Luke's Personal Health Wake-up Call

yeah like everyone has a dogmatic approach to what they do and they think that their thing is the right thing to do and you see this a lot in like the physique world okay so i did a contest and this type of dieting worked for me and this type of training worked for me and I did no cardio and I did this and these supplements worked. And then you try to fit all of these people who are round pegs. You try to shove them in a square hole and it works for some people, it doesn't work for everybody. So, I mean, I grew up in a system that was fairly dogmatic. Like everything was low carb, everything was no cardio, aerobics makes you fat and all this. And I kind of came to the realization when I was 35 and I went to the doctor, I just didn't feel right. You know, I was like crying after sex, wanting to cuddle and didn't want to watch football anymore. And that type of thing. And I was like, what is wrong with me? I think I have low testosterone. So I went to the doctor and sure as shit, I had low testosterone, high estradiol. So no wonder I was being so emotional and that type of thing. But then I also, holy shit, I had stage two hypertension and my triglycerides were 399 and they should be below 99. And my LDL was high, my HDL was low. And I was having all these metabolic syndrome things. And I said, man, how, this doesn't make sense because I'm big and I'm ripped and I'm strong and I'm fast and all this stuff. But then I realized, man, I'm just focusing on the performance and everything I do is so performance orientated that it's swinging me too far towards one side of the pendulum and I need to swing back. And the only way you can do that is if you think about the body on a sliding scale, there's nothing black and white about the body. So what I was doing is I was taking an allopathic model of medicine and trying to fit it in with my personal training. So I said, okay, I can't do aerobics, going to be fat and weak. Okay, cool. So then I lost my cardiac output. I lost my ability to transfer oxygen. I've lost my ability to process carbohydrates effectively and eat the most amount of calories. And that was impairing my performance. And then when things, when you do that and you have a mismatch of certain macros and certain calories, you're not making energy effectively. Certain things have to shut down in order to parlay that energy into what's most important, which is survival. So I had a couple of years where I was mentored by James LaValle and he changed my thought process on this and says, you know, stop being so one dimensional. You know, the body's a three-dimensional space, and you have to accommodate for that. So you can't just do – you can't pay Peter to rob Paul unless you pay Paul first.