In this episode you will learn:
Jyoti’s difficult journey so far
How Bikram yoga is still the best anti-RA exercise
How prednsione and Enbrel cannot hold the disease at bay
The emotional trauma that comes with RA
The path forward
How we need support
Decisions in trying to start a family whilst on heavy medications
Disclaimer -the information on this site is not medical advice. Before making any changes to your lifestyle, diet, exercise, drug or supplement routines you must first discuss the changes with a licensed professional.
Clint: Well, here we go again with another episode of the Paddison Podcast. And we’ve got a guest on today. It’s Jyoti. How are you, Jyoti?
Jyoti: I’m fine. Thank you, Clint. How are you?
Clint: I’m doing great. I’m doing great, keeping the family under control here in the rest of the house so that we can have a quiet conversation. Today, we’re going to hear about what you’re up to with your healing journey and I’ll offer some thoughts, based on my perspective, and tell you what I would do in your situation. So tell us what have you been going through and then we’ll look at what we can do next.
Jyoti: Well, I’ve been going through a lot of pain, swelling and stiffness in obviously all of my…in all my body. And I’m still on medication at the moment. I’m taking steroids, prednisolone. And I’m taking, once a week, an injection called Enbrel…Enbrel. So those are the only things I’m taking for my condition at the moment.
Clint: And how long have you had it?
Jyoti: What? The condition or the medicines?
Clint: Both. Let’s go back a little bit and let’s look at when you got diagnosed, exactly what the diagnosis was and what you’ve done since then.
Jyoti: I’ve been diagnosed back in June of 2013. They told me that I’ve got rheumatoid arthritis. And since then, I’ve been on medications, which I don’t think has helped me at all, to be honest. I mean, it’s got me a little bit moving, but that’s it. I mean, to help myself, the only thing that I think is working is Bikram Yoga, to be honest. And I’ve been going there for nearly a year…nearly a year. And I have made so much improvement in terms of my movement, flexibility. It’s brilliant, absolutely brilliant. I would recommend to anyone, yeah.
Clint: Awesome, yeah. Well, that’s what I’ve been doing for the last seven years, recommending it to everyone.
Jyoti: Oh yeah, that’s fantastic. Fantastic is the word.
Clint: Yeah, it is.
Jyoti: Yeah, my whole family’s into it.
Clint: Your family has been going as well?
Jyoti: Mom, my dad, my sister in laws, yup, my auntie, everyone, yeah.
Clint: That’s fantastic.
Jyoti: It’s brilliant, absolutely brilliant, yeah.
Clint: And so you started that a year ago, okay. And when did you start these drugs? Are these the original ones you started on? Or did you start with something else and shift across?
Jyoti: They started me on steroids and they also started me on salfidine?
Clint: Sulfasalazine?
Jyoti: Yeah, that’s it. But that didn’t suit me.
Clint: Why?
Jyoti: I only took it for about two weeks because I started getting thumping in my head. It was really bad, a lot of pain, like someone’s crushing me and my temperature’s really high. Then I would end up in hospital and I had seven antibiotics, seven antibiotics. I had rashes all over my body, all over my body like high…
Clint: That came after you started taking the sulfasalazine?
Jyoti: That’s right, that’s right. And then my rheumatologist, she told me to, obviously, not take ’em. But I was really angry with her. I didn’t wanna go back. But I obviously did because I had no choice, yeah.
Clint: And why did they give you the antibiotics after you went to hospital? Do you remember their rationale?
Jyoti: No. They gave it because obviously it was…I didn’t know why they actually gave it, obviously because my temperature was high, my blood pressure was low. I was in a pretty bad state. I mean, I got videos and photos of me being in the hospital. It was 2015 in January. I think it’s January when I was admitted for three days.
Clint: Three days in hospital from the drug?
Jyoti: Yup.
Clint: And how long did you have take those antibiotics for?
Jyoti: The antibiotics were given to me in the hospital. That is it. I had seven different ones, yeah.
Clint: Seven different ones over three days.
Jyoti: Yup.
Clint: Okay, all right, well, we’re getting a little bit of a picture here, aren’t we, before we can start troubleshooting? So your exercise is outstanding. What about…what does your dietary side of things look like, sort of before and then at diagnosis and then after diagnosis?
Jyoti: My diet before was pretty…well, it wasn’t great, because the thing is everyone keeps telling you different things, “Don’t eat this, eat this, don’t eat this.” So I’m a bit confused with my diet, to be honest. And I’ve been trying to go to different people to say, “Look, could you help me? Could you help me?” I mean, everyone’s got their own way of dealing with things. But, you know, not everything works for everyone. So it’s hard to explain. I’m lost. I’m actually lost.
Clint: All right, well, we can fix that. So tell me what does it look like then. Before you said it wasn’t great? Most of us underestimate how bad our diets are. I used to think I had a pretty good diet before I got diagnosed. That’s because I just didn’t eat McDonald’s every often or I didn’t eat Burger King very often. You know, I might have only eaten those once a month when I was travelling. And the rest of the time now I was single guy with time [inaudible 00:05:40] trying to, you know, achieve, achieve, achieve. And so my diet would look like some kind of meat and normally some vegetables and never ever, ever did I eat anything raw. I was never eating like raw fruits and vegetables, maybe the occasional little bit of fruit here and there, some bananas after gym. But, of course, that was on top of then taking whey protein powders and all of this other junk, you know?
So, I mean, were you sort of similar, just sort of the meat and vegetables sort of stuff?
Jyoti: I’m a vegetarian. So I don’t eat meat, no eggs, fish.
Clint: Okay, okay, good.
Jyoti: But my food is normal, like I will have chapatis, lentils, curries. Like yourself, I never go to McDonald’s or…I never like eating outside food as much. I’m always like the health freak. You know, I’m always on top of the world, like I’m always looking after…well, I try to look after myself anyway. But I never thought that this could happen to me because I thought I’m the most healthiest person going.
Clint: Okay. But was there dairy in your diet?
Jyoti: There was. I used to drink milk, yogurt, homemade yogurt that my Mom used to make. Cakes and stuff like that, I wasn’t a really big fan, very, very rare, very rare. I like homemade.
Clint: It sounds like, you know, compared to most, you probably were a little bit more on the unlucky side to develop the disease. I mean, the statistical likelihood of you getting it versus someone on a Western diet was much lower but you still got it. And so, you know, someone posted in our community forum recently and made me really laugh. You know, sometimes, we’re like obsessed about why this happened and so forth, that like there’s this, you know, traditional Indian kinda saying, like, you know, “Who cares who shot you in the leg with the arrow, just pull out the freaking arrow” right? And so we gotta pull out the arrow. It doesn’t matter where it came from or why it happened.
Jyoti: That’s it.
Clint: And so, okay, and then what did you after that? I mean, are you doing your program?
Jyoti: No. You know what, my mom bought me your book, you know, your first book. I think it’s your first book, I don’t know which one it is. She bought it for me but I never had the opportunity to actually go through it and look at it because she’s got the book. And I only go and see my mom once a week, so, yeah. I’ve been trying different things.
Clint: Yeah, that sounds like an excuse to me. So we can talk about what you need to do then. There’s a lot of content that a lot of our listeners will already know that I’ll probably cover then in this call, because we can cut back to some fundamentals and look at why I recommend the processes that I do. So where you’re going to find the most return on your investment is going to be radically intervening with your current diet. Even people who are following the Paddison Program find that if they make deviations by 5% and make some small allowances for some of their favorite foods from time to time, that although that doesn’t set them back in the long term, it immediately sets them back with regards to their pain levels.
And so, just to give you an example, if you were to be eating 100% compliant on the Paddison Program and then, once a week, you’re going to eat a food that contains a lot of olive oil or vegetable oils in that meal, you are going to have pain for several days afterwards without doubt, there’s no question about it. And so, no matter how kind of clean we get our form of eating whilst we’re in the real healing stage, the early stages, one mistake is going to really throw things out of whack temporarily. The problem is, we keep making those mistakes every day, then we are permanently out of whack.
Okay. So, you know, one thing in your diet, like vegetable oils right now, will keep you in extreme pain, simple as that.
Jyoti: So what would you use then instead of oil to cook your food in?
Clint: Why are you cooking oils in stir-fry dishes? Why are you doing that?
Jyoti: I don’t know, because it’s the norm, everyone does it. There used to be one time, people used to use butter and, you know, saying, “Your cholesterol is gonna get high.”
Clint: So nothing that I eat, even today, even though I can tolerate everything that’s a plant and I can probably tolerate everything that’s not as well, but I don’t wanna eat some of these other things because I know what it can do to the body now. So even I don’t like to eat stir-fried stuff because I just fear the oil inclusion. Now, when we go out to restaurants, and this will be rarely for us, will I want to go to a restaurant where things are stir-fried? I just know that particularly in the Asian cultures, you know, everything needs the oils in the pans.
Now, here at home, sometimes, Melissa will make us stuff in stir-fries but she will use water. And you can stir-fry in water. It just means that you can’t multitask. You can’t go and play with the kids and then come back and then just give it a flip. You’ve got to stay with it, because it’ll otherwise stick to the pan. But, apart from that, there’s no downside with stir-frying in water. But I just don’t tend to seek the foods that are stir-fried as much as I do things that are steamed, like the steamed rice, or baked, you know? Steamed and baked comprises 99% of my diet.
So you’ll appreciate this when you actually go through and read the why behind all of these things, okay? So you’re not even in the preliminary sort of phase of our process that we go through. So, in our program, there’s five phases. The first one is there’s a preparation phase. You’ll need to get your blood tests done. You wanna make sure that you’ve got some before shots or you’ve made some notes about your range or motion, your pain levels. You’ll write all this stuff done. And then you understand where you’re at. And this would be today, where you are right now, okay?
Jyoti: Yup, okay.
Clint: Then you go through a two-day cleanse process, which is just celery and cucumber juices and some leafy green salads. So you don’t actually eat any foods that have calories in them. You’re just cleansing and you’re eating fiber, plant fiber. At the end of the 2 days, unless you’re about 1 in 20, the 19 out of 20 people will feel incredible pain relief after two days.
Jyoti: Really?
Clint: Yes, of course. The pain returns to some extent when you start eating again on day three, because no food creates no pain when you’re in your chronic state. It takes a long time until food can create no pain. So in those first two days, the reason we’d have that is, one, is that we can cleanse out all of the crap that’s been moving through your body and to alkalize the body and make you have a fresh start. But the other part of it, which is at least as important, is to come to that realization that the moment that you stop filling your body with these foods and with these toxins that you feel essentially no pain or at least a dramatic pain relief, like huge, not just a little bit. But in two days, it’s huge.
And then after that, there’s a 12-day baseline period where we eat a small range of foods over and over again for 12 days. And these foods took me a long time to finalize and to appreciate ones that can alkalize, not be irritable to most people with RA, easy to digest, because we’ve all got ruined digestive systems when we’re about to start this process and also meet all of the nutritional requirements, everything from iron through to vitamin C and you name it, everything, right? And so you’ve got this baseline period.
And then there’s a reintroduction phase where you reintroduce foods and test them back into your diet because everyone has different food sensitivities. And so, you mentioned at the top of this conversation, no diet fits all. I disagree with that and say that there hasn’t been a person who has done the Paddison Program who has not improved or has persevered when they have hit a stumbling block and not improved. Some people get to a point and then they stop because they’re not improving. But if you look at the back history, they’ve stopped medications recently. So they’ve just stopped medications thinking they don’t need them anymore. Or they’re not exercising or they’re trying to do it while they’re working two jobs and running a family of three kids or… You know, there’s always a reason as to why the body is not responding.
And then after the foods are reintroduced, that is a quasi-personalized system. It’s both guided but it also has a discretionary component based on how your body feels, for instance, to fruits. And then you move through that until you get to a maintenance phase where you can have tons and tons of normal, enjoyable meals, including many from the Indian cuisine, such as lentils and various dals, mung dals.
Jyoti: Yeah, mung dal, mung dal.
Clint: Oh, yeah. And so a lot of your cultural foods are in there. And so, yeah, I mean, this is what you’re in for. This is what you should be doing.
Jyoti: Okay. I was gonna say isn’t it like you said you suffered when you got sick from eating those cherries unwashed?
Clint: Yes, yes.
Jyoti: Well, I had an episode but not with food, but with water because obviously my parents wanted me to get well and start seeing my family. So they got me this pH you can get and they’re like drops, you put it into the water. And so that was supposed to help me with my levels. I drank it. I think I might’ve overdrank it and I ended up in hospital.
But I was feeling sick but nothing was coming out. Do you understand? I was feeling sick [inaudible 00:16:32], you know?
Clint: Yeah. You’re just vomiting bile at the end of the process because you’ve gotten everything out of your stomach, yeah?
Jyoti: Exactly. But the funny thing is when that was happening to me, I mean, I was in pain obviously, when I got off that bed, it felt like nothing was wrong with me.
Clint: Exactly.
Jyoti: I was walking normally. I mean, I was feeling “Wow! I’m back to normal” no pain, no nothing. After three days of resting and stuff and then eating food again, that’s when problems started.
Clint: Precisely. So you already have had the experience of not eating equals no pain, right?
Jyoti: Yup.
Clint: So you already know that. You know that this is a gut disorder.
Jyoti: Definitely agree.
Clint: What becomes infuriating and absolutely mind-blowing is that medical professionals, the vast majority, think that this isn’t related to the gut. Now, if you stop putting food in the gut and you stop having the disease and then you say that it’s not related to the gut, then you pretty much should just go and lock yourself in a cave and rot for the rest of your life. I mean, it’s so ridiculous.
Jyoti: Yeah, it is. It is. They don’t believe it, you know? They think it’s got nothing to do with your diet. So what has it got to do with then, you know? Your destiny, this is what’s gonna happen to you, because I [inaudible 00:17:56] time. I seriously have. I mean, I was crippled six months of my life. I was living with my parents. They took me in. I’m married but then my father was ill at one point and then I was ill. And they had to carry me up the stairs. I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t do anything.
Now, just last year, I’ve been able to cook a little bit for myself. But I still can’t do the things I used to do, you know? I suffered a lot. I understand how you’ve suffered. You know, you’d been through quite a lot, similar to basically what I’ve been through, I think, maybe more. I don’t know.
Clint: Look, anyone who has this for a day gets a sample of how hell it can on earth. I think anyone who has it has… You know what it feels like? It feels like that, even if you have it in a couple of your fingers, that your cup of pain is already full. And then if it’s more than just your fingers and it’s your knees and it’s your elbows and it’s your jaw and it’s your feet, you know, your cup of pain was already full at fingers and now just anything beyond, you gotta, you know, just give me a break. You know what I mean?
Jyoti: Exactly. You know, yourself, I mean, have you actually now totally healed from this condition? Are you totally free from it?
Clint: I mean, there’s no inflammation. There’s not inflammation in my body. So, I used to have… You’ve seen my fingers swelling in my pictures, right? So you can see that my fingers aren’t perfectly straight. They’ve taken a bit of damage over the years but they have zero pain and work normally. And you’ve seen the pictures. And I can hop on the left leg that I previously could place no weight on. I can hop around the house on it. Now, I don’t like to because it’s so messed up from the damage that was done that I might kinda irritate it. Like, it’s like trying to, you know, drive on a wheel that’s got a bit of rust on it, you know what I mean? You don’t wanna run it at 100 mile an hour.
Jyoti: No, of course not.
Clint: My elbows always need to have attention. I like to go to the gym a lot. But now I’m bench-pressing. I can now, on the bench press…the other day, I was doing 22-kilo dumbbells on each side, so that’s, like, a six-year old child on each side and pumping out 12 sets. I’m no longer the guy at the gym who is, you know, embarrassed around me by the weights that I lift.
Now, obviously, it’s not about sort of being in competition or anything but for me…and I keep track of my strength and my, you know, abilities. I basically measure everything, right? And so I still measure. I still have little books lying around that I take to the gym. And there are multiple books because I go through them and I buy another and I keep the old ones. And the one that I have now, you know, I’m jotting down what I do at the gym. But my elbows, they’ve been rotated at the elbow joint a little bit. So they’re not perfect elbows. And it all happened during the inflammation years.
And so I’m still, to this day, doing what you would call rehabilitation. And I’ll always do rehabilitation because I wanna get stronger, I want my body to be at its absolute peak state and keep it that way, yeah.
Jyoti: Okay. So, yeah…
Clint: But no, I mean to…I don’t know if that completes your question. I haven’t felt the need to go and get a blood test or anything. I mean, if you don’t feel the inflammation, then you know, I do a lot of other things with my life and don’t think about these things anymore, you know. So, yeah.
Jyoti: No, it’s good.
Clint: This is powerful medicine. The medicine that you can be given, the ones you’re on like prednisone, which has all these side effects, depletes your vitamin D levels, makes you osteoporotic, deletes your mucosal lining, so eventually you’ll actually get more leaky gut by being on that drug. And then sulfasalazine that you’re on that’s got an antibiotic component. So, you know, who knows what’s that doing to your microbiome, because you’re taking a drug that has antibiotics in it? And then Enbrel, well, I’m having someone work right now on all the side effects of these biologic drugs. And some of them are far worse that anything that the disease can ever do to you because these drugs effectively shut down your immune system. And if you haven’t got a defense to the world with all of the things that can affect you and your health, then you’re exposed. You’re leaving the door open at night to intruders.
Jyoti: Yeah. So what do I do then because I went for my blood test, I mean, I went to the rheumatologist just this week and my CRP level’s gone up. In May, it was 19. From May to January, it’s gone to 50. So she’s put me on…I was on 2.5, she’s put me on 5 mg now. So I’m trying to [inaudible 00:23:07]
Clint: What do you think you should do?
Jyoti: In terms of what? In terms of what I should do? I just wanna get rid of my medicine, you know, and get myself well. Seriously, I know what you’re saying that I shouldn’t be on this medicine because medicines give you side effects. I’ll tell you something. My memory’s gone really bad. My hairs are falling out. My skin is really bad, you know? And my eyesight’s not that great. It’s not what it used to be because of all these medicines. And I don’t know if it’s prednisolone or if it’s the Enbrel that’s doing it. But as far as they’re concerned, she’d go, “This is the best thing for you”. I’ve got really swollen knees. They’re bent.
I was perfect, Clint. I could run, walk, I used to love my dancing. I can’t dance anymore, you know. And, you know, sometimes, I get emotional and just… Sorry.
Clint: No, don’t apologize.
Jyoti: I do get emotional, you know? And because of all this, I’m having problems having children, you know? So I’m stuck.
Clint: How old are you?
Jyoti: I’m 44. I’m 44 years old. And I’m just stuck with my life. Because of this condition, it’s hard for me, you know, to try for a baby right now. But I have no option, what option do I have left, you know?
Clint: Yes.
Jyoti: So I really wanna get myself well that I can make something of my life, like, you know, have a natural child. I don’t wanna go through any other, you know…I don’t know…
Clint: Yes.
Jyoti: Sorry.
Clint: No, it’s understandable. I completely, completely appreciate what you’re going through and all the emotions. And I’ve got video footage of myself basically at a loss that I have never shared with people before, because, you know, the disease can do this to us. And I think that you don’t need to apologize for being upset. In fact, anyone who is listening to this now can probably cry along with you and realize that this is…you know, like my doctor said, of all the diseases you would never wanna get, this would be at the top of his list. It’s that bad.
You know, and I was talking yesterday with someone about how, when we have a condition like cancer, which is, of course, you know, right up there as well, everyone comes in to support you. It’s like the whole community raises money for you, they basically get behind you, if you’re lucky. And then with a condition like rheumatoid, that doesn’t actually, literally have sort of a death sentence associated possibly with it, everyone goes quiet. And people don’t understand and there is no “Hey, I’m a cancer survivor and I’m going to do this.” It’s like you suffer in silence. And it can be extremely hard to find that level of enthusiasm to try to combat it.
Jyoti: We need the support, you know? It’s hard. It’s been really hard for me. I’ve got my family supporting but, you know what, sometimes you need more than just that. It’s not enough. It’s not enough…
Clint: Yes, okay, that’s right.
Jyoti: …you know?
Clint: So let me tell you what we can do. I’m all about trying to solve problems, right? I like solving problems.
Jyoti: Yeah, that’s good.
Clint: That was a nice smile. You don’t look 40…what did you say 42, 44? You look about 32, okay?
Jyoti: Thank you.
Clint: All right? So once we get you back on track, which I can provide you with all the information that I can. I can’t create miracles but I can show what has worked best based on the science and thousands of others going through this path. And then, you know, we can only do what we can and put all the odds in our favor. That’s what I can do for you.
So, you know, you said your mom has these materials. I’m just gonna email you direct access to our advanced package so you don’t have to have that kind of, like, confusion about how to get the materials. I’ll then set you up inside our community forum and I will be able then to support you personally. And you’ll also get the help from hundreds of other people who understand exactly what you’re going through. And we’ll be able to offer you love and support and encouragement and advice because all of them have had these experiences, okay? And so, with those two things, you’ll have the materials, the step-by-step guides, the troubleshooting guides and all the handholding from myself and everyone else, to give you the very best chance of having the least amount of pain, the least amount of drugs and the best health and, therefore, maybe be able to start a family.
Jyoti: I hope so.
Clint: Okay? But again, I don’t want to, like, have your expectations that, you know, this is going to be easy. It’s hard. And, you know, what you actually do is you have to shift the effort into a different format. You have to shift the effort into kind of your, sort of, misery and time to yourself and challenges with doing this and that, into determination and commitment and discipline. Because you have this cross to bear right now, you know, no one can just instantly click their fingers and take it away. Like Enbrel, for instance, these biologic drugs, these are the best things that medical science can offer. It is one of the, you know, top three in terms of recommended drugs. And you said yourself, you’re getting worse on that drug and you’ve upped the dose, right? So no one’s suddenly going to present you a solution that is going to eliminate this situation.
So you have to apply the right tools and the right discipline and you will start to turn things around. Your exercise, being able and having the privilege of going to Bikram and having it available to you is a blessing. Because some people are not able to go to class because there isn’t a class near them and they don’t have the means to be able to take a month off and go and do Bikram for a month somewhere. But you do have that in your favor and that’s a big blessing. And then you also now have what I’ve just said and what I will set you up with. And it makes an incredible amount of difference to have the support of people who understand around you. I mean, we literally will answer every one of your questions, every single day.
Jyoti: Okay, on the forum?
Clint: Yes. And we do coaching calls as well. I set up coaching calls and you just jump on the call. We actually spend time with each person and discuss the number one thing…hurdles that they’re trying to overcome right now and we overcome the hurdle. And then if you do that often enough and you continue to search and ask questions about what else can I do right now to drive down this pain, then answers come and progress comes.
Jyoti: Okay, you know, in terms of my CRP, is there any ways of helping me to reduce that?
Clint: Well, this is not a long-term… Look, this is the power you have over that, right? You know that if tomorrow you didn’t need any food and then the next day you measured your C-reactive protein, instead of it being 15 milligram per liter, it’ll be 5…5, okay? So we can see that we can influence the inflammation in our body. What we need to do is know how to influence it positively using food and not fasting, because fasting is powerful but it’s unsustainable.
Jyoti: Okay. It’s temporary, in other words.
Clint: Very temporary, yeah. So in terms of this discussion, I don’t see this as a sort of a troubleshooting detailed discussion. I think that’s about what we wanna cover on this call. And I think from now, we pull up our socks and we put on our hat and we go to work in deploying everything that I’ve learnt in the last nearly 11 years.
Jyoti: You’ve done well for yourself.
Clint: I don’t…look…
Jyoti: You fixed stuff, you know?
Clint: I did. But it’s not about a sense of like… What it is, these feelings that I get, I crawled out of a hole. That’s not a showmanship thing. This isn’t about showing off. I’ve got no sense of that whatsoever. What I have is a sense of gravity with how bad my situation was. I have a sense of deep, deep appreciation of getting out of that very, very dark place that I was in. And nobody, no asshole can ever tell me that it was because of the medications or it was because of…I wasn’t a severe case or it was because of anything other than 100% unlimited bulldog determination.
Jyoti: So the determination got you where you are.
Clint: Unbelievable commitment, because not one day was easy.
Jyoti: No, it’s not.
Clint: I’ll know what I went through for the rest of my life. As I said earlier, you know, my joints have had damage to them. And I am going to be living with that till I’m old. Those joints aren’t going to make structural improvements unless I am continually relentless forever.
Jyoti: So you have to keep yourself fit and strong…
Clint: Yeah. I did Bikram the other day. It knocked me around because I hadn’t been for about five months and I felt like going because my left knee’s been a little bit clicky and grindy because I’ve been doing squats at the gym with a barbell. I’m trying to push my body, right? And then, you know, the reason Bikram started is…they put together the Bikram yoga sequence is because he dropped a barbell on his knee doing weightlifting and so his whole process is around restoring structural damage to the knee. And, you know, I’m always pushing the limits. I’m trying to build my body. I wanna look really, really good, basically and take some pictures and just do a comparison about my body and my physique and how I am now, compared to some of the images of me when I was at my worst.
And I just wanna encourage people. I wanna say, “Hey, look what you can do.” I mean, what’s more important in life than becoming passionate about extreme health, not in a way that annoys other people, but in a way that gives you that self-confidence that you’re gonna minimize your likelihood of getting cancer, minimize your likelihood of having a heart attack or eliminating it altogether, making sure you never get type 2 diabetes, making sure that you’re never gonna be obese. I mean, no one needs to be obese, come on, you know? And it’s awesome to know these things and to live a life where you have that knowledge. I mean, you know, if people believe having multiple lives, how good is the one in which you learn how to never have these stupid diseases. That’s a good life.
Jyoti: Exactly, exactly. You know, they do yoga nidra as well. I’ve never been to that.
Clint: Yeah, my wife’s actually…she’s a yoga teacher. My wife’s created some yoga nidras and they’re inside your advanced package. So you can listen to those and, you know, relax and really calm down your mind and relax your body if you wanna listen to those. So, yeah, love note yoga nidras and meditation, very important.
Jyoti: Yeah. Because they’re starting up in the yoga place, yoga nidra and yin yoga. I don’t know what that is.
Clint: Yin’s wonderful. With yin yoga, it’s a very slow sequence in which you hold postures for a long period of time. And one of our community forum members called Mark, he oscillates between Bikram yoga and then yin yoga. Now, yin offers him some other relief, but Bikram is still the number one. Nothing touches Bikram in terms of its effectiveness in rheumatoid reduction.
Jyoti: Right, okay.
Clint: So these are the sort of things that we can go through and you can, you know, ask, and we can give you links. And we’ve got entire threads dedicated to prednisone. There’s something like 30 pages of people talking about how they reduced and got off prednisone. And you can learn from each and every one of them, 30 pages of training just on prednisone, right? And so you can understand how to manage the very challenging task of coming off that drug safely without the pain coming back and without symptoms returning. All right? So we can go through all that.
Jyoti: Once I get off the medicine, then you’re saying I’ll be able to heal better, isn’t it? But I can’t get off the meds just as yet.
Clint: That’s a tricky question because some people have been able to get off prednisone and keep their inflammation levels low right through the process. Other people I see, their healing starts more obviously after they’re able to get off the prednisone. Now, every drug has its own for and against in terms of its ability to impact the gut health. And right now, another research project that I’m having done, similar to the one I mentioned before, about the side effects of all of the common drugs that I’m pulling together, also is one of the impact of various drugs on the microbiome. And I am unsure of the impact of Enbrel but we know 100%, and I can produce the papers that support it, that prednisone causes leaky gut, right? It seems to be a slower burn than the non-steroidal drugs, the anti-inflammatory drugs. They have a very fast impact on the gut lining. The prednisone seems to have more of a month sort of time scale rather than days kind of time scale. And I’m only just speaking through anecdotal evidence right now.
Jyoti: So what do I do? I really want to get off these drugs.
Clint: I mean, as I said, these are the sort of things that we can now discuss. You’re gonna have to do our program for several months and then incrementally lower the drugs based on discussions with your rheumatologist, blood tests and physical exams. So that’s how we’re gonna do it. It not like, boom, we’re gonna do it tomorrow. This is going to be a project that has to have…you’re gonna set some goals as to where you wanna be in three, six months’ time. There is no way, there is no solution where you can be off these drugs and have no pain in six months’ time. That is not possible…not possible.
Jyoti: So I have to stick with my medicine at the moment then?
Clint: A hundred percent. If you want to try and start a family, right now, that’s a discussion you have to have with your doctor, because the discussion needs to be around the suitability of prednisone and Enbrel for starting a family. And I know that the listeners to this will probably have some experience with this, a lot of women may have been on a combination like this. And, again, people in our forum can support you with that information, but, ultimately, you must speak to your rheumatologist about the right drug combination that is friendly for starting a family, friendly for falling pregnant and friendly for being pregnant.
Jyoti: Well, she’s saying that the steroids is okay and the Enbrel is okay.
Clint: Okay, well, there you go. If you’ve got that from your doctor, then that’s what you can go on. I mean, that’s where you really need your doctor.
Jyoti: Yeah. But she just told me that “Your levels are very bad” and that “You’re not fit enough at the moment to have a child.”
Clint: Okay, well, that’s also valuable information to have an opinion like that. So, you know, we have a plan. We have a plan. I’ve sorted you out with everything I’ve put together in terms of materials and I’m gonna support you on a daily basis. So let’s get to it.
Jyoti: Okay. So basically what, you’ll just email me? Is that how we’re gonna speak or…?
Clint: Yeah, yeah. So we’ll wrap this up right now. I’m gonna email you a link to our advanced package then you can go through and all that. And very shortly, that’s gonna be a phone app. So probably within six weeks, that will be available on the phone. And I’m gonna talk about that in a different podcast. But people are gonna be very excited about that because access to all information, just through a tap of an icon on your phone, which is gonna be really great. So you’ll be able to use that. And then I’ll also send you a access to our forum and bypass of the…you know, all of the commitment that…you know, just because you’ve come on this and you’ve shared your story and I think we’ve got this connection and I wanna help you.
Jyoti: Yeah. That’d be great, Clint. So then we can contact maybe like this at times?
Clint: At times or I do that as a group call, yeah, as a group coaching call, yup, yup.
Jyoti: So would you mean you’d be talking to a lot of different people at the same time?
Clint: No. We take turns, one on one and then the next person. But everyone can listen and take part and offer some commentary or make some suggestions in a live format, with a live chat, whilst it’s happening. But it’ll only be you and I talking, but, let’s say, there’s another 10, 15 people on the call, then they will hear and then they will wait, kinda like seeing the doctor, but everyone in the waiting room can also listen to every conversation.
Jyoti: Did you lose any weight when you had this problem?
Clint: Oh yes.
Jyoti: Right.
Clint: Yeah. So, you know, I’m conscious of time. You know, we were going to do a 30-minute and now we’re up to like 47 so I wanna wrap this up. So we can talk about more things inside the community.
Jyoti: Okay, excellent.
Clint: So thanks very much for going through… I hope this has been really valuable. And we can do so much more hands-on once we get started.
Jyoti: Brilliant. Okay, I’ll look forward to it. Okay.
Clint: Okay. Good night.
Jyoti: We’ll speak soon. Good night.
Clint: We’ll speak soon. Bye-bye.
Jyoti: Bye.