of food and the transformative impact it has had on people’s lives.

I believe this life transformation in a box is what sets us apart from other wellness clinics. We have provided our detox products to other doctors to help as many people as possible by shifting away from maintaining disease and embracing healing as the model going forward. I wrote a book called, WTF is wrong with our health? A rebel physician’s manifesto for reversing disease and increasing smiles. I wrote it as a practical, humorous and truthful approach to being a rebel for your health. Teresa recently created a certified monk fruit sweetener (thegrinningmonk.com) that has all the delicious taste of sugar without the toxic effects of sugar. In fact, it is made of anti-oxidants from the fruit that are anti-obesity, anti-diabetic and anti-inflammatory. We are constantly creating products to help people enjoy life and food without sacrificing flavor or deliciousness.

This is what wholesome eating is all about. Many patients don’t understand why they can’t lose weight or why they always feel tired despite eating better or exercising. We educate them on their hormone deficiencies, which are common due to processed foods and EDC’s or endocrine destructive chemicals that suppress fat metabolism. When we correct their deficient hormones including cortisol, thyroid and testosterone with nutrients and plant-based hormone therapy, we are able to optimize energy production, fat burning and health balance. It’s not about losing weight with diets but getting your physiology in a state of balance to promote normal body function and fat metabolism. Don’t focus on dieting or gym memberships, find out how out of balance your physiology is with hormone blood levels to determine what is needed to get you to optimal health. The IBODy uses a comprehensive approach to elevate your health and regenerate your life by removing toxins and correcting deficiencies.

How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
We are at a point of reckoning in this pandemic exposing the true underlying pandemic of chronic disease and a medical system in the coffers of the pharmaceutical industry. Buckminster Fuller said that if you wanted to change an existing model, you needed to create a new one to make the old one obsolete. We need to change the existing model of disease management with drugs to healing with food medicine. I believe people are tired of being sick, tired of doctor visits, tired of pharmacies, tired of medications, tired of being sick and tired and want to feel better. Since the system won’t change the change has to come from more wellness centers to be advocates for patient’s health and regeneration.

This will be the inevitable shift in the next years as awareness grows of healing modalities and nutrition. It is long overdue to upgrade our health os in digital terms. We need to upload fresh foods and delete processed foods, install a healthy mindset and chances are your medications will end up in your trash, deleted. We’re seeing more restaurants that offer vegan options and healthier items as take out, on-line cooking instruction to bring back the lost art of home cooking with fresh ingredients, edible gardens appearing in communities and doctors putting down the prescription pads for grocery lists. The movement is here because people want change and so do healthcare providers. As I said before, shift definitely happens. We need to become the generation of regeneration NOW!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.theibody.com
• Phone: 626 593 5993
• Email: [email protected]
• Instagram: ibodydetox
• Facebook: the IBODy
• Other: thegrinningmonk.com, ibodydetox.com

 
Image Credit:
Michele Laurita, Tana Gandhi

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