Root Cause Solutions For You

Beyond Weight Loss: Understanding Peptides and Their Role in Your Health with Dr. Eleanor Duelley

• Fabiola Reyes, BCHHP - Root Cause Expert, Cert. AK, CellCore & Nutrition Response Testing® and Quantum Nutrition Testing Practitioner • Season 3 • Episode 6

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Struggling with weight management despite "doing everything right"? You're not alone. In this eye-opening conversation, Naturopathic Doctor Eleanor Duelley demystifies peptides - the natural compounds your body makes to regulate metabolism that diminish with age.

Dr. Duelley explains why GLP-1 peptides like semaglutide (found in Ozempic) have gained so much attention, distinguishing between responsible therapeutic use and celebrity weight loss headlines. "Peptides are supporting that system that I referred to as your metabolism," she clarifies, contrasting them with conventional medications that block bodily processes.

The conversation takes a fascinating turn as we explore how peptide production naturally declines as we age, explaining why that lightning-fast metabolism of our twenties seems to vanish despite maintaining similar habits. More importantly, Dr. Duelley shares her personal transformation - losing 34 pounds while significantly improving her metabolic markers through a balanced approach of micro-dosing peptides alongside sensible nutrition and movement.

Beyond weight management, we discover peptides that support joint function, sexual health, gut healing, and muscle preservation. Dr. Duelley addresses common concerns about peptide delivery methods, explaining why injectable peptides offer significantly higher efficacy (85%) compared to oral options (1-2%), and why micro-dosing just once weekly makes the process far less intimidating than most imagine.

Whether you're frustrated with stubborn weight issues, concerned about metabolic health, or simply curious about peptide therapy, this conversation provides practical, accessible information to help you make informed decisions about your wellness journey. Ready to restore your metabolic flexibility? This episode might just change your approach to health forever.

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Disclaimer: The Food and Drug Administration has not evaluated these statements. This podcast is not a medical service; the information provided is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease or condition. The Root Cause Solutions For You, its practitioners, and employees make no warranties, express or implied, concerning the contents. The information shared in this episode is the opinion of the speaker and should not be considered medical advice. You should never disregard medical advice or delay seeking it because of the contents of this episode.

Fabiola :

Hi everyone, thank you for tuning in for another episode of Real Cause Solutions for you. My name is Fabiola and I am your host, and today I'm super delighted to have as our recurring guest Dr Eleanor Dooley, who is a board certified naturopathic doctor. She's also a board certified nutritionist and a licensed dietician and nutritionist, and I'm just so happy about our conversation that we're going to be having today. It is all about peptides and I think if you've been through social media Facebook, instagram, youtube you'll probably have heard this word peptides and I'm just super happy that we're going to have this conversation. Dr Dooley, thank you so much for being here with us today.

Dr. Eleanor Duelley :

Yeah, I'm really excited to be here and share all of the good things that I've learned personally about peptides and then also bringing them into my practice to help my clients with them, because there's a lot of questions and curiosities and fear, and so I just want to be a resource for people to help learn more and educate themselves. I love it.

Fabiola :

Also, let's begin with explaining to us what peptides are in simple terms. As much as you can. I can do simple.

Dr. Eleanor Duelley :

So, basically, peptides are made in your body. Okay, so your body makes peptides to help many different processes in the body. The one that is most popular and most buzz around, of course, is the GLP-1s, which is a peptide. One of them is called semaglutide, there's terzepatide and then there's combinations of these Now peptides. These particular ones are helpful in the body to allow the cells to properly manage glucose and insulin. So most people recognize these words, these terms, from either commercials or maybe someone in their life or themselves with diabetes. Blood sugar often comes into a conversation when I'm working with women with hormones, insulin resistance, if people are trying to lose weight. So, really, what glucose and insulin do in the body? They are what control? That is the definition of your metabolism. So if you put that in perspective, a lot of women say my metabolism has slowed down since my 20s and that's, in a sense, actually true because peptides will manage your metabolism. They manage how insulin shows up to do its job, to allow glucose into the cell. And if glucose and insulin can't work it out, if they can't do their jobs together, what happens is they convert to fat, no matter what you're eating. So you could be eating healthy foods, but if the mismanagement of glucose and insulin is happening and the default setting is turn it to fat, then we see people gaining weight or inability to lose weight, even when they cut calories and even when they work out really hard. So it's very frustrating and it was very frustrating for me as a nutritionist to go. I am not losing weight, even though I'm following the textbook formula of nutrition because I think we were only given those two tools for weight loss right Not eat or eat super strict. Right and working out harder. And if those two things didn't work, you were at fault. It just wasn't for you. And what the peptide actually does your body makes it to help regulate the glucose and insulin so that it doesn't store as fat and so that it uses glucose as energy. So why this is like such a big thing these days is because as we age, our peptide making abilities decrease over time.

Dr. Eleanor Duelley :

And just think about if you're in your 50s and 50s, like me. Think about in your 20s you can eat anything. You could stay up all night and survive on coffee. In your 20s, you can eat anything. You could stay up all night and survive on coffee. You just didn't really pay that much attention. But your system was efficiently working because you were producing these peptides a lot and they were helping. But then, after the years and the decades pass, those peptides aren't as effective because they're not as prevalent in the body. They're chemical messengers that help regulate how your body manages energy.

Dr. Eleanor Duelley :

Over the years, in this business that we're doing keeping people healthy, we realized exposure to toxicity just in everyday life. It slows down all of our systems. So this is one of those instances where just living in this world, even if we're doing all the right I always hear this I'm doing all the right things, it's just not working. Yeah, what's happening is the body is stuck in this fat storage because it feels safer for the body. The body doesn't actually care what you look like. Its job is to keep you alive and to get to homeostasis as easily as possible.

Fabiola :

Yeah, that's for sure. There's frustration around doing all the right things and still not achieving that desired outcome.

Dr. Eleanor Duelley :

Yeah, and I tell my clients on a daily basis like the newest diet, right, we wrap it up and we label it something else let's intermittent fast, we'll call it this new diet when we're actually reducing caloric intake on a body that perhaps maybe is not metabolically, and so it grinds the problem even worse and it pushes it down. It pushes the can down the hill of dysfunction, and then people get even more frustrated because they're like I did this really hard thing. I thought it was going to work and I feel terrible, and so I was just really tired of it for myself, doing all of the homework and all of the things, and then I thought there has got to be something about this metabolic system that is not being addressed.

Fabiola :

Yeah, yeah, I agree. And peptides, there's, like you mentioned, the GLP-1, and then there's also different peptides for joint function. Can you tell us a little bit about those?

Dr. Eleanor Duelley :

Sure, the reason. The GLP-1s are basically top of the mountain right. They're the big dogs right now because everybody wants weight loss. I say that loosely, don't come after me if you're not one of those people, but for the majority of people, they're interested in weight loss, not just for appearances and size, but when we are metabolically sound, we think better, we digest food better, we sleep better, so our joints have a lot less strain on them, our hormones are more likely to be balanced, so weight and obesity is more than aesthetic for us. So when we dig deeper, we find that regulating the systemology systems in the body not only reduces symptoms, but it is making the other systems and pathways function better.

Dr. Eleanor Duelley :

So there's all kinds of peptides on my website. There's sexual health ones, if people have libido issues. There is a gut health, if people are trying to recover from leaky gut. Now, supplements are wonderful and I've built a practice helping people using supplements. We actually met at a supplement conference many years ago. Supplements we actually met at a supplement conference many years ago and you have to have proper detox systems in order for peptides to do their full function. So this is not a standalone thing by any means. So the other peptides I think I mentioned the big ones. There's ones that help preserve muscle in the body, for not just bodybuilders. Sometimes people get scared off with protein. I don't want to look like a bodybuilder and I'm like, trust me, you couldn't if you tried, because the discipline and what it takes to be a bodybuilder is way beyond the capacity of an everyday person eating protein. So what I try to do as a nutritionist at heart is give a well-rounded solution, not just oh, you got to do this and nothing else. We know it doesn't work that way.

Fabiola :

Yeah, yeah, the one magic pill. Just because you're taking, for example, jlp or some other peptide, you know that's, yeah, it's not magic. You still have to eat right, sleep, manage stress levels. However, if we do feel better about ourselves and are more metabolically flexible, then doing those other things are just going to be a lot easier. I have a sweet tooth. I just love sweets, especially like pastries, as that is my like Achilles heel and I'm like if I'm stressed, then I want to reach for sugar, but if I'm happy, then I want to reach for sugar, because I'm either mitigating stress or celebrating having something like this. That is in the correct delivery, which we'll talk about the different types of supplementation. When it comes to peptides, it does help to get the body, probably back, like a little, if your car is out of battery and you have to jumpstart it. So maybe am I on the right track.

Dr. Eleanor Duelley :

Yeah, and that's exactly what it is. It's like I said, the peptide making in the body has worn down, whether it doesn't get the right ingredients, whether it's just a tired system. This peptide, this particular one that we're talking about, your body needs it to get metabolically healthy. Food and exercise alone can only get you so far in doing that, and I think that's what we've been seeing over and over, having been in practice for almost a decade of giving people the right quote unquote diets, the right nutritional markers, the right detoxing supplies, and this is that extra little let's turn it on now, that's for sure.

Fabiola :

So now we're seeing sudden weight loss from certain celebrities, but we're also seeing now, potentially, what the ramifications if you don't do it right. You have to be on it all the time. How does that work?

Dr. Eleanor Duelley :

Yeah, and there's. I'm so glad you I can take the time to just explain this, because there's so much fear when we see things on TV. We have this oh my gosh, there's something not right about that, or all of these side effects, and you hear the commercials with all the diarrhea and all of the things, and so it's really hard to really get what is the real deal here. So let me just start off by saying, oh, zempic is not bad, it would go. These, like these, are not bad medications, and I use that word in a way because those particular ones are prescribed by medical providers. Okay, medical doctors write prescriptions for things like Ozempic, and the main ingredient in Ozempic is semaglutide. Okay, so peptides that are prescribed in this way, just like I said earlier, are helping your body systems. Okay, where a prescription such as a statin that would be taken like a cholesterol reducing medication maybe you've heard of that or are on it, people those kinds of prescriptions are stopping systems in the body.

Dr. Eleanor Duelley :

Okay, so there's different kinds of medications and peptides. You can call them a medication or you can call them a peptide. It is a synthetic copy of what the body's already making. Now everybody's going to freak out because synthetic. I don't put synthetic things in my body, I don't want all of these things. But let me be clear that somebody that has type one diabetes okay, they require insulin all the time they wear pumps or they have injections and they have for years, decades. Okay, insulin is made in the body, but for them it's not made well or efficiently or able to be used. So they, in fact, are using a synthetic hormone to regulate a system for them to live. Okay, to regulate a system for them to live, yeah, okay. So that is how I dispel the. Oh my gosh, it's a drug and it's changing things in my body. Peptides are supporting that system that I referred to about your metabolism.

Dr. Eleanor Duelley :

So the problem that has come about in our society is the majority of people that are on multiple medications who don't really invest their time and brain power into holistic healing. They are focused on the result. So in this regard, it would be weight loss. It's not a bad thing. We all want that. But if you're prescribed this Ozempic, the semaglutide, with no support, with no nutritional understanding, not even being told what glucose and insulin are doing, I run blood work to make sure that everybody understands what they're doing. So there's a lot more background information.

Dr. Eleanor Duelley :

And the Ozempic will only work if you use it by itself, with no diet, no exercise, no regard for your nutritional intake. And so let's just say a person think of a person, a couch potato and they take Ozempic and they start to lose weight because it does alter your appetite, and I'll get to why. That can be a good thing in a nutritional sense, but in the couch potato person sense, what it's doing is just reducing their caloric intake to their nutritional intake to almost nothing, because if they're not eating fruits and vegetables and salads and lean meat, they're not getting nutrition either, and so their body is rapidly in a state of oh my goodness, like we are in a starvation mode. We need to burn this fat. Okay, now you burn fat too quickly.

Dr. Eleanor Duelley :

Obviously it might have skin issues. People that lose weight too quickly they have a lot of extra skin. That's another issue. But metabolically what happens is their system becomes efficient for a short time because of the peptide, but it doesn't have anything to lean on, like it will soon run out and we have to continually dose higher for it to work. And that's when people get stuck because you can't go any. You get to a point you can't go any higher. Yeah, you haven't done any of the foundational work. Yeah, so you have to stay on it to maintain, and then, even after that, at some point there won't be any maintenance, like you will just end up learning to live however long your body adapts to that high dose of peptide.

Dr. Eleanor Duelley :

So that's where we get into dangerous places of overdosing of a peptide without any foundation, and the overdose itself can be very problematic for your digestive system because you don't know how to eat properly to support your gut health or your hormones. So you hear a lot of people having digest digestional distress. You know that I can't eat anything. I always have diarrhea or I'm always throwing up or I'm and I'm like okay, the dose is clearly wrong for you, whatever that dose is, and I'm not a medical doctor so I don't dose people. I educate that you just need a small amount of this peptide to turn it on. We call it micro dosing, so small dosages, and you could actually do this with Ozempic. I don't know how it works as far as the prescription and what they dose you at, but if you took one-tenth, one-twentieth of the dose of Ozempic and you did it in the proper timing sequence, it would be very effective for healthy weight loss. So I know that was a lot. I hope that was what you were.

Fabiola :

I hope I answered most of the questions, yeah no, thank you, Because we have this like, obviously, people who are following celebrities and people are not really understanding the whole mechanism behind a JLP or a peptide in this case, a JLP1 peptide. Then the ozempic phase right and the warning of thyroid cancer that was detected on rats. So many people have thyroid concerns.

Dr. Eleanor Duelley :

Proper nutrition even without a Zempik, proper understanding that the liver is the star of the thyroid show. We don't talk a lot about the conversion of T4 to T3 and how important it is to have proper mitochondrial health for T3 to actually work. I do a lot of work with clients of like just showing. I have made a slide show. I made a slide and I said this is the full thyroid picture and the thyroid is just one tiny piece of it. And when we're talking about thyroid concerns going on peptides, the concern is malnutrition and overdosing the peptide. The concerns have nothing to do with the actual metabolic resetting.

Fabiola :

Yeah, isn't it funny. If you really know how to use tools, then they're going to get the result that you want, versus something different. And I love the example you used when people freak out about not wanting to do something synthetic diabetes, type one. And that's exactly what I tell clients, because sometimes, yeah, we do have to resort to some of these things, like potentially thyroid hormones. Right, they're not medication, they're not fixing anything. Supporting, yeah.

Dr. Eleanor Duelley :

Yeah.

Fabiola :

Yeah, so I love it. So I know that delivery of any supplement it's important, but I'm sure that delivery and the form of peptides is also very important. So tell us about that?

Dr. Eleanor Duelley :

Yeah, because I work with an affiliate and I'll list it if anybody's interested. But they're medically supervised and they have very different forms of delivery. So, the most popular by far. We hear the shots and people freak out about the shots and, trust me, I did too, because I don't want to be injecting myself. I'm not comfortable around needles. I've heard it all and I've said it all, but what I can say is the efficacy of a peptide that is given through injection is about 85. Just keep that number in your head. Okay, that's pretty good In my opinion. Right, if you go to the emergency room and you need medication fast, they're going to give you an IV Okay. They're going to put it directly into your system, okay, rather than giving you a pill to swallow. So the pills I use a lot of supplements. I love them, but I also know that my stomach acid has to be functioning well in order to break down the cellulose capsule or vegetarian capsule, wherever you're taking, to break that open so that I can get the good stuff inside.

Dr. Eleanor Duelley :

When we use oral peptides. The efficacy, because it has to go through the digestive system. So for those of you that, like you're like, yeah, in my throat and my stomach. So it has to go through the whole thing to get into the small intestine that's after the stomach. So it's got to go through this whole path and in the stomach there's a lot going on, so it has to survive all of that. The efficacy is one to 2%. So if you are spending hundreds of dollars on peptides that you swallow and peptides that you inject, you're getting 85% out of it versus 1% to 2% in a digestive check.

Dr. Eleanor Duelley :

And I'm not saying they're not effective, but I did take oral peptides for a few months because I was like I don't want to do the injections, I just want to see. And me personally, I didn't get any results. And I use muscle testing. I know you do, fabiola. I was muscle testing myself.

Dr. Eleanor Duelley :

10 and 20 of these pills. Yes, because and I'm like I can't sustain this financially and who wants to swallow that many pills? Yes, yeah, exactly. So there has been some other in between. They'll do something called sublingual If you've ever taken something under your tongue what the delivery mode is to try to get it absorbed into your system without getting into your digestive tract. And that is effective. I don't know the percentage because that wasn't in the study that I was looking at, but I know it's not going to be 85%. Yeah, so if you're looking for a powerful mode, you can move past the needle. I promise it doesn't hurt that much. It's a tiny insulin needle and I do an injection once a week, so it's barely anything that really even registers as a big deal.

Fabiola :

Oh wow, so it's not even something you do every day. Nope, yeah, yeah, because you're micro-dosing it. So that's cool.

Dr. Eleanor Duelley :

Yeah, and even again, I have never got Ozempic, but I think those are only dosed once or twice a week. There should be. I don't think there's anybody taking them every day, every day.

Fabiola :

Don't quote me on that. Can you share any success stories from anyone who's gone?

Dr. Eleanor Duelley :

through your peptide program. Sure, your own testimony. Before I wanted to give this to my clients, I really had to make sure that it was real, that it wasn't just this sham or anything like that. So it was just the last week of December, it was around Christmas. I ordered it and I was like I'm just going to do like brand new year, I'm just going to try it. And I dedicated okay, I'm going to start a very basic strength training, like two, three days a week. I'm talking five pound weights. I'm like I'm starting from ground zero, but I committed to it, just three days a week, with some walking, nothing crazy.

Dr. Eleanor Duelley :

And cleaned up my nutrition. I dried January. I really didn't pick up any drinking but and then just what I call regular eating. You eat breakfast, you eat lunch, you have a sensible dinner and you move on with life. Nothing super. And I to this day.

Dr. Eleanor Duelley :

I weighed myself this morning. I've lost 34 pounds. But my metabolic health? I did blood work and I'm like, oh my gosh, my insulin actually moved down. I have been getting clients to try to get their insulin down for years and seeing a point maybe. So my metabolic health is better. My cognition, like I feel when I wake up, I'm ready to go. I'm not in that haze.

Dr. Eleanor Duelley :

Not to say there haven't been side effects, because I know that's everybody's question, I do have to say everybody's different. So just because I had one or some doesn't mean you will, and you can always read the long list that they say in the commercials. The way that I've managed. It is okay. If I feel a little constipated, then I'm sure that I have enough water, I'm sure that I have enough vegetables and if that's still slowed motility, then I will move to something like a daily bowel mover for a few days. That's the price to pay, so to speak. Occasionally I've had nauseous feelings, not long nausea, over a couple hours. Usually if I eat something like a banana or some crackers it'll subside. But other than that I haven't had any sort of dramatic things. I haven't had anything that would cause me pause or want me to quit, because I'm almost at my goal weight and once I get there I plan on just staying there and maintaining, being on more of a maintenance dose or just off of it altogether.

Fabiola :

Yeah, that's very powerful and congratulations. I saw you work together at a conference in May and I was like man, Eleanor, you look awesome, so I knew that you were doing something right. Yeah, I love it. Yeah, I struggle with getting my insulin under control and I admit I've never been perfect. And here and there, my husband and I just went to dinner and guess, we had a brownie and we split it and it wasn't a gluten-free brownie and I tell everybody like there is no perfect people walking around with perfect diets and perfect metabolic health.

Dr. Eleanor Duelley :

We can have healthy metabolic health without being perfect. So we need to dispel all of the because we look at somebody and we go, oh my gosh, they must know exactly what they're doing, because they look like X, y and Z. Yeah, and they could be metabolically chaos, true?

Fabiola :

Yes, yeah, body composition. Just by looking at someone and assuming that they're healthy because their body composition, it doesn't necessarily mean yes, because we see college students where we are, we have we're a college town and sometimes, unfortunately, these kids come in and they're so metabolically inflexible and they're like skinny, they're like again, they're on their twenties, so their metabolism they have all their peptides yeah, that's awesome. So how does working with you work? And like if someone wants to do your program including some of those peptides that you're working with.

Dr. Eleanor Duelley :

Yeah, got two kind of things my, my, one that I'm really trying to push out there because I think it is accessible to a lot of people is it's called slim down and glow up. It's a group program, it's 12 weeks, it's a rolling enrollment so you can join and there'll be people that joined last week or there'll be people that join next week. But the biggest offer is I do group coaching once a week, so you come to the call with your peptide questions, your nutrition questions, like your gains, your losses, all of the things, and that environment is really inspiring for people. Also, you get the nutrition piece. So I do nutrition education and everybody thinks they already know everything and I get it. I get it Because to me a lot of it does. And I said to my husband I'm like this seems like common sense to me. It's not common sense to everybody. So it's really understanding how much protein is too much, is not enough, is supporting your metabolism and you're different, so there's not a cookie cutter answer and so that's why this program gives you that support from me and also access to peptides. So, like I said, I work with an affiliate company that you can order and I'll give you recommendations on what I think is a good fit for you peptide wise, and you can order them and do them along with the other people in a group setting and you have somebody to ask you, have somebody to guide you and hold your hand.

Dr. Eleanor Duelley :

Essentially. So if you get nervous like, you have this group, so that I've started that. I opened that up at the beginning of this month, so it's relatively new. So if you want to get in, it's $1.57 a month to join, so it's small entry costs because I know that peptides can be an investment. Those are on top of it and that pricing is different depending on each person. And the other offer is simply just my one-on-one, which is a lot more in-depth. I do blood work, I do analyzation videos one-on-one. I do hormone testing, gut testing. So that's the bulk of my practice at this time. But people want to do peptides and get started and get going. The group program is a great way to do that.

Fabiola :

That's awesome. I do find that, working on a group setting, you're learning what others are going through, you don't feel alone and you learn from what other people might be doing. That could be a benefit, and others learn from you as well, so I think group coaching is the way to go for sure. Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. So, yeah, I think we covered key points and great information, and you busted some myths regarding peptides, what they are and when they're used properly, they can definitely bring about restore that functionality that we want, because we know that the body is very intelligent. It knows how to seal and repair itself If it doesn't have the proper tools to do that, if those tools have been worn out gosh. You have to replace your brakes from your car, right? You have to change your transmission fluid. If you don't, then your car is bound to not work as well as it used to when it was new. I'm thinking it's pretty much the same for our bodies. Yeah, are there any last words of wisdom that you would like to leave us with?

Dr. Eleanor Duelley :

Yeah, it's just. Don't be curious, don't be scared, find out as much. And if you even just wanted to do a quick phone call with me to ask your own personal questions, I'm happy to do that. I'm not a sales person, I'm a sharer of information because I know it works. I understand the mechanics of the processes in the body and I just don't feel like that is access. People think it's not accessible to them out in their other community, in their conventional medicine model, because that's built on other principles. Right, you and I are built on whole body healing. And what can we do to support our system? What's in the way these toxins are in the way, these parasites they're in the way and we need to thrive. We need to understand what they're doing, figure out how to work around them and then, you know, grow. And that's why I am just so passionate about sharing it, because I know it works and I know it's safe and I know it's supportive. That's awesome.

Fabiola :

I appreciate your time and your knowledge. Thank you so much for being here with us and thank you everyone for tuning in and we'll see you in the next episode.