Photo Credit: Courtesy of HealthGAINSI’ll be the first to admit it: getting healthy can be overwhelming and confusing for even the smartest of people. Am I doing the right exercises? Am I eating well enough? How long do I recover?
Most don’t even consider what might be going on inside their bodies or how that might affect their day-to-day lives. So, when it was time for me to get serious about getting healthy and losing some weight I went back to the basics. I wanted to see if there was a natural way of transforming this dad bod into something a little more pleasant to look at (and live in). What I needed was a gamechanger.
So, what’s in the box?
I admit I’ve tried to lose weight and get healthy before. For the past decade or so, it's been a persistent New Year’s resolution of mine, but after about a month or so I would lose interest or forget I was “doing that” and all of my gains essentially evaporated. It’s a struggle I think many people can identify with. The question is, how do you overcome it?
In a lot of ways, an answer is obvious: you get help. Sometimes this means convincing your partner to eat salad for six months so you don’t feel envious. Other times it looks like posting progress online to keep yourself accountable. Regardless of what form it takes, almost all of these “solutions” involve some kind of outside support to make them successful.
That’s honestly how I discovered HealthGAINS in Aventura, Florida. A friend of mine had long been a patient of theirs and in passing had always mentioned that I should go see his doctor if I was really serious about changing my life. It’s so funny to think about now, but at the time I remember thinking “I’m getting up at 6 am every morning to run three miles, I think I’m pretty serious about this.”
How very wrong I was.
The trap I found myself in was that I thought that my physical issues had to be dealt with in physical terms. Want to lose that belly? Gotta do some crunches, right? Turns out, that’s not quite the case. As we get older, what we experience on the outside often has deep roots to the functions going on in the inside. Turns out, years of poor nutrition and a fairly sedentary lifestyle had done a number on many of my hormone levels which, as I would later find out, is not a great thing.
After the decision had been made, the process of getting started was really easy and surprisingly fast. A quick call to their office and I was set for a blood draw the following day. After that came the physical exams and despite evaluating more than a hundred different data points, the entire process took almost no time at all. And after meeting my wellness advisor and the support team I’d be working with, I went home and waited for my life to change. It didn’t take very long.
The next day, I found myself standing in front of a recently delivered package from my pharmacy. I had just gotten the tape off of the box when my phone rang.
“Hey, this is Marco from HealthGAINS. It looks like your package just arrived so I wanted to reach out to make sure you had everything and to go over your treatment plan to make sure you’re good.” a helpful voice offered.
Thank God.
Let me paint you a quick picture.
Imagine opening a box only to find it filled with other boxes. Like some nesting doll, every box has something else inside of it and there are oh so many tiny slips of paper. I can absolutely understand how overwhelming this can be for patients, which is why I was all the more appreciative to have them call me to walk me through everything.
About fifteen minutes later, with my anxiety abated, I was ready to begin.
What Nature Intended...and Medicine Perfected
My consultation really opened my eyes to a lot of things. Up to this point, I had never considered the impact my hormone levels had on my health and happiness. I mean, on an intellectual level, it's easy to understand that too much or too little of anything can cause problems for a system that’s unprepared to deal with those fluctuations. But in reality, I never translated the junk food I was eating or the video games I was playing into the trouble sleeping, the extra weight, or the general sense of achiness I was beginning to experience.
What my physical exam would suggest and my blood test would later confirm was that, like millions of other Americans, my hormone levels were low. Specifically, my testosterone was at abysmal levels which was likely a major contributor to many of the complaints I was beginning to have about life.
For years I have complained about a lack of energy and a lot of stubborn weight. Despite being an avid runner and eating kind of well, I found it just impossible to lose any meaningful amount of weight. I had trouble staying up late and even more trouble waking up early. I was even beginning to have difficulty stringing my thoughts together, suffering an uncomfortable amount of brain fog before my morning’s second or third coffee had kicked in. So, it was with some amazement that I found nearly every complaint I had about getting older melt away as the weeks went by.
It sounds a little farfetched to say correcting this one hormone level has opened the door to a lifestyle I frankly never thought I’d have before, but correcting my testosterone levels was the key that unlocked so much in my life.
The thing about HealthGAINS is that every patient receives a comprehensive, personalized treatment plan. For skeptics like me, this is fantastic because the proposed treatments are laid out in laymen’s terms with the medical staff offering input and context about what kind of gains you can hope to expect and how long it will take to begin seeing these results. You can start slowly with just one or two changes and ramp-up (as I did) or jump in from the beginning and tackle the entire routine from the start.
Especially when it comes to treatments like these, precise medical dosing is the key to long-term success. Because treatment plans are individualized, my treatment manager was able to work with my doctor to make adjustments based not on timetables found in some chart, but rather based upon my own progress. This meant that at the three-month mark when I was really starting to feel good, I was easily able to adjust my prescribed dosages and add a couple more services without experiencing any side effects.
From the stories and lackluster results many of my friends have related, my HealthGAINS experience is very much not the norm. What they’ve managed to do at their spa-like Aventura medical campus is give healthcare a much-needed makeover—providing incredible outcomes through precise, custom treatment programs. These programs not only work to correct age-related health issues, but they also work to improve long-term health by expertly correcting hormonal gaps that may have developed over the years.
A lot of the reason they’ve grown to be so successful over the last 20 years in South Florida and a big reason for their success has been this focus on perfect diagnosing and dosing. The goal is not to overstimulate your body, but rather to support and optimize your hormone levels so that your body can operate at its peak. Returning our hormone levels to a naturally healthy level, unlocks our long-dormant potential, in theory making it easier for us to get out and experience more of what life has to offer.
No, It’s Not Magic. It’s Medicine.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of HealthGAINSI think throughout this entire process, the first couple of months on the program were the most difficult for me. Initially, I didn’t see any changes occurring. But, around the start of month number two, I realized I was sleeping soundly through the night and was beginning to feel a lot more like my old self again. By month three, I found myself fielding questions about what I was doing to stay so “young-looking.”
Truthfully, even with all the positive feedback, I didn’t really feel like I was making any real progress until about month six. That’s about the time I was finally able to wave goodbye to all of my “big boy” clothes in order to make room for new shirts, suits, and pants that actually fit. You see, over the previous six months, my clothes went from tailored and well-fitting to looking more like something I stole from my dad’s closet.
Absolutely nothing fit.
The thing is, the moment one part of your treatment program starts to make sense, you feel compelled to reevaluate the rest to see what else you might have left on the table. For me, I started tackling all kinds of things that had been lingering in the back of my mind since starting this journey.
For example, one thing I never imagined myself trying was Botox®, or Brotox as it’s known colloquially for men. Now I should preface this by saying I've never really thought of the wrinkles by my eyes or the furrows in my forehead as anything but the signs of a well-aged man, but as I saw the rest of my body change, I couldn’t help but look in the mirror and wonder if I could turn back the clock on my face as well.
Turns out the answer is yes and just two short weeks after my first foray into aesthetics, I was fielding regular compliments about how youthful my skin looked. I was hooked. Before long, I had added EMSCULPT to finally get the abs I’ve always wanted and with a mix of supplements and treatments was able to restore my thinning hair.
It turns out that getting healthy opens all kinds of doors. This past Christmas, I met a remarkable woman a bit younger than myself and that inspired me to return to my treatment manager to see what kind of magic she might have for this kind of situation. It turns out there’s a lot.
I began with a GAINSWave treatment to “clear out the pipes” which was quickly followed by a regenerative therapy. The result? Starting from the very first night when I woke up to my first nighttime erection since high school, it’s basically been some of the best, most rewarding sex I’ve had in my life. This treatment, which was initially designed to help men with ED has, in recent years, been offered to otherwise healthy men as a method of boosting bedroom performance. Well, it works. And without getting too crass or too descriptive, since getting my first GAINSWave in March, it’s been incredibly rewarding for myself and my partner.
Looking Ahead
After a year of being treated by HealthGAINS, my only wish is that I had started this journey earlier. In the past twelve months, I’ve completely changed my life. I’ve lost a lot of weight; I have more energy, but best of all, I just feel so much healthier. Although it can be easy to be complacent about these improvements, I have an eye on the horizon.
In the next few months, I’ll be looking at adding regenerative therapy to address some lingering back pain, and possibly a couple of NAD+ sessions to help me clear out the brain fog. I would also love to try an immunity-boosting peptide to help me stay healthy during flu and virus season. I might also add one of the at-home acoustic wave therapies like the Phoenix Pro to get even more out of my GAINSWave treatments.
Now that my eyes have been opened, I’m excited to try all the services HealthGAINS offers to see which work the best for me and my goals. And to think, I would never have contacted them in the first place if I hadn’t had a simple conversation with a friend about getting older.
If you’ve been thinking about what life could be like if you weren’t so tired, overweight, or unhealthy, then I highly encourage you to talk to a HealthGAINS wellness advisor today. Not only can they answer any lingering questions you may have, but they can also help get you set up with your very own personalized treatment plan. Call 866-609-9122 today.
