My Story

 

My Story

 

I enjoyed my life as a young child.  I played sports, had lots of friends, and life was just very enjoyable and it made me quite happy.  Around the time I was 10, life began to open itself to me from the negative side.  I remember some kids calling me fat, although I wasn’t obese or anything extreme at that time.  I remember being a little pudgy as I considered it, but it didn’t bother me very much. 

On my 10th birthday, I went to my 10 year old checkup appointment at my pediatrician’s office.  My pediatric doctor told me I was overweight, and I remember feeling really sad and hurt from his comment.  It was a realization that what was being said to me was actually true I guess, since my doctor told me the same thing.  So my mom and I left his office and went straight to the only gym in the area within 25 miles of my house.  She bought me a gym membership that night, and set me up with an appointment with one of the trainer’s who worked there, a man who became a good friend, Larry. This whole experience was the 1st awakening for me in my health journey.

From that point on lifting was a major focus for me, along with improving my athletic abilities and excelling in the sports I played.  As I began to pack on muscle and lift weights heavier than my friends and peers.  It elevated my clout and social status as a youngster.  It was one of the greatest decisions I had ever made at this point in my life and it continued that way for quite some time.  I played multiple sports throughout my school years - baseball, soccer, wrestling, basketball, and also football for 13 years all the way through graduating from Franklin & Marshall college.

I met the most beautiful and amazing woman after I graduated college. I thank God for her, and for crossing paths with her in this lifetime.  I’m just thankful she felt the same way about me as I felt about her.  I knew instantly she was my soulmate, and Alexa and I got married in 2009.  By 2010 we had our first son Michael.

Priorities began to change at the time, and I lost focus on keeping myself in shape.  It was getting a little harder to stay in shape for my standards.  I wasn’t walking around a college campus to classes all day, or playing football like I had for the previous 13 years.  Along with the increased stress of figuring out life from a personal and financial aspect, I lost touch with my physical self both from an appearance standpoint and a performance standpoint.  I battled it mentally as it really didn’t bring any direct benefit to my life at that point, but it still bothered me a little bit.

We hit the Cape May beach when my son was 1, and my wife took family pictures of us all.  I saw myself in the photos and it was an instant mid-life crisis. I was never been as out of shape as I was in those photos, never in my life. My self confidence and perspective of myself changed forever that day. This was the 2nd awakening in my health journey.

I cannot explain how horrible I felt, to essentially be completely stripped of what was the backbone of my identity up to this point in my life. I never had anxiety or low self confidence and embarrassment about myself.  It brought me back to that 10yr old doctor’s appointment, but it was much more elevated at this point.  This was a more of a mindset awakening for me at this point. It was like the 2.0 version of my age 10 experience and the mission was to figure out how to be “ripped”, as it was something I never really put much focus on as it sort of came naturally to me with all the physical activity and exercise that was part of my days training for sports. 

I was determined to figure out and learn how to achieve single digit body fat, while simultaneously becoming as strong as I had ever been.  It ended up being a process in which I gained a total grip on nutrition and strength training, learning how to deadlift over 3x my bodyweight, squat over 2.5x my bodyweight, and bench press 1.8x my bodyweight… all while living with single-digit body fat.

There are things that happen mentally when you feel very powerful.  As Spiderman says “with great power comes great responsibility.”  As I would get up at 4:30am to hit the gym, I’d look at my son and my wife while they would be sleeping.  I started to think about the health of my family, and educating them about how to be healthy and be strong.  I felt that’s what a father should do, and I took on that responsibility and it became a personal priority for me.  My wife got herself into the best shape she had ever been in her life. By far it was the strongest and leanest she had been in her life, even as a track athlete and dancer.  She deadlifted almost 2x her bodyweight within only a few months of the family’s strength training plan.  Everything in our lives was at a very good point and we were literally the happiest and healthiest that either of us had ever been in our lives.

But something had crept through the back door of our lives and showed it’s ugly head.  Something none of us saw or could have seen at that time.  At this point life took an unexpected turn for the worse that would have the deepest negative long-tail impact on our entire lives. My wife’s mom came home from a doctor’s appointment and told us that she had cancer in 20+ of her lymph nodes…

The whole bottom fell out of our happiness and joy.  Life immediately took on new meaning and new purpose as we were helping her fight a disease that we knew nothing about.  We had no idea how to fight this monster, and had no idea how we were going to win this battle.  We believed we had no choice but to put our faith in the medical professional’s hands and in God’s hands.  I also thought that since I knew about nutrition that I could help her get healthy, but I quickly realized that the one size fits all approach was not the remedy for this scenario.  It was a heavy realization period for me that I knew how to build muscle, and no Idea how to detoxify the body from disease.

Unfortunately, God brought her to his kingdom in 2013… and from that point on our lives were forever changed in so many ways.  The entire experience changed everything we thought we understood and knew about life.  And for anyone else who has experienced this, you understand that there are essentially no words to summarize this experience, and my love goes out to you.  This experience is cemented in my timeline of life and it has been hard to draw positives from it.  I’m a super positive person, and even I have difficulty drawing positivity from it.

I thought that by learning how to balance my energy consumption and lift heavy weights that I was a master at nutrition and weight lifting.  I thought I knew how to keep everyone healthy and strong… but it really only to help people who weren’t sick.  I felt like I couldn’t come through when my family needed it the most, and when live’s depended on it.  It broke me apart, and left me with scars and the feeling of being powerless.  Even if I could help people lose bodyfat and gain strength and muscle, what did it really matter if I couldn’t help people be healthy and keep them healthy, or eliminate sickness and disease. 

This was the 3rd awakening for me in my health journey.  This was both a mental and emotional awakening for me.  I had many many things on my mind and my heart at this point after losing my wife’s mom, Gina, to cancer.  The biggest thought in my mind was that I needed to really understand how to keep my family healthy.  I never wanted my son or my wife to go through that pain and suffering if I ever got sick with a disease.  And even worse, what if one of them become sick with an illness or disease!

I was a little shaken at this point, again feeling powerless.  My feelings of personal responsibility as a husband and father to keep my family healthy had elevated to a whole different level. The next biggest thought that just wouldn’t leave my mind, was that being sick can take away someone’s life in a heartbeat, so it has to be prevented.  The only thing I knew at this point was that preventing disease was much better than eliminating it. 

I had a gameplan but I didn’t really know how to execute it.  I knew I needed to make sure my family was healthy, and that they stayed healthy.  I needed to figure out what causes these illnesses and diseases, and if they did become sick I needed to know how to get them healthy again.

First things first, I felt that I needed to focus on nutrition and foods.  In the 2.0 experience the major discovery was around nutrition.  I attributed ~80% of my results to nutrition, and only about 20% to efficient strength training.  I understood the power of nutrition with becoming lean and strong, and I felt there was more power and knowledge to gain from this aspect.

I also knew I needed to strengthen my mind.  I felt like I needed the healthiest and strongest mind I could create if I had any chance at figuring out this puzzle of true health.  I needed to take health to the mental space and strengthen it just as I had strengthened the physical.  I knew I needed to strengthen my emotional self, but I put it last on the priority list and just approached it from the perspective that over time it would strengthen.

For the next 3 years I had been building health knowledge and continued to educate myself from many different angles, while raising a family and introducing our 2nd son Bobby Jr. into the world.  In 2016, I decided to work with one of the highest ranking powerlifters in the world in the 82kg category, since that was my bodyweight.  I was approaching many things simultaneously at this point.  I also began working with a professional who trained and helped neurologically heal some of the top football players in the NFL at the time, including Odell Beckham Jr. and Von Miller.  During this period, my whole perspective changed on strength training and functional medicine.

I felt like I had essentially maxed out my knowledge in this realm, and I began to become unfulfilled again.  My nutrition knowledge had improved some, but my health and wellness and healing education wasn’t up to the same standards.  At this time of my life I connected myself back with nutrition, as it was the next obstacle I needed to overcome if there was any hope in fulfilling my ultimate health gameplan.  But nutrition felt a little daunting to me, as it seemed like a huge mountain to climb that would probably take my lifetime to understand, let alone true health and wellness, and healing.  After all medical doctors don’t even have a full grasp on health and wellness so how was I going to gain control over it.  Fear and doubt had crept into my mind at this point, but I decided to proceed with it anyway as I had maxed myself out by clinging to my comfort zone in the physical strength space and was no longer gaining fulfillment here.

I started digging very hard into nutrition.  I started learning herbal and natural medicine.  I began to really connect with detoxification and healing.  I began to identify that the physical vehicle we operate also has direct correlation with the mind.  I began to understand what the body needs and requires based upon how it was designed and created.

Animal agriculture began to grab my attention in a not so good way.  Seeing the destruction that animal agriculture was doing to the planet, and witnessing animals being killed, tortured, and treated inhumanely began to sicken me. It was something I no longer felt connected to eating meat if that’s what needed to take place in order for that meat to arrive on my plate.

I began to understand vibrational frequencies and electrical energy.  I learned that the dead bodies of animals have 0 energy to add to mine, as the human energy levels need ~6500 angstroms of electromagnetic energy to support health and vitality.  I began to see a correlations of meat and dairy sickening the masses.  I began to see people, health, and the world very differently than I ever had in my life.

As nutrition knowledge enhanced I began to make the connection with the diets of healthy and disease free people, and it opened the door to understanding true healing.  It was a ray of light into a world that gave me true hope of solving the ultimate health puzzle for my family and I, and if I could do it for us why not help others do the same thing. 

I began to see deeper trends and patterns connecting natural food and nutrition to health and wellness.  What I began to identify is that the healthiest, longest living individuals, all had a couple of things in common.  They practiced lifestyles in harmony with nature and plant based activity.  They understood how to detoxify and cleanse the body, and were all utilizing the power of herbs. This was the 4th awakening in my health journey, and it’s what I would also consider the first awakening in my spiritual journey.

It was the ultimate connection, and the ultimate health connection was made.  I had finally figured it out, and it was a super humbling experience.  Things had finally come back full circle, and there was mixed emotions of extreme happiness along with the sadness of losing my mother-in-law coming back to me.  I had figured things out, but it wasn’t too late from that perspective.  I realized that I couldn’t change the past, and the only choice of control I had was to move forward and impact the lives of those in the present time.

With 20+ years of combined health, wellness, nutrition, strength training, herbology, detoxification, iridology, and healing experience and self-experimentation, I finally felt like I could completely help myself and my family achieve ultimate health, but also other people in the world.  I felt a great power, and an even greater responsibility to help others.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The root of all health is that food is medicine, or it is poison.  In order to maximize the nutrition from the foods that we consume, we must be efficient in the 4 main processes to health and vitality, which are digestion, absorption, utilization, and elimination. The digestion process of our foods have an outcome that is either acid ash, or alkaline ash.  There are 2 sides to chemistry - acid or alkaline (base).

As we learned in chemistry acids are corrosive.  Our bodies must provide an alkaline medium, or terrain, in order to have optimal and superior health.  I understood that nutrition is where it all starts in providing the body what it needs.  If you begin to provide the body things it does not want or need and is not naturally designed to consume, it must rid itself of them, and if it cannot, that is where disease begins. The human body is very simple, from a chemistry standpoint.  It’s acid and base chemistry.  Those with sickness or disease must heal themselves of acids through detoxification and nutrition, and must alkalize the body

I began working directly with people to improve their health and to provide a foundation of knowledge to help them live a healthy lifestyle to maximize vitality and longevity.  Folks who were overweight lost weight. People who wanted to gain muscle and strengths achieved personal bests.  Diets and lifestyles were altered and people began living differently and healthier.  Their minds were elevated and their eyes could see clearly what health is and what it needs to be, both short term and long term.  My father who had congestive heart failure, began to get his health and vitality back.  The achievement of healing sickness and disease was something that was finally achieved over the course of almost 6 years since my mother in law passed.

A massive internal driving force was initiated and a seed was planted when we lost my mother-in-law to cancer.  I can’t explain all that it did to me and to my family, but I know there are literally millions upon millions of people who have suffered and felt very similar pain by going through a loss of a loved one from cancer, and from many other diseases.  It was the motivation to achieve ultimate health.

It is my purpose, my daily motivation, to spread the truth about health and to raise awareness of natural health.  To help change people’s lives directly and indirectly by preventing that level of pain and suffering, to help people live a healthy lifestyle.  My mother in law, and the millions of others, will not be lost in vain.

I’ve unintentionally dedicated my life to understand health since I was 10 years old.  That day changed my life, and I am thankful for my experience with my doctor, and I must be thankful for all of my experiences as it has shaped me into who I am today, equipped with the knowledge, awareness, and truth I have today.  It brings me immense happiness to help, and to help people live a healthier life.  Sparing people the pain from losing a loved one or losing themselves to a disease or sickness is the most fulfillment I can receive in serving others. 

I don’t want people to go through what my family has gone through after losing my wife’s mother.  I want to spare that pain and suffering for all the people who are involved in these scenarios, and I will continue doing it until my days on earth have ended.

Health is not a difficult subject at its true core.  Truth is universal.  I feel health has taken on a mysterious and secretive aspect. To me, it’s a fundamental element of life that we all must battle throughout our lives, and it should be common knowledge to all human beings.  Providing your body what it needs so that you can go live your life to the highest levels of achievement and abilities is what life is all about. Put yourself in control of your health.  You are alive, so maximize your health, your vitality, and your longevity while you have it, and do something amazing with your life and stay with your loved ones for as long as possible.