My story begins when I was 2-1/2 years old when suddenly I developed significant allergy symptoms after moving to a new home in a new area. Allergies, it would seem, to virtually everything around me. It was not so severe that I had to live in a virtual bubble, but it would end up affecting me in a very detrimental way. The allergies were based on many of the most common foods, in addition to numerous environmental allergens. The result was that I did not act as a typical young boy, full of energy, fully aware of my surroundings, loving life. It was quite the opposite. I would spend most of my days lethargic, no energy to even want to do much anything, which also caused me to be very introverted and keeping to myself all of the time.
This was the case until I was about 6 or 7 years of age. Although my symptoms did not change, something else did. In an effort to make me better, my parents took me to doctors as best they could to attempt to determine what was happening and how to make me “better”. In typical medical fashion, which does not take one entire body, nutrition and lifestyle into account, I began being injected with huge amounts of allergens directly into my bloodstream, thinking that this would prompt a response from my body to become less sensitive.
I recall vividly to this day how every Thursday afternoon I would sit in a crowded waiting room, sometimes for 3 hours, to get a shot in each arm and leave. What was the result? Well, I can tell you it was nothing positive. I never got any better. I just felt more miserable because of these weekly visits which felt very similar to sitting in an emergency room for hours waiting to be called.
Throughout this time, the best way I can describe myself then was “sleepwalking”. Simply sleepwalking through life, never truly living it. This way of life continued on until a very fateful day in late September of my 14th year. Little did I know when I woke up that morning, that my life was about to change forever.
I loved virtually all sports as a child and was considered fairly athletic. I did not have it in me to work out as hard as most typical kids, but I did what I could. In preparation for high school, I decided to do something I had always wanted to do: Go out for one of the school sports teams. My choice was soccer.
We began practice just before the official beginning of the school year. This was really, really tough for me – more so than I expected. Between the practices themselves, and the physical and mental exhaustion for me personally (mental because of how introverted I had become) I was not keeping up my energy levels. My sleep began to immediately suffer, my appetite went down, and I was having a really hard time keeping up, particularly with the running sessions.
One day, after 3 weeks of practices on the freshman soccer team. Something happened which, at the time, I did not realize would change my life as it did. I began bleeding. Internally. A LOT.
To the horror of my mother, we proceeded to the hospitals and doctors – finally to receive the diagnosis of Ulcerative Colitis (UC). I can understand it now, but no doctor has ever, not even to this very day as I write this, told me what could have caused this. And I realized later how virtually everything they told me was incorrect.
You see, my allergies indicated a weakness, a lack of proper function, of my immune system. Something was not right, but with the medical mindset we have here, the root cause, and appropriate correction, was never addressed. Never even searched for! So I was living my childhood with a weak immune system that was only waiting for something else to hit it hard - to “make something break”. That “hit”, if you will, was the emotional stress, physical stress and lack of sleep that I experienced from my soccer practices. The straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back.
The following 7 years were an absolute mess. I was immediately placed on massive amounts of catabolic steroids (Prednisone, and others), plus antibiotics and a host of other pharmaceuticals that only gave me side effects and only further weakened my immune system – the opposite of what my body needed! I developed severe sleep problems and became addicted to prescription sleeping pills for over 15 years. These pills then had dozens of their own side effects, that made other aspects of my life fall apart. I couldn’t think. My muscles, bones and joints were all deteriorating, I wasn’t sleeping properly, wasn’t able to wake up, not able to think in school, and became very depressed.
I didn’t give up, though. It is at 14 years of age, as I watched my muscles and joints deteriorate before my eyes, that I began weight lifting in an attempt to counteract the effects of all of these drugs, particularly the various forms of steroids. Unfortunately, they were just too powerful. Added to that, as much as my mother tried to ensure that we ate well (I was taking supplements and drinking vegetable juices before all of that was ‘en vogue’, and even ate comfrey leaves several times a day (growing them in our garden)), it was not enough. There was more to it than that, but we did not know about it at the time.
Another fateful time that changed my life even more significantly occurred when I was 20 years old and in college. I had wanted to pursue a medical career, but due to the effects of my UC condition, coupled with the drug side effects in not being able to function and think properly, I decided to take a shorter route (in my mind, at the time) and went to pursue my B.S. in Electrical Engineering. At least that was “only 4 years”, or so I thought.
Matters only became worse. The situation became critical and the decision by my doctor was that I need to have surgery. Surgery? To do what? You may have guessed it – I had everything removed,..and then some.
The surgery was experimental at the time, with virtually no data on how long people could even survive from such a procedure, aside from the quality of life (or lack of) that comes with it. This would actually take 2 separate operations, 4 months apart, to complete. Again, or so I thought.
I was told that the biopsy after the first procedure indicated that I had a pre-malignancy already forming and it was “good that I had all of this removed”. I found out many years later that this may not have been true.
While waiting for the time when my body was ready for the second procedure, I developed an infection and was rushed to the emergency room in the middle of the night. I was told later that if I had come to the ER just 2 hours later, I would have been dead.
3 months later, expecting that all was behind me, I developed adhesions and was told, yet again, had I not come to the ER at the moment I did, I would have been dead by morning.
Okay, so at least all of this is behind me and I can move forward healthier, happier, and ‘normal’, right? Not so fast,. Vic…
The next 15 years brought even more surgery, sickness, drugs, bleeding, cyclic weight gain and weight loss, depression, near-death experiences & addiction. I would be lying if I told you that I never thought of what it would be like to just no longer have to live and stop dealing with all of this. Yet, something (actually it was God, I later found) kept telling me to go on – there is more to it than what I realize. (Oh, and yes, I did finally receive by BS in Engineering, but only after taking 5 semesters off at various times, over what resulted in being the 6 years of my studies.)
Fast forward to today. You see, throughout all of these experiences, I have learned a tremendous amount, from the very best professionals and lay-people alike, about health, nutrition, fitness, muscle, mindset, recuperation, etc. I have failed at many. I have succeeded in many. And I have taken all of my learnings, from both success and failure, to the knowledge and experience base I have with me today.
My life today is beyond anything I could have dreamed because I have learned, by first hand experience, the very basics of what is most important to our physical lives. My energy, strength, clarity of mind, self-confidence, internal feeling of calm, and countless other things are more than I could have ever dreamed or imagined! I am here, offering my services to others, so that I can be there for you what I hoped and prayed I would have had available to me.
I have energy to spare, virtually never even get so much as a cold (let alone anything else), my clarity of thinking and ability to understand is nothing short of a miracle when compared to my ‘previous life’. I work out with such fervor and pleasure that it seems to bring me to new heights every day. My sense of well-being and happiness is more than I could have every hoped for.
It all started with just a couple of ‘superfoods’ I decided to incorporate into my diet, which led to more and more changes (detoxification, food choices, exercise, physical alignment and more) that resulting in amazing long-lasting, achievable lifestyle results that will remain as simply the way I live this life. I had mentioned that I start lifting weights when I was 14, without success. Today, after both learning about numerous aspects of health and continually studying the newest information in exercise science (and particularly when it comes to resistance training), I continue to make gains that I never thought possible...at 45 years of age!
I am not a doctor and will never claim to be. I simply consider myself: a provider of information – a mentor – a guide – a cheerleader - and a facilitator. Not only based on what I know, learned and experienced, but also based on the fact that I continue to spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each and every year advancing my understanding and knowledge of what is available, from as many valid sources as possible.
You see, I do that work for you.
In this age of great scientific advances, there is continually new information that becomes available, as well as supporting foods and products that we are only now beginning to realize their importance to our health, vitality and happiness. (Unfortunately, and conversely, there is even more mis-information being propagated, which I work to remove from becoming distracting, misleading or confusing to you.) I continue with this each and every day, to add to my 3 decades of exercise and nutrition real-world study, physical trials and experiments, and my ultimate, ongoing success and growth.
My fight, my struggles and my success is here to be your success, too, only measured in weeks, rather than decades. My goal is to transform – I mean truly, decisively transform - the lives of as many people as I can. My experiences over the past 30 years have taught me not just about one or two ailments; instead, they served to teach me the very fundamentals so essential to our bodies, our health and our minds. Fundamentals that are truly transformative in a life beyond what we could typically imagine.
This is where my story ends. And yours begins...