Episode 18: Pursuing Health When It Seems Too Hard

Hey, Hey, welcome back to the pursuing uncomfortable podcast. I'm Melissa Adkin and I'm so glad. And so thankful that you're spending time listening to this podcast today. And I'm going to get a little bit nosy here to start things off. Do you ever wander to your refrigerator? Even if you're not hungry, but because you're feeling something or thinking something. Have you ever sat down to eat dinner and you're still eating because your plate still has food on it, but you're already full. If you have any of these situations in your life or any of these things sound familiar to you, you're going to want to hear what David Hernandez has to say about it. David has an amazing life. He has an amazing commitment to serve people in this world, and he has a process that's going to help you. So stay tuned and listen for the four steps that you can incorporate to make your life healthier and happier. So without any further delay, let me introduce you to David Hernandez. Hello, and welcome back to the pursuing uncomfortable podcast. David. I'm so glad that you're able to join me today. How are you?

I'm doing fantastic, Melissa. Thank you so much for the opportunity. It is an absolute blessing to be here on your show and be connecting with your audience. Thank you for this amazing platform,

David. I knew within the first. 12 and a half seconds of speaking with you that I had to have you as a guest on this podcast. I love your story. I love what you do. I love the way you help people. So do you mind if we just jump right into it and let everybody else see the you that just, I saw it and had to share?

Absolutely. That's the best way let's jump in and explore the waters together. So to speak. Yeah. Perfect.

Now I know that you had a best friend growing up and this best friend had a real impact. On your life and what you do now, is that, is it all right if we talk about

absolutely. And, um, I'll be, I'll be raw and vulnerable in this, uh, episode. And, um, this, this topic still has, uh, an impact on my life and an emotional impact because it. In spite of the loss and in spite of what happened, um, there's a lot of good that came out of it. So, um, sharing the story. I had a childhood best friend. We did everything together and we played sports together. He's he was a brother to me. He spent more time at my home than he probably did at his home. And so I saw his struggles and I saw his battles because he was to paint you a picture. I was the skinny athletic. Kid. And he was more of the little huskier heavyset, um, non-athletic type. And so his name with us? Absolutely. His name was Eric, Eric, Eric. And so. He struggled with being overweight from a very young age and he's struggled through many hardships in his life. Right. He, unfortunately, his mom didn't raise them. His mom gave him over to, to, um, his, her mother, his grandmother to, um, kind of raise him. So he didn't, he wasn't raised with the mom. He wasn't raised with the father, his father left them when he was young. And so in his fight to try and fit in. He would do his best. And so all I remember doing at a young age was just encouraging him and motivate him because I saw him suffer. And a lot of the things I saw him suffering were in silence because he didn't know what to do. He didn't feel comfortable in the way he looked. He was made fun of because of how he looked. He had, you know, nicknames that were given because of how he looked and how he was. And. It was just a very hard life for him. And so we'd go to the gym together. I'd push them, we play sports together. And so even all the way through high school, I did my best to try and get him to release weight and get healthy. And so at the age of 18, we split, we went our separate ways. I was in tech. We were both in Texas. I moved to Miami to pursue a culinary arts and nutrition degree. And, um, we kind of lost. You know the relationship. And at 21, I got a phone call that, um, he had passed away and he had gotten so obese and he had gotten so desperate to get the weight off that he went to get a gastric bypass surgery. And two days later he, he died. He passed away. And so it really was, and it was a sucker. It's still today, you know, um, um, impacted by what he had to go through. And there were moments for, I would say about eight months where I felt really. Angry and guilty and shame came on me. And I would shame my blame myself, because I would say I could, I, I could have done more. I would tell myself I could have done more. Why did I let this happen? Why did I let that occurred to his life? And so after those eight months of just battling with my own thoughts of destruction in that area, I finally had to realize something there wasn't much more I could do. You know, I couldn't have done it for him. He had to be in a place where he would be willing to do whatever it takes in a healthy way to fight for his life and to fight for his health. But I realized that he didn't know how, and I was so young that I didn't know how either. So it woke me up and I made a commitment in that moment that I hadn't shared with anyone for years up until recently that it was a person. Commitment. And I said, as long as I know of someone, or I can have an opportunity with someone, I want to help them in any way that I can to make sure that they never go through what my best friend went through. And that's where I really dove deep into the health and fitness industry. I was already on my own journey. Right. I was training. I was. Learning about nutrition. I was really big into bodybuilding, so I was learning a lot. And so that just really brought purpose, clarity, and focus into knowing what I wanted to do and where I could impact people. And, you know, fast forward where we're at now, um, 14 years later, 15 years, uh, tomorrow. But, um, it. It changed my life. And so now I'm doing this to helping others and I'm holding myself to that commitment still today.

And I want to ask you more questions about that, but I feel like we should give Eric A. Little more time and let him have his moment. So do you mind sharing a couple of things about Eric that made you two brothers?

We had the most amazing heart. And to him, everything was let's make it fun. What can we do to have fun? And together there wasn't a moment where we weren't laughing together. It was always jokes left and right. And just, I remember I would, we would wrestle and then I would tickle him and he would tickle me and, uh, and just, uh, uh, a poking way type of thing, right. Just to pick at each other. And I remember he had. Enjoyed every moment. And especially during Christmas, that time was so, so important for us because we would come and we would decorate the entire home with, with lights and we look for different ways on how to. Make the house better than we did it last year. And I'll never forget. He was, he was afraid of Heights. And so I would play these little chicken games with him. Like how high can you go on the ladder? And as he would go, it kind of rattled the ladder a little bit and kind of pick on him and he would pick on me. That's right. That's right. And, and I remember he, he loved his car. He bought this car and for him. At the time there was like this show on MTV called pimp my ride. And I remember he was Embrel what can I do to fix my car, to make it better? And so we would work on things like that together. I remember trying to, um, set up speakers inside his seats so that the people can hear it vibrating and it could just be louder in his car. And we just looked for every opportunity that we could just have fun and laugh together. And so.

Even David, when you talked about him, you just lied up and I can see how the light of a life that was just so joyful, still lives on with you. Yeah. And I can see how that really inspires you and motivates you to do the work that you do. It does.

It does. I mean, it

was something I I'm sure I'm not unique in this whatsoever, but. Getting in shape was just a thing to do in my twenties. But with each passing decade, it really is a matter of life and death. And that is such an obvious statement, but not one that we really get until those decades start to Mount.

Right. That's right. And so with him being so young, Right. And just going through so much in his life, it's very easy to give up on yourself and it's very easy to blame yourself and bring a certain level of even condemnation on yourself because of the life that you're going through. And a lot of those things, we take it out on ourselves in a very destructive way. Even though we know it's not good, it's affecting me, but it impacts us in such a way that we need to find a reason as to why I'm living this type of life. Yeah, whether you've gone through trauma, whether you've gone through, maybe you don't know your dad you've been abandoned, you've been rejected. You've, you know, had a bad breakup. There's always this. I want to know why this has happened to me. And so we look for these justifications through our life and when we can't find them, we end up looking at ourselves and judging ourselves and blaming ourselves for what we're going through. To find a justification as to why we're living this life. Right? And so I saw that pattern repeated in him. And one thing after one thing, one choice after one choice, after a bad choice, after bad choice, it adds up and, you know, sadly, he was

gone. Uh, powerfully negative emotion. That's right. And sometimes we even punished ourselves with guilt when things are going well, because who are we to have things going so well? That's right. When our friends or. You know, ontologically, other people in the world are suffering and we're not, I, you know, that can just play on us. And it really affects the choices we make every day. And especially when it comes to food and how we treat our bodies. That's right.

And so that's where this destructive spiral happens. And it's so dangerous to fall in that because we look at well, I was the reason why this problem happened. Right? So therefore we feel that. Take it out on ourselves. We may speak negatively to us. We may say, you know what, forget this. I don't care about me anymore. And we might fall into destructive habits, but then the guilt comes in, which then makes us feel like, dang, why did I do it? I'm a failure. I can't believe I did this. And what do we do? We do more of that destructive behavior. And all it does is a big circle spiral, a destructive. Cycle that keeps us trapped in this destructive behavior that ends up literally destroying our lives.

I want to argue with you so much, but I don't have anything that I can argue that statement with. It is so true. So true. I know I've done a lot of work and I spend a lot of time on the space between my ears, because mindset is so powerful and it's the key to catch everything in life. It really is. And I know you do a lot of work with mine.

Yes, ma'am I sure do. I sure do. That's really the foundational piece because when we look at health and we look at weight loss, right. Or we look at losing weight, releasing weight, we tend to think of it as a physical component. Only a physical element. When in reality it has. Really nothing to do with our physical, but more to do with our identity with our psychology was what we've been, what we've become. Because when we look at our life, right, everything from our young age has shaped the Senate's molded us to who we are today, but how do we get there? It's by what we've experienced, what we've gone through. And specifically when we're talking about health and weight, it starts with our relationship with. Hm, that literally shapes us conditions us and makes us become who we are today. So I always tell my students when I'm teaching and I'm talking with them, is that your relationship with food has shaped who you are today, literally psychologically and even emotionally. And so when we don't work on these areas here, the psychology, how are we looking at food? How are we looking at ourselves? How are we looking at me? The human element, right. We will never truly be able to change. As a whole, right. We'll temporarily change. We'll get some results, right? Because diets work to a certain extent, supplements work to a certain extent, right? Like exercising a work for a certain extent. But what happens when it stops working? What's next? What do you do? And so if we're not working here on the psychology side of things, we're not working on the emotional side of things, then we're not changing our identity. Look, it's going to be a roller coaster. Going up and down, up and down.

Absolutely. You know, David, I can remember as a kid. Sitting at the dinner table, usually in front of a pile of canned peas. Whoa. I mean, I love peas, fresh peas. If I hadn't had fresh peas as a kid or frozen peas, I would have been an entirely different life, but I remember sitting in front of a plate. Been emptied except for this lump of canned peas. And my mom would always say, you know, if you don't finish your plate, the sun's not gonna come out tomorrow. And I thought, oh my gosh, everybody's going to be mad. And they'll know it's my fault. I mean, I literally took that on. And of course, an eight year old kid would have dominion over whether the sun shines the next day or not. You know, the logic of that never entered my mind. But the guilt did. And today I get anxious and my plate is almost empty and I'm still eating and I'm full and I'm thinking of why am I still. I'm not hungry and it's hard to not do that, even though I have the awareness, it's hard to break that association.

That's right. That's right. And that's why, when I talk about the emotional eating or others might say, yeah, I don't, I'm not an emotional eater. Okay, fine. Then let's call it stress eating or boredom meeting. Right. Because a lot of people are, we use. Term stress eating and people take offense. They don't like to own it. They say I'm not an emotional person because it makes them feel weak. Right. It makes them feel less than it makes them feel like, oh, what are people going to say? It really doesn't matter what people are saying. It's, they're going to say something about you anyways. So if we're dealing with this might as well own it, right? Because that is the first step to being able to allow change, to come to your life. And so. In this component, when we're talking about emotional eating, when, when I've been doing my research on what others are teaching, we hear a lot about this term of like, okay, if you're, if you're emotionally eating, stop eating and get a stress ball instead to release your emotions. It's like, if it was that easy, we wouldn't have this. Right. You wouldn't have this issue if it's simply like, oh yeah. Today, just stop eating and do this instead. It doesn't work.

I wish somebody would have told me that

that's right. Well, because it's. What's happened is through behavior, through the repetition of what we've been done or what we've been heard or what we've been told or what we do. We literally start to create narrow pathways and these neuro pathways start to create deep associations, deep roots in our brain that will literally. Be fired and triggered to a specific behavior. So that is why it is so crucial, even as parents, especially as parents, because we are, we are shaping the relationship of food from a very young age from kids. So that's why food is ever used as a treat or as a punishing. We start to develop a bad relationship with it, right? If food is used in a sense like terms as this, you have to eat everything on your plate. As you grow older, it doesn't matter how much food is on your plate. You literally feel guilty because there's food on your plate. So what is that doing? You've already been, and I'm a

grown woman and woman I can do. And a lot of things, I know the things and I.

Well, because you created because of the repetition of childhood being told, you have to do this, you have to do this, you have to do this. You've literally create that you created that association in your brain. And so now when you're there, it's like, you automatically feel it. You automatically have to do it otherwise you don't feel. And you know

what? My husband has more self-control than any human being should be allowed to have. Yeah. But he will eat dinner and he will have one bite of food left on his plate and he'll say, oh, I'm full. I'm done. And it just makes me so anxious. Yeah. You have one bite. Yeah.

Yeah. And so what happens is we need to, when we're talking about how to get over or how to defeat emotional eating, we literally have to rewire your brain and peach it, how to do a different behavior so that we can. Release ourselves from the previous behavior that we've done to now adopt a healthy way of doing things. And it starts with our relationship with food. And let's say another example. Let's say, when you're young, you go to school, you come home, you had a bad day, your mom sees that you are sad. So she comes, she sits down and you talk it over. And then afterwards, she says, look here, have this cookie. So you can feel. Right there. There's been an association with bad day, have a cookie to feel better, bad day, have a treat, to feel better food, right? As the tree, as you grow older, you best believe if you had a bad day, you are going to feel this urge to want to have a cookie. And because it's been in you for so long and you've repeated this behavior, you literally do it without even thinking about. Until you realize and go, whoa, what just happened here? I'm doing it again. And I'm doing it again. Right. And

so I'm sure you have some tips and strategies for us that can help us break that.

And I hope I do. I do. I do. And so that is something very. And, uh, very important for what I teach. Right? It's, it's a foundational component that, that I mentor in that a coach and I teach people through and it's literally a four-step process. And so we still need to have awareness as to where do all of these things come from. Because a lot of times when we're dealing with emotional eating stress, eating boredom meeting, we think that there's a problem with them. Why can't I stop doing this? So then we look at ourselves as the problem and we make ourselves feel bad as if we are from Mars where this weird person that just will never change. That's not the case. And so when we start to learn that emotional eating is simply a learned behavior, which means you learned how to do that at some point. From a young age, middle school, high school, others may be as an adult. You learn how to do that behavior. And all it is is we need to unlearn. If we want to call it this way, we're going to unlearn how to do that behavior. While we learn to do a new behavior that is going to be beneficial and that is going to be healthy. So step one is we need to identify the root cause. Like for example, in your situation, we've identified that it's what your mom does. That is one of the root causes as to why today you continue to feel this anxiety and this guilt of not eating everything on your plate. Yes. And so that is step one. We must identify, where does this come from? When we do that, we can then eliminate some shame and some guilt as to blame ourselves for it. 'cause when you're young, like you don't have control of things that are done to you or said to you, especially if they're coming from your parents, right. You're very innocent. You're vulnerable. You just believe it and do it. Like you're innocent statement that you said yes.

I feel like you're going to tell me that it is quite possible that if I don't finish my plate, The sun may indeed shine the next day. It is. I know you're not going to go so far to say that if it doesn't that it may not be my fault,

but no, it's not. It's a natural. And so that route identifying that route is going to give us deep clarity as to where it starts. The next step is to identify well, what are my triggers? What triggers me to. React and do this behavior. For example, I use my life growing up. I was. I had a nickname. My dad gave me that nickname. It was a Spanish term set, meaning Flaco. He would call me that skinny still to this day. He does growing up. I hated that because I didn't like how skinny I was and how thin I was. And I was made fun of, because they didn't think I was going to, I was a good football player. I would never play good sports. I wasn't fascinated because I was too thin. So growing up that word became a trigger for me. That would make me get very angry. Hmm. And so we need to identify what triggers me to then go to food. Maybe it could be a comment that they make of you that you feel disrespected, or you feel rejected or you feel abandoned. Right? It could be a comment that somebody says it could be something that you. Something that you experience a specific thing that maybe your husband said to you, your ex-husband said to you, and so we need to identify what triggers me or I like to say what makes you tick to then go to emotionally eat? Right? So that's step two, step three, then leads us into, well, what happens when you're. There is a physical and there is a emotional response that we always have when something happens to us. So again, with my example, they call me skinny, right? I would say. Very angry. So my body temperature would rise. I would get knots in my stomach and I would start to pace and pant. Right. So there is my demonstration of my emotional response and my physical response. And so you might be asking, well, David, why is that even important? Because these two components now become your alert system and alarm sorta speak that saying alert, alert. You've just been triggered. Be careful. You might go to. You're going to talking.

I think in me, my big trigger is when I get feelings of not being enough, like this problem may be bigger than me. Ooh. I don't know what I'm going to do in this situation. Yeah. The anxiety of uncertainty, of course, I think is the big trigger

for me. And we must know that about us. We live on earth knowing about more people than we know about ourselves. And that's sad. And so what I want to do through my coaching and mentoring is really helping people understand and know who they are, have awareness about themselves. How can we be happy and live happy and have others love us? If we don't know anything about ourselves truly, and we don't love ourselves. All the ways. And so this process really allows us to understand, okay, what is David about? Who is he? What triggers him? How does he feel? So now we start to bring attention to your body, to your emotions, right? And now that is going to help you to start to take control of yourself and then eventually take control of your choices. Because right now, everything around you. Or other circumstances are literally choosing for you.

Yeah. And you know, I feel like I interrupted you. Is this it's okay. Know, go

ahead and step three in the promises still in step three. Yes. Okay. Correct. And so this awareness piece, right about knowing what does my body do? How do my emotions respond? What are they getting very specific about that again, serves as our alarms. Right. And then step four is looking at well, what do I do when I am triggered? And I feel this, okay, I go to food, but I want to say let's be more specific. What types of foods do you go to? Because we all have our thing.

Yeah. Anything that doesn't require effort that's

right. Yeah. And, and most times it's either sugar or fatty foods, processed foods. Hence foods that aren't necessarily good for us, right? No comment. Well, we all do it to a certain extent and that's where that term comfort food comes from because we are trying and literate. What is really, I'm just going to now, I'm just going to go off on a slight tangent, but it's really not. It's it's relevant to the topic. Emotional eating is really your releasing your emotions with. That's it, your coping mechanism to release your emotion. So release your anger, your sadness, your rejection. You're feeling not valued, not, not seen, not wanted, right. Is literally just your coping. It you're releasing it with food. And so why is this such an addictive thing? Because food literally does something to us. One, it fills our stomach. So it seems to be filled, filling a void. Right. And too, it triggers our risk, our reward system in our brain, which is dopamine, which makes us feel good. Yeah. And so that is my

love language now because I'm such a huge proponent of forgiveness and how unhealthy it is to hold onto the grudges and all of that stuff. And there are so many studies by people that know things like, um, Johns Hopkins and Mayo clinic that these folks have outlined direct. Consequences of holding on to grudges and not forgiving and holding onto those negative emotions and things like high blood pressure and increased risk of diabetes, dose and so forth and so on. And I hear you echoing those same things and how food is such an integral part of that.

That's right. And so when we get clear as to what food we go to, we can then also identify why do I go to these. Like, why do I always go to lase original chips? Why do I always go to the blue Doritos? Right. Well, the reason behind that is that there's also a connection with that food, right? Those foods. Connected with you in a certain way. Maybe when you were young, those were your go-to foods, right? Maybe these were treats that were given to you. I had a student of mine. She said, I don't know why I go to chocolate all the time. We started doing these four steps. I started breaking everything down. And what she learned was that chocolate, dark chocolate specifically was given to her from her grandma and her grandmother raised her. A few years ago, she lost her grandma, but the problem or not the problem, but the thing was that her grandmother would bring her chocolate every time she was having a bad day, but she would also comfort her and love on her. And so when she was noticing that every time she would get stressed or in a bad day, or had a bad situation, she would get this crazy urge for. Well, it's not necessarily that she wanted the chocolate it's that she wanted the comfort and the love of her grandmother, but she associated chocolate with her grandmother. And so now this urge of chocolate was increasing. So what did we do? We worked on how to simply change that chocolate to something else that can remind her of her. And it was a bracelet, so she would carry the bracelet with her. And every time she felt discouraged and she felt lonely, all she'd do is grab the bracelet and not go to chocolate anymore. Wow. So that is why it's so powerful to understand these components, because then we can take the steps necessary to change that. And that's where the final piece comes into play. That is really like the glue for this is using a plot, the power declaration statement that I put together. And what this is going to do is through a power declaration state. And doing a new behavior. When we're triggered, we will literally start to, because of neuroplasticity, start to change our neuro pathways and change our behavior to now, when I'm triggered, I'm no longer going to go to food, I'm going for a walk instead, and you perform that new action.

You know, I do know that the midbrain houses, both emotions and the habit formation. Right. So if we want to break or make a habit, attaching a feeling is really necessary and it's a chicken and egg thing. Did the habit come from the emotion or does the emotion come from that habit? Those two are just so the same.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. And that's why emotional eating is PSI. A serious topic and such a big, a big issue. Right. And, and I think it's something that needs to be spoken about more. And I am hoping to be able to keep shining light on that because we should not be ashamed of it. We should not feel bad about it. Look, we got to stop with this shame, right? Or what are people going to say about me? Look, we're freaking human. We all have issues. We all have, if you want to call them flaws. Right. I made, I put a post recently and it was like, look off, humans have flaws. It's just who we are. Right. Embrace them. But more importantly, when we own it and we release the shame from it, it's like, then now we allow ourselves an opportunity to be able to change the situation that we're in. And we should not be ashamed of it.

Right. And if you're having trouble with the shame, there are a lot of people that you can reach out to, to help you with that. David. Can you recap those four steps for us? I know I'm trying to sort of mid my head.

Absolutely. You can do that. I would love to. So number one, identifying the root cause where did it come from? What things can you remember? Situations, events or circumstances that happened? Number two, what triggers. To go to do that behavior. Right. And what you're going to find is that the trigger and the root cause are going to be very similar. They might be the same. They're linked together in some way, shape, right? Number three, identify your physical and your emotional response. How do you react? What happens in your body? Where do you feel it and what emotions come up and then for identifying exactly what types of foods you go to and associate them with, where they may have come from. Why do you go to those foods? And then the final component, which kind of puts all of these four steps together is the power declaration statement. When I. Triggered. I no longer perform this behavior. I now do this instead.

That sounds like a powerful process. It is David. I know that. Um, losing your friend, Eric, wasn't the only hardship you've had in your life. You also had a brush yourself at a close call. If you will. Do you mind telling us about that and how that has shaped?

I'd love that. Back in 2018, I went on a missions trip to Haiti with a local church. We're going to go support orphanages. We had a gentleman that we knew out there who had two orphanages and several others that he was partnering with. We went out, had an amazing time. Seven days out there impacted hundreds of kids came back. Five days later, I started to feel sick. I went to. Uh, client at six in the morning, I was feeling sick. I then went to a presentation that another client of mine had that she invited me to go to. And I was just very sick. That day I had to be rushed to the emergency room. I was 106, 108 fever. I couldn't, I couldn't speak, I couldn't stand. I couldn't walk. I couldn't do anything. And they rushed me in tried multiple tests. They didn't know what was happening after six misdiagnosis. We finally got a doctor that was visiting from Puerto Rico to come in. He overheard my case and he said, I want to take this case. I know exactly what he has. He walked into the room and he says, Hey. I know what you have, you're dealing with tropical viruses. And one, I know you have is dengue fever. And then he turned around and he said, you're going to feel like you're going to die and you might die because there's nothing we can do. It's up to your body if it wants to live. Wow. And he walked away, what, and that was it. That was the end of the conversation. And, uh, I remember laying there as, as conscious as I could be as saying, all right, so here we go. Now

what? And tell him out. So he comes in this room and basically says, Hey, good luck. This is what you got. You may die. You may live nothing. We can do. See ya. That was

it. That was it. My lungs were shutting down my left lung. Wasn't functioning anymore. My, uh, Kidneys were starting to break down. I was one step away from hemorrhage and all they could do is just give me antibiotics so that it wouldn't go to my brain and shut down other major organs. And so there I was it's dengue fever is known as the bone crushing virus. It literally breaks your bones from the inside and it eats your muscles from the inside. And I remember the third day I was done, I said, I'm done. I don't want to live anymore. God just take me. This is too much. I am done with this. And fourth day came fifth day came, things kept getting worse. My platelets kept going down. My blood count kept going down and all they could do was keep me quarantined. Nobody was allowed to come in and just see what would happen. So seventh, they came in eighth day and finally, on the 10th day, I started to feel. They ran some tests on me a couple hours later, the doctor came in and he says, well, you beat it. You beat dengue fever. And he said, had it not been because you were so heavily. And had so much muscle because at that time I was at the healthiest I'd ever been. The biggest I'd ever been. I was, I was working out in training to compete the following year. So I was about 240 pounds, 15 to 18% body fat. Like I was a big boy. And he said, if it wasn't because you were healthy and had that much muscle, you wouldn't have made it through. And I turned around and I said, if it wasn't for God and because I was healthy, I wouldn't have made it right. I also believe that it had my faith had some things to do in that area as well. But after that, I lost 65 pounds in those 11 days. But then a question started to be stirred up in me. And this question said, well, now that you have a second chance of life, what are you going to do with it? And it was another one of those that just like smacked me in the face. And I was like, well, what do you mean? I'm going to go back to my normal life. Like I'm D I'm grateful. I'm happy that I'm alive, but like, what exactly is this is this mean? And so I pondered on that question. I finally came to a realization to say, I'm not doing enough with what I've been given, not doing enough with. I've learned or what I have achieved. And so I had to really be honest with myself because at that point I was training clients. I was already doing my, my, my career, but it was very intimate on a personal level. I was very selective with the people that I, that I, that I would take on as clients and very private. And so it was really waking me up to say, yeah, I'm not doing enough. I'm not impacting enough people. I'm not speaking out enough. I'm not doing what I said. I was going to commit to when my best friend died. Wow. And I made a commitment again to say, it's time to speak out. And that's where I finally kind of. Body by purpose together. And I started talking about it openly. I started flooding through social media, just being very open about it. And now I'm able to impact people all across the world, different states and countries, and be able to help them be healthy and live their best life. So I like to say that this experience was the best thing that could've ever happened to me because otherwise I wouldn't be here today and we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Well, you know, I can see that, but again, David, if I have a plan to have a vacation or an activity, you're not going to be the one I call too overbearing.

That's hilarious.

David, who are you for people?

You know, I'm a guy that loves people. I'm a guy that, you know, and just as a big heart too. Help others. And more importantly, I'm a guy that believes in humans believes in others and sees hope where others see defeat and see potential where maybe others see Burt and grime, because I believe that we all have amazing potential inside of us. And sometimes all it takes is something. To see it when we don't somebody that can lift us up, somebody that can just inspire and bring a little bit of hope to get us up and help us fight for our life. And that's who I am. And that's what I strive to do each day. And I'm still learning how to do that because I believe that. We should all fall in love with this process of discovery. And this process of discovery is discovering who we are, but not right now. I mean, who we are to this maximum it's destined state, right. And what our real untapped potential is. And so when we fall in love with this process of discovery of discovering who we are, I think we're going to surprise ourselves because. We're we're a lot and there's a lot in us

and I've read somewhere that we are fearfully and wonderfully.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Like the creator doesn't make mistakes. Right. And he made us perfect. He made us with amazing abilities and amazing gifts. Maybe some, you know, had more opportunities than others. It doesn't define who you are, because when you understand who your creator was or what you were created to be and how you were formed and shaped, you're amazing. Incredible.

Even if you look in a mirror and you only see the, the ugly stuff, you need to look deeper into the mirror, find someone like David, that can shine a light beyond all of those things.

Many people. I love working with those that say I've tried everything and nothing works for me. I'm like, thank you because now I know I can take you from this defeated state. Be able to shine a light on something that you have never seen or experienced and be able to guide you to achieve it.

David, all of your contact information is going to be in the show notes so people can reach out to you if they feel defeated, if they feel like there is no hope for them. So I want to invite everybody to, to click on those links, to see what David's up to and the difference that David can make for you in this world. And David, I want to thank you so much for giving your time and yourself. And your vulnerability and your authenticity to us today. It's

been an absolute honor. Thank you so much for having me, Melissa and keep doing what you're doing. Look, we need more of this. People need to hear amazing, um, stories like yours and what you're doing with this platform. So thank you so much for the opportunity. And if anybody has any questions, please feel free to reach out.

Thank you, David.