Never Broken, Never Healed

Dr. Matt (cold open): A diagnosis in general tells us what. It doesn’t tell us why. So many people are lost in this specialist shuffle. And we see the body so isolated and so segmented that we forget about how interconnected the body is, and really how miraculous it is, and how it’s designed to heal. Sleep, stress, movement, toxins. And until we address those, why the hell are we so concerned about the pennies?

Ashley: Welcome to the Rock Bottom Podcast, presented by Jigsaw Health, where we share health horror stories that inspire. I’m Ashley LaRue.

Patrick: And I’m Patrick Sullivan. Each episode, we explore raw, unfiltered journeys of survival. Experiences that will inspire, educate, and remind you that no matter how low you feel, there’s always a way up. Before we dive in, just a quick note: this podcast is for informational purposes only and it isn’t a substitute for medical advice. Always consult a health care professional before making any changes to your health routine.

Ashley: Today’s guest hit rock bottom in his late 20s. What followed was a deep unraveling of stress, trauma, and overwork, and a journey toward healing that challenged everything he thought he knew about health. So let’s get into it. This is the Rock Bottom Podcast.

Ashley: Dr. Matt Delgado, I am so excited to have you on the show today. I know Patrick is too. We’ve been looking forward to this chat. Why don’t you just start off by telling us, if you can recall, the moment where you truly hit rock bottom, and what led you there?

Dr. Matt: Yeah, tough question to answer, because we see it as, and I have a visual in my office, I’m a chiropractor, it’s the straw that broke the camel’s back. So to recall the one straw now, seven or eight years later, I’m like, dang. So I took some notes in my phone and I tried to think back to when, or what was maybe the exact moment where I thought something was wrong. I was working as a chiropractor in my first job out of school, in a clinic in Omaha, Nebraska. And I was in the middle of a shift, and I remember feeling, it was the left side of my abdomen. And I remember it was the left side because in school we learn the different symptoms. If you have left-sided abdominal pain it can be this, versus right-sided abdominal pain it could be this. So I remember thinking in my head, left-sided abdominal pain, what is going on? Is this my spleen? Did I have malaria? I’m like, no, no, no, it can’t be any of these. But my gut was literally just screaming at me, and enough was enough. So if I had to name the last straw, that was it. To the point where I literally called my boss during the middle of a shift and I said, “I need to be done. I can’t do this anymore.” And I quit my job in the middle of a shift, on, it was either a Tuesday or a Thursday. And it was enough is enough. He told me to pack up my stuff and be on my way. And just like that.

Ashley: How old were you?

Dr. Matt: 27.

Patrick: What were the events leading up to this? So it wasn’t like, hey, everything’s hunky dory, everything’s going great, and then one day I had a pain in my left side and I quit my job. What was the buildup to all of this?

Dr. Matt: Yeah. And at that time, by the way, I didn’t even know a diagnosis. I would find that out a little bit later on. But leading up to it, to answer your question there, it was a combination of many little things. I’d say for me, I was right out of chiropractic school, so that intensive schooling process. I did an accelerated program, which, for people that don’t know, it’s a doctorate level program, similar number of hours to a medical doctor. But then the accelerated one, for me, I get bored easy, so I wanted to just occupy my time. And then beyond that, I would fill my 5:00 a.m., because it was cool to wake up at 5:00 a.m. and work out. So I joined the 5 a.m. club for about a year, which exhausted me further. I would schedule my evenings also. My favorite way to stress my body, and probably still to this day, is overscheduling my life. And I’d say being overscheduled and stressed for those three years was a huge contributor for me.

Even thinking back prior to that, there was a really stressful family situation that we went through right before starting chiropractic school. And I didn’t yet put any time into really sitting with that, being with that, dealing with that. And it was a really traumatic event. And I put it in a closet and went into chiropractic school. And I think those two things for me were probably the big contributors. And I’d say that during chiropractic school, it’s fair to say as well that sleep was one of the things I was sacrificing regularly. I was getting maybe six hours of sleep per night pretty regularly.

Ashley: Yeah. And especially being in your mid-20s. You know, I need at least eight hours to be at my best, but from what I’ve read, when you’re in your 20s, you really need extra sleep at that time. So it’s kind of interesting that you say you had this traumatic event, you put it in a closet, and you just kept pushing on, right? And I feel like that’s kind of what we’ve been taught, at least my generation. Just keep pushing on. Put it in the past. Don’t think about it anymore. Move on. That is how we were taught to deal with things. But the reality is, all you’re doing is putting it in the corner, and it’s still living in your body. You’re not addressing it. You’re not having time to process, or even maybe know how to process, that kind of trauma. So it’s just sitting there festering inside, in your left abdomen.

Dr. Matt: In my left abdomen. It turns out that’s where it was living.

Ashley: Wow. That makes a lot of sense. What happened when you quit? You left the job, you’re like, I can’t handle it anymore, it was a Tuesday. What was the next thing that happened?

Dr. Matt: I found refuge, for lack of a better term, at a friend’s, a colleague who I went to chiropractic school with. She lived in Lincoln, Nebraska, so 45 minutes away. And I had a little rental in downtown Omaha that was actually in a really cool place. I never had any time to really enjoy it. I didn’t mention my first job. I was working 75 hours a week. I was really inspired by the work that this clinic was doing in a chiropractic sense, and totally, of course, 27-year-old male that’s just going to take over the whole world, I was like, oh yeah, I don’t need to rest, I don’t need to do that, that’s fine. And I was so inspired by this clinic that I moved to Omaha, Nebraska, in the winter, which I would not recommend.

Ashley: You must have been inspired, because that is not fun.

Dr. Matt: Yeah. And so then when I quit my job, it was just survive mode. I broke my lease, and the only furniture I had was a blow-up mattress that I had borrowed from someone. And I had this little tote, like a storage tote that you’d get from, I don’t know, Home Depot or something. And that storage tote served as my kitchen table. So I’d sit on the floor and I’d put my food on there when I needed to eat. If I needed a chair, I’d just move my food and I’d sit on the tote. I had a tote, I had a blow-up mattress, and I had a $2,000 espresso setup. So, priorities, friends. Priorities. So I took all my stuff, I broke my lease, I had about $200 left to my name. And I stayed at my friend’s, I say on her couch, but they had a guest bedroom, and I nursed myself back to life. It was relearning the basics. I remember my first couple weeks felt really jarring, to go from so stimulated and so stressed to nothing. Not having a job, not feeling like I had a purpose. And I would wake up in the middle of the night a few times a night, feeling like I was late for something, or I had to be at work, or I was missing an event. This panicked state.

Ashley: You’re just in fight or flight 24/7.

Dr. Matt: Yeah. And I slept probably 15 hours a day for the first, I mean, shoot, if I think about it, I probably slept at least 12 hours a day for a month. To make up on lost time. Which, how cool, how intelligent for my body to just say, “Dude, you’re in some serious debt. Time to start making it up.”

Ashley: So when you quit your job and left that day, did you get some sort of diagnosis? Did you go to doctors? What was that journey like?

Dr. Matt: I went to a functional medicine doctor in Omaha who was actually a chiropractor. And it’s interesting, because that umbrella term, functional medicine, you realize it can be a chiropractor who doesn’t really practice chiropractic, it can be a medical doctor, it can be a nurse practitioner. And for people that aren’t familiar with functional medicine, it’s someone that’s practicing health in a way that they’re looking at the body through a lens of restoring health, rather than managing symptoms or sickness. So coming out of chiropractic school, being more holistic minded, I found one locally. Just so happened to be a chiropractor. There weren’t many there in Omaha, I think this might have been the only one. And they saw that I was a fellow chiropractor, so they actually didn’t charge me, which was really kind, because I didn’t have much money anyways. I had about 200 bucks. They didn’t know that. But I got my blood labs from them.

And health also isn’t so black and white. So even when looking at blood labs, there’s different ratios you can look at, there’s different relative normal ranges. And if you give the same results to three different people, they’re likely going to have different interpretations of what that even means. So I found a practitioner that I was taught by in chiropractic school, who was a doctor of natural medicine, similar to a naturopath here in the United States. She’s Canadian. And she looked over my labs and gave me a consult over Zoom, and told me that she thinks I have Graves’ Disease.

Ashley: Graves’ disease. What is that?

Dr. Matt: It’s an autoimmune thyroid diagnosis. So the body attacking itself. And the thyroid is an organ right here in our throat, and it plays a role in a lot of different things. There’s a couple key thyroid hormones that have a big role in things like metabolism, immune function, and hormone regulation in general.

Ashley: So it plays a role in energy, weight gain, weight loss.

Dr. Matt: Exactly. Yes. Body temperature, all those things.

Patrick: So your body was attacking your own thyroid, based on the symptoms and the blood work, correct? Do you recall what your T3 and T4 numbers were, your TSH, all those?

Dr. Matt: I don’t remember exactly, but I’d say, if there’s anyone listening to this, push for more than the traditional test. Because if I would have gone a traditional route, TSH is usually the only thing people are going to test, and my TSH was normal.

Patrick: So your thyroid stimulating hormone looked like it was fine. Your body was saying, hey, make thyroid. But your T3, T4, reverse T3, how your body is utilizing that testosterone, that’s really the question. And, not testosterone. What did I say?

Ashley: You said testosterone.

Patrick: Thyroid hormone. Thyroid. Yeah, I got you.

Dr. Matt: And then the antibodies too. The thyroid antibodies, TPO was, I think, the one for me that was increased, which usually is just an indicator that it’s autoimmune, that your body is attacking itself. And reverse T3 was high with me for quite some time. I think that was the last thing to normalize. I don’t remember exactly what my labs were, but I remember that it wouldn’t have been so clear if I would have gone a traditional route to find something.

Ashley: Well, they probably wouldn’t have dug any deeper than that initial, what is it, TSH.

Dr. Matt: TSH, yeah.

Patrick: And the reverse T3 being high means what?

Dr. Matt: You know, there’s a few different interpretations. And again, this is the hard thing with health. It’s not black and white. Because even from, I don’t even know if you’d say a more woo-woo lens or more mainstream, a lot of what I heard was, oh, there’s an energetic component to that, or it could have been the trauma that I had put in the closet showing up. So it’s not really so clear. Sometimes these tests can be really vague indicators of dysfunction. And a diagnosis in general tells us what. It doesn’t tell us why. So the underneath for me was the lack of sleep, and the stress, and the trauma in my closet. Those were the whys. The what just makes it easy to tell other people, oh, it’s Graves’ disease. It’s a good starting place, because then I don’t have to give you five minutes of the why. I can give it to you in one word, and it’s so much easier as humans to give something in one word. We like labels.

Patrick: We like labels because we like categories. Because if we can categorize it, we understand it. It’s not the unknown.

Dr. Matt: Yes. And then all of a sudden there’s a chemical solution to it, or a surgical solution to it also.

Patrick: What were those chemical and surgical solution potentials?

Dr. Matt: So for mine, the surgery would be, since with Graves’ the thyroid is overactive, versus hypothyroid, or Hashimoto’s, which is typically underactive, or Hashimoto’s will go both sides. So Graves’ being overactive, they say, well, let’s just cut it out. Let’s make an incision right here on the neck, cut your thyroid out, and then, oh yeah, minimally invasive, just cut through your throat. And then we’ll give you the thyroid hormones that your body should naturally be making, since you no longer will be producing them. Or, we’ll give you some radioactive iodine to kill the thyroid.

Ashley: You know, just take some radioactive drugs.

Dr. Matt: Yeah. 27 years old.

Patrick: And I actually know people that have had that surgery. I was talking to a friend just recently, Brian. Actually, y’all know Brian. And he said that he was interviewing someone for his business, and she had a tattoo here on her throat. I think it was a heart. And he asked what that was for. And she said, “Oh, I have Graves’ disease. That was where the surgery was, where they took my thyroid out.” So it’s pretty common that people have this, because they make you think that you need this solution, otherwise you’re screwed.

Ashley: Well, they make it sound like it’s the only solution, and that it’s so harmless. We’re just going to cut it out. That way we can manually manipulate the medications to put you just right where you need to be. Not taking into consideration any potential unintended consequences of that.

Dr. Matt: Exactly. The body’s just a very complex and intelligent thing. And when something vital like that is removed, there’s going to be some other things that are affected by taking it out, and just by taking a medication. Some people have to do that, you know, like if they have thyroid cancer, it gets taken out. The medication’s awesome for things like that.

Ashley: But so you’re saying you found a way. You did not get your thyroid taken out. You found a way to manage or cure Graves’ disease. I’d love to know more about that.

Dr. Matt: Sure. Yeah. And really important, sometimes we talk about word choice, because when you say that, to manage or cure, I love that you even said that. Because in my business, we call them brandable chunks, and written into our language is: we are never broken, and we’re never fixed. And we so often identify as broken or fixed. And it was so easy for me to feel broken when that last straw came down for me, that gut pain in the middle of my shift on a Tuesday afternoon. But then fast forward a year and a half later, and sending this into remission, spoiler alert, there’s the ending of that, and we can talk about that. But I wasn’t fixed. And I’m not fixed. And if I’m not careful, I will easily find myself back to having one foot in the grave. Pun intended.

Ashley: Right. So you’re not fixed, but you’re also not broken.

Dr. Matt: Correct.

Ashley: And that is an important mindset.

Dr. Matt: Yeah. Because we think of health as black and white, at a certain threshold. When we’re fine, we’re fixed, or we have no symptoms. And we think of symptoms, or pain even, generally speaking, like a smoke alarm. It’s a signal. It just lets us know something’s going on underneath the surface. Well, can you have a fire without the alarm going off? Yes, you can. Can you have no smoke, but there’s still a fire? Yes, you can. And we are so infatuated with this alarm that we forget the whole point of the alarm. The point is not to turn the alarm off. That’s not why we made an alarm, to be able to turn it off, or to wave a towel in front of it, or to take the batteries out. The point of the freaking alarm is to tell us there’s a fire. But somehow we forgot that.

Ashley: So, to be grateful for the signal, so that we can do something about it.

Dr. Matt: Exactly. And it’s the story that we’ve somehow reshaped and told ourselves, that this signal is a bad thing instead of a smart one. I thank God when my smoke alarm goes off in my home, because I probably burned something or messed something up, and I need to open the door and put the flame out, and then we’re good.

Ashley: But I get it, the alarm is annoying. So I think we could do both. How do we figure out a way to shut it off, and then how do we find a way to really say, okay, this is what it was trying to alert me to, let me also address this thing. Because we can do both.

Patrick: Such a good point that you make, about our brains trying to get things into a permanent state, versus recognizing the reality that we’re always in a temporary state. You said never broken, never fixed. Is there a corollary to that? On the right path, on the wrong path?

Dr. Matt: Yeah. When you think of a health bank, I think, is an easy way to look at this. It’s depositing. What are we depositing into this? And if we’re overdrafting, that’s when we feel like we’re broken. And when we have a really net positive, that’s where we feel like we’re untouchable. And we actually get used to where we are. There’s a term, baseline resetting. So even when I was in chiropractic school, or in my first job out of school, I would have identified with healthy. If you would have asked me, are you healthy? That’s why I hate that question. How do you know? And it’s always changing. An hour ago it’s different than it is now.

Ashley: Right. You probably would have said, oh yeah, I’m totally healthy. I’m just a little tired.

Dr. Matt: Exactly. Or not even, because I was drinking how many cups of coffee a day?

Patrick: Well, I mean, with a $2,000 espresso setup, can you blame you? You’ve got to run that thing.

Dr. Matt: I’ve got to run that thing. And we get used to it. We get so used to the state. We’re so resilient as humans, almost too resilient. It’s a blessing and a curse. We can push ourselves further and further and further, until there is a straw that finally breaks our back. And this is a concept I really have athletes to thank for. Through working with a lot of athletes through my career, I’ve found that they’re missing a certain word in their vocabulary. The P word. It’s not a bad word, I’m not about to say a bad word. Pain.

Ashley: Pickleball. That’s what I thought you were going to say, actually.

Dr. Matt: So I’m curious if you hear this in pickleball. Do people say shake it off, or keep going, or kind of suck it up?

Ashley: I don’t think so, actually, because I feel like most people that play pickleball are old enough to recognize it’s not worth damaging your body, because you don’t bounce back the same way you used to. So everyone’s like, oh, well, it’s not worth it, let’s just stop playing, it’s fine. But I think that is unique to pickleball. As a kid playing sports growing up, and dads coaching teams and whatnot, shake it off, walk it off, we heard it a million times.

Patrick: Shake it off mentality.

Dr. Matt: Yeah. Which is saying, take the batteries out of the smoke alarm. You’re programmed to hear that so many times, and to ignore the signals enough. It’s like when the check engine light is on in your car. If you see it every freaking day, you forget that it’s on. Or if someone’s telling you to put duct tape on it, it’s not even showing to you. So that’s so prevalent in sports. But then I realized, oh my gosh, it’s kind of all of us, in a way, normalizing. And then health is such a relative thing. We’re comparing ourselves to our friend group, and 60% of our country has a chronic disease. So who we’re comparing ourselves to are really sick people, right?

Ashley: But they’re showing up at happy hour as their best self, and on Instagram, and you’re like, well, I must be the only one struggling. And no one wants to talk about their health issues when you’re out with friends. But once you get to deep dive with people, you start to realize almost everyone is dealing with health issues.

Dr. Matt: Yeah. The illusion of health. I looked so good as a 27-year-old with an autoimmune crisis going on, and at one point my hair literally falling out in chunks. And I remember calling my mom in tears, and feeling so rock bottom and so fatigued. When I went to my friend’s house, I couldn’t walk around the block. I was experiencing so much fatigue. Didn’t feel like I could fall asleep normally, felt so stressed, and then I’d wake up probably four times throughout the night. But I appeared so healthy. I could have gone to a happy hour, to your point, and put on a smiling face and acted just fine. It’s the illusion of health.

Ashley: So to that, let me ask. During that time, when you said you hit your rock bottom, what would you say, if you had to rate it, one to 10? 10 being the worst, one being the best. Or flip it. You know I always do that.

Dr. Matt: Actually, how would you feel if I called you a one right now? Like, you’re a solid one.

Ashley: I mean, I’m number one.

Patrick: You could totally flip it. Reverse it.

Ashley: So let’s just call one the worst, 10 is the best. Perfect 10. At that time, what was your number on a daily basis?

Dr. Matt: Because it was relative to what I’d experienced in my life, I’d have to say it was a one. That was the worst that I had been in my life. And also, I’d say socially, I felt so isolated, other than my friend who was a godsend, who I was staying with and could have good conversations with, who was also in my field, so I could talk about chiropractic. I actually almost thought about giving up being a chiropractor for a little moment of time. I haven’t said that to many people, but I almost considered giving up being a chiropractor.

Patrick: Did you feel like it was contributing to your stress load?

Dr. Matt: Yeah, exactly. Like, how am I going to do this and maintain my health? It just almost doesn’t feel possible. This feels so tough. And I think the common narrative, to answer your question, Patrick, in my field, it’s a really old school profession traditionally. You see a lot of young ones changing the narrative in that, with their branding and their messaging and the cultures they’re creating and their work-life balance. But traditionally, it’s a very old school profession. It’s work hard, play hard, work long hours, earn your spot. And that’s the majority of what I was exposed to. And I thought that it had to be like that.

Ashley: So you didn’t want to, from that perspective of, I’m burnt out, I don’t know exactly what’s wrong with me, I have a nice espresso machine, but other than that I have a blow-up mattress and a tote. It’s the quarter-life crisis kind of thing. And you had the extra straw on the camel’s back of hair falling out. Take us back to that moment. What’s going through your head as you’re seeing chunks of hair come out?

Dr. Matt: Yeah. So my first month, I spent really focusing on foundational things. Good sleep. When I could get back to movement, I did. It was about a month, honestly, before I felt like I could go on walks again.

Ashley: Wow. So walking was kind of your go-to.

Dr. Matt: Yep. Which was important, because I’ve found now, as a clinician, a lot of people want to do a HIIT workout, because that level of stimulation we’re used to when we’re so stressed just feels comfortable to us.

Patrick: Like, I just want to blow off steam. I want to feel like I did something hard. Otherwise, I didn’t really do anything.

Dr. Matt: Exactly. Walking is too boring. And now that’s my favorite form of exercise, honestly. It sounds weird, but it’s walking. But yes, foundational basics, and then eating good food. I remember, if it had a label on it, I didn’t eat it. For the first month, only whole foods, and I got rid of any kind of sugars. Actually got rid of coffee for a month, which I love.

Ashley: But how did you feel, and how quickly did that make a difference for you?

Dr. Matt: Very quick. I mean, 27 years old and doing foundational habits religiously. I was to a T. There was no such thing as a cheat, sugar, coffee. I just didn’t mess with it at all. And I was sleeping. Comedy movies were actually a big part of the initial process. I realized how serious I’d gotten, and Adam Sandler was my favorite childhood actor. So I put on Anger Management, and I remember the scene where he backs into the car on the rooftop and it falls off the roof, and I laughed so hard for the first time in probably years. And I realized, wow, I’ve become really serious.

Ashley: Too serious. Oh, did you see his Netflix special? It was, how many years ago? Probably close to 10 years ago now that he put it out. Probably eight. What was it called, Patrick?

Patrick: Oh, God. I think it’s maybe 100% Fresh.

Ashley: Yeah, I think that might be it. So I love some of the Adam Sandler movies too. He’s made some that were not so great, but the good ones are the good ones. When I watched his special, I think we watched it maybe six or seven times. Every time someone would come over, we were like, we’ve got to watch this, because it’s totally old school. You’re going to love it. Just put it on, and you’re welcome. Okay, so, you managed everything through basically food. Any kind of supplements you threw in there?

Dr. Matt: Yeah. I think for the first month, I didn’t mess with anything. And then after a month, I moved to, well, I moved, to a few places. Which, by the way, moving is one of the most stressful things you can go through, and I didn’t even realize.

Patrick: Four-letter word, to move.

Dr. Matt: Yeah, there you go, exactly. And I counted back, I think I’ve moved 12 times in the last eight years.

Ashley: Oh, there’s one of the big stressors on my list, too. 12 of them.

Dr. Matt: Yeah, 12 of them, exactly. They accumulate. So it was one month in Nebraska. Then I moved to Dallas, because that was kind of my gateway to Texas. I knew I wanted to go back to Texas. I live in Austin now. And in Dallas, I have an uncle who does construction. I did a few blue-collar jobs growing up, but I had never done construction. So I helped do that part-time to make a little bit of money, so I had more than $200 to my name. And that’s where I noticed my hair was falling out. I remember calling my mom in tears, like, I don’t know what’s going on, I don’t know what to do. And my mom was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s. So it was really cool, I got really close with my mom through that time, through literally daily phone calls. She had been diagnosed with Hashimoto’s, which is also a thyroid-related condition. It’s underproducing thyroid hormone. Typically Hashimoto’s will kind of bounce back and forth, but typically settles with hypo, which is underproducing thyroid hormone. And she had been diagnosed for about 10 years. So even when I was in high school, I remember we used to make fun of her for eating gluten-free, and for baking things with monk fruit as a sweetener, or stevia, instead of all the sugar and flour that we were used to. And I remember looking back at an Instagram post that I had made when I was in Omaha. I put, “gluten tastes so good.” And I used to poke fun at people that would eat gluten-free. A few months after that, I stopped eating gluten. And I haven’t since. It’s been like eight years.

Ashley: Oh, goodness.

Dr. Matt: So there were a lot of little changes. But I ended up with all these different supplement protocols at a certain point that I started doing.

Patrick: Any standout supplements that you could say have helped more than others? That you’re still doing? Like, all right, I tried these, those didn’t work. I tried these, these do work.

Dr. Matt: Yeah. I’m going to take a little bit different stance.

Patrick: Oh, yeah. Please.

Dr. Matt: So, when we talk about this health bank, here’s what I found, and what I lived personally, too. I think we’re so sold on this idea that supplements are the first thing that we should take. There’s a little bit of an order problem here. And I’d say that supplements are really good pennies to add back to our health bank. Really good pennies. And yes, I’ll answer your question, I did find some really good supplements and different lines that I’d take and trust. But I think we’ve forgotten about the dollars. And I think when we’re getting robbed of the dollars, we’re all arguing over the pennies. And I love the pennies. I’m a nerd about the pennies. I have a freaking PEMF mat in my home office. I’ve got the Eight Sleep on my mattress. I’ve got the Oura ring on my finger. I’ve got all the pennies, and I love them. But where are we talking about the dollars, people? Because these things will never change. We call them in my office the Core Four, the foundational things that never change. Sleep, stress, movement, toxins. And until we address those, why the hell are we so concerned about the pennies? So, I dabbled with a ton of supplements. But the biggest thing by far that changed my life was committing to those four things for a period of time that was long enough for my body to heal. Which was a year.

Ashley: I mean, I have chill bumps right now, because that is absolutely true. I feel it in my soul. And I think that’s just not what we are taught in our culture. So I love that you’re teaching that, and you’re teaching that in your clinic. For someone who maybe has been diagnosed with Graves’ disease, or some sort of autoimmune, which is so many people, or some people that are suspicious that maybe they have that, and maybe they don’t have a functional medicine doctor, or they don’t have the money to go see one because they don’t take insurance, and they feel a little lost. What would you say? I mean, probably those four core principles, but where to start?

Dr. Matt: Yeah. This means so much to me, because I lived it, and now I’ve named it. It’s the specialist shuffle. So many people are lost in this specialist shuffle, and we see the body so isolated and so segmented that we forget about how interconnected the body is, and really how miraculous it is, and how it’s designed to heal. So I think reclaiming our power is the first thing. Just understanding and remembering, oh yeah, there’s a real intelligence within my body, and it’s designed to heal, and it can heal, and it will heal.

And I think the first barrier for most people that I’ve seen is time. We have this urgency, because there’s things we want to do, and we want to do them yesterday. We want to run the next marathon on our list, or we want to get back to work, or we feel like we’re sitting on the sideline. If it’s a pro athlete, it’s, I have to sit out one season? I’ve worked my entire life for this. I don’t want to sit on the sidelines. So I think the first thing is just accepting this is going to take some time, and maybe a little longer than I thought. Because it took longer than one night. It wasn’t the pillow that messed your neck up. It wasn’t the mattress that gave you back pain. It wasn’t the one donut that gave me metabolic dysfunction or pain in my gut. It wasn’t one donut, right? It was years of that stuff. So I think the time is the biggest thing to address.

And then from there, I go with sleep first. Because I’m a nervous system guy. In my office, we say the nervous system’s the star of the show. Really, our brain and our gut. If you can control those two things, everything heals. And I start with the brain first, personally, because it’s the wiring system. The brain, the spinal cord, the nerves, they control everything. So sleep is the most important thing we can do for our brain. And eight hours a night, like you said, is ideal. Seven hours minimum, no excuses. And there’s seasons of life where we might need a little bit more.

Ashley: Yeah. Definitely times of stress. And you know, that’s why we feel so tired and run down when we’re under emotional stress. It’s like, listen to your body. Make time to figure out how to get some more rest.

Dr. Matt: Yeah. And there’s a phrase, actually, that I think is important for people going through this too. Because we hear socially, don’t be lazy, do something. There’s a guy, Thich Nhat Hanh, who’s a Buddhist author, and I remember seeing a quote from him once and thinking, oh, that’s really good. That holds so much weight, especially right now. He says, in the Western world, we can’t sit still. We’re always doing something. There’s a saying: don’t just sit there, do something. But his premise was that here, often the opposite is more important. Don’t just do something, sit there. That’s the Eastern world. And he’s saying we should implement more of that into our lives. Stillness, slowness, rest. And when you look at a lot of spiritual and religious practices, and I don’t know where people stand, if you’re spiritual or religious, you have moments of rest that are built in. And nature is always somehow a component of that, too. And we’ve lost sight, again, of how we are living beings.

Patrick: We’re not just this tech thing we plug into a wall.

Ashley: Exactly. And I was talking to Patrick over the weekend about something we’ve been personally working on trying to get better at. Stillness. Rest. What does that look like? Because for so long we’ve been like, okay, we’re going to relax, we’re going to watch Netflix. Or, let’s go on a walk and talk about business. Let’s read a business book or a health book. Are all of those things really rest for our nervous system, or not?

Dr. Matt: It’s a great question. If it’s productive, is it really resting? Or if it’s zoning out on Netflix, is it really resting? One of my favorite sayings, and I’m not even going to answer your question, I’m just going to give a statement and let people decide for themselves: what’s often productive for our schedules is not productive for our health. Or, what’s often productive for our business is not productive for our health. So if we say, well, I want to be productive, okay, for which one? For our business, or for our health? We can choose both, but it’s a real conscious effort. And for me, I struggle just as much as anyone else. I’m just as human as anyone else, and I love toeing the line. I always have, and I probably always will. I’ll have slightly more coffee than I should, or sometimes eat foods that I love that maybe I shouldn’t, or want to stay up late, or want to overschedule my life. So I’ve found that building more of a designed life is helpful for me. I leave room for some spontaneity in there, but having enough structure where I’ll do one week a quarter to just have kind of a lockdown, to not do anything, to recharge. That’s ideal for me. Otherwise, I won’t.

Ashley: Okay, so, question. When you do your recharge, what kind of activities are you doing?

Dr. Matt: I talk to friends on the phone. Being in community is so important for us, so I’ll catch up with friends I haven’t in a while. I go on walks, I go on hikes. I’m going to Asheville, North Carolina in a couple weeks, and that’s where I’m doing my recharge this time. I don’t always go somewhere, but for me it’s helpful if I’m somewhere in nature where I feel really inspired. And I’ll stop on hikes and just reflect, or just sit there for a little bit. And it’s usually really uncomfortable, by the way. And I don’t think enough people talk about that. Because when we go from so stimulated, drinking cold brew, going from thing to thing, to the middle of nowhere, and it’s really beautiful, my thoughts usually are, wow, this is incredible, but I’m having a really tough time. I feel like I can’t sit still, and I want to check my phone every two minutes, and I want to move. I was in Boulder last fall when I did this. And it was alarming to me, because I hadn’t been taking enough recharges. And I ran for about two miles, just to feel enough, because I didn’t feel enough stimulation. It was so quiet. I was in the most beautiful place, but it was really uncomfortable. So I just ran. And I hate running.

Ashley: Yeah, me too. You must have been desperate.

Dr. Matt: I was. I was like, I need to feel something.

Patrick: What happened at the end of the two miles?

Dr. Matt: I settled.

Ashley: What an amazing way to get to know yourself more and push those edges. I love the recharge, making time once a quarter. Maybe a lot of people can’t do a whole week if you don’t work for yourself, but even doing a whole day that’s unplugged from things, figuring out how to make time for it, seems really good. I think I’m going to noodle on how to do that in my life.

Patrick: You quoted, I don’t recall the name, but you said, don’t just do something, sit there. What was the name?

Dr. Matt: Thich Nhat Hanh. T-h-i-c-h, N-h-a-t, H-a-n-h. I think so.

Patrick: I love the mirror-ness of that. You know, don’t just sit there, do something, flipped into don’t just do something, sit there. That hit me, because, very busy body. And, well, Twitter is so tempting, you know. Ash and I were talking about this over the weekend, where my inbox is sort of stuff that I’ve got to do, so I don’t really like going to my inbox. But Twitter is a Charlie’s Chocolate Factory of new facts and amazing things that the algorithm knows I’m going to like to learn about. And it’s not doom scrolling, because I don’t feel stressed out about it. I’m just like, oh, that’s neat, that’s neat, that’s neat. But it’s the dopamine stimulation. And to just sit there and do nothing kind of has an appeal.

Ashley: How do you feel about reading, though? Like a specific kind of book. Can that also be part of doing nothing, if it’s a book that makes you happy?

Dr. Matt: Yeah. I mean, I read a lot of non-fiction, honestly. And for me, again, I feel like I freaking can’t. I don’t want to go read fiction. That’s not enough for me. I need a little bit of something. I need to toe the line. So I’ll bring a textbook sometimes, honestly, and read a science-y textbook.

Ashley: You’re so nerdy.

Dr. Matt: I know. But I love that. Or a business book, or an audiobook that I’ll listen to. So that counts as recharge too, for me. I’ll go on a walk and listen to the nerdy stuff in my ears.

Patrick: That’s a good point, because Ash was saying, I can’t do business podcasts or whatever. And I’m like, but I enjoy those.

Ashley: But it also then gets the wheels turning, of, oh, maybe we should implement that. And you’re like, well, that’s not really resting now. That’s just another form of working. How do you determine for yourself, this is rest material versus this is work material?

Dr. Matt: Yeah, good question. And it’s hard, I think, because I feel like y’all would probably have a similar answer. I love what I do. It doesn’t feel like working, and it’s easy to toe the line even on a weekend or an off day. It’s like, well, I’m supposed to be off during these hours, but this doesn’t really feel like that much. So, to answer your question, I’ll take notes. If I’m listening to a business book or something health-related and I think, oh, I like the way they delivered that, or I want to look more into that, I keep a note in my notes app and take some notes on it. But I won’t actively go on my computer. Same thing, I won’t go into my home office. I have a room where, when I’m in there, I’m working. I’m only working. And it’s easy for me. When I’m working, I’m working. When I’m not, I’m not. And sometimes I do a little bit of stuff that seems work-related, but I’m also good at not working. I’ve gotten a lot better at it.

Ashley: So, kind of similar to what you said earlier about health, it’s not necessarily black and white. It’s shades of gray. I think intuitively you know if you’re doing something that is stimulating you in a non-resting way, or if you’re just doing something you enjoy. So it is an individual approach. That’s what I’m getting from this.

Dr. Matt: Totally. And I feel like letting ourselves not be perfect is important. Because I think a lot of what we want to show people is that we’re perfect in some way, or that we’re fine, or that we’re healthy in some way. And I think it just gives, like what you were saying earlier, Ashley, almost a false narrative. Really, all of us have something health-related.

Ashley: And one amazing thing about being quiet, being still, spending time doing nothing, is that you do start to learn to listen to your body more. And your body is talking to you all the time. Do you need more rest? What nourishment do you need? Where is your heart pulling you to? Helping you solve problems. It’s not necessarily up here, it’s more in the body a lot of times. But we don’t really pay attention to our bodies, because we’re go, go, go, thinking about all these external things all the time. So it does force you to kind of reconnect with yourself, and then be able to tap into that intuition that we all have inside.

Dr. Matt: Yeah, exactly. And there’s actually something, when you think of a kid that burns their hand, the first thing they’ll do is pull their hand away. It’s a reflexive response. You don’t have to tell them to. And they’ll shake it. Movement overrides pain, neurologically. And when we’re moving, it’s a similar mechanism. We tend to not feel so much of what’s going on in our body if we’re always moving. So what’s a blessing can also be a curse. If we’re always ignoring it, or always overriding it, then it can be a curse. You only take the batteries out of the smoke alarm so much. Or that towel trick is really cool, how it turns the alarm off. But if you do that all the time, again and again, the fire’s getting bigger. You’ve got to address it at some point. And I’m not saying I’m perfect. I know how to shut the alarm off.

Ashley: I feel like it’s helpful sometimes to learn the little hacks or the little tricks. Which, by the way, those are the things that are all over social media. There’s not a lot of people talking about the foundational health habits, and how to utilize those in a way to restore health. Any of those you can throw at us right now?

Dr. Matt: Yeah. So, sleep, eight hours, first. Movement, 10,000 steps, roughly. I mean, 7,500, really, metabolically, is where you get the max benefit. But if you’re working from home like us, I think closer to 10 to 12,000 a day is ideal. And not just in one long walk to get all your steps. We’re meant to have little bursts of movement throughout the day, not be sitting in a chair the entire day. Which sometimes is hard. And I’ve worn a continuous glucose monitor this year, on my arm, every month, to track my blood sugar spikes.

Ashley: I’ve been wanting to do that. What brand do you recommend?

Dr. Matt: Lingo.

Ashley: Lingo. Okay.

Dr. Matt: And this is really cool. The last one I’ll hit really quick, before we go back to the glucose monitor, is stress. Reducing stress, which is hard. And for me, the thing that I tend to do, my favorite flavor of stress, is to overschedule my life, or to be overstimulated. That’s stress. So sometimes I’ll put a chunk on my calendar where it’s just, do nothing. It feels like jail time, but it’s helpful. It’s productive for my health.

Ashley: You’re putting yourself in timeout.

Dr. Matt: Yeah, I put myself in timeout.

Ashley: You know what? We need that as adults, too, it turns out. So, the blood glucose monitor.

Dr. Matt: Highly recommend it. It is so cool. Lingo is good because they don’t break. I wore this other one that would break after two days, or not work after two days. Lingo is a continuous glucose monitor. They’re over the counter now. It costs $90, I think, for a month’s worth of data. So you can just go into Walgreens and get one, or online.

Ashley: Online. Okay.

Dr. Matt: Yep. And it is amazing to see, again, what’s underneath the surface. And we’re big on data in my office. I think you both wear an Oura ring?

Ashley: No, not me, but Patrick loves it.

Patrick: I’ve got one, yeah.

Dr. Matt: So I’d say data is the bridge from how we feel, which is how most of us are measuring our health, to how we’re functioning. Data gives us some insight into what’s underneath the surface. And again, what’s a blessing can be a curse. We can overdo it with data, or we can look at the wrong numbers, or, what are the right numbers? We’re all going to argue over that. We can obsess over it if we’re not careful. Certain personality types.

Ashley: Which is maybe why I don’t have one yet. I’m like, you know, I’ve got enough going on in my mind. I don’t necessarily need that at this time. But I am feeling ready for the glucose monitor, because I know how important keeping your blood sugar in line is. Because when you have those insulin spikes, it causes inflammation in the body.

Dr. Matt: Totally. And glycation, which is sugar coating the cells, which is aging. When you look at what AGE stands for, advanced glycation end products. It actually alters the structure of even collagen. So when we talk about people wanting to look younger, why is nobody talking about what’s actually aging us? Every time we get a glucose spike, that’s where aging comes from. And a fructose spike. If it’s something sweet that we’re eating, we have an associated fructose spike with it, there’s fructose in the sweet foods that we eat. They say that’s 10 times the amount of glycation. So again, we are damaging through foundational things. We’re getting robbed of dollars, but then, let me just use some Botox, which is some pennies that I’m going to add back in.

Ashley: Yeah. Come on.

Dr. Matt: I know. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Patrick: So how many days in a row do you wear the monitor?

Dr. Matt: For 15.

Patrick: And you just put it on once, it stays on?

Dr. Matt: Yes. Two weeks. 14, maybe 15 days. And I didn’t realize, for years I’ve had some signs of insulin resistance, for sure. I’m 35 years old right now, but for years I ate the worst things you can possibly think of. Growing up, it was Bagel Bites, Costco stuff, pizza pockets, whatever. Doritos, Oreos, the Twinkies, the sugary drinks, everything. Soda. I’d have at least one 20-ounce soda a day for years. Probably the first 25 years of my life was the worst diet. If you wanted to poison someone, feed them that diet. That’s what I did for 25 years.

Ashley: Well, that definitely contributed to the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Dr. Matt: That was a contributor, too. I forget all the things from the years prior.

Ashley: So when you started using the monitor, what were some of the surprising things that you noticed? It’s like an app on your phone, it tells you what you ate, did it stabilize, did it spike. You get to see all that data in real time, basically.

Dr. Matt: Yep. So, the illusion of health is all around us. Marketing is very good at showing us that things are healthy, and we’ll put the air quotes on it again. That’s why I don’t like the word. Because who says that it’s healthy? If I eat something that’s “healthy,” I like the healthy sweets, so I’ll just go ham on those, and then I get a blood glucose spike. And sugar in the body, it’s handling it the same. It doesn’t matter if it’s, I mean, it does relatively. I’d take the intelligent forms of sugar that are natural over white sugar. But the body doesn’t actually know any different. It’s doing the same things. It’s doing the same damage underneath the surface. And we don’t talk about that so much.

So if you can see it, and learn some basics about what it’s doing. There’s a really good book, Glucose Revolution, and an Instagram account, Glucose Goddess. She’s become known for all of these things, and her stuff is awesome. And her book is a really easy, simple, like a six-hour audiobook listen. If you buy that book, get a glucose monitor, and then track the basics, even with a smart ring. I’m a firm believer you can reverse just about anything. And I like the smart ring because, so, the Core Four. Here’s how we track them. The ring that we’ve got on: we can measure stress through HRV, and we can measure sleep. So there’s two of the four right there. Steps, there’s three of the four. And then the fourth one, with the glucose monitor. And the results we’re getting right now clinically, even through simplifying and really going all in on these foundational things, is miraculous. And the people that are caught in this specialist shuffle, it’s not just people you’d think of, like, oh, my parents, or my aunt, or my uncle. Young 20-something-year-olds, 30-something-year-olds, pro athletes even.

Ashley: Even younger. Teens.

Dr. Matt: Yeah, even younger.

Ashley: This is really exciting to me, because it’s an actionable step that most people can afford. At least the glucose monitor, maybe a ring later on.

Patrick: I’ve gotten the Chinese knockoffs of the Oura ring. They work. You can buy the cheap ones for 50 bucks.

Ashley: So, by just looking at, eat how you normally would, and then take a look at that and see where things are, and then start making adjustments based on where the spikes are.

Dr. Matt: Yep. You’ll see miraculous changes in your health. And I’m going to put it this way, because here’s how we tell the story with humans. It’s like, really, you’re telling me that you can do this? So let me tell you this also. If you have a plant that’s withering, but it’s in a dark closet, and you’re giving it all these chemicals, you’re trying all these even natural powders, the organic powders even, in this dark closet. What if I told you, you can move this plant in front of the window, and if you just start watering it every day, it’s going to take some time, but this thing is going to come back to life. And you’re going to look at me like I’m a little bit crazy, because all anyone’s ever told you is that this plant in the closet just needs the healthy chemicals and it’ll come back to life. And I’m over here saying, yo, we’re not even looking at it right. Let’s put it by the window, and let’s just talk sweet to it a little bit, and let’s give it some water, and give it maybe a year. And then, damn, this thing’s going to grow back again.

Ashley: Yeah, that’s a great analogy. Well, I know I’m getting both of those things now. I’m completely sold. And I’m totally intrigued to know, what were some of the things that you thought were healthy, when you put on the monitor, that happened to spike your blood sugar?

Dr. Matt: So, order. If you read this book, you’ll learn that the order of food really matters. And without going too far into it, fiber is kind of a buffer. Fiber first, then protein and fats. Carbs really should come last. And that’s why dessert is actually much better than just having a sweet snack. So for me, one of the spikes was having a sweet snack. I didn’t realize that sugar in isolation, without something to buffer it, was going to give me an immediate spike. And I was actually always getting hungry. And you see, I’m thin. I just attributed it to a fast metabolism. I do have a fast metabolism, but it was food cravings I was getting. I was always hungry, because I didn’t have the feeling of getting all the nutrients from my food. And when you have a spike, you have an associated crash after. And after the crash is usually when you get food cravings, or you’ll feel hungry, or extra hungry, because when it’s low, your body’s alerting you: hey, eat something. And it would kind of come back to a normal baseline. But I didn’t realize that how I was eating, more than what I was eating, was my problem.

Ashley: And, sorry, in what order? How were you doing it wrong?

Dr. Matt: I was eating carbs, or sweets, in isolation, without fat or protein.

Ashley: And most of the snack foods out there are carb heavy.

Dr. Matt: And even when you go out to restaurants, you realize eating out is a real challenge. And for me, I’m always on the go, and my life is really all over the place, in a good way. I love it. I love the organized chaos. But I eat out a lot. And in Austin, I’ve got the good, healthy, again, I’m going to put air quotes every time I say healthy, healthier options and good foods. But you realize, if you look at the macros of what’s on your plate, it’s more carbs than anything. Protein is more expensive, so naturally there’s going to be less of it. And a lot of times they’re just not giving you as many vegetables. So that’s where learning how to order when eating out comes in. Having a salad first, or vegetables first. We’ll order, going out now, a side of broccoli. Eat that first, and then you can even eat a pizza.

Ashley: And it’s not going to spike you in the same way. Ah, interesting. Okay. So fiber first, then protein, then carbs, if you can.

Dr. Matt: Protein and fat go together as the second one, and then the carbs and sweets at the end. And everyone’s going to have a different amount. I’m more sensitive to carbs, because of 25 years of crap in my body. I have friends from chiropractic school, chiro kids they call them, that were raised by chiropractors. Many of them never had vaccines in their life, and they’ve always had this type of natural lifestyle, where the plant’s always been by the window and it’s always been watered from a young age. And you build so much resilience. And I got to see, through data again, the miraculous nature of what resilience really is. When I compared my glucose curves to someone who had lived this natural way, this other individual could get away with so much more, because the body’s just more resilient to it. And I was so jealous. I still am. Envious, like, what the heck. You can put pizza and all this crap into your body, and I have, I don’t know, a slice of the gluten-free and dairy-free pizza that’s all organic, and I have one slice of it in isolation, and I’m spiked, and you can have four of them and you’re fine. What the heck?

Ashley: Everybody’s different.

Patrick: Well, because the terrain is different.

Dr. Matt: The terrain is different. Yeah. And it’s easy to generalize health concepts, but you really see the cumulative nature of health when you look at two people’s data side by side. It’s easier to see, oh, there’s years’ worth of health habits, again, in the health bank. Someone like the person I’m mentioning, who had good habits, deposited for years. It’s like investing. Huge compounding interest. So even making big withdrawals is not going to do that much to this person. And me, I’ve been over here in debt my whole life, just taking and taking and taking, working to get back to zero. Which many of us do. Just working for years to try to even get back to zero. And then when we do, it’s like, okay, now I’m fixed, I’m going to withdraw more. And, well, then we’re right back to that negative balance.

Ashley: Gosh, that makes a lot of sense. Well, I think the key takeaway for me from this conversation is, get a glucose monitor. I’m going to get the one you recommended, and I’m going to see what’s going on for myself. It’s just highly personal, which is amazing. And the fix is food. So it’s not like you have to go pay to see a specialist right now, or take these expensive supplements, or any of the other modalities, magic cures that are out there. Let’s just start with the basics. Let’s put our plant by the window. Patrick, I like that for sure.

Dr. Matt: Well, I was going to say, I’ve even gone so far as saying that. I had a guy who flew in to see me in Austin, which has started happening more and more, for people caught in a specialist shuffle, trying to figure out how to get out of it. And I recently talked to this individual on the phone and was doing an audit of their data. When you can measure it, you can manage it. And it’s really simple. And it was sleep and movement. I think most people, if they’re experiencing even physical pain, you control these simple variables, your pain will go away. So I honestly think that if chiropractors were just working to relieve pain, which many of them are, and that’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with that, most would lose the majority of their business if people were owning these four things. So we even try to teach people in my office, because our office isn’t about pain where I’m at. It’s health and health restoration. And you see all the things change when you deal with restoring health from the ground up. It’s like, again, the plant. If it gets water and sunlight, maybe your one targeted response is, oh, I want the brown leaves to turn green. But in the process, you also happen to change the soil, and you change the root, and you change the trunk. We think of it so segmented, but when you bring health back to it, actually all the things start to clear up, which is really cool. So you notice, with this simple framework, all the things start to get a little bit better. It’s not just, oh, I’m going to do this for my hair loss, and this for my energy, and this for my sleep, and take this for this and this for that. It is all so interconnected.

Ashley: Gosh, amazing words of wisdom there. I think a lot of people have a misconception about chiropractors, that you only go, and this was me, okay, you only go to a chiropractor when you throw your back out, or you have neck pain, or something like that. And what you’re telling me is your focus is really more on resetting the nervous system. Getting the frame of the body back in line. If there’s something out of balance, it can cause blockages, so your energy and everything is not flowing the way it should. But really, it’s much more than a snap, crackle, pop. What is the process like when someone comes in to see you?

Dr. Matt: Yeah, great question. I’m making a comeback to YouTube right now, and I hate that I’m even going to say this, but I’m going to say it here. My marketing coach, my business coach, calls it the boob tube right now. There was even a reality show where this guy is watching chiropractic videos and his boss comes in and is like, what are you watching? You’re in trouble. And he’s like, oh, it’s just chiropractic videos. Because there’s all these women in athleisure, and in Austin, athleisure, they’re not wearing much. And on my channel, we didn’t tell them what to wear. They were wearing what they were wearing. But then you see all these chiropractors follow suit, and it’s just turned into a reality TV show that is not so great. Bringing it full circle, though, back to YouTube: Beyond the Crack was the name of the series. The whole point of even saying that is because there’s so much more to chiropractic than cracking or popping. And it’s turned into that because people love the noise, and they’re fun to watch, those videos. But it’s a joke. And it’s turned the profession, I think, in my opinion, largely into a laughingstock.

Chiropractic initially was founded on restoration of health through an optimally functioning nervous system. And testing was used to figure out where in the spine there were these little alterations. We use a technical term as chiropractors, subluxations. It’s almost like a distortion of the spinal cord, where it messes with the signaling of the nervous system. And again, instead of so black and white, instead of, oh, I put my arm out and hit the table funny and now that messed with my signaling, or a pillow. No, come on. We’d be extinct. Honestly, if pillows were causing all of our neck problems, we would be extinct.

Patrick: That’s a good little sound bite right there.

Dr. Matt: We really would. Seriously. So we look at it more in the cumulative nature. If you can measure it, you can manage it. So we measure the nervous system through our INSiGHT scans, three separate scans, to look at how healthy the nervous system is. And to really simplify, I’m going to oversimplify it to make it easy, but there are three key branches. One is sensory. All the information, our alarm system, essentially, that controls pain, tingling, numbness, or burning. That’s meant to be feedback from our environment, where we are in space, if we’re experiencing pain. The other key ones are motor, or movement, how our body is moving in space. Every muscle needs a nerve signal to work. And the autonomic, which is all of our organs. So we can measure that through a couple scans, and we can see how well the nervous system is functioning. And that’s really key, to give us enough data to figure out how deep the roots go. How deeply rooted is someone’s challenge or problem? Because without that, we don’t know. We’re mostly guessing.

And when you do this enough, just from talking to someone, you start to see patterns. If someone’s been through 12 moves, we’ll use me, and they’ve had a past autoimmune diagnosis, and they’ve had this and this and this, it’s going to take a lot longer. So we can really pinpoint a better roadmap for healing in front of them, based on what they’ve been through and the scans. We can see how deep the roots go. And then from there, we design a series of adjustments based on the data we’re finding. And these adjustments are beyond the crack, more geared toward restoring balance to the nervous system.

I actually have a diagram that I just made. When someone gets their report after these scans, it’s an iceberg. On the tip of the iceberg is where we write all their symptoms that seem so unrelated. It’s the knee pain, and the foot pain, and the back pain. Oh, and the things that I didn’t even realize were going on that you dug out of me. Like, I’m actually not sleeping more than six hours at night, and I haven’t for two years. My fatigue is killing me, but it’s okay, because I drink four coffees throughout the day. And I’m on testosterone medication as well. Oh, and my digestion. Yeah, I only have a bowel movement every three days. Put all those, that’s the tip of the iceberg. And the underneath looks really similar to what mine was, on most of us. It’s sleep debt for years. It’s high stress levels. It’s eating crappy foods. And usually there’s some kind of a fender bender that we shook off, that we didn’t feel injured in, or something that we put in the closet. That’s the formula underneath the iceberg. And then the one diagnosis that we give people, and I’m spilling the beans here, because it’s written in the report, so it feels personal, but it’s what we do in my office: nervous system imbalance. That’s the diagnosis. But we want a diagnosis, so I’ll play the game. To me, that’s the diagnosis that interconnects the whole damn thing. And instead of 20 bulbs, and we change all the bulbs, why not flip one switch, and all 20 bulbs come back online?

Ashley: That makes a lot of sense to me.

Patrick: Yes. Yes, indeed. I have a number of questions.

Dr. Matt: Sorry, I know, I went…

Patrick: No, this is great. In your Core Four, we’ve talked a lot about sleep, stress, and movement, but we didn’t talk much about toxins. Could you touch on that a little bit?

Dr. Matt: Sure. That’s the blood sugar spikes, mostly, I’d say. Toxins, in the biggest form, is what we’re doing to ourselves, self-induced, through food and drinks. And they’re hidden a lot of times, right? In dressings, and things we put in our coffee, or whatever. And then outside of that, some of the pennies that do matter, that are big, and y’all probably do these in your own life too: the household cleaners, what you use in your home, or the candles that you use. And I love what your brand is about, from what’s on your shirt to what you put on your social media. I remember the first time we played pickleball. There’s a phrase that I’ve used for years: these are our people. And I looked at who was with me that day, and, y’all didn’t hear this from me, but I said, these are our people. Meaning, they live a life just like us. They don’t use the toxic stuff, down to the ingredients in your supplements. I know a brand that I can trust. It’s like, oh, I can breathe, because whatever they put out, I can get behind, and I know I can trust them, and I know that they’re in it for the right reasons. They’re not going to sell the company for $2 billion like Poppi just did. What the hell is that all about? So much for a legacy.

Patrick: Well, on that note, this almost might be kind of a closing note, but maybe that’s the right time. So, when we met, about three months ago or so, friend of a friend, Brian Eisenberg, shout out to Brian. And he was like, you guys are going to hit it off. And we definitely did. But you telling us a little bit about this story, your health challenge, maybe about a week later or so, that rolled around in my subconscious for a while. And you, and that story, were actually one of the inspirations for this Rock Bottom podcast.

Dr. Matt: All right, that’s awesome.

Patrick: Thank you for being one of our first guests.

Ashley: Yeah. I was like, it’s too bad that we’re not going to get to interview Dr. Matt on the show that he helped to inspire, because he lives in Austin and we’re here in Arizona. And I was like, oh, how are we going to ever connect again? Literally, I was thinking, well, maybe when he comes back around Christmas time next year. But then you reached out to me last week, and the universe was like, now’s the time. Maybe now’s the time to help us launch this show, to help us launch this series. So we really are delighted that you have shared what you shared. And I don’t fully want to close the show yet, because I actually want to go back to your Graves’ disease. And I think this is maybe the way to put a button on it. You talked to your chiropractic friend that was in Canada, she helped give you a label. You found out, and I think really discovered the Core Four things for yourself. Was there a moment of freedom, of release, of, I beat it?

Patrick: Empowerment.

Ashley: Empowerment. Walk us to the, not that it’s a finish line, because that’s the wrong way to say it, but there was a moment of light. Inspiration. I’m headed down the right path.

Dr. Matt: Yeah. No, this is so good. There’s a lot. I’ll try to make it simple. There were actually a few times that I celebrated, that I thought the finish line was only five meters in front of me, and then you realize it’s 100 meters. Then you realize, oh, it’s never-ending. The race keeps running. So, years of experience have helped me find that there actually is no end. I first thought it was so short. After about a month of these habits, I would feel really good, and I would go out. I was 27 years old, and happy hour was what we did. So I’d go out with a friend to a happy hour, I’d have a beer or two or three, and I would feel like I was right back at the beginning of where I was. And for probably three months, I did that. I would get better, fall back. Get better, fall back. Get better, fall back. And then I was like, shoot, well, that’s not working. I’ve got to do something different.

So I told myself, and I found it was helpful for me, giving myself a timeline. I was so upset. I was like, is this going to be the rest of my life? This sucks. And my whole life looked so different. My whole identity at the time, being a chiropractor, I thought I was this image of health, and now I feel like I’m broken. And my family, of all people, were some of the ones making little jabs, like, oh, you’ve got to eat different, oh, you’re so picky. And I’m like, it’s not picky, it’s my health. So I gave myself a year. I said, I’m just going to commit to a year of this, and I’m going to see what happens. And after about eight months was when I was like, oh, this is different. This is a different body. This is actually even better than I had felt before I ever had a diagnosis.

Ashley: Right. When you thought you were healthy.

Dr. Matt: Exactly. Which is the irony. So much better. And then I got ongoing checkup tests with my blood work, just to see where my levels were underneath things. And it was about a year that things really normalized. A year to a year and a half, where I hit the status of, where you’d say, remission. And it was incredibly freeing. In that moment, I actually felt fixed. And the way that I even told the story, when I look back at some of the podcasts I did earlier in my career, it was like I was fixed. And I didn’t yet find out what I didn’t know, until I toed the line enough through my career that I found myself regressing at times a little bit. I wouldn’t regress enough to go back to where I was. I never would, and I never have. But being a line-toer, I regressed enough to still feel some of the effects and some of the symptoms, where the fatigue would come back, or my sleep would be really off. And I came to realize, after my good habits would come back, oh, I can get back to a good place. So then I’m like, oh, it’s actually literally never-ending. It’s just finding where the bumpers are, and staying in between them.

Ashley: It’s all choices that you make, right?

Dr. Matt: Yeah. And continue to make. And I’m writing a book on all this. It’s almost done. It’s Stepping Out of the Grave. Brian, Brian Eisenberg, you got the shout-outs today, was the one that really nudged that into existence, because he’s like, hey, so many people can benefit from this. And the more I’ve written, and it’s almost done, I’m seeing these are the same narratives that I’m seeing daily or weekly. No matter the diagnosis or the symptoms, it all comes down to the same four core principles. It’s like flavors of ice cream, almost. You have all these different flavors, but underneath, it’s the same ingredients in the ice cream. You just change one slightly. Which is great news for all of us, because it’s much better than just wondering, why is everyone so sick, and why are there no solutions? It’s like, oh, actually there are, and they’re quite simple, and they’re not expensive. But you don’t hear it that much. So, again, I’m glad that y’all are even doing this, and I’m excited to listen to other people’s stories too, and probably see a lot of patterns. And I liked the things you sent over to kind of prime people for what you’re going to talk about, because I think you’ll find a lot of similarities and patterns, for some of the things that were maybe hidden in the closet or hidden under the bed.

Ashley: Absolutely. I mean, our inspiration for doing this is literally that we as human beings can learn so much from each other. And the ones that are willing to be vulnerable and share their experiences, what worked, what didn’t work, with each other. I think that’s a beautiful thing. We have gotten so used to just listening to a white coat doctor, or a specific publication, or whatever. Let’s talk real stories from real humans, and let’s learn from each other. So thank you for being willing to open up for us today.

Dr. Matt: Absolutely.

Patrick: We want this to be a Roger Bannister four-minute-mile kind of podcast series, where people talk about how they didn’t think they could do it, and they did it, and then other people see it and they believe it. Previous to Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute-mile marker, a randomized controlled trial would have said it’s impossible to run a four-minute mile. So I think there’s so much power in anecdote, and in being able to be inspired. And I love how you said it was when you decided, I’m going to commit to these habits for one year, that about eight months in, you started to be like, oh, it really has clicked. You put yourself by the window and gave yourself sunlight for eight months, but you committed to do it for a year. And gosh, that decision, that mentality, starting up here, to say, I’m going to do this, seems to be an underlying thread with everyone who’s ever stepped out of the grave. And I love that as the name of your book, Stepping Out of the Grave. Where can the audience find and follow you? Where’s the best place?

Dr. Matt: Sure. Instagram, at drmattdelgado.

Ashley: We’ll put it in the show notes, too.

Patrick: It’ll be in the show notes. Thank you so much for inspiring. We’re excited for the book.

Ashley: And yeah, we’re excited for your book, and we’ll certainly announce it to the Jigsaw Health audience when it comes out.

Dr. Matt: Awesome. Thank you. Thanks for having me.