Overcoming Obstacles: Dan's Inspiring Weight Loss Story

 I ran into someone at a dinner about four weeks ago, hadn't seen him for a while. And his response was, where's the rest of you? What happened? Where'd it go? And he goes, wow, you're making me look really fat now. And I'm like, you can do this too. I can tell you how you just got to want to do it. Hey guys, it's Dr. Ryan, and today we're going to talk with one of my patients who's been with me for just about a year, and we're going to find out a little bit about his experience with the clinic. Dan, why don't you start out by telling us a little bit about yourself, where you live, what you do, some of your hobbies. Sure. I live in Massachusetts. I am self employed. I have been for 27 years. I own two very busy liquor stores in Massachusetts and am a very. Hardworking, overworked, stressed out guy. That's where I was before I started the program. Overweight, not in the best shape I've ever been in my life and with a lot of issues that I needed to address. Yeah. And you, you touched a little bit on the first question I was going to ask you is what it was like for you prior to starting with the clinic, you mentioned that some of these things like energy levels and physique not being up to par, but. What else did you notice? What were some of the other things that you're really trying to correct and improve upon? I think stress more than anything. So you don't realize when you are out of shape, when your biomarkers are very bad, how bad you actually feel and what it creates for you. As a business owner, I was always fighting through it, fighting and fighting it every single day. And Now it's completely different than that. Okay, during this process of you recognizing you have some issues and perhaps looking at your lab values and assessing your energy levels and looking at yourself in the mirror and maybe looking at your performance and athletic activities, was there an exciting event that made you say Hey, I got to do something about this. Yeah. I actually decided to do blood work on my own that I actually paid for because it wasn't time for my regular doctor actually do blood work. So I did a complete panel on myself of everything. And when I looked at where I was and I obviously I did a lot of research. I was online. I was seeing where I should be, what things were really knew that I had to do something about it. Um. 53 years old. And I felt like I was 73 years old and I looked like I was 73 years old with my, my, all of my markers and my blood work. So that's when I knew I had to do something. I'm a pretty positive person. I didn't, I don't think you ever looked 73, but I think on the inside, maybe I felt. 73. I think that was the problem. Yeah. Okay. Okay. And then during this process of research, how did you come across the clinic? Went online. I Googled a lot of things. I, I, everything that came up, I did a thorough review of every single company that was out there that was doing this, which there's an awful lot of them. I even talked to a couple of them. My impression with most of them was we're going to do blood work and then we're just going to prescribe something for you and that's going to be the end of it and then we'll check your blood work and another year and see what's going on. There wasn't a lot of communication going on when I found your website and really started digging into what you do and I wasn't looking for a cheap way out when I was looking for something of quality that that actually is going to accomplish what I want to accomplish. If I went to one of these other places and it was just, hey, yeah, do this. I'd probably already be done with it. I probably wouldn't be sticking with it. It wouldn't work. And that's not what I wanted to do. I wanted to find someone like you that was going to be persistent with me and follow up with me constantly, which is great because it keeps me on track of everything that I'm supposed to do. And when we have a meeting scheduled, it's scheduled, it's there. It happens. There's no, Hey, oh, can we reschedule this till next month or the month after? It's we do it. And we get it done. And that's what's, that's what I was looking for. And that's what I found in your program. Yeah. And I'm glad that you recognize it again. I'm not one to really talk negatively about the competition, so to speak, but I just feel that when you're in a business and you recognize this too, the way you differentiate yourself as being centered around the customer or the patient and providing them value. Yes. Um, I think it might have been Warren Buffett, but I may have been misquoting him, but he said something along the lines of price is what you pay, value is what you get, and we're all value centered. And so you do your very best to provide the most amount of value, or at least what you think the patient or customer needs, and you go from there. When I had my, um, chat with one of your people, the information provided was way beyond anybody else, way beyond that they were giving me and helping me to make my decision. So, it was clear from the beginning, as soon as I started that chat with them, that okay, this is gonna be the place that I'm gonna go with because it's, this is what I've been looking for. I can't vouch for how other... Clinics or other providers view patients. But from my standpoint, I try to take a very holistic view. I use my training from the American Academy of anti aging medicine, functional medicine background. I think it gives like a unique perspective to your blood work and to your, my approach in terms of improving. Your health, longevity. And so I'm glad you, you recognize that and it's good. Okay. So why don't we talk a little bit about the changes you experienced after joining the program? And why don't you tell them in a couple of sentences what you noticed? Sure. I, and I think for the biggest thing for anyone who's going to do this and look at doing it is you don't expect a miracle in two weeks. And unfortunately I think that's how. There's a lot of things in our country that make us want instant satisfaction. So this isn't one of those things. It's not like you can start taking anything that you prescribe for us. It's not like you can start taking it and you're just going to feel like a million bucks the next day. You also have to put the work and effort in. So, you have all of the stuff that you prescribed for us. You have the work and the effort. You have the exercise. You have the diet. And when you do all of those things, it's amazing how, after four weeks, the significant difference that you feel inside of your body. It's significant. You might not look significantly different in four weeks, but you certainly feel it on the inside. And that's what motivated me beyond anything else, because in, in my... First six weeks. I was also on vacation for two weeks during that time. So it was like trying to balance everything out. And a couple of weeks after I got home, I felt so much better than I had felt past 10 years. And that is only continued to get better every single week. It gets better all the time. Right now, today, I feel as good as I've felt. Ever in my adult life, probably. I woke up this morning and I was like full of energy, ready to go. And not for nothing, it's been a crazy busy week for me. And I've been working long hours and doing stuff, but at 5 30 this morning, I was ready to roll. And that. A year ago would not have been the case. I would have been dragging myself out of bed, saying, Oh my God, how am I going to do this again today? Hopping in the shower, maybe turning it on cold for a few minutes to wake me up and revive me. And I'm not doing that stuff now. I just feel better. That's amazing. And for a lot of my patients who are entrepreneurs like yourself, you really focus on the business. You want to see it scale. But you just ignore your health, but when it goes, or when you notice a detriment in your energy levels and your physique and your ability to do the things you always do, it's, it just hits you so hard. And I'm glad that I was able to turn that around and hopefully it's manifested in terms of your ability to grow your business and scale and talk to other customers and bring in more. You, you just have more energy to do everything. And I, people refer to it as brain fog or whatever. I have so much less of that now in my life. When I'm doing things, I'm doing everything better than I was doing a year ago. And it's great. It's really great how I feel. And it's everything that I'm doing that you're helping me do to make me feel this way. Let's take a more quantitative approach and take a look at some of your lab values here that have improved. So what I'm going to do right here is just talk a little bit about a segment of your lab values that I was a little concerned about when I started, when you started with this. And you can see this is the portion of your lipid panel. You can see your AD, your total cholesterol and your lipoprotein A. And just by making these dietary changes, you have radically transformed it without the use of statins, just diet and exercise and supplementation. And what's pretty remarkable to me is apolipoprotein B is a very important marker in terms of determining your risk for heart disease. It's reflective of LDL and VLDL and you've made a tremendous change to a very healthy level below 90. But something that was really interesting to me was your, the decrease we saw in your life protein A. A lot of conventional physicians feel that this particular marker doesn't change. You're consigned to where you are. If it's high, sorry, it's your genetics. And my experience, what I found is that is simply not true and you've demonstrated that. You've changed your lipoprotein A from 65 to 11, again, through diet, exercise, supplementation and medication, uh, hormonal optimization. So it's really made a big difference. And so I'm really happy about this. In addition, you've made some significant changes in terms of your body composition. First by losing weight, you lost almost 35 pounds, which is pretty remarkable and it's manifested in the way you look. It's how you looked like when you started in your waistline, your face, and your physique has really improved. Is there back view? Yeah, it's really, it's a big difference. Yeah. And we're not done yet. That's the great part. Yeah. We're not done yet. No, we're still going to keep going and get you down in that 10 to 15%. So that's what I'm really excited about. But the fact that you've made these changes and such as in a relatively short period of time. By the way, I'm down five sizes in my waist from a 40 to a 35. That's unbelievable. If you look at the first picture, I carry almost all of my weight in my stomach. I was wearing a size 40 waist short last summer. And I'm in a 35, which is starting to get a little loose. It might be down to 34. So that is the one thing I probably should tell patients the there, you may have to invest into a new wardrobe. Yes. Yeah. It's not just the cost of the program. It's the cost of the wardrobe too, because with, but it's, so I'm afraid to buy too many things. Cause I know I'm going to keep going down. So it's a couple and get through it and see what happens. So you did touch upon this generally, but what are some of the specific changes you've seen in your business after joining the clinic? What are some of the things that you noticed that have improved? Yeah. So I think my entire staff is better now because I'm far more positive. I'm more upbeat. I'm more energetic. So I'm bringing that. Every single day into work and it's reflected in my staff and their performance and what they're doing. We, we've been growing for a lot of years and we continue to grow our business in an environment right now where most of our competition is shrinking and we're still continuing to grow. And a part of it is it's not all me. I have a great staff, but it's us working together as a great team and me being the team leader that has really helped us to continue to do that. And part of that is I'm ready to go. It's when you get rid of all the brain fog and everything you're doing, all of a sudden you have new ideas all the time. You're constantly coming up with what can we do next? How can we be better? What are we going to do? Let's start. Yeah, we're good. Let's be better next week and let's be better the week after that. And that's what we strive for all the time. Yeah. Unfortunately in the world of business, if you're not consistently innovating and trying to add more value to our customers. In stagnating, you're, you're not just stagnating, you're actually losing. Yes. And it's really important to, to have that consistent idea flow and, and implementation, which, you know, as we get older and our energy levels drop, we don't feel our best. That really tends to taper down. And I'm glad you turned it around. So what about some of the changes that your friends and family have noticed? You mentioned your colleagues at work, but what about your friends and family? Yeah, it's even, I see my mother all the time. She only lives five minutes from me, and I saw her yesterday. And you said, wow, you're really looking skinny. I just laughed. I was like, well, I wouldn't say I'm skinny, but thank you very much, mom. I'm glad you're noticing. And it's just when I bump into someone in business that I haven't seen for maybe six months, I ran into someone at a dinner about four weeks ago, hadn't seen him for a while. And his response was, where's the rest of you? What happened, where'd it go? And he goes, wow, you're making me look really fat now. And I'm like, you can do this too. I can tell you how. You just gotta want to do it. And there's been, especially over the summer where I'm running into people, there's been a lot of that. I saw someone yesterday and he was like, Hey skinny, what's going on with you? What's going on? And it's just funny. It's funny to me 'cause I know how much weight of us, but I certainly don't feel skinny and I'm not skinny and I have a lot more work to. Go, but that motivates you to keep going. When people notice that there's a change in you and it's a positive change, it's much better than the alternative. When you walk away and they go, wow, he's put on 20 or so he's not looking too good. So it's always nice. It's nice to see that. It's, we really are turning back the clock and I think, I think as we mentioned, the, the journey hasn't been completed. We're going to keep on going and obviously going to get more and more of these comments, which is a good thing. Yes, absolutely. Okay. So why don't we close up with this? What would you tell someone who is watching this now and is uncertain about joining the program? Yeah. So we all, when we're going to make a major change in our life. And our lifestyle and what we're doing, we all tend to think about doing it and then we put it off. We put it off. Let me think about it a little more. Maybe next week, I'm going to start doing it. Maybe, you know what? I'm going to email them next week. And then you, the next week comes and you say, I'm going to email them the week after that. Get on your laptop, get on your phone, whatever you're doing. Email Dr. Ryan and get started. That's what you need to do. Okay, Dan, I really appreciate you sharing your experience with the clinic and I want you, I want to thank you again for taking time out of your data to do this.