When people decide to take on the formidable task of climbing Mount Everest, they’re often assigned a personal sherpa to guide them on their journey. It’s common for climbers to experience symptoms of altitude sickness as they trek their way up the mountain. These symptoms begin as subtle annoyances, such as heavy breathing and body aches, until they manifest into serious problems like frostbite and then death. Without a sherpa to guide them, these climbers would likely wind up in the danger zone. Once they’re in the danger zone, things get tricky: Most climbers find themselves hopeless and stuck, eventually dying from the severe conditions.
Having been in the health and wellness space since 2008, I’ve seen many people who are in the metabolic health danger zone . . . and they have no idea. Symptoms are the first signs of trouble, but most people reach for medications or fad diets to cover them up while continuing to step closer to the danger zone.
My goal with this book is to be your sherpa on the journey to health and metabolic freedom. I’ve created the exact game plan you need to pull yourself out of the danger zone and into the thrive zone.
When your metabolism falls apart, every aspect of your life comes crashing down. I know—I’ve been there. For most of my childhood and early adulthood, I struggled with a broken metabolism. At age 24, when many people are starting their careers or building a family, I was struggling to find the energy to complete simple tasks. The 80 pounds of extra weight I was carrying due to a broken metabolism caused knee pain, lower back pain, autoimmune disease, prediabetes, depression, chronic fatigue, and inflammation. My family physician warned me that my blood sugar kept creeping up within the prediabetes range, and my blood pressure had increased. When I asked him for advice, he simply said, “You need to lose some extra weight. Just eat less and move more.” I tried this approach, as many do, only to find myself in worse shape.
I remember having several doctors’ appointments during which I was told that most of my bloodwork was “normal,” yet I felt anything but. The doctors thought I was crazy, but I knew something was interfering with my body. Conversation after conversation only led to more frustration—several prescriptions to aid my symptoms were suggested, but there was not one discussion about the root cause of why I felt and looked inflamed. Like millions of other people, I left each doctor’s appointment feeling more discouraged than ever before. I was so hopeless that I began to entertain suicidal thoughts. The only thing that prevented me from taking my life was my mother. Every time I entertained a suicidal thought, I thought about the pain and suffering she would endure.
In the depths of darkness, I also knew deep down that there had to be a way to overcome the uncomfortable symptoms and inflammation I was experiencing. I discovered that there’s a blessing in hitting rock bottom: You can use it as a springboard to discover how magnificent your human body is. You can take all your pain and turn it into purpose.
I was desperate for answers, so I began reading books. I started with books from Dr. Wayne Dyer, who helped me break out of a victim mindset. At the time I was blaming my enabling family members, bad genes, and slow metabolism for my health issues. Dr. Dyer taught me how to take ownership and responsibility for the first time in my life. He said, “Responsibility is your ability to respond to life.” Up until that point my ability to respond to life was poor, and then I heard Dr. Dyer say, “If other people are the cause of your problems, you’d have to hire a psychiatrist for the rest of the world, in order for you to get better.” After taking responsibility, I immediately stopped being the victim of my history and instead became the victor of my destiny.
I made small changes to the food I was fueling my body with, then began to move my body. I had the mindset of one tweak a week. I started digging into research articles and books on metabolism, and I discovered that not all foods are created equal. There are foods that support a healthy metabolism and foods that destroy it. I had been eating foods that were marketed as healthy, but they were actually destroying my body at the cellular level. These were popular health foods, such as whole grains, oatmeal, cereal, canola oil, and many others. These foods were given a stamp of approval by the FDA, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s MyPlate guidelines, and other organizations like the American Diabetes Association and American Heart Association.
After switching to metabolism-supporting foods, such as eggs, meat, butter, and non-starchy vegetables, within just a few days, I felt the shift in my body that I’d been desiring: more mental clarity, fewer suicidal thoughts, and less inflammation; and the weight began to peel off like a snake shedding its excess skin. I knew that if I was going to get well and achieve metabolic health, I needed to find a more unconventional path. I didn’t want to rely on medication or extreme diets to mask symptoms. I was determined to find a path that would heal my metabolism for good. This led me to the greatest health tool we have: ancient healing strategies.
When I began to study these principles that have stood the test of time, I knew I was on to something really profound. As Dr. Dyer said, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” I looked at metabolic health through a different lens, and this moment changed the trajectory of my life in an instant.
Once I discovered the secrets to a healthy, flexible metabolism, I was able to shed over 80 pounds of excess fat—and keep it off for good. I went from 34 percent body fat to 6 percent body fat, from a size 38 waist to a size 30. My energy levels skyrocketed, and the chronic fatigue and pain disappeared. Having a physical six-pack can be great, but more important, I achieved a mental six-pack. Gone were the days of calorie counting, hopelessness, and yo-yo dieting. I achieved something we all desire: true metabolic health.
I’ve been metabolically healthy and lean ever since I incorporated these ancient healing practices into my life. How was my body able to respond so well to these changes? Am I an outlier? No. What I discovered is that the human body is built to be self-healing.
Inside your body you have the world’s greatest physician: innate intelligence. For years I had been blocking my innate intelligence by eating the wrong foods. Once I removed the interference, my body went to work to heal itself. Out of this process, I cracked the metabolic code to health. It doesn’t matter what your age is or how many symptoms you are experiencing right now; when you have the combination to the code, you can unlock it.
I became fascinated by the lack of education most people receive about how their metabolism works. I studied and tested the most popular diets and methods for weight loss and have spent the last 17 years working with the most difficult health cases, helping those patients discover which foods support a healthy metabolism and which foods wreck it.
Since 2008, I have taught these metabolic secrets to millions of people across the world. Every single function inside your body is dependent on metabolism, which comes from the Greek metabole, meaning to change or transform. Your metabolism takes different substances, such as protein, carbohydrates, fats, body fat, sunshine, and oxygen, and transforms them into energy. When this happens the way your body intended, your metabolism produces energy, buffers oxidative stress (what leads to cell damage), and burns excess fat.
There’s never been a more important time to become metabolically healthy. Decade after decade, chronic conditions like cancer, diabetes, autoimmunity, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s, hormone imbalance, mental illness, and even chronic fatigue and pain have risen to levels we’ve never seen before. Many people feel overwhelmed and disheartened by the traditional way of treating these conditions, which usually involves a cookie-cutter approach that masks the symptoms but rarely gets to the cause.
As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported, in 2017–2018 the prevalence of obesity among U.S. adults was a whopping 42.4 percent.1 Another 32.5 percent of American adults were overweight.2 Things have not improved since these results were recorded. Today, in all, more than two-thirds of adults in the United States are overweight or obese. Why does this matter? Because excess weight impacts health. Conditions directly related to obesity include type 2 diabetes, stroke, heart disease, and certain types of cancer. These chronic “lifestyle diseases” are some of the leading causes of premature, preventable death.
The rise in obesity and diabetes is no accident. There’s a clear cause: We’re eating more processed food than ever before in human history. Obesity rates in the United States in the 1930s were almost nonexistent at less than 1 percent. Now Harvard is predicting that by the year 2030, 50 percent of the U.S. population will be classified as obese.3
In 2018, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill published a study showing that only 1 in 8 Americans are metabolically healthy, which equates to only 12 percent!4 In addition, in 2022 the Journal of the American College of Cardiology published a study revealing that 93 percent of American adults are metabolically unhealthy. In other words, only 7 percent of people would be classified as metabolically healthy.5
How many people in the United States live a healthy lifestyle? The Mayo Clinic set out to ask this question back in 2016, and they determined that individuals living a healthy lifestyle abided by four key metrics:
It turns out that only 2.7 percent of Americans fit this criteria of a healthy lifestyle.6
We are failing at biological life. One in four women are infertile, as are one in three males. As a species, we are literally losing the ability to procreate. Other species that have had this problem ultimately became extinct.
We also aren’t living as long as we should. After centuries of steadily increasing lifespans, life expectancy in the United States declined from 78.9 years in 2014 to 78.7 years in 2015, and then down to 78.6 years in 2017.7 We lag behind other comparable high-income nations, where they average a lifespan of 82.3 years. In the United States alone, 50 percent of the population is suffering from a chronic illness.8 The United States ranks 34th in life expectancy at birth,9 which means many developing nations are doing better than we are.
According to the CDC, one out of three women and one out of two men are diagnosed with cancer during their lifetime.10 That’s a huge number! What’s causing this incredible increase?
It’s estimated that 60 percent of Americans are prediabetic or diabetic. Sixty-eight percent of these diabetics end up with heart disease, 16 percent will have a stroke, and 70 percent will have diabetic neuropathy, where their nerves are degenerating.11 I saw this happen with my dad.12
My dad followed the Standard American Diet (SAD), and as a result he developed type 2 diabetes. I didn’t understand the disease, and I blindly followed the instructions his doctors gave him, which were only based on Western medicine principles.
I remember driving my dad to his doctors’ appointments and picking up his insulin and medications for reducing his blood sugar. Every Tuesday, I also took him to the grocery store to purchase the foods recommended by his doctor. At this time, I didn’t understand how to read ingredient labels, so I followed the instructions and purchased zero-calorie sodas, whole-grain cereal and cereal bars, instant oatmeal, and many other fake healthy foods for my father. Little did I know that these foods were loaded with artificial ingredients, such as aspartame, sucralose, red dyes, and many others, causing his diabetes to become worse. I then proceeded to fill up his seven-day pillbox for the week.
Year after year, my father’s health declined. He gained weight, and the dosage of his medications increased. One day he called me because he was having terrible diabetic neuropathy in his feet, and he was having a hard time walking. My mother and I picked him up and took him to the emergency room. Neuropathy occurs when there’s a lack of blood flow to the extremities caused by elevated sugar in the bloodstream. This can be a serious issue because it leads to infection, which could spread to the rest of the body and cause death. To prevent this from happening, doctors often amputate the feet to save the rest of the body. Every 24 hours, 238 amputations take place in the United States in people with diabetes.13 My father knew an amputation might be in his future.
After being admitted to the emergency room, he experienced high stress thinking about the possibility of losing his feet, and he suffered a massive stroke, which left the entire right side of his body paralyzed. He also lost the ability to speak. The craziest part of this story is that the doctors and nurses didn’t know he was having a stroke. I remember walking into the hospital room to check on him, and he wasn’t speaking to me. He was just looking at me with such hopeless eyes. I said, “Dad, are you okay? Why aren’t you speaking to me?” I knew something was terribly wrong, so I tracked down his doctor and nurses. After several tests, they determined he had suffered a stroke, but it was too late. The damage had been done.
After the stroke, they transferred my dad to hospice care. Week after week, I witnessed his body shrink before my eyes. Nine months into this extremely challenging time, I went to see him one evening. My father was in the worst shape I had ever seen. When I walked into the room, he was convulsing and throwing up on himself. I immediately flagged down the nurses to help. They cleaned him up, and he looked better. Before I left, I walked up to him and looked him square in the eyes. His eyes were hopeless. I told him how much I loved him. I shared that he would always be my father, and I would always be his son. I kissed him on the forehead and whispered the words, “Hasta la vista, baby.” One of our favorite movies was The Terminator, and he always quoted that line to me when he said good-bye.
I drove home that night, sobbing the entire time. I remember arriving home and uttering the same prayer I had been saying for weeks, which was to please end my father’s suffering. It had been enough, and all I wanted was for him to be at peace. There was something different this time—I felt an energy, a feeling that someone, something, was listening to me. I went to bed, and 12 hours later I received the phone call that my father had passed.
Losing my father raised several questions for me. I wanted to know why he’d had to endure so much pain when we had followed the advice from his doctors. Yet it’s not only my father—far too many people are dealing with sickness. Are we designed for sickness? Why is there such an epidemic of disease?
I took a deep dive into the research, and to my surprise, I discovered that my father’s doctors were only treating his symptoms. His doctors failed to see that there was a cause and an effect, not just a result. I soon realized that the same information I was teaching on stages all over the world—and now in this book—was the same information that could have saved my father’s life. I also knew that I was given that mountain so I could show the world this mountain can be moved. This was my pain-to-purpose message.
Something has to change. We need to recognize that the human body has the innate ability to heal itself and provide these tools for healing. Back in 1858, Dr. Rudolph Virchow, founder of the field of cellular pathology, said all diseases are disturbances at the cellular level. He made the case that to treat any disease, we must first understand the cause, and the cause is always found at the level of the cell. Once you work on removing the cause, and in some cases causes, the disease and symptoms go away by default.
Type 2 diabetes medication will show an improvement in blood sugar levels, but diabetes is getting worse. Conventional medicine treats the symptom (glucose), when the root cause is excessive insulin and cell membrane inflammation. By taking insulin, you make the root cause and the diabetes worse. You can’t superficially treat only the symptoms and expect the disease to get better. This is exactly what happened to my dad . . . and what’s happening to millions of people. The cell receptor sites have become desensitized to the screams of insulin. Therefore, the beta cells need to work harder and “shout” to get the message across. This is like when you first shout at your child to clean their room. They listen at first, but if you keep shouting at them to clean their room for months and years, they eventually become desensitized and start to ignore you. Medication and insulin may regulate the blood sugar levels, but they’ll fail to help you recover your sensitivity.
What is the solution? Ancient healing strategies. A low-carbohydrate, keto lifestyle paired with intermittent fasting (IF) have been proven to help sensitize your cell receptor sites so your pancreas doesn’t have to work so hard.14, 15, 16
After working with tens of thousands of people from different walks of life, it became clear to me that no diet will work if your metabolism has interference. The main reason why so many people fail to get well these days is because they place their focus on the symptom instead of the cause. The book you hold in your hands will help you identify the interference, so you can remove it and allow your body to heal itself.
Many of my clients have tried to speed up their metabolism by using harmful supplements and extreme approaches, only to find themselves in a worse situation. They have discovered my work because what I offer doesn’t rely on willpower; it provides an understanding of how the metabolism works, and simple yet effective steps toward metabolic freedom.
Since 2008, I’ve delivered keynote lectures across the world on the topic of metabolic flexibility—where you flex in and out of fat burning—and I’ve developed online courses with step-by-step videos and guides. I have a popular YouTube channel with over 300,000 subscribers and over 20 million video views from people across the globe.
My social media following has grown to over one million combined followers who are eager to learn this information. I’m in the unique position of having interviewed over 900 of the best doctors, scientists, and researchers in the health industry for my Metabolic Freedom podcast. I’ve taken close to 5,000 people through the protocols you’re going to learn in this book via my online coaching programs. And I’ve personally worked one on one with hundreds of clients who had tried almost everything to get well but were still dealing with mystery illnesses. I’ve been able to teach them how to become health detectives to identify their interferences, remove them, and allow their bodies to heal themselves.
This book is the culmination of my personal and clinical experience, along with my 17-plus years of research. The millions of people who have discovered my work when they were feeling helpless have inspired me to write it. Metabolic Freedom is different from anything you’ve read before because we tie in the science and art of metabolism. I will help you shift from being a sugar burner to a fat burner by gradually decreasing carbohydrates and steadily increasing healthy fats and proteins. This helps alleviate cravings and symptoms, so you will stick with the plan. Once you’ve shifted to fat-burning mode, I’ll pair that with IF, which increases your metabolic efficiency. You will then flex back and forth from fat burning to sugar burning to ensure that your metabolism keeps adapting to change, which is key for results.
In these pages, you’ll find proven strategies for restoring your metabolism that I have used to help tens of thousands of people just like you thrive. This book is divided into two key sections. In the first part, we’ll explore the primary causes of metabolic dysfunction, delving into the factors that disrupt optimal metabolic health. In the second part, I’ll present effective, science-backed solutions to help you restore and revitalize your metabolism. Additionally, you’ll find a comprehensive 30-day plan to put these strategies into action, complete with delicious, fat-burning recipes, and a glossary at the end for easy reference.
As you move through the pages of this book, you will learn:
You’ll realize that there is a path back to perfect health that is unique to you. No matter your stage in life or individual circumstances, this book is designed to help you find your customized path. The best thing about the 30-Day Metabolic Freedom Reset in Chapter 12 is that it’s actually easy to follow.
Metabolic Freedom will inspire you to reconnect with your innate intelligence so this inner physician can go to work for you and allow your body to heal itself. Whether you’re managing high cholesterol, autoimmune disorders, diabetes, or other metabolic conditions, this book provides the precise steps you need to reclaim your health and restore balance to your life.
I’ll be your sherpa, holding your hand gently as you take back control of your health. I’m excited to share in the pages ahead the only solution you’ll ever need to reset your metabolism, balance your hormones, and burn fat. The 30-Day Metabolic Freedom Reset seamlessly integrates with any dietary approach you choose, whether you’re a meat-eater, vegan, or vegetarian. I hope this book changes your life by helping you identify what has been interfering with your metabolism—so you feel better today, and prevent disease tomorrow.
Let’s dive in and uncover how to break free from the cycle of yo-yo dieting, so you can burn fat effectively and feel incredible every day. Get ready for a paradigm shift in health that will serve you in so many incredible ways. I’m writing this with a big smile on my face, because I’m grateful to hold your hand and walk you through the process to achieve metabolic freedom. Hold on to your metabolic hats!