Your Genes Are Not Your Destiny

Your Genes Are Not Your Destiny

The Being Hohl Conversation on Genetics & Epigenetics

For years, genetics has been treated like a life sentence.

You either have "the gene" — or you don't.

But what if that's the wrong way to think about it entirely?

In this episode of the Being Hohl Podcast, Dr. Dani Hohl, PhD, BCDFM kicks off Season 2 — The Biology of You — exploring what your genes actually are: not a diagnosis, not a doom, but a starting terrain. A blueprint that your environment is writing on, every single day.

This isn't an episode about fearing your genetic risks.

It's about understanding what they're really telling you — and how much power you actually have over what happens next.

Because your genes load the gun.

Your environment pulls the trigger.

In This Episode You'll Learn:

🧬 Your Genes Are Not Your Destiny

• The real difference between your DNA (fixed) and your epigenetics (not fixed)
• Why "it's just genetics" and "it's just lifestyle" are both incomplete answers
• Why identical twins can have completely different health outcomes by age forty

🔬 The Science Behind the Story

• Methylation — the dimmer switch controlling which genes are turned on or off
• Histone modification — how tightly wound DNA decides what gets expressed
• Why folate, B12, and choline aren't just "healthy" — they're raw material for gene expression

⚖️ Genes Load the Gun, Environment Pulls the Trigger

• Why a genetic variant is a predisposition, not a guarantee
• The two mistakes people make with genetic testing — panic, or dismissal
• Why fear of a gene can do more damage than the gene itself

👭 A Real Client Story

• Two sisters. Same DNA. Same childhood home. Completely different outcomes in their late thirties
• What changed — and what it reveals about terrain vs. destiny

🩺 The Physical, Energy & Emotional Body

• Why the physical body (bloodwork, genetics) is downstream — often the last place a problem shows up
• Why the energy body moves first, and is often where "normal labs, but I feel terrible" lives
• Why the emotional body determines whether your nervous system lets healing happen at all
• Why Being Hohl collects data from all three — every time, every client

One of My Favorite Takeaways

"Your genes are not your destiny. They're your starting terrain."

And perhaps even more importantly…

"You were never the problem. You were just never given the full picture."

The Being Hohl Perspective

At Being Hohl, we don't believe your genes are a verdict.

We don't treat one layer of you as the whole story.

We don't chase generic protocols.

We ask what your specific biology — physical, energy, and emotional — actually needs.

The scan tells us the story.

The bloodwork tells us what is happening today.

The genetics tell us what your body may naturally need more support with.

Together, they help us understand the person — not just the diagnosis.

Because healing starts with understanding.

Next Week

We're going deeper into Episode 2 — The Biology of You — with an episode on the real biology of stress. Not the surface version. Why two people can go through the same hard year and come out with completely different bodies on the other side.

You won't want to miss it.

Disclaimer

This podcast is intended for educational purposes only and is not medical advice. Hormone optimization, peptide therapy, supplements, and lifestyle interventions should always be discussed with an appropriately licensed healthcare professional who understands your personal medical history and goals.

Symptoms are signals. At Being Hohl, we help you understand what your body is trying to communicate through a root-cause, mind-body-soul lens.

Book your Bioenergetic Scan at beinghohl.com. 

Tiktok @danihohl - Instagram and Facebook: @beinghohl

Symptoms are signals. At Being Hohl, we help you understand what your body is trying to communicate through a root-cause, mind-body-soul lens.

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not medical advice.
Book your Bioenergetic Scan at beinghohl.com.
Tiktok @danihohl - Instagram and Facebook: @beinghohl

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Last episode, we talked about hormone replacement therapy and why it's not always the answer. And if you listen to that one, you might still be sitting with the question. Because if HRT isn't always the answer, what determines who it works for? Why does one woman start progesterone and feel like herself again in two weeks, and another woman starts the same protocol at the exact same dose and feels nothing, or even worse? That question doesn't have anything to do with the hormone. It has to do with her. Specifically, it has to do with her genes. So today, we are starting somewhere most health conversations skip entirely. We're going back to the blueprint. Because before we talk about protocols, before we talk about supplements, before we talk about what modality is right for you, we have to talk about the thing that makes you biologically you. If you are new here, thank you for spending your time listening to me. I am your host, Dr. Danny Hole, board certified in functional medicine PhD, meaning I am educating you. Okay, I'm not an MD, I'm not a DO, this is not medical advice. Talk to your primary care physician, but don't be surprised if they have no idea what you're talking about, so here I am educating you. Let's get into it. Okay, here's a question I get almost every single week in some version. Danny, my friend did this protocol and it changed your life. I did the exact same thing, why didn't it work for me? Or my sister and I grew up in the same house, ate the same food, and she's never had a weight issue in her life. I look at a carb and I gained five pounds. Or the one that breaks my heart every time. What is wrong with me? Nothing is wrong with you, you are not broken, you are not doing it wrong, you are not lacking willpower or discipline or trying hard enough. You are running different software. And until we talk about that software, which is your genetics, nothing else we talk about this series is going to make complete sense. Because genetics isn't just a topic, it's the lens, everything else gets filtered through. So let's start with the basic distinction between DNA versus epigenetics. Because most people conflate these two things and they are not the same at all. Your DNA is fixed. It is the sequence that you were born with. You didn't choose it, you can't change it. Okay, it's the same on the day you die as it was the day you were conceived. Your epigenetics is not fixed. Epigenetics is the layer sitting on top of your DNA that decides which genes get turned on, which genes get turned down, and which genes stay silent for your entire life. Think of your DNA as a piano. Every key exists, every note is possible. Your epigenetics is the sheet music. It decides what actually gets played. Okay, and here's what most people don't realize. Your environment writes that sheet music every single day. What you eat, how you sleep, how much stress you're under, what toxins you've been exposed to, whether you grew up feeling safe or feeling on edge, whether your gut is inflamed, whether you're getting enough sunlight, all of it. Every input is quite literally instructing your genes on what to do. This is why identical twins with identical DNA can end up with completely different health outcomes by the age of 40. Same piano, wildly different music. Okay, and this isn't abstract. There are actual mechanisms doing this work every day inside your cells. Two of the big ones are methylation and histone modification. Methylation is like a dimmer switch. Your body attaches a small molecule, a methyl group, onto a gene, and depending on where it lands, that gene gets turned down or turned off. If your diet isn't on point, it can directly feed the system. So things like folate, B12, choline. Okay, these aren't just healthy nutrients in some vague sense. They are literally the raw material your body uses to control which genes are active. Histone modification works differently but does something similar. It changes how tightly your DNA is wound around the proteins that store it. Wound tight, a gene is inaccessible or essentially silent. Loosened, it's available to be read and expressed. Chronic stress, poor sleep, and inflammation all influence this winding and unwinding. Okay, and I'm not telling you this so that you walk away like memorizing biochemistry. I'm telling you this so the next time someone says to you, it's just your genetics, or it's just your lifestyle, you know that both of those statements are incomplete. It is never just one. It's the conversation happening between the two every single day at the molecular level. And again, I'm educating you, right? So the next time you go to the doctor for something and they look at you and say, It's a gene you have, ask them which one. Because unless they've tested it, they don't know. We know all of the genes in the human body, okay? There is not one specific gene that promises you are going to have this outcome. Once you know what genes you have, we can do something about it. Let me give you an example, okay, because this can get abstract pretty fast if we stay in theory. Two sisters. Same childhood, same house, same food growing up. In their late 30s, one of them develops significant anxiety, disrupted sleep, and stubborn weight around her midsection. The other doesn't. Same DNA pool, raised in the same environment as kids, so what happened? Their adult environments diverged. One sister went through a high stress period at work for three straight years, barely slept, ate on the run, and had minimal recovery time. The other had a slower pace decade, more sleep, more regulated stress, more consistent movement. When we ran genetics on the sister who was struggling, we found a variant affecting how she clears cortisol and a variant affecting methylation efficiency. Neither of those, on their own, guaranteed anxiety or weight gain. But under three years of chronic unrelenting stress with insufficient nutrient support for her methylation pathway, that terrain became fertile ground for exactly the symptoms she developed. Now her sister may carry similar variants, we don't know, because she's never needed to look. Her environment never pulled that particular trigger. Okay, this is the whole point of this episode in one story. The gene didn't do this to her. The gene made her more sensitive to a specific set of conditions. And then those conditions showed up. Okay, that's not a life sentence, that's information. Once we knew her terrain, we knew exactly where to start. Okay, you may have heard this before. Genes load the gun, environment pulls the trigger. Okay, now I want you to actually sit with what that means because it's more hopeful than it actually sounds. Having a genetic variant, say a variant in a detox pathway or a methylation gene or a hormone receptor, does not mean you are guaranteed to have the symptom associated with it. It means you have a predisposition or a loaded gun. Whether that gun ever fires depends entirely on what you expose it to. This is the single most misunderstood idea in genetics, and it's the reason so many people either panic when they get genetic testing done. I have the gene for X, I'm doomed. Or they dismiss it entirely. Genetics don't matter, it's all lifestyle. Okay, both of those are wrong. Your genes are not your destiny, they're your starting terrain. They tell us where you're more vulnerable and just as importantly, where you're more resilient. What they don't tell us is what's actually gonna happen. Okay, that part you actually have enormous influence over. That's not a night that's not just a nice, comforting platitude. That is literally what the science of epigenetics has shown us for the last two decades. Now, I think there are two mistakes that people make with genetics, and I see both of them constantly. Mistake number one is treating genetics as a life sentence. Someone gets their test back, sees a variant tied to something scary, and mentally files themselves under broken or at risk forever. Okay, that belief alone, the stress of believing that you're doomed, changes your biology. Chronic stress is one of the loudest environmental signals there is. So the fear of the gene can end up doing more damage than the gene itself. Mistake number two is ignoring genetics completely and doing generic protocols. Okay, this is one I see even more, literally daily, especially in wellness spaces. Everyone gets put on the same supplement stack, the same cleanse, the same eat this, not that, and then we're surprised when it works beautifully for one person and does nothing or actively backfires for another. Both mistakes come from the same root error. Treating genetics as one thing instead of understanding that your genes only make sense in the context of your body specifically. Which brings me to something I want to introduce today because it's gonna be the framework for this entire series. At being whole, we don't just look at one layer of you, we look at three. Okay, I want to slow down here because this is the actual framework that the rest of this season sits on top of, and most health conversations only ever hand you one third of the picture. If you've listened to me, you already know where we're going. If you're new here, I think this is gonna crack your world wide open. Okay, layer number one, the physical body. This is the layer that everyone already knows. Okay, your organs, your systems, your blood work, your genetics, your biochemistry, cholesterol, thyroid panels, hormone levels, inflammatory markers. This is where conventional medicine lives almost entirely, and it's where most wellness content stops too. Even in the functional medicine space, same panels, different ranges. To be clear, this layer matters enormously. Okay, blood work and genetics are not optional, and they tell us real objective things about what's happening inside you. But here's the limitation the physical body is downstream. By the time something shows up on a blood panel, it usually already has been building for months, sometimes years, in the first other two layers. Layer number two, the energy body. Okay, this is the layer that most people have never had a real conversation about with a practitioner, and I think it's the most underestimated layer in all of healthcare. Your energy body is your nervous system's real-time signaling, your circadian rhythm, your cellular communication, the electrical and vibrational information moving through you constantly. This is closer to what a bioenergetic scan is measuring. Okay, it's not vague, it's information at a level of resolution that a standard lab panel was never built to capture. Here's why this layer matters so much. Okay, it moves first. Long before cortisol shows up abnormal on a blood test, your nervous system has already shifted into a dysregulated pattern. Long before a thyroid panel goes out of range, your cellular energy production has often already been struggling. The energy body is an early warning system, and frequently it's exactly where the root cause is sitting, even while the physical lab still can look completely normal. Okay, this is exactly why I see clients regularly whose blood work comes back quote unquote fine and they're told there's nothing wrong and yet they feel terrible. Fine on paper, not fine in their body. That gap almost always lives in the energy layer. And then the third layer is the emotional body. This is the layer that people resist the most because it feels less medical. But your emotional body, your nervous system's relationship to safety, your stress history, what you're carrying from your past or your present is not separate from your biology. It is your biology. Okay, we already talked about this today. Chronic stress changes gene expression through methylation and histone modification. Unprocessed emotional patterns keep a nervous system anchored in the state of threat, and a nervous system that believes it's under threat will never fully prioritize digestion, detoxification, hormone production, or repair. Okay, it doesn't matter how well designed your supplement protocol is, if your body doesn't feel safe enough to use it, it won't. This is the layer that explains why two people with identical blood work and identical scan results can still respond completely different to the same protocol. One of them is carrying an emotional load that the other isn't. And until that's acknowledged, part of her biology stays braced. Now here's the mistake I see constantly in both conventional and alternative medicine: picking one layer and treating it as the whole story. Conventional medicine tends to live almost exclusively in the physical body. Blood work, imaging, medication targeting a specific pathway. When the physical labs look normal, the conversation often ends there, even if the person is clearly saying they're unwell. A lot of wellness and alternative approaches swing the opposite direction, heavy on the energy work, heavy on emotional healing, sometimes without ever confirming what's actually happening in the physical body. Okay, that can miss something real and measurable that also needs direct attention. Neither approach alone gives you the full picture. And this is the actual reason I collect data from all three layers in every client every time. We collect your blood work, your genetics, and we do a bioenergetic scan for the energy layer. We also have a real conversation about stress and history for the emotional layer. Okay, the physical body tells me what's already happened. The energy body tells me what's happening right now, often before it's measurable any other way. The emotional body tells me why the first two layers are stuck in the pattern they're in. When those three data sets agree with each other, and they almost always do, once you know how to read them together, that's when a plan stops being a guess and becomes precise. Your genes get expressed differently depending on what's happening in all three of these layers. A methylation gene doesn't just respond to nutrients, it responds to stress. A detox pathway doesn't just respond to toxin load, it responds to whether your nervous system feels safe enough to prioritize detoxification at all. You cannot understand your genetics by looking at your physical body alone. That's the piece almost everyone misses, and it's the piece we're gonna spend this entire series unpacking, layer by layer, system by system, until you understand your body the way I do when I sit down with the client scan, blood work, and genetics on the table all together. So let's close the loop where we started. Why does HRT work beautifully for one woman and do nothing for another? Genetics is a huge piece of that answer. How she methylates estrogen, how her detox pathways clear hormone metabolites, how her nervous system interprets the shift. None of that shows up on a standard hormone panel. All of it shows up when you look at her genetics alongside everything else. Okay, this is why I don't believe in one size fits all protocols. Not because it's a nice thing to say, but because I've watched it play out in front of me client after client. Your genes load the gun, but you, through your food, your sleep, your stress, your environment, your nervous system regulation, you decide every single day whether that trigger ever gets pulled. That's not fear, that's power. Now that you understand genes load the gun and environment pulls the trigger, here's what we're actually gonna do with that this series. Okay, we're gonna take that one idea and follow it all the way down. We're gonna talk about stress. Not the surface version, but the actual biology of it and why two people can go through the exact same hard year and come out with completely different bodies on the other side. We're gonna talk about why you and your best friend can eat the exact same meal and get two completely different results from it. We're gonna talk about methylation, the pathway I think is the most misunderstood thing in all of functional medicine, and the one that quietly runs your hormones, your detox, your mood, and your energy all at once. Okay, we're gonna talk about your mitochondria, the part of every cell in your body that's actually responsible for whether you feel alive or exhausted. And we're gonna end the series by putting it all on the table. Symptoms, scan, blood work, genetics, and showing you exactly how a plan actually gets built from that picture. Not a generic plan yours. Every episode this series is going to add one more piece of the picture that we started today. So if today made you think a little differently about your body, for even five minutes, stay with me. It gets even better from here. For today, here's what I want you to sit with. You were never the problem. You were just never given the full picture. Until next time, this is Being Whole. Love you bye.