This quote from Mother Teresa is incredibly inspiring and profound to me. It brought a real sense of deep conviction into my soul. It so easily captures the reasoning behind the founding of my new company, Epiq MD and it explains the reason why I left a 20+ year career in energy to pursue something in an industry that I had absolutely known nothing about. From the outside looking in, you wouldn’t say, “that guy is the epitome of health”. I grew really tired of where I was and what my life looked and felt like. Certainly, as we get older, we begin to look at things differently and even have a different type of energy about our approach to life. As an aside, I am working on a blog entitled “The 1000 Pound Journey”, which talks about my life as a naturally born insulin resistant kid and how I have struggled with rapid weight gain throughout my entire life. I knew that I wanted something different for me physically and not just losing weight once and for all, but true health. Muscle strength, flexibility, cardiovascular, all my organs working right, blood sugar, blood pressure, everything working well and wanting to have a good quality of life – physically, mentally, and spiritually. Certainly, none of us are promised tomorrow; however, I do want to make the most of it for the days that I am here with the people that I love.
So, I must admit founding my new company Epiq MD was an incredibly selfish decision. I realized that according to my personality type, my behavior and quite simply just the way I am, I needed to create an entirely new ecosystem if I wanted to have a chance to succeed and defeat my own DNA. I knew that I needed a different ecosystem from what the energy industry gave me. Secondly, I wanted this for my family. When I say secondly, it is a simultaneous decision. I love them, I want to be there for them in the best capacity that I can. I have five children now, some of them are young adults and some of them are still in the throws of teenage life but I certainly recognize the ebbs and flows of their life, mentally speaking. They’ve inherited the DNA of mine and my wife and we’re both broken people coming from very poverty-stricken backgrounds, so we didn’t have access to any kind of mental health care or wellness in general, but I know that I wanted all of this for them. I believe in the law of impartation; you really can’t give what you don’t have. This was purely selfish; this was about me and my family.
I’ve always believed that my calling in life was to help people, and this was another way for me to do that. As an entrepreneur, I certainly have a big vision, you know I believe in vision and I’m hopeful that Epiq MD will help millions of people. If I can help a million people reverse their obesity, reverse the type two diabetes and if I can bring access to doctors and mental health professionals to millions of blue-collar working families, middle income, upper middle income and rural America – improving their quality of life then that’s what I want. But this was purely selfish, I needed to do this for me first and in my home as well. That’s what this quote did for me – it drilled that point home.
We regularly speak about these topics in our home, around the dinner table. We’ve implemented dinner as a family, three or four nights a week and we begin to address things head on, not letting things slip by, ignore them or act like certain negative things are not present, when they are. I’ve done a pretty good job of personal development starting at around the age 17, when an old mentor Robert Morin gave me my first copy of Tony Robbins’ Unlimited Power. My wife has been a stay-at-home mom and personal development hadn’t necessarily been a big part of her life until recent years. This change and this new ecosystem put my wife and entire family in a position where they would have to address things head on moving forward. My wife and I both have undergone childhood trauma; however, my wife experienced a significant amount of trauma, followed by a complete lack of support system in a broken home. She’s been diligently unpacking it for the past year. The healing process has begun and we’re hopeful that she will soon achieve new levels of progress. She only recently has begun to realize and grasp what the impact of that childhood trauma has had on her as an adult and then of course derivatively the impact on all of us, as a family. This whole thing is about us and if I can do something good in my home and have some sense of healing, restoration, restored vitality, have people find their purpose, that’s what living an Epiq Life is all about. Everybody’s got their own version of it, and I just want to help people unlock that, but I needed to unlock it first in my own home.
This quote from Mother Teresa captures it very nicely and we’re in the early days of starting this new company. Hopefully this passion, this labor of love, and this vision can continue to fuel us. My dream is that this becomes a new way healthcare is accessed, delivered, sold and that we can bring access to everyone. So, thank you Mother Teresa for this quote, may you rest in peace always and let’s see what kind of magic we can make happen here.
s most of you that keep up with my blog know, over the past 24 months or so I’ve worked diligently on reversing the type two diabetes that I have long been diagnosed with. I started out with an A1C count just under 10 and since then, I’ve been able to normalize my A1C count, still on the higher side of normal; however, I am due another full blood test soon and will update everyone then (I am hoping for a 4.9). Simultaneously of course, I’ve dropped 170 pounds. However, I was very busy trying to lose weight and I knew that I had blood pressure issues, but I never really knew the extent of where my heart health was.
As I’ve been on my fitness journey, I’ve certainly improved some of the markers regarding heart health. For example, I’ve improved my blood pressure greatly. I’ve definitely improved my resting heart rate significantly, and my recovery rate when exercising has also improved significantly. However, I have not really done a real scan to look at what kind of damage has been done to my heart until recently. Last week I did a CAC scan which measures and determines how much calcification via plaque has been created in one’s arteries, specifically around your heart. This is also referred to as a “heart scan” and stands for “coronary artery calcium”.
The ranges for this are interesting and I’ve been studying why they vary in the manner that they do. If you score a 0, then that’s perfect with zero signs of calcium present in the coronary arteries – a score of 1 to 10 on this scale, means you are at low risk, or that you have a less than a 10% chance of heart disease. Then, if you score an 11 to 99, you have “mild” calcium deposits, which is still a good score. If you score between 100 and 399 then you are facing a moderate risk of incurring either a heart attack or stroke in the next 10 years. Anything between 400 and 999 is considered “severe” and if you score anything from 1,000 and over, then you have a 25% chance of having a heart attack within a year. So, you can imagine why I found the ranges a little bit difficult to interpret. In any event my score came back at a 128. This means that technically I have coronary artery disease, generically known as heart disease. I have attached both my score, scale and results for your viewing.
I am kicking myself in the ass because I wish I would’ve done this test when I was weighing 465 pounds so that I had something to compare by. Interestingly, for decades now the “experts” have said that you cannot reverse the calcification once it is settled or present in your arteries. You can only prevent it from further worsening. Now, the experts have also said that cholesterol was the driver behind this process and of course we now know that there really is no such thing as good or bad cholesterol; furthermore, we also know that cholesterol has nothing to do with the calcification process in terms of it being the culprit (Click Here to see an informative video on this topic). With respect to reversing the calcification process, newer evidence has come out that it can indeed be reversed. This is not some obscure study that happened at some obscure university in some Eastern European country; these are the words that came out of the head of prevention, Dr. Stephen Kopecky of the world-renowned Mayo Clinic… It doesn’t get more credible than that. Having said that, there are still today many doctors and other “experts” who do not agree with the two above recent findings.
I share all of this information to tell you that I am now embarking on reversing the calcification process that has settled into my body. Because of the radiation exposure when doing the scan, I’m going to wait 6 to 9 months before I do another scan however, we do know today that my score is 128 so we have a benchmark now and let’s see if I can get that score lower over the next 6 to 9 months.
It doesn’t escape me that many people do not like to discuss heart health – mostly because for many of us, it’s a scary topic and creates a sense of anxiety. We live life thinking, out of sight, out of mind – therefore, it can never be a reality. This is foolish talk – I want to state that EVERYONE over 40 years of age should know their CAC score – I scheduled my own scan at Baylor Scott White in Plano and I paid out of pocket – it was only $79.00. Information is power and the more you know about yourself, the more empowered you become – fear not!
Your thoughts, well wishes and prayers are welcomed and coveted… Please and thank you.
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