Hi, guys. Welcome back to the FAKTR podcast for our first episode of 2025. At FAKTR, we explore innovative ideas and actionable strategies to elevate your healthcare practice. I'm Jessica Riddle, your host, and I'm so excited for today's special solo episode. As the year comes to a close, it's the perfect time to reflect on the lessons we've learned, the tools we've gained, and the strategies we've developed together over the past 12 months. As many of you know, every year we host incredible webinars, typically on a monthly basis, where we sit down with thought leaders in health care, functional medicine, sports performance, acupuncture, and so many other disciplines within the clinical health care space. So these are free webinars. They are completely open to anyone that wants to hop on and join us live, or you can watch the recorded replay.

And then, of course, we take those webinar recordings and produce this podcast. So many of these may not have been produced yet as podcast episodes, but will be coming down the pipeline soon. Today, I thought it would be cool to sit down and share the top ten lessons from these webinars. Insights that can help you transform your practice, improve patient care, and set yourself up for long term success. And if you're like me, at the dawn of a new year, you're always looking for ways to have a bit of that cutting edge in the new year to do things a little bit differently, a little bit better than the year before. We're not just talking about concepts here. Each lesson we'll discuss comes with actionable strategies you can implement right now, Plus, we'll tie it all together in the end with some big picture insights on how these lessons can drive practice growth and patient outcomes for years to come. So let's jump right in.

Okay. Our first lesson comes from doctor Robert Silverman, who is the developer and lead instructor for our functional nutrition certification program. He presented an eye opening session on optimizing health span. And if you're not familiar with the term, health span is the years that we live free of chronic disease. Isn't just about living longer, it's about living better in the years that you have. Doctor Silverman introduced the idea of immune resilience as the cornerstone of a long healthy life. See, think of the immune system as the master regulator. When it's strong and balanced, it impacts everything from energy levels, mental clarity, even our ability to recover from stress and injury.

He also shared simple but effective nutrition strategies. Did you know that reducing your calorie intake by just 12% can significantly improve cellular health and slow aging? Combine this with taurine supplementation and intermittent fasting, and you have a powerful recipe for longevity. So here's some takeaways and things that you can implement right away. In your practice, consider adding immune health screenings, like testing for things like c reactive protein levels and build nutrition protocols around those results. Educate your patients on the connection between diet and longevity. Talk to them about the things that they're putting in their body and what we like to call the core 4. And these of course are things like proper hydration, of course avoiding things like gluten and dairy and sugar and excessively processed foods, as well as other things that sometimes get overlooked like sleep and recovery, and of course when we talk about recovery that's not just your sleeping hours, but taking time to recover in between intense training, especially for those of you that treat high level athletes or weekend warriors. And then of course, other things such as controlling stress, which as we know and as the research suggests, the more stress that you have and the more chronic stress that you're under on a regular basis, the more susceptible you are to chronic disease, autoimmune disorders, and the more inflammation you have in your body, which of course those of you that are health care practitioners that deal within the physical medicine space, you know how inflammation can wreak havoc on any type of healing or recovery that you're trying to do with your patients.