 Hi everyone, this is Dr. Ruscio. I'm here with Mark who has had some nice results after reading Health and Good Health U and he's here today to share his story with us. So Mark, welcome. Hi, thank you. Tell us a little bit about before Health and Good Health U because I like to give people a synopsis of kind of the road up. What were your symptoms? What had you maybe been tinkering with? What did that all look like? Yeah, sure. And so it started about seven years ago and I was living in Hong Kong and I was going through quite a lot of stress at the time. I ate a really, really bad diet looking back and terrified how bad it used to be. Just as an example, I used to post gym workout down a liter of chocolate milk thinking it's a lot of protein and I'd be fine. Being a skinny guy, it wasn't really a big deal to me. I didn't put weight on so I thought it wasn't doing me any harm but it obviously was. So I think the mixture of stress, terrible diet and maybe living in a region of the world where the quality of water and the level of cleanliness of the water that is fine for people that have grown up around that but as a foreigner coming in, it probably wasn't so good for me. I started to get just discomfort initially and a bit of tightness in the throat and discomfort and over a period of weeks, I thought it'll go soon, it'll go soon and it didn't. It started to get a little bit worse. It started to see my GP, my doctor and they just gave me some basic recommendation saying just wait a little bit longer, maybe try to relax, that kind of stuff. Nothing helped and it got gradually worse. So there was indigestion as well as feeling a pet in the throat? If I ate something such as, I don't know if you have wheat to picks in the US but if you ate like a heavy wheat cereal with lots of milk or something like that maybe for a day or so I get tightness here but the main symptom was just general discomfort and like a gnawing feeling in the stomach and some cramps in the morning or maybe at night and I think that messed with my head a little bit as well. It caused a little bit of confusion and brain fog which caused me problems at work and these are all a bait in the common go right so it's very difficult and frustrating to describe to a doctor sometimes especially when it's the general practitioner usually just thinking he's stressed and he's not been eating very well. So over the next three or four years really I tried loads of different stuff so I started off doing the basic things like just getting off the shelf probiotics and trying to change my diet, eating a little bit more healthily, exercising, meditation. The one thing that did work for about a year and a half maybe two years was following the FODMAP diet and that did initially work but then towards the end of that two years it started to tail off so I started to avoid alcohol and I tried what else did I do? The most extreme thing I tried was FMT under supervision of a gastroenterologist and also didn't work and it was really bad results for me actually is really really horrible experience. There's a good thing I just want to piggyback on really quick because one of the things that some patients will think is that FMT is the best most powerful therapy that can be used for your gut. Understandably so partially because it's pretty invasive the other because it's a new therapy and sometimes we conflate new with better or good and I routinely advise patients to leave FMT because it is a viable option to the very end of the kind of treatment road for the very reasons I describe it. It was a really weird experience for me. I read a lot about it and I thought a lot about it beforehand and I've got an engineering science background so I like to read up on as many papers that are freely available as possible but the experience I had was I felt extremely ill. I tried three to four times and after each one I felt like I just wanted to curl up into a ball and die. It was really really horrible experience but that could have been the donor that I was using and I was recommended to go with my wife as the person I was most in closest proximity to. By that point I then just reverted back to a semi FODMAP diet and just just hoped for the days where I felt healthier and it was common to despair because you're feeling extremely sick and it's quite debilitating. I felt an effect on my mind as well and I had a hard job. I then got a chance with a group of people weirdly in the US in Colorado and they recommended your name and one other that suddenly lost me. If I remember I'll mention it before the video is up but they mentioned your name and I started to listen to one or two of your podcasts and the short podcast sort of quite easily digestible and then I got your book I read it on Kindle and I devoured it in about a week in a bit and it was great because it had loads of the stuff I was familiar with that I read about in different papers and things like that but I just tried them on their own I just tried them piecemeal and yeah it brings some benefits like for example I found doing a 36 hour 72 hour fast helped but then I'd go right back into eating a relatively high carb diet and not doing anything else to follow up on it and just hoping that that would be the one-off fix and whereas putting into a framework really really did work for me but I needed to follow all of it and I went through certain parts of the great innate processing I did them maybe two yeah two times especially the earlier stuff and yeah it was a slow going process for me as well I was hoping I was telling myself when I finished the book I don't know four five months I'll be done and I'll be fixed but it took me a year and I really had to persist and I think if I'd not hit such lows and if I'd not hit rock bottom I wouldn't have had the perseverance to sort of stick with it or ignore all the truth and so I think that's one of my things that I do recommend your book to a lot of people it's one of the things I say is the first step is the the fast and if you're put off by doing a five day fast then you've not hit rock bottom yet because it really has to be that terrible for you to be motivated enough to do it and honestly the fast wasn't anywhere near as fast as I thought it would be the modified fasting really isn't too hard because you do have a source of calories just to clarify for people it's not exclusive fast you do have the option of either bone broth or if you master this kind of solution for two to four days you can go longer if you want let's jump really quick to where you are now are all the symptoms gone and then let's come back to what the road to healthy guy healthy you look like so since finishing um I'd say I wrapped it up fully um september last year and I didn't be my wife I both not wanted to sort of count our chickens really and but it's been fine until maybe about a month ago and it started to come back a little bit so I've now got like a like a lump in my throat kind of sensation um but other than that no gut issues like I'm like they used to be and no brain fogs coming back so to I've been part of my time to sort of start taking more seriously again but um yeah my this lump in my throat is back a little bit but it's not a big deal and so I'm now going back through the so maybe seven years of this indigestion gas and this kind of connected brain fog so seven years and about a year that has now been resolved and you've maintained that other than maybe a slight regression of the lump in the throat which you're now going to start tinkering to address is that a fair encapsulation exactly um that's exactly right and I'm not despairing this time because I feel I've got this structure to work through and the symptoms I have this time are far more mild um and I feel confident that I don't have to go through all the eight steps this time but if I do I will um it's worth it you know um there's there's a path for me to follow which will resolve this and it's not that much for problems to be honest um I think one important thing that that that looking back was being quite making sure that I was being quite honest with myself about about my diet and my relationships with food like I said I'm a skinny guy so I kind of don't worry about what food I eat I didn't used to worry about what food I eat what food I used to eat and but I did I did terribly I did terribly and and I never really took responsibility for that it's one of the maybe the liabilities of being thin is you feel you can get away with a lot more which I actually fell into that that same category but for me it was predominantly neurological um that I would notice it was more food reactive brain fog and took me a little while to also associate I can kind of eat whatever I want and my body composition won't change but I'll feel it more so in my head which to me is one of the most debilitating symptoms so I I feel your pain there but I'm glad you were able to kind of connect those dots as and you'll learn that with a FODMAP like you're saying with going through the initial phase of the healthy good healthy protocol did any other dietary realizations occur any of the dietary realizations I think from doing the recommended fast that you had in the book did did help me exercise more self-control over what food I did and didn't eat um and then after that and following the paleo diet I don't know if this is normal or not but I really felt like once I was properly into the paleo diet I stopped craving food oh yeah that's very commonly reported yeah it's quite strange because I mean even normally now and the past year if someone's eating I know a bit of delicious looking cake and I know it's not got any weight in there I'll maybe have some you know whereas on on the paleo diet when I really stick to it I I didn't really crave anything I can watch people eat a delicious snack in front of me and just pass it's a great feeling isn't it yeah it was it was it's like real control and if you know that the diet is causing the problem in the first place to know that you don't need to do it it helps you get on this virtuous cycle you know and so that was a that was a cool insight around diet um one one thing that didn't work for me diet dietary wise was um I think it's the seventh step I can't remember and increasing the fiber intake and that that didn't have the desired effect for me and and didn't mess with my gut much but the brain fog was really quite intense so I I tried that a few times and then tried to do it in very small amounts but as soon as I got to over a teaspoon a day again it it caused me problems I'm glad you mentioned that because there are you know there are some camps on the internet that um are really all about optimizing dietary fiber intake which is all fine and good you know itself but for some people trying to optimize fiber intake or really maximize I should say fiber intake doesn't go well for their gut and that's where kind of the zooming out and kind of connected to a point you said earlier you have all these different things that you've read about but healthy good health you finally put them into an organized structure to help you see well I did this that helped I did this that helps I went to the higher fiber that didn't help I isolated that variable I tried it a few times now I clearly can see that higher fiber intake doesn't work for me and I think part of the thing that makes it so hard for people to finally feel also like you said like they're a little bit empowered or not worried about having a mini regression is needing to have learned along that road what works for you and what doesn't work for you and that's that's part of the rationale behind instead of doing it every step kind of all at once and throwing the kitchen sink at you we break it down into steps so you can learn what works for your system and what doesn't work for your system and then you're empowered when you do have a regression to say okay this is what really worked well for me over the past several months I've been feeling better I've kind of been loosening things up but now I know where to go back to in order to feel better anything analogy I use for people who sometimes frame this the wrong way like oh is there something wrong with my gut and I'm always going to have to do this not really I oftentimes parallel a musculoskeletal analogy like if you had a really bad let's say a hamstring in college you may temporarily need to go back to some of your stretches and exercises to rebalance some of that musculature doesn't mean anything is wrong it just means here's something that you need to give a little bit of attention to periodically and then everything's fine yeah that's exactly how it feels the analogy used with having a sprain or an injury like a physical injury on the joint or something it does kind of feel like that like you know it's still maybe there you just need to give it a bit of attention and get it back to normal again okay and I think you did a one more one more insight that I gained through your book from around diets was I've realized if I'd spoken to myself 10 years ago and said hey look you're gonna have to completely change your diet I don't think the old mark couldn't have done it and and I think just through doing it slowly and doing these different things and starting with the fast and then doing these sort of slow increments it definitely changes my relationship to food and real I now realize it's all just a habit so foods that I shouldn't eat like high fiber foods or a lot of food in my diet it's just through habit I now no longer crave them so learning all these little things like avoid too much fiber or more than two copies a day isn't great for my go and that will start to put me on a downward spiral after a while I stopped craving that stuff anyway and it's just I just learn to not crave stuff and it's not pleasant I enjoy my diet just as much as I did 10 years ago I just eat I eat better now that's all yeah it's quite nice to realize yeah if you can learn through the process it's funny how once you make some changes even though they you know you may kind of be dragging your feet at first as you start the changes but then as you have a clear mind less symptoms better energy you start to associate the new foods to the new feelings and it really kind of D programs of cravings that you had prior because you now start to see the association between those foods and feeling poorly and it really does kind of dampen the cravings for those who just as well as when you're physiologically healthier and less inflamed people do seem to crave less which is also another thing that really kind of compounds together so it's almost like as you start getting better you get better and better and better because the cravings abate the cravings stop you from flaring those flareings stop you from having these satiation problems where one of the analogies or examples I've used is sometimes when people are tired or they have brain fog they think they should eat to improve their energy and improve their mental clarity whereas that's probably because they're inflamed the inflammation is causing those symptoms and there's some weird reflexive mechanism in the body where we sometimes want to try to eat our way out of a problem and that can even make the problem worse so I'm glad that you've kind of those thoughts it's kind of like you know teaching you to fish rather than giving you a fish um what else with other aspects um probiotics antimicrobials omicrobial anything else there they really seem to help you it's the fast that the paleo and then following the the regimen so I went through all the stages right so it's a while ago now coming to a year but I guess it was the um the extracts and the the the herbal supplements yep the herb alliance microbials yeah so I followed all that um and that wasn't always easy but because it was cyclical and you moved into different things after a few weeks it was fine it was fine I went through that stuff twice um I don't think I'll learn anything from those specifically um but I am glad I did I took that route as opposed to what I tried in in previous years which was searching online for a regimen of antibiotics mega doses and going to a general practitioner and saying I'd like to do this please and that was hard so that it was a little bit more of a softly softly approach over a longer period and I I preferred that and I guess maybe yeah maybe one thing other thing I learned was that because there's so many stages because I knew it was going to take a while to start to view my stomach as something that will take time to heal and it will take time to improve and it's a slow deliberate process I'm going through as opposed to looking for quick fixes no question there for you um did you notice I'm hoping you noticed that even though it's relatively slow meaning if we're looking at um taking an Advil sure you'll feel better in 20 minutes um and this was a number of months in your case but I'm assuming that every month there was a degree of improvement so that even though it was a longer road you felt like you were seeing some improvement along the way helping to keep you engaged in motivated is that fair or was your road a little different I felt yeah it's a really good question I felt I made gradual improvements and through the early the early stages especially the first four or five stages especially um but I felt that it all started to really come together towards the end and all I can really put my finger on is that I started to put bring in more obvious um more obvious steps to just basic self-discipline like not eating at 10 p.m before I go to bed um being a little bit more disciplined with uh taking digestive and times after a meal right um those kind of things I think helped compound it and I think in the background I guess my gut health was improving anyway and maybe like you said when things are getting better you become you become more on top of your game anyway and then it's a virtuous cycle so so I felt it was very much like an exponential kind of increased improvement and I just had to and I didn't really move to the next step until I felt I'd made a noticeable improvement even if it's just five 10 improvement otherwise I did it again and carry on well that's good to hear because you know there's different trajectories some people improve a lot out of the gate and then it's a slower road to the rest of the way they probably have the easier road but then there are some that's a little bit of a slower bill the next financial at the end and it's important just to identify these patterns so that people don't feel like what's happening to them is abnormal right and I was actually more like yourself where after I resolved the parasitic issue that I had it was kind of slow slow and then I looked back to my life a few months prior and said wow there was no way I could have been in classes all day come home went to the gym come home and and studied I would have needed at least two naps during the day prior and I didn't realize it until three months later or so I was doing all that stuff with no nap and just great energy all the way through so good to identify these patterns to help people feel like they they fit into some sort of camp to help them keep on the plan yeah I see that's interesting well mark is there is there anything else you want to share people this has been great I'm super appreciative of this because people really do benefit from these we get such great feedback on the sharing of these stories is there anything else you want to leave people with and I wanted to say thank you to you for putting the time to get through that book it really did help like um it my quality of life and my mental health was really terrible going through periods of that so thank you very much and thank you to your wider team as well and your your team on the forums were super helpful and the content you have was fantastic so thank you awesome yeah you're welcome I mean these exact stories are really the wind in our sails keep us motivated because I've been in your position I know how awful I felt and how I would have done anything not to feel that brain fog and the fatigue and everything else you know what a gift to feel well we take it for granted sometimes that you know I'm just walking down the street and I have normal energy and normal cognition as opposed to oh I feel bloated or painful or foggy like I'm disengaged or goofy when you don't have that you realize how much we take it for granted how much of a gift health really is so it really makes it worth it so really you're feeling better thank you for the compliment and thank you again for sharing your story thank you