Functional Medicine with Dr. Lilli Link of Parsley Health

Dr. Lilli Link is a board-certified internist practicing functional medicine since 2006. She completed her training in internal medicine in 1997 at New York-Presbyterian Medical Center and then studied lifestyle change and cancer at Weill Cornell Medical College. She also completed a fellowship in Cancer Epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, where she continued her research on diet and cancer. Dr. Link currently practices functional/lifestyle medicine at Parsley Health in New York City and resides in New York City with her husband, three children, and beloved rescue dog.

Can you tell us a little about yourself and what inspired you to become a functional medical doctor?

My grandparents were ‘health-minded’ and part of the ‘Hygiene Society.’ For years, my father made the first and only electric wheatgrass juicer, the Wheateena.  So, growing up, I was aware of alternative ways of healing.  But in medical school, I was completely indoctrinated to think that diet was irrelevant for most diseases, and my holistic upbringing fell by the wayside. 

When I was 31 years old, about a year after completing my internal medicine residency at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in NYC, I was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer called a sarcoma.  Because my odds for survival were not very good, I added complementary therapies, focusing on diet and lifestyle, to my conventional regimen.

I learned about functional medicine a few years after my cancer diagnosis and was thrilled to discover that this truly integrative form of medicine was already established.

How does functional medicine differ from conventional medicine in its approach to disease and patient care?

Conventional medicine is interested primarily in treating the symptoms of a disease. For example, if someone has high blood pressure, traditional medicine looks for ways to lower blood pressure, whereas functional medicine will also try to address the underlying causes of high blood pressure, such as stress, diet, and sleep.

Functional medicine is root cause medicine, which means we listen to a person’s story, pay attention to their health history from before they were even born, and do in-depth testing to look for the underlying causes of their health challenges.  If you can find the cause of a disease, that gives you a much better chance of actually healing from it.  At Parsley Health we practice functional medicine. 

What led you to Parsley Health?

I had my own solo holistic healthcare practice for years but wanted the opportunity to work in a group practice.  Our healthcare team learns so much from each other every day, and this sharing of knowledge benefits our members greatly. My growth as a holistic practitioner has been exponential since I joined Parsley over five years ago.

How do you think Parsley is changing the landscape of medicine?

It’s exciting to be part of a company that is doing just that - changing the landscape of medicine. By offering virtual care throughout the country and in-person care in New York and California, we are making functional medicine accessible to people all over the country.  

You’ve shared with me that you follow a vegan diet. Can you explain what made you go 100% plant-based and what benefits you’ve experienced from eating this way?

When you look at the medical literature to see what foods are consistently associated with health and longevity, it’s plant-based food.  That isn’t the case for animal-based foods. As a cancer survivor, I need to follow a completely anti-cancer diet which is why I follow a plant-focused, vegan diet.  It is also important to me that a vegan diet spares animal suffering and death and may be better for the planet.

I want to point out that a vegan diet does not automatically equal a healthy one.  Sugar, soda, and pasta are all vegan foods.  Adhering to a healthy vegan diet that is tasty and satisfying takes some effort.  

What advice would you give someone interested in adopting a vegan lifestyle?

For starters, it’s good to know that the only nutrient you won’t get enough of from a vegan diet is vitamin B12, so you would need to take a B12 supplement. It’s also helpful to know where your main protein sources come from: Nuts, seeds, and beans, including soy, are the primary plant protein sources. Finally, aim to fill at least half your plate with vegetables at lunch and dinner.

As a doctor and mom to three children, how do you prioritize wellness in your life? 

Not as well as I’d like to! Eating healthfully comes pretty easily to me. But getting enough exercise and sleep are challenges. My family and dog keep me busy, and I love my work, so I’m not great at creating boundaries at home. It’s helpful that I’m constantly reading studies and attending conferences that remind me how vital exercise and sleep are for good health. So you’ll frequently find me executing new plans to do a better job with my self-care.

Life has been throwing us many curve balls these past few years. How do you ground yourself and find a place of calm these days?

COVID has indeed been life-altering for all of us. I have been lucky that it happened at a time in my life when I had the company of my family and dog and have been able to continue to work as a holistic doctor with virtual healthcare. At this point, COVID is not as frightening as it once was.  Between vaccinations and antiviral medications, we know a lot about how to avoid getting very sick from it. It’s still hard not being able to socialize normally without worrying that you’ll get COVID, but I am grateful for the many things I can do safely.

What is one simple thing readers can do today to improve their health and support healthy aging?

If you all could join me in trying to get a good night’s sleep most nights, that would be amazing! It means not working for a couple of hours before bedtime, shutting down addictive things, like Netflix shows and Tik Tok at a reasonable hour, and avoiding caffeine later in the day. It’s astounding how many diseases are associated with inadequate sleep. But that’s the long-term benefit. Short-term, it makes for a great start to the next day!

Where can readers find you? 

You can find me here at Parsley! If you’d like to join, use the code LINK200 and get $200 off your first year of membership.

Thanks you Dr. Link for taking the time to chat with us about functional medicine, plant-based eating and the benefits of an integrative approach to wellness.

The Magic of Wine with David Baird

Clients often ask: “Can I drink wine and still lose weight? Would I be better off with Tequila?”

My answer is always the same: Enjoying a glass of wine over dinner from time to time can indeed be part of a healthy, balanced lifestyle and will not interfere with weight loss goals, as long you are drinking wisely, moderately, and follow an overall healthy diet. I love to remind people that if they love wine, giving it up for hard alcohol doesn’t really make sense. Life is meant to be enjoyed and thinking of food simply in terms of calories and sugar content robs us of our ability to make empowered choices that work for us. It also sets us up for an all-in/all-out approach to wellness that strips us of pleasure and a sense of well-being.

It is also worth noting that wine is so much more than the sum of its parts. When enjoyed over a meal with family and friends, a glass of wine has the power to bring people together and enhance the experience of the meal itself.

I recently had the privilege of sitting down with David Baird, head winemaker at Folktale Winery and Vineyards in Carmel, CA, to talk about organics, sustainability, food, and the magic of wine. You can catch the full interview here

You can catch David’s longer interview I did for @vinepair here.

Health and Mindfulness with Joanna Cohen

Joanna Cohen is a health and mindfulness coach, and a yoga Instructor at Y7.  Joanna has been teaching yoga to groups of 20-200 at Y7 for the past 5 years and launched their health coaching program, Vibe Higher, to help people improve their habits, mindset, communications and relationships. Joanna is also a regular contributor to Medium, an open digital platform where she shares her thoughts on mindfulness, mental health, yoga and other health related topics. 

In 2015, after working four years in the start-up industry, you pivoted and took a deep dive into yoga, wellness and spirituality. Can you tell me a little about that journey? 

Those early years of my career in the startup world were such a rush. As a young adult right out of college, I assumed I’d climb the corporate ladder. But unexpectedly I found myself at an early stage startup (I didn’t even know what a startup was before I joined). At a company like that there’s no ladder, and you’re given a ton of creativity and autonomy and opportunity incredibly quickly. It was all-consuming, exhilarating and, after some time, fairly exhausting. 

When that company collapsed I experienced a wave of both emotional and physical relief. It truly was like stepping off a treadmill. I suddenly had an effortless ability and desire to change many of the habits I’d built over the 4 years prior: I stopped eating meat, I stopped drinking for a while, I started sitting for long meditations. I deeply felt a need to step away from the pace and intensity of the startup world and to spend time moving much more slowly. It felt like my only option: after putting work before everything, it felt like a now-or-never opportunity to prioritize my health or I’d permanently move in a destructive direction. 

Then you started working as a yoga instructor at Y7 in NYC and created their coaching platform, Vibe Higher, which focuses on healthy habits, mindset, and communications. How do communications tie into optimal well-being, personally and professionally?

I think “communication” more subtly means “relationships”. Having a strong and honest line of communication with myself (in other words, a trusting relationship) is imperative to my well-being. It was only when I was able to develop this relationship that I was able to deepen the relationships with the people in my life. And this, in so many ways, contributes to my wellbeing. I didn’t have a strong line of communication with myself, or a healthy Self-relationship of any kind, before I really dove into yoga. 

As I started teaching yoga I witnessed the same void of honest communication / relationship to Self in so many of my students. Vibe Higher spoke to people’s intuitive understanding that developing the relationship we have with ourselves is really important. Yes, we talked about things like nutrition and sleep and money, but the underlying approach was always that we were learning to be honest and committed to ourselves by opening lines of communication about these topics and simultaneously establishing a deeper relationship with ourselves. 

How did Yoga help you develop strong, authentic communication with yourself? 

Being on a yoga mat sparked the first internal dialogue I ever really had. Your body and your mind start to work in unison in a new way when you have to do all these hard physical postures you’ve never seen before. Most of us are used to spending time in quite a disconnected existence: we move physically without thinking about it; we spend time in our minds without paying attention to our bodies. Yoga changes all that. 

Once I was familiar with that experience of mind-body connection I became more and more interested in yoga philosophy. It was a fairly natural progression, and through the study of philosophy I entered a whole new world of exploration about what it means to be connected to myself. There is so much depth in yoga philosophy, and it’s all focused on self knowledge and connection.

What does spirituality mean to you in the context of wellness and how does it play out in your daily life?

To me, the idea of “Self-connection” is another way to describe Spirituality. And once we understand Self-connection on a deep level it connects us to something deeper than our individual physical existence which opens an enormous, magical way of existing in the world. 

In my daily life it plays out in the form of as many things I can possibly throw together to strengthen my Self-connection: meditation, a physical yoga practice, exercise that keeps me present in my body, foods that keep me grounded in my body, intentional moments of connection to other people or the environment. Our modern world seems designed in almost every way to move us away from this type of Self-connection, so these practices serve as my resistance to that. 

How do you coach clients seeking to create a spiritual practice? What does that look like in a coaching relationship?

I try to work with the client to suss out their personal vision of what spiritual connection looks like. Many people think they have to have a meditation practice to be spiritual. But if sitting for meditation does nothing for that person, I’d argue that that is not the appropriate avenue to them establishing a spiritual practice at the moment. Maybe they feel most deeply connected to Self when they’re cooking, and taking the perspective that their time cooking is their spiritual practice is the key. Or maybe they love long walks and learning to treat that walk as a spiritual practice is what makes sense. 

Can you share 3 things readers can do now to create a spiritual practice in their own lives. 

1. Ask yourself when you feel most present in your everyday life. What are you doing, where are you, how does it feel? 

2. Apply intention to doing that thing regularly, and treat it as your spiritual practice.

3. Take small steps towards studying spiritual practices more deeply. Maybe you love going to yoga class in a studio, so you look for a book that helps you understand the origins of postures a bit more thoroughly. Maybe you’ve grown up as part of a traditional religion, and you seek out a deeper understanding of some of the spiritual practices (remember: the things that develop your relationship to yourself). Maybe you love being in nature and you explore something like forest bathing. I think the key here is to push yourself into slightly unknown spiritual territory every so often, and to be open to what you learn. 

You wrote two very beautiful, personal essays for Medium describing your relationship with depression over the past three years. Can you share some of the most powerful lessons you’ve learned from your experience which may help others living with depression and/or the emotional fallout of COVID-19. 

First and foremost, I think I learned that all of us may/will experience depression. 

Second, I learned that depression alters our set point. It basically resets your baseline to a place that’s much heavier, darker, and pessimistic than a more “normal” baseline. In my experience that didn’t mean I had to live there all the time, but that I was starting there and constantly having to fight out of it—which was often impossible—to experience a level of enjoyment or motivation that previously came effortlessly. 

Third, I learned that although my everyday “healthy habits” couldn’t make the depression go away, they were the thing that gave me a fighting change to face it through other methods (therapy, and circumstantial life changes that came as time passed). 

In our conversations together, you told me that one of the most powerful things you have given yourself is a daily practice. What is a daily practice?

To me, a daily practice is intention activity that bolsters the relationship we have with ourselves. It goes back to what we discussed earlier about having an open and honest line of communication with ourselves, which is the foundation of a healthy relationship to Self. So a daily practice is any activity we do everyday that contributes to the maintenance of this communication and relationship.

How can someone develop a meaningful daily practice?

Start simple. Find something in your day that makes you feel connected to yourself. It should be something that’s yours—not something you have to do for someone else, or something you feel obliged to do. Then do that thing everyday, make a point of it. 

What can they expect from committing to a daily practice?

I think this will be different for everyone. I find a sense of accomplishment, a renewed sense of safety with myself each day, and a daily revival of curiosity about myself and the world.

What are you up to now?

I’m back in the startup world at an education company called On Deck, working on the Experience team. I help entrepreneurs make the most of their experience in our programs so they can build amazing companies.

How are you finding time for self-care and connection now that you are back to work in a more traditional 9-5 job?

It’s truly an everyday challenge, one that I take very seriously! For starters, I’m really organized with my time. I make sure to create space in the morning for exercise and personal things. Meditation is (more than ever) imperative for me first thing. 

I’ve had to move some things around to account for the way my mind is occupied in a different way with fast-paced operational work. For example, I used to listen to a podcast during lunch. Now I find that placing my podcast in the morning with my coffee helps keep my mind off of what I need to do work-wise before I dive into the day. Movement serves as a more suitable break in the middle of the day, to get me up and force my mind into a different place. I’ve started doing quick one-mile runs in the middle of the day. 

I’ve also started to plan out fun dinners to make on weeknights, and I try to really step away once I’m into that part of the evening. I’ve needed to implement meditation at night as well, because otherwise my mind has a really hard time slowing down enough for me to fall asleep.

Where can people find you and learn more about your services?

My website or on social!