 Our next caller is Kelly from Mississippi. Hi Kelly. How can we help you? Hi. Thanks so much for talking to me today. I'm super excited to get your take on my question. Okay. So once upon a time, I was a gym rat, qualified gym rats that all the time in the gym really loved cardio, which I know you guys love. I was a Zumba instructor, half marathon runner, Tabata hit, you name it. And then really got into strength training, realized the benefit of strength training tracked away from so much cardio. Also formerly had a pretty terrible eating disorder. And I think I actually moved into more of like ortho-xia. And so that went on, really started to pay more attention to nutrition until I got really sick and was sick for about two and a half years with an undiagnosed medical condition. But then very recently as of eight months ago was diagnosed, I'm now a medication, it's controlled. But I am basically starting from scratch. And I know I've read your book, South loved it, is a lot of really fantastic advice. I needed to hear a lot of it. But I'm basically starting from scratch. And as much as I hate that, I'm really looking at this as a clean slate to do nutrition right to do rest right. I'm now back in the gym, exercising with a little bit more weight, trying to build some strength and build that muscle back. But I would really love all of your opinions on what is the what if you had somebody that it was like clean slate, they have muscle memory, they know their way around the gym. What would be your best advice for somebody who wants to really tackle this with a lot of smart technique to really make sure that they're getting as strong as they can for life. Okay, Kelly, you're amazing, by the way. Yeah, this is great. This is really, really great. And a couple of things before Sal, I'll let you take off. One shout out to Zumba because Justin is a huge Zumba fan. And then Sal, if you could break down what orthorexia is before you get into your rant, and then I'll let you take it from there. Yeah, so orthorexia is where you're just you're really obsessed about eating clean or healthy. So it's a bad relationship with food, but the driver is I want to eat perfect. I want to eat perfectly healthy. It can cause people a lot of stress. It could very common in bodybuilding, right? It is. And it can take away from your relationships with other people. It can make your essentially what you eat takes over your life in many respects. Okay, so I want to I want to help you, but I think I could best help you if I know what the condition is that you've been diagnosed with. Now, if you don't want to say, okay, go ahead, tell us what it is. And yeah, so I have something called mast cell activation syndrome, and it caused a spontaneous CSF leak. Okay, okay. So can you go into a little more detail with that? I'm assuming that that affects your central nervous system and causes your okay. Yeah, so a CSF leak is when you tear a hole in the dura around your spinal cord. So your spinal fluid leaks out into the body and it causes your brain to sink down on top of the spinal cord causes a really horrible headache. It's really hard to diagnose them. The mast cell activation syndrome is your immune system attacking your connective tissue. So similar to an autoimmune condition, but not an autoimmune condition. Okay, this is okay, that that really helps a lot. Okay, so with in my experience, okay, now of course, I want to disclaimer, I'm not a doctor. Sure. In my experience, I've trained a lot of people with autoimmune issues that affect the body. And in all of those situations, what you don't want to do is train the body harder or longer than you need to because that tends to trigger autoimmune reactions. So if I'm training someone who, you know, they get really inflamed, for example, I would notice like their inflammation would kick up. So let's say the average person I train a little too hard, either just sore for a little longer, not a big deal with somebody who has an overactive immune system, that can turn into weeks or months of getting back to recovery. So my number one piece of advice to you is go really slow. Now, this may be hard for someone like you with your background, right, because you're used to, you're used to working out hard, you have a bit of a skewed perception of intensity, you know, you know, I can go low. So I'm going to say, I love starter for always, yeah, always err on the side of going easy. And I would like you to treat your exercise like practice, don't ever treat it like a workout. So when you go to the gym, forget that you're training your quads, or your hamstrings, or your shoulders, think to yourself instead, I'm going to get really good at shoulder presses, I'm going to get really good at lean into the technique of all these that's it just just just treat them like skills 100% go to the moderate to low intensity, and just get better at the skills that will give you that'll give you way more dividends than going to work your body out like you're going to do a workout. Adam said map starter, I agree. I think map starter is a great way to get going. And again, I can't stress this enough, err on the side of less. Okay, it's better. Okay. It's better that you progress slower because you're doing too little than doing too much and knocking yourself into a case where now you have to stay at home and sit in bed for the next couple months because you've caused the flare up so really go easy, really go slow. And just remember that too much intensity or working out too hard or too long, it's not just going to be like, oh, I need to take next week off or go easier. It could turn into months of being into a flare up and be and be competitive with yourself with the technique. Like, I mean, watch, watch the model in the videos and the goal should be, can I can I make the form look even better, more controlled and better. And so you can still have this kind of athletic competitive mindset, but just switch it from, you know, sweating and burning and trying to hurt and put pain on yourself to more like, can I can I make this look better than the model performing the exercise and be competitive with yourself and that slowing the repetition down and being very meticulous to how you move the weights and the position of your body as you do the exercises. So and that's why I like starter starter has got stability ball stuff on there, there's a lot of stability exercises. So there's a lot of things that are going to just challenge your balance and form and technique really air on that side. And even as you progress and move out of starter and maybe into another program like anna ball, do not leave that mindset. I just this is actually how I train my clients for most of my clients for most of my career is, you know, lay that solid foundation of just getting perfect at all the movements be more focused on that than adding weight to the bar or repetitions. Okay, I like that. I like that. I actually heard you say that about practice on a previous episode. And I really appreciated that it's not something that I had ever really thought of as a person who I've always really respected weight and really respected technique and form and I've always strived for that. But the thought of really approaching that as practice had never occurred to me. And so even this morning when I went to the gym, I thought, okay, we're just practicing shoulder presses. We're just practicing that. And it really did change the workout. I just I love that advice so much. So I'll gear my competitive nature towards myself at just getting really, really good at practicing all of the techniques. Yeah, because you know, the key is is going to be to control that inflammatory response. And you need some of an inflammatory response. That's part of how the body adapts. But in your case, the inflammatory response can trigger, you know, a remission that can get you to the point where you're like, oh, it starts to kind of get out of control. The other things I would look into are eating in ways to reduce the inflammatory response sleep is probably going to be really important. Yes. And then in this again, I'm not a doctor. So I'm just going to encourage you to look this up for yourself. But I would look into cannabinoids and how that may help with your body's inflammatory response and your immune response, but also talk to your doctor. I'm assuming you're on immune suppressing drugs. So talk to your doctor before you try anything to to help yourself out. Okay, great, great. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. No problem. And by the way, we're going to send you map starter if you don't already have it. Oh, I don't. Thank you so much. I actually was looking at the programs that you listed in the book now and was thinking, you know, would this be something I should do? Or so that that's great. Thank you so much. Yeah, you actually the programs in the books will do will do you just fine as well. But map starter also, but you go and start with map starter. Since there's videos that okay. Okay. Okay. That's great. Thank you so much. No problem. Awesome. Why do I why do I love her so much? Is it the act is a great mentality? Is that what it is? I can't tell if it's the accent or or maybe a great attitude. No, she does. I mean, you could tell that she's done her homework, you know, saying, and you could tell she's got a great attitude towards health and fitness like really, really cool and talk about very unfortunate situation to be in. I don't think I've trained a client with that that condition. Not that. That's super rare. Yeah, super. I've trained lots of people with issues that flare up when the intensity gets too high, you know, fibromyalgia, you know, being one of the multiple sclerosis. Another one. You know, it's like you have it's like exercise can be the best medicine resistance training in particular can be the best medicine, but like any medicine, it's all about the dose. Yes, too much becomes poison, literally. So you have to err on the side of less and just allow that medicine to do its job. And it's hard, right? Especially when you're someone like her, who you know, what she did before, you want to, you're like, oh, change what it, you know, the definition of working out. Totally.