Pain Management

Good morning, Cadre. Sorry for the delay there. The internet speed test was not speedy, to say the least. So fun with technology, right? But we're here. It's another beautiful morning, steamy morning, a little warm. It's been the trend, but I feel like there is a reprieve on the horizon. So what I'm going to talk about today is inflammation and how it can relate to mental pain, right? Mental struggles. So I discovered inflammation was probably about February of 2025. No, February of 2024. It's amazing how time flies, right?

I was dealing with a knee injury from playing hockey that wasn't healing and it was essentially manifesting throughout my whole body in the form of pain. I couldn't raise my arms above my shoulders. My wife Melissa had to literally grab me and roll me out of bed because I didn't have the strength to push myself up. It was a very scary time. And it led me to get some blood work done, which then led me to a rheumatologist. And I'm not a traditionally big doctor guy, but when you have persisting issues, knowledge is power.

You got to get knowledge or you got to get information. So at that point I learned I had inflammation and there wasn't really any direction given other than the fact that I have it. And it wasn't like the rheumatoid arthritis type of situation, but yeah, it's had inflammation. I was told I could do that by cleaning up my diet. So cleaned up my diet for a little bit and started feeling better. And by clean up my diet, I meant I cut out alcohol for a period. I cut out sweets, sugar for a period, and started feeling better.

So Then come, a little over a year later, and this inflammation that was, you could say, raging inside of me in February of 2024 was, never, the fire was never doused. Think of it like, I like to make the analogy of in Canada, there's a lot of zombie forest fires where there's just fires there's fallen trees and there's just a fire underneath and at any point in time it could just rage. So I was, going through the transition period of evolving out of my role at Back Channel Brewing and stepping into my kind of my full circle identity of being an athlete and really focusing on the wellness world.

And I took a six-week road trip hauling my mobile sauna 6,500 miles around the southwest, which was incredible and it really fed my soul. And I got back home and I had about 3 1/2 weeks left of my day-to-day role. So I was spending a lot of time working, grinding, right? So I was doing my own roles. I was executing my own stuff. while organizing my roles to be passed on and just kind of dealing with the stressful nature of leaving something that I created, leaving an identity that I had, that represented me for the better part of 10 years.

And that can be a challenging time. Change is never easy, but change is necessary. And there can be pain by being stuck in an identity and not living your authentic self. So for a while I had one foot in wellness, I had one foot in the beer world, and I tried to do both. And that kind of just took a toll on me because I was just grinding in one category and then grinding in another category so that I could make this transition when I was ready. And during those final 3 1/2 weeks, I was kind of on a bit of a farewell tour as well.

So I was working hard, but I was also spending extra time at the brewery, having some casual beers, having a little more food truck food than I wanted. But I wanted to spend time with my people. This is a community that I helped create. And my final act as as being a brewery operator, was participating in a national beer fest in Fargo at a brewery called Drecker. And I wanted to essentially just say goodbye to people that I'd been, have become really close to over the years. And this is breweries from all over the country.

And it was always a goal to be a nationally recognized brewery, and we did that. So went for a final sendoff. and consumed more than I typically have in the past. It was kind of like a science experiment in my belly in a sense with all the different styles that I was consuming. So drove home on Easter Sunday and I was just full, right? And I looked in the mirror and I was like, I hate how I look after I consume alcohol. And I've always known that alcohol is a cause of pain in my body. It's a muscle deterrent and your brain, your nerves, and your muscles need to all work as one.

And if you're adding a muscle deterrent into your body, then there's going to be a traffic jam of communication, we'll say. So that's why I really evolved myself out of my role and back into the identity of being an athlete and really focusing on wellness because I couldn't, it wasn't authentic of me to promote something that I couldn't consume every single day. And I can consume wellness every single day, every minute of the day. I love it. It's just, it just fills my cup, right? So, I'm driving back from Fargo and going to Easter dinner and I kind of have a gluttonous dinner with dessert because on that Monday was going to be my first day back into, my first day into the next phase of my life.

And I actually had a sauna planned with Jen Varale and Reed Forgrave of the Star Tribune. I was really looking forward to that. So I go to bed Sunday night, Easter Sunday night, and I wake up with horrible pain and a couple days later I find out I have appendicitis but my white blood cell count was low enough where there was a chance that I could beat the bacterial infection that is appendicitis. And for me being someone who tries to highlight a natural way of healing, I wanted to pursue beating appendicitis.

And I had talked to a number of people in my circle of pain who had beaten appendicitis before. And I had also talked to people who had a ruptured appendix. And I took all that information and decided, all right, I got a short time period to try to beat this. And for a lack of detail, which I can share, all the pain of dealing with appendicitis another time, or you can check out some of the pain stories on my YouTube program, Get Sweaty with Letty. But ultimately, I was in the hospital on Thursday, found out I had a ruptured appendix and had to have surgery.

And I went into surgery. I was septic, so I almost died. This was April 9th that I had this surgery. And when I came out, I felt so much better. And so then I really started to dig deep on why did this happen to me? And I learned that I had chronic inflammation, which is inflammation for a long period of time, I want to say. it kind of gets to the point of chronic if it's anything over six months. So, and it was obvious, it was, diet induced, it was stress induced, and my body was sounding an alarm to the point where it saw that I had one foot in the wellness and one foot in the beer.

And literally as my appendix ruptured, we won best brewery in the state of Minnesota. And so the beer world, it's got its lasso around me and it's pulling me back in like you're not going anywhere. My appendix had other thoughts of that. And I've learned that spiritually the appendix is associated with change. And I was going through a big change. And the appendix has a proper function for us. The old thinking is that we just need to get it out, but it does serve a purpose. We're born with it for a reason.

Yes, we can live without it, but I didn't want to remove my appendix if I didn't need to. So that's why I went through this process. But ultimately, you know, I did have to remove it. And then I learned about, and then I start really learning about inflammation and I. had to kind of do a deep dive on rebuilding my gut after that. What you put into your body is a big source for inflammation. This led me to connect with a previous guest of mine on Get Sweaty with Letty, Christina Jacks. She's A functional nutritionist who will be at Refresh, my wellness and movement festival.

That cadre is the event sponsor of Sunday, August 9th. So you can talk to her and meet her and ask questions. But she offered to team up with me. She was at a period where she had some time and I was all about it. So that led me to take a blood test where I took, it was basically a mediator release test, MRT. And I got this document back and you can see the green, you can see the yellow. over here, and that's a test 176 commonly consumed foods and compounds that we all eat, right? Fortunately, I didn't have anything that tested high in the red, but I had a good amount of yellow.

And some of the stuff that I had regularly consumed for years and years and years, basically my whole life, was not good for me. So you can kind of see in this yellow card right here, there's some There's some weird ones, right? You got broccoli, peach, wheat, so beer, right? And so if wheat's bad combined with alcohol, that's just really bad for me when it comes to inflammation. Onion, mushroom, lettuce, salmon. And when you look at salmon right here, look at this. 9. So it's the salmon. and wheat are my two highest inflammatory markers, something that I would consume very, very frequently.

So that was a pretty big eye-opener for me where I realized in my whole entire life I've been consuming things that were inflammatory for me. And this could have been exacerbated by the appendix rupturing. So if I come into it with chronic inflammation and then I have an appendix rupture, all that bacteria that it's storing is going to leak all over my organs and really exacerbate the inflammation tenfold. So I had to do this deep dive, right? And I've been on this diet now since I started it after Memorial Day.

So there was a period where I was just rebuilding my gut, rebuilding my gut. and unknowingly consuming bad things while I was rebuilding my gut, or at least I thought I was rebuilding my gut. And when I finally started focusing on this diet, I could just, my body improved, my mental health improved, because I wouldn't wake up with a puffy face or a puffy body. And I've now come to relate food as little embers. And there's damp embers and there's kind of big fiery embers. And we need to consume as many damp embers as possible to dampen the flame that is inside of us.

And if you consume a fiery ember, that's just going to fan the flames. And kind of reverse any positive work that you've done. And it's okay to have some of these fiery embers, but it's all about frequency and quantity. So if at some point in time, you know, I want to have a nice oyster mushroom with my eggs, and you can see egg whites on there too. I can have the yolk, but egg whites tested in the yellow, fortunately it was a lower yellow, so I can consume it more easily than wheat or salmon. So yeah, it's just, it's been this game I've been playing now where the mediator release tests was also associated with this leap diet.

It's a type of elimination diet. And you can see those phases where it kind of phase, these are all this phase one, that stuff I can pretty much eat every single day no matter what. And really phase two is like that as well. So my phase one and my phase two, those are my damp embers that I should be consuming on the regular. And the other stuff in phase three, four, and five, I just need to build that into a rotation. where I'm not consuming too much of it. And I've always said too much of anything is never a good thing, even if it's a good thing.

And if you consume something so often, all the time, you could develop sensitivity to it. And I learned that I have food sensitivities. And I don't know if I was born with it. When I think it back, I feel like I was born with it. And it's, or at least I was developed I developed it because I grew up in the age where breakfast was cereal and toaster strudels and pop tarts and that's not the not the ideal breakfast. So I feel like there is just this underlying base layer of inflammation that I introduced to myself at a young age unintentionally because we didn't know that stuff back then.

So in food sensitivities are are in about 20 to 30% of the population. So some of you listening out there might have a food sensitivity. So pay attention to that. Pay attention to your skin. Pay attention to how you feel. Pay attention to your stool. Your stool is a very important indicator for inflammation. And I've been ignoring that for quite some time. I initially took a food sensitivity test in 2020 because My stool was not what it should be. And it was like that for a long period of time. And then I got it a little better.

But I ignored it for a while, thinking to myself, I'll just, I'll take care of that in the future. So don't do that. Take care of it now. You don't want to have inflammation raging inside of you because that can lead to a host of medical issues that nobody needs to deal with, nobody wants to deal with. And I just think back of all the times I would wake up and I'd look in the mirror and I would just be puffy and it would just crush my mental attitude. I just didn't like that, right? I want to feel, I want to look like myself.

I don't want to have fluctuating appearances based on what I'm consuming. So there really is a mental health component to consuming good food. We all need nutrition. Nutrition is essential towards our bodies operating optimally. So that's my little story, I guess, about inflammation. I'm going to keep talking about it over time on my YouTube program and my other social platforms because I really think that inflammation is rampant amongst our society. And our whole society is way too reactive. We need to be proactive and information is power.

So even if you don't have some of the symptoms that I had been experiencing, I highly encourage you to take a blood test and learn what's good for you. Throughout all this, I've learned that there's no such thing as a broad diet that is good for everybody because we all have, we're all individuals. So what's good for someone else might not be good for you. So it's really important to do the work and get some blood work done and coincide that with speaking with a functional nutritionist who can help.

And so I highly recommend you to come to Refresh on August 9th. You'll be able to talk to a functional nutritionist. You'll be able to talk to the people of Game Day Men's Health who Granted, that's just kind of for men to receive blood work, but they're going to be able to steer you in direction for getting blood work and those types of things for women as well. And it was in working with Christina, it was easy to get a blood test anywhere. So don't let that intimidate you. But the moral of the story is inflammation sucks and it can lead to bad things like your body exploding, like it happened to me.

And I'm As odd as it is to say, nearly dying, but I'm better off for it because even though I was going to really focus on my wellness with my next phase, I don't think I would have taken my diet as seriously to this degree. So now I know what I can put. I have this whole category of food that I know I can put into my body every single day. And that makes me feel great. And as I've been reintroducing certain things and testing things out, the proof is in the pudding. I can't really have the pudding because it has, likely going to have cane sugar or other sugar or other things that are just not good for me.

So yeah, do the work. Put good things in your body. Feed your mind with good nutrients. So I'll leave it with that today. Hope you enjoyed hearing about my inflammation. 30 and it took me a little bit to get on. That's just the nature of technology sometimes, I guess, right? But I will always be persistent and I will always make it happen in some way, shape, or form. So hope you enjoy the rest of your day and we'll see you all very soon. Cheers.