metabolic therapy Saved my life

In October 2018, a dinner with siblings became the genesis of my health transformation. While celebrating my sisters birthday I saw my younger brother for the first time in about 4 months. He looked about 30 pounds lighter. When I asked him how he did it, he said "I did this low carb keto thing". 

Nothing else was said that night. The next day I went to Chicago to Play in the Chicago Charities National Platform Tennis Tournament with one of my best friends. Two years earlier we finished fifth in the Nation in the over forty five age category at Nationals. 

The before picture was taken that day in Chicago. I could no longer consider myself functionally fat after my performance that day. I felt depressed that my body just couldn't do it anymore and that I let my partner down. I was thinking I might have to give up one of my passions. 

Arthritis in my knees hurt from four meniscus surgeries. I had two on each knee and my tennis elbow had begun to hurt over the last 8 months, for the first time in my life. God I felt like such a mess. 

Once I returned home I immediately started to research what was this low carb keto thing. I remember wondering what was this thing at dinner two nights earlier. I had spend over 20 years in the health insurance, corporate wellness, disease management, and pharma industries and never did I hear the words "low carb or keto" ever spoken.

Always loving a good mystery, I put my detective hat on and started down the rabbit hole. I utilized, Google, YouTube and Pub Med to try to figure this out. In the first couple of hours I started seeing things that worried me.  

Conversations online discussed that saturated fats are not unhealthy and that LDL isn't necessarily an unhealthy molecule. This flew in the face of my 10 years of selling disease management programs. I understood the guidelines. 

I was starting to fear that a fad diet I had never heard of might be the end of my brother. 

Over November and December, I spend all of my free time trying to find the definitive research and data to show my brother. I put about 30 hours in over November and I was coming up empty. 

The more I researched the more I started to think that he had found something. But how could my whole career in and around the health world left me and almost everyone that I knew completely uninformed about this?  I couldn't get my brain around this. 

I continued the deep dive into December. I was now obsessed and I threw in the towel. Stopped trying to debunk it and just wanted to learn. 

By mid-December, I started cutting my carbs and tried to find ways to implement all the knowledge that I had just ingested. I figured that on Jan. 1 becoming thin would be my New Years Resolution and I would be all in. 2019 would be my year. I was going to be thing again. 

In the first six weeks, I was down thirty-eight pounds.  But on January 10th something incredible happened. The arthritis in my knees and my tennis elbow were suddenly gone. I know longer needed ibuprofen to be on a court. 

What had happened is I returned to the metabolism we are all born in. I was once again fat-adapted. I no longer had hunger or pain. I was only down 10 pounds but I felt like a new man.

By the end of February, my mind was racing. I left the Corp Wellness & Disease Management world in 2014 but now I was flirting with trying to get back in. 

During my deep dive, I found Virta Health. It was a major force in my epiphany that Disease Management should be thrown away and replaced with a Disease Reversal industry. One particular Ted Talk named "Reversing Type 2 Diabetes starts with ignoring the guidelines" impacted me like nothing else in my professional life. Dr. Sarah Hallberg went on after that presentation to become the Medical Director at Virta Health. Please watch the video. I linked it above. It might change your life or someone you love. 

At the moment Virta wasn't hiring for anything I could apply for. So I started reaching out to my old industry contacts. While most of the conversations were on the phone I could tell that the people I was talking with knew nothing about what I had found. I could feel there eyes glazing over like a deer in the headlights. 

I then reached out to a former competitor. He had just started a position running sales and marketing at a disease management company that I wasn't familiar with. It was a Monday at 3:30 pm and he answered his cell. We chatted for sixty minutes and he booked me for a follow up interview on Wednesday morning. 

After another two-hour call, he asked me to drive to Iowa the next day and offered me a sales position.  I was back in the industry. I was pumped. I thought I was about to change the industry and world. 

When I returned home I was so energized. I found myself pacing in my office saying to myself, "in a few months I am going to be thin again, I'm not on meds, I am going to be bullet proof". 

Suddenly I remembered two things:

• First, when I was a freshman in college the #1 selling book in the book store was "The Complete Book of Running". The author was Jim Fixx and it shocked the world when this very fit 52-year-old died of a heart attack while jogging.
• Secondly, my earlier epiphany with Virta Health include a story how their billionaire founder won the 50 and over Iron Man competition in Hawaii and came home to find out that he was prediabetic. He was bewildered and started his own deep dive that ended much like mine. Ketosis is the answer. 

Ten years earlier at 45 years old I had a CT Heart Scan and discovered that I had now plaque in my arteries. I decided to get another one. If I was clean again then I could celebrate. So I self-referred myself to a local system and booked another scan in two days. 

Two days after my CT Heart Scan, the system called to share my results. My zero score at age 45 had become a score of 268 by 55 years old.  

This was a pretty serious blow. I realized that my future was no longer bulletproof. I sat there for a few minutes in disbelief. And then my first epiphany started to come back into my mind. "The Disease Management industry should be Disease Reversal industry".  Healthcare need to change from a sick care profit generating model back to a health care, disease reversal, and prevention model. 

I knew that Type 2 Diabetes was reversible. By this point I had seen dozens of examples of of it and Virta Health's mission statement was to reverse Type 2 Diabetes in 100 million people. 

I remember seeing the Diet Doctor website back with I thought that ketosis was snake oil. They listed dozens of conditions that could be reversed through Ketosis. However, through my deep dive I was able to verify that these weren't snake oil but a reality. 

I remember finding Ivor Cummins, at the time he was the President of the Irish Heart Awareness Charity.  He taught me so much during that deep dive and in the first few months of applying my low-carb knowledge to me. I found him one of the best educators of all that I had found.  

Beyond being instrumental in creating a documentary on the CT Heart Scan and heart disease detection called The Widow Maker, Ivor also had his own YouTube channel called The Fat Emperor. It is now rebranded to just his name. However, his channel focused solely on reversing heart disease and understanding how arterial plaque was formed and reversed.  I now had a new mission. My goal for 2019 wasn't to be thin again, it was to reverse my arterial plaque. 

So I started watching every episode that Ivor had. I did deeper dives on his guests and started really digging into understanding the role of cholesterol in my body and in my arteries.

It took me only a couple of weeks of all my free time to exhaust Ivor's content. It was like having a part-time job at night and another full-time job on the weekends. 

Then on May 11th, 2019, my holy grail episode was released called  Want to Reverse your Calcification and Heart Disease? Here's How!". In this episode, the guest's name was Patrick Theut. Beyond hanging of every word, I had this feeling like I knew Patrick. He looked so familiar. 

As Patrick started telling his story I put together our connection. Patrick lived a couple of hours north of me in Wausau WI. He was a Ph.D. and executive at one of my former clients, Wausau Papers. Ten years earlier I had sold Wausau Papers their Corporate Wellness and he was on the vendor selection committee. 

Patrick shared how, during a multi-day executive physical at the Mayo Clinic, before leaving with a perfect bill of health, they asked him if there were any additional tests that he would like them to do. He had heard of the CT Heart Scan and asked to have one. After the test, he had lunch with the medical team to learn about his Scan results. 

He was told that he had a score over three times mine. The doctors painted a grim prognosis to Patrick telling him to move to California and start selling surf wax on the beach.  That he didn't have long to live and should enjoy the last couple of years that he had. 

Ivor and Patrick are serious engineers by training and major problem solvers within their corporate environments. So instead, Patrick put his Ph.D./Engineering problem-solving hat on and put in about 16,000 hours of reading every study he could find over the next few years. Wausau Papers allowed him to just work a couple of hours a day and devote the rest of his time to trying to solve this medical mystery. "Could plaque be reversed?" And guess what, it could and he did it. 

I listened to this episode a dozen times, took notes, and started to find every other place that Patrick had been online or in print. You see, Patrick determined a protocol to reverse the plaque and demonstrated it over almost thirty scans in Milwaukee, the same center that I had used ten years earlier for my first scan. 

Over a few weeks, I found out where he shared the protocol. I typed it up and have been following it, handing it out to those who were interested. If you also would like it, just reach out, and I will forward it. 

Knowing I was doing what I could, I felt pretty good. From this time forward, I knew I would need to be living the protocol. Even if I conquered my plaque, I knew that if I screwed up my lifestyle again it would come back. 

A couple of months into the protocol, I was on a pickleball court with a friend I have had since I was a teenager. He is now a Cardiologist and that day I learned that he had just suffered a heart attack and had three stents placed. 

I was curious about how he was going to handle this life-changing event and what his plan was going forward. His plan was pretty much the opposite of the protocol I was on. I started sharing the studies and people that I had been following. It took about four months, but he also followed the same protocol.  

At first, he was very resistant. He wanted to follow the predominant narrative inside of standard cardiology. However, it was hard to argue with what I had shared. Nobody in the standard model discussed plaque reversal and the successes that some were having in the newer model.  It is too long he type out here, but you can listen to the whole story on a podcast I was on in July 2024. 

We have also created a Podcast called The Metabochondriacs. Here we discuss our mutual passion for metabolic health. We each also host our own individual podcasts also. 

Six years later, as I type this, I am still completely obsessed with learning as much as I can about Metabolic Therapy. Back in 2019, the term had barely hit the lexicon, but I went into what I now refer to as Monk Mode. 

While I still play tennis, platform tennis, and pickleball, and I work out at the gym, beyond working, all of my free time went into learning and sharing this information. I barely pay any attention to pro or college sports like I used to. If I'm invited to a gathering that has it on, I will watch and cheer like the old days. But I don't care like I used to. 

I now follow scientists and research instead. Since I have always been a history buff, I pay attention to the history of healthcare, trying to figure out where we went so astray. I think I found most of those smoking guns, which I will explore through my MML Blog and podcast episodes.

Today, I assist people in conquering conditions that they never thought they could overcome. I show them how, by eating real foods and making some easy-to-follow lifestyle changes, they can become pain-free and often off their medications. The medication scenario is handled with their doctors, usually with professional guidelines (yes, there is more than one set of guidelines to follow). I share that most doctors are not aware of. 

If their current doctor doesn't want to learn or refuses to follow new data, I assist them in finding a doctor who understands Metabolic Therapy and its healing power. 

So, my three favorite activities are: 

1. I love working with people and watching them achieve health they couldn't imagine and craft bodies that they are proud of.  
2. Breaking doctors' brains. Every time I do the downstream, the ripple touches countless people. 
3. Learning as much as I can regarding the Metabolic Therapy world. It is changing the world. 

I hope we meet and chat in the future. Feel free to reach out. I offer a free first hour so I can learn about your situation and answer questions while a plan of attack is created. 

Enjoy your journey, spread the word, and let's change the world.