About the Founder
Hi there 👋🏻
I’m Matt, and I’m a guy working to continuously improve my health. I started this site to help document my journey and to record my own findings and experiences related to questions that I have along the way. I’m not a doctor and I don’t even play one on T.V. I’m simply a lifelong learner who wants to feel better and would love to help others do the same.
Sharing My Experience
I’m working on building my health back up after years of what I now know were poor lifestyle choices that beat down my health. Rewind a bit and I was a 28-year-old man who found himself in a heart hospital despite looking relatively fit and healthy on the outside. I wasn’t overly overweight and despite being chained to a desk for about 50 hours a week, I was fairly active on weekends. But there I was, diagnosed with pre-hypertension and told that I would be on medication to control my blood pressure for the rest of my life.
This was a big wake-up call for me. I wasn’t used to taking any medications, or anything daily, for that matter.
In general, I felt pretty much like I’d always felt. In my mind, I was just a few workouts away from being in decent shape and I felt I was on par with most of my peers. Walking up several flights to my apartment was never an issue and I’d never had more than the sniffles in the past many years.
Taking a moment to be more introspective, I realized that I actually had been ignoring a number of issues: stomach aches, headaches, poor bowel movements, acne, and trouble sleeping. Those were all things that I had been willing to overlook as they were bearable to me and I had other things to worry about like rent and my career.
But now I had high blood pressure and that meant something different to me because I was told it could and would lead to more serious issues if I didn’t take it more seriously.
I initially went the common route of going to the doctor and taking what they prescribed me but quickly found that my symptoms were receiving the treatment, and not really the causes of those symptoms.
And I didn’t feel the doctors were able to spend enough time with me nor did they have the training to dig down and find the root causes. Their training seemed to be focused on prescribing medication that would only mask the problem.Â
I asked about how exercise and nutrition would influence my affliction only to be brushed off. I was told that because heart attacks and strokes ran in my family, I was simply destined to be on medication the rest of my life.
I was told that due to my family history, my only hope of avoiding heart disease if I didn’t take the medication for the rest of my life was to take up participating in triathlons. In addition, I was told that laying off burgers and shakes might have a small impact but that it wasn’t going to be a solution and that my having hypertension was just luck of the draw – I simply had bad genes.
I left the doctors office and made a bee line to the pharmacy to pick up my prescriptions. I dutifully took what had been prescribed but I couldn’t help but think there had to be more to it than just bad genes.
It became my goal to take control of my own health and future by digging deeper to try to find out what was causing my high blood pressure as well as my other health issues.
Now, I’m not a health expert – I’ve never enrolled in classes beyond health and nutrition courses in college. I don’t claim to have concrete answers and I certainly won’t claim to be able to diagnose or treat any particular health issues.
My Beliefs
I believe that prescription medications, doctors, hospitals, and the like absolutely have a role in today’s healthcare. I won’t ever live in a completely off-grid, remote location due to this belief. But, I don’t believe your healthcare should start and end at the hospital.
I believe that one can experience improved health by taking a magnifying glass to the things they eat, drink, wear, and breathe, and by looking at what they do and don’t do in regards to movement and exercise. Rather than simply relying on prescription medications to bury what ails me, I choose to dig deeper to see if I can find non-prescription solutions that attack the underlying problem and aide or supplant medications and rely on the healthcare system for anything that I cannot address on my own.
How I Responded
Through a lot of trial and error and a lot of time and effort on my and my family’s part, I was eventually able to come off my prescribed medication. I’d built new exercise habits, changed my food intake, and my blood pressure was in a healthy range. This blog has articles on exactly what I did to change my own life, the tools I used, the books I read, and more.
Health and vitality rightfully belong to you. If you don’t have both, I encourage you to seek to better understand what has caused any ailments you have and to learn what actions you can take to improve your situation. You too may have been told that your lot in life has been decided and that perhaps you have “bad genes”. Take ownership of your health and you too can become healthier and happier.