Metabolic and Immune Health
After Defeating Arthritis Pain, Shane Lost Visceral Fat and Gained Lean Muscles in Five Steps
A significant loss of fat and muscle gain led to an increase in libido, deeper relationships with his wife, and a baby after 50.
Key Points
Why arthritis matters
How we can reduce the symptoms with lifestyle changes
A Brief Background to Shane’s Painful yet Empowering Journey
Autoimmune diseases, like arthritis, affect the lives of millions of people globally. My father died from one of them. This article reflects on Shane’s painful yet exciting journey to overcoming inflammation and freeing himself from debilitating pain.
This story underlines the healing power of our bodies, even for complex health conditions like arthritis, when we nurture them with what they need.
Science and medicine pave the way, yet what we know so far is not more than a drop in the ocean.
Thus, I invite my readers to consider alternative healing methods with sensible experimentation and support from qualified healthcare professionals and follow conventional wisdom to get the desired health and fitness transformation.
Like millions of open-minded people, I reaped many benefits by following such a holistic approach, allowing me to defeat a dozen debilitating health conditions experimentally.
When experiencing arthritic pain, Shane could not perform resistance training, a high-intensity workout, or even simple exercises like walking or swimming.
His body was sore, his energy was low, and his mood was gloomy. He constantly had to focus on his unbearable pain in desperation. The only hope was gradually increasing high-dose painkillers, even in injectable and suppository forms suppressing his symptoms and hiding the root causes.
His muscles were stiff and sore. His joints could not support his weight, stopping his motion. He did not enjoy limping and using a walking stick at such a young age. Gaining significant weight and losing valuable muscles speed up the aging process.
Consequently, his partner lost interest in him as he also lost his libido and became a grumpy older man in his wife’s disagreements.
They struggled to create intimacy. Shane was in a desperate situation needing help. However, he believed that every cloud came with a silver lining.
At the age of 50, I met Shane during a presentation I made in our health club advertised to locals as a free public speech. When Shane’s wife found the brochure in their mailbox, she thought it was too good to be true.
She said, “Shane, look! This man, with an esoteric look and name, seems to be an old bloke like you, and mentioned that he fixed his arthritis naturally. How about you join this free speech a km away from our home? I can book it for you”. Shane was willing to try anything to get rid of his incapacitating pain.
Shane got hooked on the opening of my presentation, including the points from arthritis.org.
“More than 50 million adults and 300,000 children have some type of arthritis. It is widespread but is not well understood. Arthritis is not a single disease. It is an informal way of referring to joint pain or joint disease. There are 100+ types of arthritis and related conditions. People of all ages, sexes, and races can and do have arthritis, the leading cause of disability in America.”
At the end of the speech, Shane said this event became a serendipitous encounter for him. He tried to pick my brain. I gave him my business card and invited him to become a free member of our health club. He loved the hospitality and support of the members.
Three years later, he became an inspiring guest speaker sharing his empowering experience with the public.
I shared my detailed protocol with Shane. With such inspiration, he met several qualified healthcare professionals who validated my method, increasing his confidence. With support from the informed community members, Shane developed a comprehensive action plan.
He walked through the details with his family doctor, who admired his proactive and responsible attitude. The physician helped him refine the plan based on his medical history.
The doctor also requested multiple blood tests and referred Shane to several specialists, including a new rheumatologist, endocrinologist, and gastroenterologist.
After a year, Shane has a more refined action plan with the help of multiple specialists whose services were covered by Australian Medicare, costing no additional expenses to him. He was happy as he did not have private health insurance supporting two teenagers with a single salary.
Besides, his wife was unable to work due to fatty-liver disease. Remarkably, Shane assisted his wife in healing with a similar method that I plan to share in another story.
Meanwhile, I introduced Shane to my friend Alberto who had weight and libido problems like him. Shane followed some of the methods Alberto used to increase his libido.
After three years, Shane significantly reduced his pain, lost substantial fat from his abdominal area, and gained lean muscles. More inspiringly, Shane improved his relationship with his wife.
They celebrated his success as a second honeymoon in Bali. After the second year of their honeymoon, Shane and his wife had a healthy boy at the age of 55.
After this background, I’d like to summarize the key points that significantly contributed to Shane losing visceral fat, gaining lean muscles, and reducing arthritic pain within three years with experimentation supported by qualified healthcare professionals and informed community members of a health club consisting of scientists, sensible biohackers, fitness enthusiasts, and health professionals.
1 — Optimized Vitamin D Levels and Calcium
One of the striking points identified by Shane’s family doctor was his vitamin D deficiency. It was no surprise to me as thousands of men in Australia suffer from this condition due to fear of sunlight in the southern hemisphere.
Unlike me, as Shane did not want to take the risk of exposing his body to sunlight, his doctor asked him to take 1,000 IU (International Unit) vitamin D tablets daily. Later they increased it to 5,000 IU with the endorsement of his specialist.
Vitamin D3 helped his body absorb calcium better. He also started taking 600 mg of magnesium and using Epsom salts bath daily. After increasing vitamin D and essential minerals, his blood markers noticeably improved.
2 — Improved His Gut Health
One of the key messages in my public speech was the importance of the gut-brain connection, highlighting the causes of numerous mental ailments that start with the gut. I explained and exemplified to my audience that a leaky gut might also affect arthritis, an autoimmune disease.
Interestingly, Shane felt significant digestive issues, but he ignored them as his focus was on his terrible pain. He was surviving with anti-acids after each meal. After learning about the harmful effects of long-term anti-acid use, he followed a combination of my protocol and the protocol used by Anna, who fixed her leaky gut naturally and shed 50 pounds.
In those days, Shane and I had different diets, but his diet was closer to Anna’s, so they clicked well.
The key points were a customized diet eliminating offending food with the help of a dietician, increasing stomach acid, which also helped his calcium metabolism, using gelatin (collagen) from homemade bone broth covering essential minerals, and boosting gut microbiota with support from a qualified naturopath.
3 — Detoxified the Body by Perspiring in a Dry Sauna
One of the best rituals of our health club is to have a dry sauna used by health and fitness enthusiasts, including several centenarians.
I introduced some friends like Algor, Gisela, Janine, Jeremy, Maggie, Jennifer, and many more. The heat of the sauna also encouraged him to try cold exposure via cold showers, which I explained its importance for browning our white fat.
As the community was supportive, Shane had no dull moments and got addicted to the sauna. He loved the idea that saunas could improve cardiovascular health.
Furthermore, he was fascinated by autophagy inducing features of the sauna. We believed that removing faulty proteins and pathogens from his body via the autophagy process could improve his arthritis. So, he decided to attend it for one hour every day after work.
He said dry sauna detoxified his body and gave him mental clarity. Janine (a psychiatrist) said the mental aspect was mainly due to community spirit. However, she did not know Shane was in deep ketosis.
4 — Entered Deep Ketosis by Making His Body Fat-Adapted
According to Shane, ketosis was the panacea for him to combat the pain of arthritis. I knew it, but I wanted to hear his finding during a sauna session with other friends.
His family doctor was nicely surprised when Shane’s inflammation markers, like C-reactive protein, significantly dropped. Shane couldn’t believe it when I mentioned the anti-inflammatory effects of ketosis in our first meeting.
Most of his pain was caused by inflamed joints. But deep ketosis reduced the inflammation substantially, even more than his anti-inflammatory medication. Shane initially started with intermittent fasting, as approved by his family doctor.
Within a year, he lost significant visceral fat and gained lean muscles due to time-restricted eating, a ketogenic diet, and fast-mimicking diets, increasing his growth hormone.
After a year, when his body got fat-adapted, Shane started 36 to 48 hours of prolonged fasting again with approval from his physician.
When Janine heard about deep ketosis, she better understood his mental clarity as his BDNF significantly increased. Mental clarity was only a bonus for Shane. His goal was to get rid of inflammation, causing terrible pain.
5 — Improved Sleep and Fitness Together
Due to debilitating pain, Shane couldn’t get restorative sleep for many years. He woke up with sore muscles several times in the middle of the night and felt awful all day long, causing chronic stress and increasing his inflammation.
I documented my sleep stories with him from Fredrick and Heather (37 years old bodybuilder), who also inspired Shane. Mindfulness practices like meditation helped Shane to improve his sleep, similar to Heather, who desired doctors to prescribe meditation for sleep deprivation.
Nevertheless, the best part of fixing his sleep was his motivation to exercise. He joined the senior’s fitness club and started with gentle workouts.
Adrian, who helped Eliza to shed 30 pounds, created a customized workout plan for Shane, including hopping on the trampoline (low impact on joints), compound workouts, and calisthenics that I love to do during my travels. Shane learned a lot about the benefits of planks from Audrey.
Within a year, his subjective fitness level tripled, in his words, with improved sleep. He lost more visceral fat, gained more lean muscles, went into deeper ketosis, increased his growth hormone, and optimized his other hormones (cortisol, insulin, leptin, and testosterone).
Shane admired the support of community members who helped him get free remedial massages that relieved his pain in the first year. He did not need massage therapy after the first year.
As a result of reduced stress, improved sleep (especially deep and rem), and enhanced fitness, hormonal balance significantly contributed to reducing his chronic stress and inflammation, which were the root causes of his arthritic pain.
After three years, Adrian informed him that his bone density improved 40% according to the DEXA scan they measured yearly. We believe bone density helped him to reverse his arthritis.
Conclusions and Takeaways
After joining our club with demonstrated progress, Shane developed an optimistic outlook on life. Her efforts in nurturing the body methodically, consistently, and persistently helped him self-heal.
He agreed with my point that “no one can heal us; only the body can heal itself with homeostasis.” Shane got good support from healthcare professionals.
Fortunately, he did not need any medication to reduce his stress, inflammation, and arthritic pain.
Even though arthritis is believed to be a lifetime issue by medical professionals, we might reverse it from my experience and observation of other people who defeated it with holistic health solutions.
My rheumatologists couldn’t believe me labeling me as a maverick. Whereas I firmly believe that the body’s healing power with proper nurturing might reduce the progress of arthritis.
I keep my optimism that medical scientists will shed light on my hypothesis one day. I witnessed many people who prevented or patients reversed their cancers, heart diseases, type II diabetes, insulin resistance, leptin resistance, fatty-liver disease, and metabolic syndrome, including slowing down dementia.
When I shared this observation with my rheumatologist, an approachable person, he remained silent for a few seconds, then he said, “Not in my lifetime,” as he was over 70 years old.
I believe that detoxifying the body (especially the leaky gut), deep ketosis, and hormonal balance catalyzed Shane’s healing and transformation journey. By using this five-step program, his allergies and inflammation cleared within a few years.
These five approaches might have had a combined effect in addressing multiple symptoms and solving the root causes of his arthritic pain.
During the process, Shane got another bonus for his health transformation. After losing significant visceral fat, his abdominal area had substantial loose skin.
By following the protocol we use in our fitness group, with support from the community members, he significantly reduced his sagging skin to the delight of his beloved wife.
Encouraged by his teenage kids, Shane posted some transformation photos on Instagram and Facebook to inspire his friends. With this motivation, Shane is now planning to have six-pack abs before he becomes a centenarian.
When I teased him, saying, “how about a shredded body like Adrian” he chuckled and said, “Lord knows! We will see it, too, one day.” He desired to be a bodybuilder one day.
Thank you for reading my perspectives. I wish you a healthy and happy life.
Here’s How I Got Healthier and Smoother Skin via 5 Lifestyle and Holistic Health Methods.
Thank you for reading my perspectives. I wish you a healthy and happy life.
As a new reader, please check my holistic health and well-being stories reflecting my reviews, observations, and decades of experiments optimizing my hormones and neurotransmitters. I write about health as it matters. I believe health is all about homeostasis.
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