Your Best Shot: The Truth About GLP-1s and Natural Weight Health Hormones
The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
Release Date: 11/28/2025
How Your Posture Creates Your Mood
The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ Your posture isn't just reflecting how you feel. It's creating it. Dr. Pedram Shojai breaks down the bidirectional relationship between physical posture and emotional state, drawing on embodied cognition research, polyvagal theory, and ancient contemplative traditions. He introduces the Three Structural Gates framework (root, heart, and crown) that anyone can use to shift their nervous system state in under 60 seconds, and guides listeners through a live practice to experience the posture-consciousness feedback loop in real time. 🎯 What You'll Learn: Why William James was right...
info_outline
Your Mind Is Wandering 47% of the Time
The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ Your mind is wandering 47% of the time, and it's making you miserable. Dr. Pedram Shojai explores the science of temporal displacement and why constantly living in the past or future is destroying your health. Drawing on Harvard research tracking 15,000 people, he reveals how your nervous system can't tell the difference between a memory and a real threat. Learn three anchors to bring yourself back to the present: breath as clock, sensory grounding, and the witness pause. This isn't spiritual theory. It's neuroscience-backed practice that can rewire your relationship with time and...
info_outline
When Money Stress Hijacks Your Body
The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ Financial stress isn't just a money problem. It's a full-body physiological event. Dr. Pedram Shojai breaks down exactly what's happening inside your body when financial worry takes hold: the cortisol cascade, the inflammatory markers, the gut disruption, the sleep destruction, and the narrowed thinking that makes bad decisions feel inevitable. More importantly, he delivers three body-based tools to interrupt the stress cycle before it does lasting damage. You can't think your way out of a stress response, but you can breathe, move, and practice your way into enough resilience to...
info_outline
Lights On: The Recovery Paradox — Why Rest Leaves You More Exhausted
The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ You took the weekend off. You slept in. You did nothing. So why do you feel worse? Dr. Pedram Shojai breaks down the Recovery Paradox: the frustrating phenomenon where rest leaves you more depleted than the work itself. Drawing from polyvagal theory, he explains why simply stopping activity doesn't equal recovery, and why the way most of us "rest" (scrolling, bingeing, zoning out) actively works against us. 🎯 What You'll Learn: The two faces of parasympathetic: ventral vagal (safe, social, regulated—genuine recovery) vs dorsal vagal (freeze, shutdown, foggy—collapse...
info_outline
Lights On: Get Back in Your Body and Shift Your Relationship with Time
The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ Dr. Pedram Shojai breaks down proprioception—the sense that tells your body where it is in space—and why losing it erodes balance, posture, and neurological resilience. He shares how moms crawling with their kids stopped having migraines, then shifts to time perception: challenging the mindfulness industry for reducing ancient practices to stress-relief apps, and arguing that your relationship with time drives anxiety and quality of life. 🎯 What You'll Learn: How slow, intentional movement reactivates dormant sensory pathways shut down by injuries, desk jobs, and sedentary...
info_outline
Lights On: Follow Your Pain – The Body Is the Treasure Map
The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ Dr. Pedram Shojai returns from a week of illness with hard-won lessons about pain, healing, and what happens when a teacher has to drink his own medicine. After battling mast cell activation and histamine overload post-COVID, he found himself lying on the floor at 2am—and instead of running from the discomfort, he leaned in. What followed was an hour of breathwork, deep listening, and what he calls the alchemy of nociception: transforming the lead of physical pain into the gold of self-knowledge. 🎯 What You'll Learn: The alchemy of nociception (pain reception): shifting from...
info_outline
Lights On: Why You Never Have Enough Time And How to Fix It
The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ Dr. Pedram Shojai dives into chronoception (time perception) and why most people feel trapped in time scarcity. He explains how rushing creates compression, which makes hours disappear into autopilot—and how presence does the opposite, expanding time into something rich and spacious. This teaching breaks down why one present hour beats ten distracted ones, introduces three core practices for creating time abundance, and challenges the cultural trance of "slave time." 🎯 What You'll Learn: How time compression happens: autopilot mode processes minimal information, making time...
info_outline
Interoception: The 8 Dimensions of Body Awareness
The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ In this Lights On course coaching session, Dr. Pedram Shojai guides students through week three: interoceptive awareness training. Most people have been trained their entire lives to ignore their bodies—overriding tiredness with caffeine, hunger with schedules, and pain with pills. This disconnection means missing early warning signs before they become injuries or burnout, and struggling with emotional regulation. Dr. Shojai breaks down the eight dimensions of internal awareness and explains that emotions are your brain's interpretation of body states—when you can sense your heart...
info_outline
How Your Environment Is Hijacking Your Brain: The Science of Spatial Awareness
The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ Dr. Pedram Shojai explores how your physical environment is actively shaping your mental and emotional state every single moment. He breaks down the neuroscience behind environmental influences on your nervous system, explaining how clutter increases cortisol by 25%, how specific colors affect mood, and why silence has become medicine in modern life. He guides listeners through a comprehensive environmental audit covering visual chaos, acoustic pollution, olfactory triggers, spatial dynamics, and energetic residue, offering practical strategies to optimize your space for mental...
info_outline
Pain as a Teacher: What Your Body Is Trying to Tell You
The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
🎙️ Most people respond to pain with one goal: make it stop. But Dr. Pedram Shojai reveals that pain isn't a mistake—it's a message your body is desperately trying to send you. Drawing from decades of treating patients and studying traditional medicine, he teaches you how to separate pain (the raw sensation) from suffering (the story you tell yourself), and decode the specific signals different pain locations are sending about what's breaking down in your system. Through a guided practice using witness consciousness, you'll learn to read your body's language with precision, track...
info_outline🎙️ Registered dietitian Ashley Koff joins Dr. Pedram Shojai to unpack the truth about GLP-1 medications like Ozempic and Wegovy. While these drugs mimic hormones our bodies naturally produce, they don't solve the root cause of why our own weight-health hormones aren't functioning properly. Ashley explains how gut health, the vagus nerve, stress, and digestive function all play crucial roles in our body's natural hormone production. She shares her personal journey from childhood obesity to understanding that healing weight health isn't about what you eat or avoid—it's about optimizing your body's operating system.
🎯 What You'll Learn:
- Why GLP-1s are biosimilar hormone replacements that stay active 24/7 (vs. natural hormones working 2-5 minutes)—and why they don't address the root problem
- The two key reasons our weight-health hormones aren't working: digestive system damage and inflammatory cascades blocking hormone delivery to receptor sites
- The Pizza-Making Framework: Crust (digestion/hydration), Sauce (nutrition), Cheese (lifestyle), Toppings (supplements/medications)—why GLP-1s are great toppings on bad pizza
- The 3-Hour Pit Stop Strategy: Moving beyond daily totals to consistent intervals for breathing, bathroom, movement, nutrient-balanced meals, and mental reset
- Why protein absorption matters more than protein consumption—and how eating 150g daily with poor digestion creates inflammation, not muscle
- Ashley's gastroenterologist insight that changed everything: "It's not what you're eating or not eating—your digestive system doesn't have what it needs"
- GLP-1 Activators as alternatives: Amarasate (hops from New Zealand) increases GLP-1 and PYY by 600% naturally while you fix the root cause
- The Proton Pump Inhibitor problem: Most people prescribed PPIs actually have LOW acid (not high), creating downstream B12, calcium, and protein breakdown issues
🔑 Key Insights:
"It's not what you're eating or not eating—your digestive system doesn't have what it needs to function." - Ashley's gastroenterologist
"GLP-1s slow digestion and delay gastric emptying for 24 hours. These medications can exacerbate underlying digestive issues. There's no free lunch."
"Every diet focuses on what to eat, missing the underlying operating system. Fix the root cause, and weight loss, energy, and appearance follow naturally."
"On a 1-10 stress scale, digestion shuts down at 7 or above. Even superfoods won't help if you're not absorbing nutrients."
"Protein going into your body doesn't equal protein to muscle. Excess undigested protein causes inflammation—especially when GLP-1s delay gastric emptying."
💡 Action Steps:
- Take the sweet taste bud test: Bite into an apple, rate sweetness 1-10—this reveals if you're overusing non-nutritive sweeteners
- Assess your hydration: If you drink water and pee within 2 hours, you're a "hose" (not absorbing)—water needs to be absorbed to bring nutrients into cells
- Implement the 3-hour pit stop protocol: Every 3 hours do breathing exercises, bathroom break, movement, nutrient-balanced meal (15-40g protein), mental reset
- Get comprehensive gut testing before spending $1200/month on GLP-1 shots—testing reveals easily solvable inflammatory problems
- Recognize your stress signals: What are your personal indicators? (Ashley's: talking fast, raised shoulders)
🎧 Perfect for: Anyone considering GLP-1 medications like Ozempic or Wegovy, people who've tried every diet without sustainable results, those dealing with decades of food noise and body trauma, anyone spending money on supplements without understanding their digestive system, or those who want to hack their own hormones naturally before turning to medications.
📚 Mentioned Resources:
- Ashley Koff's book: "Your Best Shot"
- Gut testing (discounted for Dr. Shojai's listeners)
- Amarasate - GLP-1 activator (hops from New Zealand)
- Gateway to Health documentary series
🌐 Connect with Dr. Shojai:
- Website: theurbanmonk.com
- Books: The Urban Monk, Inner Alchemy, The Art of Stopping Time, Focus
- Documentaries: Interconnected, Gateway to Health, Trauma, Conscious Parenting
Guest: Ashley Koff, RD - Registered Dietitian specializing in weight health and digestive optimization
#GLP1 #Ozempic #Wegovy #GutHealth #WeightLoss #DigestiveHealth #FunctionalMedicine #HormoneHealth #RootCauseHealing #NaturalWeightLoss #Microbiome #IntegrativeHealth #HealthOptimization #SustainableWeightLoss #UrbanMonk #Wellness