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I was born 2 months premature, and diagnosed with Aortic Stenosis. In other words, I had narrowing in the biggest artery in the heart. Subsequently, I had emergency open heart surgery at the age of 8. Entering life in such a traumatic way has caused me to think deeply and assess what I really wanted to do with the limited time we all have on this planet together. Being interested in martial arts and physical performance from a young age, I was always intrigued with the biology and science behind it. I constantly researched ways to optimize the body, but struggled for years with terrible insomnia. The resulting fatigue caused problems with my schoolwork. I even quit Taekwondo classes and stopped working out. I just didn't have the energy. Doctors kept throwing different medications at it, but they didn't solve the issue and caused numerous side-effects. It wasn't until years later that I discovered my problem was largely from misalignment of my spine due to an incident where I got hit by a car and refused medical treatment.

Having misaligned bones poking into muscles and nerves practically my entire life had severely affected my ability for my nervous system to relax, which I realized was causing the insomnia. I constantly felt "foggy", as if I was watching life through a low-quality TV screen. Unfortunately, it's something that often appears so gradually that many people, including myself get used to feeling sub-par and we assume that it's a normal thing. After a few months of chiropractic adjustments, knowing that alone wasn't enough, I again began applying my long-seated interests in nutrition and physical fitness to my own life and seeing great change. My muscles slowly relaxed as I became stronger and more flexible, allowing me to finally obtain restful sleep. After this revelation along a couple years of mobility work and strength training, I felt renewed. The images below compare a normal cervical spine (Top) to my cervical spine when I finally got it X-rayed.

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Witnessing the quality of my life improve exponentially, my focus has now shifted to helping others improve their quality of life by utilizing my interest in science and applying it to often overlooked areas of our lives.

I received my Personal Training certification from the National Academy of Sports Medicine in 2016, and currently work as a Personal Trainer at a local YMCA.

Exploring health and sustainability has also lead me towards fishing, hunting, gardening and raising animals to better understand where my food comes from, which doubles as a way to activate natural reward systems left over from or hunter-gathering past, leading to more satisfying experiences than simply shopping. This also serves as an effort to better understand life before industrialization allowed us to superficially detach from what I would argue is an essential part of our experience, the food chain that connects us literally and physically with all other life on this planet.

After all, don't we all want to live our lives to the fullest extent?