From Athlete To Destroyed Colon (What To Do When You're Trying To Fix Your Gut & NOTHING Seems To Be Working) With Will Malcolm.

My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Boundless Life Podcast, I just had this deep knowing that something wasn't right.

I couldn't put my finger on it. I went on, you know, thyroid replacement hormone, went and got acupuncture, saw a counselor, tried integrative doctors, and I just kept having this deep knowing that something wasn't right. And a couple of the doctors had given me comments that you need to work on your emotional health or you need to be happier. I was very driven, so I was really hard on myself all the time.

Welcome to The Boundless Life with me, your host, Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist, and nutritionist, and I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity, and beyond.

Will, it's not that often that I will just go into a podcast with a guest somewhat blind, not totally blind. I know a little bit about today's guest, but I have not read his book. I don't know if he even has a book. Do you have a book, Will?

Not yet. In the works.

Not yet. Good. So, I don't feel that lost. I have not been treated by him. We have not had any long discussions, We've never talked on the phone. This is actually the first time we've met on today's show. So, why the heck would I bring my listeners a guest who I know nearly nothing about besides the little bit of sleuthing that I've done before this show? Well, one of my friends and also a very popular previous podcast guest of mine, Joel Greene, is who introduced me to today's guest. Will Malcolm. And so, I got this text from Joel. I'm just going to read you guys the exact text that kind of made me a little bit intrigued. Joel wrote to me, said, "This kid has a great story. Ex-football player and athlete, massive gut issues, hospitalization, lost a bunch of mass, nearly died. Over several years, tried every science hack known to humankind, had mixed success. Wasn't until he finally did a lot of emotional trauma work that he got full resolution. So, he is a combination of extreme science and trauma work to heal the gut. And Will, no offense, but he finished with this, "Doesn't have much of a following, but his story is compelling." I think that was just a backhanded insult from Joel that you need more Instagram followers or something like that.

I'm going to have to have a talk with Joel about that one. Yeah.

Yeah. So, obviously, I respect Joel. Hello, Joel, if you're listening. And, this got me super interested. So, he introduced us. I was like, "Heck, yeah. Introduce us." And, obviously, based on that text, you have quite the story. I'm sure you've told it before. So, I'm going to turn things over to you and fill me out on how you got started down this road in the first place, Will.

Yeah, Ben, thanks so much for having me on the show today. And yeah, Joel, if you're gonna be listening to this, thanks so much for the text. I really appreciate it. Um, yeah, so how, how I got into this, um, really was, um, I was a hard-charging athlete. Um, I loved pushing to the limits and I fell in love with playing football. And, um, and in, in high school I made a decision that I was gonna play in college.

And so I was able to accomplish that goal, but what, uh, what, what position?

So yeah, it was a good question. Uh, Ben, so I was a running back. I was, I was the kicker and I also played, um, outside linebacker. So I would play running back. I would also kick extra points, field goals, and kickoff. I virtually never came off the field. Field. By the, by my senior year, I was 5'10", 210 pounds. And so I was just all in on football and finally did make it to, to college to play ball, Division II. And I had, I had suffered a number of injuries to that point and sustained a, a third shoulder injury that abruptly ended my career during my freshman year. Of college playing football. And on top of that, I was diagnosed with mono. So what I discovered on the back end is that I had gone through 4 days in the beginning of the football season with mono. And I had a total meltdown, a total identity crisis of, you know, what am I going to do? My dreams just went up in smoke. My doctors wouldn't sign me to keep playing anymore.

Oh, do you think you would've kept playing if your doctors hadn't refused to sign you?

Yeah. I, I, I was so strong-willed to see this dream come to fruition and willing to do whatever it took that, um, yeah, I, I was really struggling at the time to have any control over that and see a bigger picture. Um, and it wasn't maybe a, but a year and a half later. After that I had that abrupt ending to this, you know, this dream of playing college football, that, um, I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis. And then, um, I just, I want to take you and the listeners there in the house I was living with, with the other, other guys that I was living with. And I saw blood in the toilet and I had never seen anything like that in my entire life.

Wait, wait. I have to ask. You saw blood in the toilet, but leading up to that point, did you have any gut issues that would've made you think anything was wrong or was it just blood in the toilet was the first sign?

Yeah, I didn't really notice, you know, like I was the typical college kid, you know, partying, you know, beers and pizza. I worked at a coffee shop as a barista. So, like heavily caffeinated on top of that.

Yeah. Our, our, our collegiate careers sound similar.

Yeah. Yeah. Eating the standard diet, you know, uh, just You know, the survival foods and, um, yeah. And so I saw that blood in the toilet and I was just like, you know, did my intestines fall out? Like how, how can this even happen? I, I had no understanding even of how this could happen. And so, you know, I went through the whole process of seeing a gastroenterologist and, and getting checked out and everything. And, um, and I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis. And again, if, you know, listeners here today, if they relate in any way to having gut issues or IBD or IBS, having a doctor tell you that what you have is incurable and it's going to be, you're going to live with it for the rest of your life and you're going to be on medication was something that just, yeah, it was like overwhelming, something that shocked me and left me in disbelief to the point where I just kind of pushed that all down.

Yeah. And, and Will, by the way, some people might not fully understand what ulcerative colitis actually is.

Yeah. So, I mean, in just simple terms, it's, it's ulcerations in the, the gut lining down in the colon, which can cause malabsorption, malnutrition, causes lots of inflammation, damage to the mucosal lining. So, it affects your ability to process, digest food, absorb it, assimilate it, and then excrete what's not needed anymore. It can cause dehydration, anemia. There's a number of different things that down the line as it progresses, it can get worse.

So, yeah. So, this is not your average— my apologies, by the way, for anyone who's drinking like a beetroot smoothie driving to work right now. This is not your average hemorrhoid. Right. This has deeper underlying issues that go way beyond just like a broken blood vessel.

Yep. Yep. Absolutely. And, um, so I went ahead and I did the conventional treatment at the time, which was, you know, uh, anti-inflammatories that are targeted at the bowel. And it seemed to kind of clear things up a little bit, but it wasn't really anything that I wanted to put any attention to. And so, Um, I, I didn't, yeah, I was not interested at all in diving deeper into that. I was interested in moving on with my life and kind of just pretending that didn't happen. Um, and what's really interesting looking back at, you know, years ago, that, that was probably 20, 20 years ago or so, was that God was writing a story for my life.. And I didn't know it. You know, I just saw catastrophe and chaos and broken dreams and broken, a broken body, broken shoulders, broken gut. And I just thought my life was falling apart. Um, and I had no idea that God was writing a story for my life. He was, he was in the process of preparing me to, to, to transform.

Hmm.

Wow.

Yeah. My, uh, my pastor has a saying that God draws straight with crooked lines. And, I've certainly nowhere near what you've experienced it sounds like, but probably the single biggest kryptonite for me is my gut. I kind of have a princess gut. I need to be pretty careful. But, because of that, as inconvenient as that is sometimes when you're out at a restaurant or whatever, it has taught me so much about the gut that I feel like I'm able to help a lot of people. But, I'm curious for you when you say God had a plan where things kind of progressed from there.

Yeah. So, I got a degree in exercise physiology and I was able to do— my senior year, I was able to do some research in the physiology department. We did some Wingate testing and some bicarb testing and things like that. And, little makeshift lab that some physiologists put together. And I was really intrigued by research and I talked to my mentor and she suggested that I go to graduate school. And so I went through the long arduous process of applying and studying and, and I eventually got into a graduate school and continued my, my career of learning about how the body moves and about metabolism and about nutrition and about, you know, really just a deeper level to how the body works.

What was your, what was your master's degree in?

So I went and got another degree in exercise physiology, and this one was a, it was a concentration in cancer and exercise. So there was an institute at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, Colorado. That does cancer and exercise research. And so I had the opportunity to work in a basic science laboratory where we were able to look at the effects of exercise, mainly cardioprotective effects of exercise. When someone's, you're, you know, when someone's going through like a cancer treatment, as well as, you know, preventing muscle wasting, things of that nature. And then we had an applied lab. Where we were able to train cancer patients and survivors. And so it was really this awesome world where you got to go and, you know, run assays and do all this cool biochemistry stuff and then go in and apply what you're learning to people. And so that was a real unique opportunity that I had.

And you had, or were dealing with ulcerative colitis this entire time during your academic journey?

Yes. On and off. Yeah.

So what happens next?

So I graduated and I graduated in the recession, 2008, and all of our PhD candidates— Yay!

Lots of available jobs.

Yeah. Nobody could get jobs. All of our PhD candidates that I just helped with, you know, finishing their their dissertation work, couldn't get jobs. And I wanted to become a PhD myself, and I saw, um, you know, them not be able to get any work. And I said, you know, this is, this would be a really, you know, bad mistake on my part if I invested another 4 years of out-of-state tuition to do this. Um, but then I have to tell you something about going to graduate school. The thing that graduate school taught me more than anything else is that It, it gave me the confidence and ability to learn whatever I wanted to learn. That was probably the thing that I took away, um, more than anything I studied in terms of like, you know, muscle cell physiology and, you know, things like that. It, it was that if, if I wanna learn something, I just set my mind to it and I can go and study it, learn it, and develop a deep knowledge of it.

Ben Greenfield: And did that skill progress into you actually applying your your learning how to learn towards the colitis issues?

Yeah, but that, that took a little while, Ben, because the whole reason that I got into exercise science, the only reason I was interested, interested in that in the first place is I was a, I just grew up playing sports, climbing trees. You couldn't bring me inside. I was just, you know, always having a good time outside, played any, any sport, racket. Football, hockey, anything that you get your hands on. And I just, I love playing sports. And I had a weights coach in high school who happened to have a PhD in exercise science. And one of the things I loved about football and about weight training was seeing the transformation, how I could see, to see how I could transform my body. And she began to pour into that. She saw the interest and the curiosity. And so she would dive deeper and kind of, you know, give me more idea about what I was doing and why it was working the way it was in the weight room. And in the middle of that, uh, when I was in high school, my dad happened to work for a printing press and that printing press printed the NSCA and ACSM journals. So my dad would bring home the copies. Yeah, my dad would bring home the copies that they couldn't mail out. And I'll be totally candid with you guys. And this is before the ulcerative colitis thing. I had a crate full of journals in the bathroom. And like every time I'd go in the bathroom, I'd be in there reading research and I had no idea what it meant or what it was, you know, what they, I just tried to emulate the pictures and just kind of do the best I could, or I'd take it to her. Dr. Hopkins was her name and she would kind of, you know, help me understand what it said. But that was my introduction to exercise science, health, fitness. All of that was just a kid that loves sports. And then, I had those influences in high school that honestly kind of changed my life.

Ben Greenfield: That's so interesting. Not that I want to bore people with my own personal history and steer away from your journey, but our paths parallel. I didn't know much at all about exercise. I was homeschooled. There's not a huge physical education curriculum focus in homeschool, yet my brother's best friend was a professional bodybuilder, my dad's friend was the Washington State powerlifter champ and had a PhD in exercise science and biomechanics. And, I pieced together my own little gym at home. I would read research journals. I would watch exercise videos, pour through publications. And, eventually, like you, I actually wound up getting a degree in exercise physiology, then moved into a master's degree in physiology and biomechanics. But yeah, Much of it was self-taught. And then, after graduate school, basically the past 17 years talking to people like you and super smart individuals twice a week for 60 to 90 minutes has led to a great deal of continuing education. I don't have the mutated versions that you had from your father's printing press, but I have a whole shelf full of the NSCA journals and multiple other exercise science publications. Here in the office. So, yeah, it is interesting how our stories parallel. But I'm very curious, you're going through all of this yet at the same time dealing with an underlying gut issue that I would imagine is pretty distracting.

Sure. Yeah, absolutely. What was also distracting too at that time once I finished graduate school is there, there were no jobs and I, I got out, you know, I had bills to pay and couldn't find work. And so of course, um, the stress of that only makes conditions like IBD or IBS worse. Um, and not too long after I was out of graduate school, um, I met my wife or began to date her at least. And, uh, we were dating and she was actually the person that introduced me to holistic nutrition. Up until that point, nutrition for me and, you know, kind of diet was really just, you know, kind of that maybe that bodybuilder mentality. Just eat as much as you can. And, you know, we all know that like an athlete's diet typically isn't, isn't really that healthy. If you look at, you know, ultra runners, you look at triathletes, you look at Tour de France athletes, it's, it's a carbo load essentially. And so my wife introduced me to nutrition really, into holistic nutrition. And she was actually doing a 90-day sugar fast when I met her. And I'll be honest, I tried to sabotage that at a donut shop one day. I tried to tempt her with this, you know, this delicious cream cheese donut, you know, and probably the incorrect flirt to choose at the time. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And but, but I bought her a book. I bought her a, I don't remember who wrote this. It's called Sugar Blues. It's an old, old text about the effects of sugar. But the, the first book that I really got into that began to shape and change my understanding of nutrition was The Perfect Health Diet by Paul Jaminet.

Oh my gosh, that's a classic. That, that was actually formative in my own understanding of holistic nutrition. Terms like safe starches, right? Beets, potatoes, yams, white rice, like this idea that you could branch out beyond whole grains, lean protein, commercial dairy, and what's kind of shoved down your throat in the standard university nutrition curriculum. Yeah, Paul Jaminet, he's been on the podcast a couple of times. Great book, still a great book.

Yeah, it is. And so, that really began to open my eyes to, hey, there's more going on here with maybe eating too much sugar, could it be affecting my gut or having too much gluten? These things can be impacting the gut lining. I even remember around that time that there, so there was an Italian researcher, Alessio Fasano. He's the one that like discovered all of this leaky gut stuff. I remember seeing his presentation like almost in real time and kind of just being, having my mind blown that My diet can affect my gut because that's, you know, the gastroenterologists don't really think that that has anything to do with it. Unbelievable.

Yeah.

Yeah. So that, you know, we got into that book, we got married. We had a good friend, they gave us a couple of the Weston A. Price books, like Nourishing Traditions, that, that began to influence us. And around that time is when I started working. I had gotten a contracting job. To be a health coach for the US Army. And, um, around that same time that I began working with them, I also began to, um, dabble in endurance sports. I had been running a bit, um, not, not too far in distance, but, um, especially going through grad school, that, that really taught me that like, I can do anything if I put my mind to it and I think also the ulcerative colitis and kind of the suffering that goes along with that just helped me kind of go, you know, I can suffer pretty good. And yeah, and so kind of at the same time, I began to change my diet and I began to go low carb. And I noticed that my symptoms went away. In fact, between you and I, I would say that like I was in complete remission. No blood, no mucus, no, no gut symptoms other than some constipation. Everything was good. And so I began to just kind of dive deep into holistic nutrition and ultra endurance sports. And while I was working at the, with the Army, we did fitness testing. We had a Bod Pod. We did metabolic testing. I ran a lot of our stress management program. We used HeartMath as kind of the basis for that. And, and that really opened my eyes to like, wow, there, there are so many other aspects besides just strength and conditioning, speed and agility, or, you know, bodybuilding. And so, so I'm, I'm kind of being exposed to all of that while going low carb, kind of playing around with the ketogenic diet and getting into endurance sports.

Yeah. And, I would say there's nothing like a sport of attrition in which nutrition plays such a key role. Not that I want to throw any sport under the bus, but let's say baseball. You typically do not have to pay a great deal of attention to what you're eating during the game so that you don't bonk or experience glycogen depletion or neuromuscular fatigue during a sport like that. Whereas, say triathlon, or ultra-endurance sports, you really have to pick apart fats, carbs, proteins, nutrient absorption, gastric motility, potential or absence of leaky gut to a much greater extent. I probably learned or at least became the most interested I ever was in nutrition even beyond when I was bodybuilding when I raced Ironman. For about almost 15 years. That just led me deep down the path of nutrition way beyond university and similar to you, a pretty significant shift towards being open to the idea that maybe the high-carb solution isn't the only solution out there, particularly for those with gut sensitivities, gas, bloating, et cetera. So, I myself went pretty deep into the low-carb ketogenic fueling, uh, uh, approach during endurance sports.

Yeah, absolutely. I, I have to add this part of my story and it's, it's not a, a plug on me by any means. I know you're the, you, you had the career in tra— in triathlon and I, I gave that a shot. So I, I, I'm, I grew up in Kansas, so I did Kansas 70.3 and I gave myself about 6 months to train for it, kind of not totally off the couch, but more or less, and just got owned, like absolutely owned. I remember this old woman like walked the marathon or the half marathon with me because, you know, by the end of that event, I think I lost like 7, 8 pounds of water. It was just totally wrecked. And I was like, you know, maybe this is too much suffering for me. Maybe this isn't the right thing. And it happened, the event happened to be at a park. That had a, a trail, uh, course on it, trail running course. And so I ended up signing up for that. It was a 40-mile race and got into that and was like, wow, this is my thing. It's a lot easier to fuel, a lot easier to get the liquids down. It's beautiful because you're in the woods. And, and that one race, uh, it's called the Free State 40, just really lit that passion that had died with football. I had found it again in, uh, trail ultra running.

And this entire time, you're basically in remission.

Correct.

Yep. So, did the problem ever come back up? You just keep on going with endurance sports?

So, over the, like, next couple years, I continued to train and race. And each year, my mileage was going up, getting up to 60 to 80 miles per week. One of the fun things about training in, in living in the Midwest and loving the mountains is how can I, and this is where I was able to pull in my exercise phys background and go, okay, how can I train using this 200-foot hill? How can I train on this so that I can go and compete in the mountains? I can go run in the mountains. And so I was, you know, playing around with, you know, heat exposure. We had a lot of humidity and we have the hills. And so, I was beginning, I don't know if you would call it biohacking, but just training with what you have to be able to go out and do these big feats like 50 miles in the mountains.

Right. Almost like someone from Alaska getting ready to race Ironman Hawaii and needing to drag their bicycle into the sauna.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I should say at altitude as well. And One of the things I found with the low-carb ketogenic diet and training in heat and humidity, my blood plasma volume increased and I was able to carry more oxygen. So when I went to altitude, I didn't really notice too much of a detriment for, for a lowlander person. Obviously someone that's already acclimatized is gonna be at a greater level.

So I, I just fell in love with that and was Oh, so I'm just curious, just to interject here real quick, is there some kind of a correlation between the increased fatty acid oxidation or lower carbohydrate consumption and some type of oxygen sparing or increase in efficiency of oxygen utilization that would have caused that?

Gosh, I would ask you. I think you were in the FASTER study, right?

I was, the 12-month low-carb ketogenic study at University of Connecticut. That was horrible. A 3-hour run on a treadmill fueled by a strawberry.

Yeah. Yeah, that's a good question. I think that definitely it improved mitochondrial function. And so, that definitely would help improve, you know, ATP production and Yeah, I was able to just maintain a pretty good pace at altitude.

Ben Greenfield: Okay. Okay. So, you're competing in endurance sports, you're training, and at some point, I'm assuming this whole idea of emotional trauma work comes in, which I guess indicates that maybe the problems came back up with the colitis?

Yeah, Ben. So gosh, there, there's only so many ultras that you can do low carb before it just starts to tear your body down.

And, and I unfortunately just, I would say low carb or high carb or, or high body.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I, and I began to experience it. I had one summer where I raced, um, like 4 or 5 50-mile mountain ultras. Over the course of like 5 months and it broke me. I was never quite the same after that in terms of being able to digest. Uh, I started to have, you know, more loose stool. All of the symptoms started to come back up. And at the same time, when that all happened, um, I began having thyroid problems and, um, began to experience hypothyroidism. From not just the low carb and all of the running, but I was also doing, you know, I was doing cold plunging, probably too much, you know, a number of other like biohacks to try to help recover. And I think they were just, I was making more withdrawals from the bank than I was making deposits. And it began to show up in my thyroid.

Right. Hypogonadism. Joint pain, and low thyroid activity are all commonly experienced when you combine high levels of physical activity with low carbohydrate or low calorie intake. But typically, you'll find people in the endurance community eating, say, 3,500, 4,000 calories a day. But if they're on the low-carb bandwagon, not a lot of that is carbs. And even then, you know, yeah, I was amongst that group, can experience some big thyroid deficits. And a drop in testosterone and joint pain, all simply because there's not enough glucose or glycans to go around.

Yeah. Yep. And, and yeah, you can add me to that cohort. We still hadn't gotten to kind of the trauma part yet. I just had begun to notice that I just had this deep knowing that something wasn't right. I couldn't put my finger on it. We, I went on you know, thyroid replacement hormone. Um, went and went, got acupuncture, saw a counselor, tried integrative doctors, and I just kept having this deep knowing that something wasn't right. And a couple of the doctors had given me comments that you need, you need to work on your emotional health or you need to be happier. Uh, I was very driven, so it was really hard on myself all the time.

Yeah. Did your wife ever tell you that?

Yeah, that's a good question. To ask the wives how to try to control their ultra-endurance athletes, it's just a mindset that you get in that's really hard to turn off.

Yeah. I mean, my wife usually just let me wind myself up and go and just rarely did she try to reel me back, not because of any fault of her own, it was just Yeah, this is what my husband does. And if he messes himself up, he'll figure it out.

Yep. Yeah, I would say that's true. Although this was getting to the point where it was really beginning to build up that it was, I was making all the changes dietarily and trying to improve my gut health and things just were not getting better. And, you know, this, this led up to. A point where, um, I had this experience, uh, we had gotten a German Shorthair pointer. I don't know if you're familiar with that hunting dog, but they're very high energy and, and her name's Daisy. She, she jumped the fence at our house one day and my wife got up like any, any other dog owner would do and started chasing after the dog because she was headed towards oncoming traffic.. And I was sitting on the couch frozen going like, why, why am I not getting up going after the dog?

Right. You're a former football player, now endurance athlete. You should be able to handle that job.

Yeah. And I'm, and I'm frozen and I don't even know why. And I'm sitting there contemplating it while the dog's running into traffic. And that was kind of like one of the first wakeups for me that there was something more going on than just like diet and exercising too much and you know, stress, there, there was something deeper, but I, I wasn't even really to the beginning of starting to dive down in that. Um, kind of the next wake-up call I had was I just began to notice that I was emotionally numb. Like moments where you should cry, just nothing came up. Or, uh, you know, moments where I should be consoling my wife after, you know, maybe she got in an argument with somebody. You know, and I, there's no empathy, it's just numb. And that numbness scared me. And so that's when my wife and I, we got our heads together and we talked about, you know, you have this thyroid issue, you have this gut issue. And we started to think about the future. What is this going to look like if you keep trying to race like this and you, you have these two issues, like our, our life is going to become very difficult to live, um, to even function. I was having just like breakdowns, feeling depressed and anxious and fatigued and brain fog and all this stuff. And I was taking the thyroid hormone and it wasn't getting better.. And so in the fall of 2019, my wife and I, we, we closed our eyes and we prayed and asked God to heal my body and to transform our lives. Because Ben, I'll be honest with you, at this time in our life, we both have successful careers. Uh, I was at, at this time I was a corporate wellness coach, so I'd kind of shifted over a little bit away from performance into that. And she had a great career. We had a great house. We were making good money. We were traveling to all these races all over the, all over North America. And yet something deep down inside me was like, something's not right. I wasn't happy. We weren't fulfilled. It just became kind of to the end of our rope. Um, plus these two health issues. And so in the fall of 2019, we decided to do whatever it took to heal and to transform. And so we began that journey. And Ben, I'll tell you, my expectation of that journey was, you know, in 6 months, this will be knocked out. We'll get rid of the thyroid problem. We'll get rid of the gut issue.

And about, about 6 years ago at the time of this recording.

Yeah. Yep. So I just thought 6 months, this will all be over. I can go back to ultra running again. And, um, Ben, I began to head into a period of my life similar to what I went through when my football career ended and when I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, where it just kind of felt like everything was collapsing in on me. Um, I went into another kind of season of that because not too long after we prayed that prayer, um, I had been gluten-free and I thought, you know, uh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna start eating gluten again. And I just went overboard and I caused like a really massive flare in my colon. And, uh, not more than about 3 months later, I had lost 40 pounds. So I had gone from like 175 all the way down to like 135.

Wow. And I'm assuming you were on the toilet a lot and unable to train and probably unable to eat a significant amount of calories as well.

Absolutely. What was, what was, um, what was more challenging than anything else was the tremendous fear and worry and anxiety that came up. Um, and just, I just remember feeling like this is going to kill me because all I saw was blood, mucus. And I just saw my body wasting away. I mean, less than a year ago, I had been running a 50K out in California and then another shorter uphill race in Utah. And then here I am where I can barely walk a block because I'm so depleted.

Yeah. Pondering your own mortality at that point after being a rising star.

Absolutely. And so, I went through a number of different kind of back and forths of using alternative and functional and holistic medicine and kind of getting to a certain place, but not getting all the way. And then kind of going back to conventional medicine and using, you know, steroids and suppositories and things like that, trying to, trying to get a handle on this. And I, I remember specifically that, um, I went and had a colonoscopy done and they checked and everything looked great, all healed up. And the doctor told my wife, he said, yeah, I might've roughed him up a little bit when I was in there with the camera. So if he has a little bit of bleeding, like, that's why. And I don't know if it was him or if it was my fear, but it just totally lit, it just totally restarted the flare again. And then that just led into, you know, um, the next couple years of just going through hell.

What did hell look like?

Yeah, so hell looked like um, my immune system kind of crashed and I had developed, uh, shingles zoster on the right side of my face. And it got into my eye and I almost lost vision in my right eye from a scar. I have some scarring on my face from it. And about a month later, meanwhile, uh, this is all in the, during the pandemic, mind you. Um, I got super anemic and ended up in the hospital during the pandemic for 9 days.

And, uh, not necessarily the safest place to be during the pandemic.

No. And, and not only was it not the safest, but it was incredibly isolating. Um, because there were no, you, you couldn't have any other visitors other than one person. And so no family could see me. It was just my wife and I alone in there with the doctors. Um, you know, they were doing all kinds of tests trying to figure out what was going on. Meanwhile, I'm getting blood transfusions. I'm getting, you know, high potent, um, antivirals and even coming to another place of surrender as if I didn't, as if I thought I wasn't surrendered enough. I got to a place where I was in the gurney and I remember, you know, God speaking to me and just saying, hey, are you willing to do like whatever it takes? Are you really willing to do it? And I was like, yeah, I am. He's like, then I want you to, I want you to take a biologic. And so, uh, we get, we leave the hospital and I start on, um, Remicade at home and I'm getting double dosed and it's not working for 6 months, double doses. And it's, and it's not working. And, uh, my wife and I just kept getting more desperate. We ended up doing a lot of, um, environmental testing on our house and we know we found that we had a cell tower really close to us. And so we sold our house and we moved to the country to live, um, in my parents' basement.

Wow. All based on the cell tower.

Um, Yeah, we, at this point, we're just, we were looking for anything that could be stressing my body, uh, where this, you know, this medication wouldn't work. And, and so we move out there and kind of stabilize. We get to a point too, though, Ben, where the medication just, it wasn't working. And with the risks that were coming with it, um, we just, you know, we prayed about it and just felt like, you know, this isn't, this isn't working for us. We went ahead and stopped that. And actually, I began to get a little bit better. Things began to calm down a little bit. My weight began to stabilize, but the deconstruction continued. Again, in the middle of the pandemic, I was working on and off as a coach, as a health coach, working from home. So I was able to do my coaching, you know, virtually and, you know, all the presentations and programs and everything from home. While I'm going through this. And, um, we eventually move out and we get to, uh, we get, finally get our own place and God keeps just knocking on the door to, to take even bigger action to change. And so, uh, God called us to move and we moved to Florida and I left my coaching job and, um, I was stable enough that we could you know, we could, we could do that. Um, but definitely wasn't out of the woods. And in the middle of all of that, it became, it became more clear to me that there was something emotional going on here. And so I began to read and study into, uh, kind of emotional wounding, not so much trauma yet, but just emotional wounding. And so we moved to Florida and I went and found a therapist and began to do talk therapy every single week, uh, just hard charging into therapy, right? Like, we're just going to go fix this. And I spent a year and a half doing talk therapy, uh, talking through all this stuff. And that was incredibly helpful. And that did help my body to a certain extent. But then the interesting thing about trauma and emotional wounds is that they are stored in our body. So it's, it's, you know, we, we can be experiencing the thought of the feeling, but there's something deeper that's going on in the physical body. And so I left therapy because up here I felt better, but my body didn't change. How I felt in my body didn't change. And so that kind of separated things where I realized that I need to go after what's going on in my body. And that's what led me to uh, discovering trauma, this whole idea of trauma and how we can, um, go through experiences that are overwhelming where our nervous system cannot process these experiences. And I've named a couple of them off for you, um, in our time here and how these walls of trauma can while they protect us from the overwhelm, they put us into a fight or flight or a freeze state. And that's what can cause the emotional numbness, the inability to react.

Ben Greenfield: That's, I assume, the type of sympathetic nervous system activation that would cause autoimmune issues, including something like your colonic cells attacking your own body.

Absolutely. Thyroid as well. And so I began to just kind of put this picture together and began to understand that, and this is, I'm going to have to completely rebuild the way that I think about health and fitness and wellness because this striving, this hard charging, this like, there's no limits mentality. Was not serving me anymore. In fact, it was making it worse. And so I had to rethink the whole thing and kind of start from scratch a little bit.

And so what happened?

Well, during that time is actually when I met Joel. I had read his book.

Oh, that's how you met Joel? Joel Greene?

Yeah. Yeah. So I had read his book a number of years before and just in my pursuit of knowledge and just The Immune Code? Yeah, The Immunity Code. I read that and I began seeing him post things about colitis and about autoimmune and the connection with the gut and the nervous system and the immune system. And so I DM'd him and we began a conversation. And the next thing I know, I jumped in his coaches course program and Joel took me on an 18-week deep dive. Into the immune system, immunometabolism, the gut microbiome, and not only laid out his 2-day core program, but also taught the coaches, a bunch of us coaches, a bunch of advanced protocols to help, you know, like restore the gut lining, calm the immune system down, things of that nature. And so I began to notice that when I took, you know, trauma work, like somatic practices, mind-body medicine, tremoring is another one that's really helpful. And combining that with this immune-centric approach, I began to slowly see results. What's tremoring? Trauma release exercise. Have you heard of TRE?

Yeah, but I don't remember what it is, embarrassingly.

So yeah, that's a really good question. The way I like to describe this is you think about like, do you have a dog, Ben?

Yeah, couple.

Okay. When your dogs get really excited, like they see a rabbit that they want to chase, but they're in the house and they're at the door and they're like, come on, dad, like, let me out, right? You look at them and you'll notice their body is quivering. They're shaking, right?

Oh, yeah. Is this kind of like the idea that predator that's tracked down by prey and escapes, they'll kind of like shake off the stress?

Correct.

And so, if you're like shaking or self-tremoring, you can release stress?

Yep. You can release the stored tension. And if we think about stored tension in the immune system and your cardiovascular system, your circulatory system, when you're under stress, you're in fight or flight, your fascia locks down.

Yeah. I do that with kettlebell swings. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, what you found then was a lot of this emotional work is useful, but you found when pairing it with addressing the microbiome so that the immune system restabilized and inflammation was quelled using an approach like Joel's, that, that was kind of like the turning point for you.

Yeah, absolutely. And, and I want to point out one of the reasons that focusing on the immune system is so important is because when you're in fight or flight, your, your immune system gets downregulated. And so one of the things that I found was using that immune-centric approach in terms of my nutrition, any kind of, uh, like biohacks, supplementation protocol, fasting, cold exposure, these kinds of things, using them in the proper order and the proper function. And, you know, at the proper temperature too, because we don't want to go too cold. This began to help support the immune system to come back up. And when the immune system is able to protect the body, protect the gut, you know, do what it's supposed to do to fight invaders and things of that nature. Now the vagus nerve starting to get activated again. We're getting back into that parasympathetic state. We're getting those, that kind of that freeze state to come down so that when we go do the trauma work, we do our shaking, we do our somatic work, things of that nature, your, your nervous system, your immune system, everything's fueled and it's functioning so that it can release what's been held.

Interesting. Now, I know that you have this website, Intuitive Wellness. I'll link to that. And also, by the way, for those of you want to read Joel's books, they're great. I'll link to my podcast with Joel if you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com/IntuitiveWellness. Also, link to Will's website because he helps walk people through a lot of this stuff as well, BenGreenfieldLife.com/IntuitiveWellness. But I'm very curious, Will, Ben Greenfield: We've got about 10 minutes here and I would love to hear boots on the streets what this looks like from a practical standpoint. Like you mentioned, for example, Joel's 2-day protocol. What would an average couple of days actually look like for somebody who maybe has gut issues, has trauma issues, wants to quell an overactive immune system, et cetera? What's it actually look like? Like when you get out of bed, when you, you know, go to bed 48 hours later?

Yeah, Ben, it's a good question. I want to touch on something before I answer that question real quick. Because the kind of people that I'm, that I work with are folks who, like me, have tried everything. You know, they've looked at all the diets, they've done the protocols, the supplements, the biohacks. They've looked at their environment. They've looked at all of these well-known contributors to gut issues and they're losing hope. That's the person that I like to work with so that they understand that, that there, there is something beyond those, those kinds of protocols. And when we combine something like, you know, the 2-Day Core, for instance, along with trauma work, we can start to see results that we might not be able to get other places. So What does that look like day to day? That's like, that's such a hard question to answer, Ben, just for the fact that when it comes to this kind of work, you're going into the unknown. All right.

Yeah, I understand that. But like for you, like talk, that doesn't be one of your clients. Like talk about you. What's it look like for you?

Yeah. So yeah, I typically wake up at the same time every morning. One of the reasons I moved to Florida is because of the sun exposure here. We know that that's really good for the body, really good for getting back into that rest-digest state, circadian rhythm, that kind of stuff. So my time is always spent— once I wake up, I'm out on the lanai, getting my eyes and skin in the sun and on the ground. That's usually coupled with time with my wife and diving into connecting with my God and nourishing ourselves emotionally and spiritually through maybe the Bible or through a book we're reading together. And then usually after that, it's breakfast. Because I work for myself, I'm able to go enjoy nature, go to a walk on the beach, a walk in the preserve just behind us. And I like to kind of modulate back and forth between doing a day 1, day 2, just kind of depending on what my body feels. So That might adjust whether I'm going to be eating breakfast or not depending on if I'm going to fast.

Right. Because Joel kind of has more like fasting on one day than feasting on the next day roughly. It's a little more advanced than that, but you're kind of like press-pulse cycling the body through these phases.

Yep, yep, absolutely. And yeah, so basically just following that approach.

Do you do the deal where you've got, and correct me if I'm misremembering, you probably know better than me, Will. Are you doing the thing where you have a day where it's some hard lifting and then a heavy feast and then the next day kind of fasting and more gentler aerobic exercise, walks in the sunshine, kind of a well-fed hard-charging day and then an easier kind of foraging type of day?

Yeah. I have done that. If I was to talk about what I'm doing right now, it's walking and pickleball and swimming. Just because I have found that with how hard I've been on my body and what my body's been through, it just needs a nice long rest from any kind of—

You obviously haven't played pickleball with me.

Yeah. Yeah. You don't play with my wife and I. It's— yeah, absolutely. So that's really important to understand though. Like you said, like that hard charging approach, we really have to rethink that when it comes to, um, healing from trauma, because a lot of that hard charging can just reactivate those trauma walls to come back up, put you back into fight or flight or freeze, and kind of just shut the whole, uh, repair and transformational process down. So it's kind of a self-discovery process. You go from ultra runner to you know, I had never walked before really in nature for more than, unless I blew up on the trail, I never walked. And now I go for, you know, an hour walk with the dog in nature. And there's so much more to be gleaned from that, not just physically, but emotionally and spiritually and mentally in terms of what that does to your nervous system and stress, things of that nature. So, um, that's what my days look like currently. Kind of just taking it easy, refilling that reservoir.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's interesting because I like to train hard. I lift weights. I do high-intensity interval training. I find that I do need to pay much greater attention to dietary quality and even the consistency. On days where I'm training hard, I actually have to pay a lot more attention to chewing, to blending, to pulverizing. It's not eating highly complex big raw salads, et cetera. It is really interesting, isn't it, that link between how hard you train and how much of almost like a little bit of a baby food approach you need to take towards diet. And I think some people get so far overboard with the hard and heavy training that their gut never really gets a break, especially if they're combining that with the typical diet they'd eat on, let's say, an easier day. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah. And if you're doing, if you're taking the approach like I use with the 2-Day Core and we begin to add in, you know, phenols and resistant starch and, and we start to increase the fiber, that doesn't usually work so well with that hard charging approach. And so it's like, what do you want? Do you want to keep pushing your body to the limit? Or do you want to heal?

Yeah. Yeah. And my objective with this podcast and with all my podcasts is to help people fix their issues. Sometimes, I think I'm a little jaded because I'm one of those guys who just reads a book and implements, but then some people need to take a book like say Joel's and have someone walk them through it and implement it for them in a manner that's consistent with their personal health history. Am I right in assuming that's kind of what you do? Not that Joel wouldn't love to work with everybody on the planet, but if somebody were to go to Intuitive Wellness, which by the way, I'm not financially affiliated with Will at all, you guys, but that you would take this type of approach and implement it into their life?

Yeah, absolutely. And whether you think that you might be dealing with emotional wounds or trauma or just you, you have been pushing yourself to the limit and you're, you're chronically stressed out, taking these approaches like somatic work and tremoring, some of these tools that we use in healing trauma, these are fantastic for releasing stored energy, stored tension from the body, releasing the stress that's been mounting and been suppressed throughout your life. And then pairing that with this nutritional approach that improves your immune system, improves your nervous system function, and just kind of like helps to rebuild your foundation again, I think it's a really powerful one-two combo.

Yeah. If I could wave a magic wand, everybody listening in, and I'm not just saying this so I can get more downloads, would go listen to the 3 podcasts I've done with Joel and then pair it with this podcast. Because I think this would really provide the full picture for folks who need to understand, especially if they have gut issues, this link between gut immunity and your lifestyle, diet, and exercise choices. So, I think this will actually be really helpful for a lot of people because like you mentioned, somebody will listen to like 13 of my shows and try everything and it's not working because it hasn't been systematized in the right way and they're just bouncing all over the place from solution to solution. So, Intuitive Wellness. What's your website? Intuitive Wellness Now?

Yeah, that's correct.

Okay. I'll link to that at bengreenfieldlife.com/intuitivewellness. And last question for you, Will, how are things going now with the gut, with the colitis? Is it pretty good?

It is, Ben. I think the thing that's more exciting, I mean, obviously healing the body is incredibly exciting to get your vitality, your energy, your libido, all of those things back, be able to digest and eat whatever you want healthfully, obviously eat whatever you want, is in that transformational process, you, you get to discover that you can be anybody that you want to be. You don't have to be a hard-charging, constantly striving athlete if you don't want to anymore. Just that opportunity to transform and to expand your life, especially if you've been struggling to to expand and to grow as a person. So it's a really, uh, yeah, it's a really unique opportunity to discover more about who you are. And, um, that's what I love. That's why I love doing this. I love to help other people, uh, find their authentic self and discover more about who they were truly made to be. And, um, and ultimately that like God is writing a story for each one of us and, and he's written this transformational story for me, but it's not for me. It really is it's a story of hope for others that are still struggling because that's why I'm here, Ben, is this wasn't available to me when I was going through all of this. It didn't exist. And, I felt the calling to add my brick to the wall.

Ben: Yeah. Yeah. I love it, man. Well, keep doing this work, brother. And, for those of you listening in, BenGreenfieldLife.com/IntuitiveWellness. I'll link to Will's stuff, my previous podcast with Joel, and I really think this will help a lot of people out. So, I'm super appreciative you taking an hour out of your life, Will, to just share all of this with us. And hopefully, we continue to change lives, change guts. Absolutely. Change relationships. So, thanks so much, man.

I really appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you. Appreciate the time.

Alright, folks. I'm Ben Greenfield. I'm with Will Malcolm from Intuitive Wellness Now, signing out from the Boundless. Life Podcast. Have an incredible week.

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