09/05/2017
TESTIMONIAL - DAN
My story is a simple one. I live to improve myself and become the best version of me I can. I am a certified Personal Trainer and I make my living helping others improve mobility, functionality, structural integrity and joint health for a better quality of life.
The physical is easy, but for me the struggle has always been mental. Since my early 20's and for the past several decades, I have endured the symptoms of PTSD. Low self esteem and anxiety disorder are common set backs of the disorder. People with PTSD tend to carry guilt and live with a degree of psychological fear on a daily basis.
For the most part I function well enough, but during times of higher than usual stress, I can decline quickly. To compensate for stress and low self image, I have always turned to food. I have lived through much of my life addicted to eating, in particular, sugary foods. I have been overweight and highly stressed as a result, for decades.
Imagine being a trainer, training to maximise performance and an eater, eating to push away feelings of inadequacy. Lol. The outcome is less than desirable! I would push to achieve, eat to relax, stress from knowing that I needed to improve my eating habits and lose 20lbs, which meant eating stressed. Then I would train harder to compensate, stress more and eat more to hide from the problem. Lol. Sounds familiar I'm guessing.
It all came to ahead in late March of this year. After a winter of vigorous training, over working and unhealthy eating, the toil to my mind and body caught me off guard. I pushed myself to a point of having worse anxiety symptoms than I had experienced ever.
My stress was through the roof, my blood pressure was high and I needed medication to get through the day for the first time in my life. My chest would tense, my heart rate would soar and I spent a solid month trying to calm down enough so I could breathe easier. I became majorly depressed and quickly lost sight of purpose.
I couldn't leave the house and I was begging the emergency room doctors for anything that would help me sleep. The meds I was on helped marginally and I was able to sleep for short periods of time, about 90 minutes. They only exasperated my symptoms though and it was clearly far from a viable solution. My doctor prescribed Lorazepam to calm me when I was peeked in anxiety. I spent my day trying to avoid needing the drug and regaining self control, often failing and medicating just to restart the cycle.
I had to quit work, I stopped training and I couldn't leave the house except for ER visits. My doctor issued me with a prescription for antidepressants and booked me an appointment with the cardiology department to be fitted with a heart monitor harness to record cardiac output.
Holy s**t, my life was fun!!!
Wife/Health Coach to the rescue! Julia suggested that I start her 90 Day Program to change my eating habits. I don't read self help books normally, but had nowhere else to be and couldn't earn money to leave home so I reluctantly relented. I was desperate, and needed relief in the worse way, which made arguing seem more pointless than normal, so I started the program.
What do you know, I immediately saw changes. Lol. I hate to admit Julia was right, but the changes were so immediate, I had no choice but to give credit.
So you don't grow weary reading this. The first exercise we did made a small, but obvious change in my stress level. I was far from better, but I could clearly see that continuing the program was in my best interest. Over the next month I de-stressed a little each day and improved my mood marginally. I continued to feel like crap, lose sleep, wake up at night with a racing heart, wish I was dead, etc, but unarguable I was seeing change. I could see light at the end of a long tunnel.
At the end of the first month I was able to train for short periods and was doing shoulder stands on the back of our couch. Shoulder stands are complex movements that raise heart rate, so no small feat for a highly stressed person. I had lost 25lbs at this point and I looked terrible, but life was looking up. Another visit to my doctor showed improvements in my blood pressure so she agreed to wait another month to see how much I improved before reconsidering antidepressants.
The next month was hard, my new eating habits, healthy choices, no table sugar, left me unsatisfied and depressed, but I was finding much improved joy in the actual eating process. I was becoming less stressed while eating and eating cleaner that I have in my life. My next visit to the doctor revealed that my diastolic pressure was 68. Not bad considering that my last athletic assessment, 5 months earlier, it was 86. She couldn't have been happier.
After 2 months I decided to work from home and began rebooking clients. Change didn't come easy and for the first few weeks I cancelled almost every session on the day. I tore out my old gym floor and began building a new home gym. The process was so stressful, I could barely breathe and my heart rate soared the entire time. Still wasn't having much fun...
In mid June I took a trip up the Alaska Highway to visit my dad. I was able to drive the 16 hours to Teslin, Yukon before giving in to a very restless sleep. I woke up having an anxiety attack and had to spend an hour in an all night diner calming myself. I drove past my dad's home later that morning and straight to a gym. I had another panic attack whilst training, but managed to finish an hour.
I continued to eat clean and cut most meat from my diet. I ate mostly eggs and chicken and lots of fruit and veg. I went into a crossfit gym while in Whitehorse to train and weighted myself after. I was down to 175lbs from over 200lbs before Christmas. I had lost muscle and looked thin, but I was feeling a lot better. The long drive home after 10 days was much easier.
The first of July, Julia and I decided to try eating a strict plant based diet. A bit difficult at first, but the immense benefits soon began to kick in. My goal here isn't to convert to strict plant based eating, but it was a choice that I made and the benefits were plenty.
My training times improved. I had more energy and recovered in less time that ever. By mid August I was back to training 3 hour sessions, I had gained strength and 5lbs of muscle. Pretty awesome at 50! BTW, don't listen to anyone who tries to tell you that plant based eating will lead to protein deficiency. All protein comes from plants and 2/3 of a cup of pumpkin seeds contains the same amount of complete protein as a chicken breast. Magnesium deficiency is a much broader problem, affecting almost half the population. That mineral mostly comes from plants and is responsible for over 800 chemical reactions in the body.
We recently went clothes shopping for a wedding in September and I was shocked to find that my trouser size had returned to 30ins, the same that it had been in High School, 4ins smaller than it had been most of my adult life. My wife bought a dress only to realise that she had gone from a medium to an extra small, she has never been an extra small!
I am continuing the journey making new plans for my future health and training and looking forward to even more amazing new discoveries. I will speak to anyone who contacts me with questions, absolutely free of charge, regarding any program Julia is offering. My phone number is 1780 831 4588 and my email address is: [email protected].
Good luck in your discovery of a new you,
Cheers,
Danny
