Situation Positive Podcast

https://youtu.be/1LD-LcQHeOA Hey, it's Matt from Situation Positive out here on a jungle hike. And we're on a lot of stairs. Stairs are increasingly tough. Make sure you use the rails. Make sure you look where you're stepping and if you're like me, let your family go ahead of you. You'll get there soon enough. Remember, get out there. Stay active. Keep moving and stay positive. And if you slip, pick yourself back up. Do you have an experience or story to share? Check out our Positivity Project to learn more. For more tips like this, please follow us on social. Please like and subscribe to our channels to help us grow. Thank you so much for your support!

https://youtu.be/ZCKvdh4b4dA Fitness expert, champion bodybuilder, and MS advocate, David Lyons, teaches Matt and Tara the importance of community when starting (and sticking to) a fitness routine when you have a chronic illness. David talks about mindset, goal setting, and the importance of joining the right program. David shares tips from his Optimal Body Personal Fitness program. You can find David on Facebook where he shares awesome fitness tips and videos. This is part four of our interview with David. The transcript is below. You can also watch the video or listen to our podcast. [00:00:00] Matt: Hey everybody. My name's Matt and this is Tara, and we're from Situation Positive. We're here today with our good friend David Lyons of Optimal Body Personal Fitness. Um, we're here for a special workout because we joined the program and we wanted to learn more about it. David welcome to the show. [00:00:24] David: Thanks for having me guys. So I appreciate it. And you know, something I'm going to get you guys in top shape and I'm going to get you guys feeling better but more important than that, I'm going to get your brains connected to those muscles of yours. [00:00:37] Tara: Alright, so we're ready to get started if you are? [00:00:45] Matt: So those two are great. I like how it's convertible right. Because one of the things I don't want to have to do is move. Like, if I'm throwing this over a door. That's already hard enough to do. Is there a third one that comes out of this or? [00:00:59] David: Oh yeah. I mean, we can do our triceps right now. Now I can show you a triceps movement where it's going to be in the same position as well. The thing is there are groups of muscles that we're working together. Usually, we're doing our chest, our back, and our shoulders on day one. Okay. The next day we're doing our legs so that we're not doing our upper body giving a chance to rest. The third day we go and we do triceps and biceps. So went back to your upper body. The next day is a rest day. So we need to take one or two days off depending on how you feel, but no more than two days of rest, then you do that three-day cycle. Again, there are multiple training methods in my program. So this is only one type of training method. We change training methods over time. So whether do you need 30 days, which would be 10 cycles of this, or whether you need 90 days, which would be 30 cycles of this, you will then change that training method when you feel your body says, okay, I get it. I'm starting to adapt a little bit and you. You get to feel that you understand that your body does adapt. Some people adapt quicker than others. So you want to push forward faster. But no, no less than 30 days. No more than 90 days and anywhere in the middle of that is okay. After 90 days, it's enough. Even if you're thinking that I'm not feeling a hundred percent, the way I want you to move forward, we cannot let our bodies adapt our bodies are lazy. They want to adapt. They're going to find a way to not get any results. So if you trick it into putting a different training method in front of it, it's going to start getting results. So we're constantly forcing our body to get results by doing different training methods that create those three processes. Contraction training, there's stretch training, there's one and a half rep training. There's negative resistance training, there's time and detention training. So there are a lot of different terms to these training methods, all of which are in the program. But let's talk about our triceps and I'll show you how to do one movement for our triceps. So you're in the same position. We're stepping back for enough that we feel resistance to the band. We're locking our elbows into the side. Okay. So we're not up here. We are using our elbows as the pivot point of this movement and we're squeezing. So we're holding the triceps in this squeeze contracted position. 1, 2,

https://youtu.be/DP8ZOKAgY_M Hey everybody, it's Matt from Situation Positive. Do you believe that people are put in your path for a reason? I know that I do. I want to share with you a story about a chance encounter I had at a salon a couple of weeks ago with a mother, who had lost all hope in finding a rare disease specialist for her daughter. Now I've been going to the same stylist for about the last 12 years or so. And we're old friends at this point and she fits me in, she'll have a color appointment and then she'll fit me in well that color's processing. And at my last hair appointment, we were just launching the Situation Positive website and all of these videos that we're doing. So I was telling her all about that and what some of the content that we've been discussing here on our channel has been. And as my haircuts finishing the, the client whose color was processing stopped me. And she was like, Matt, I think that I was here for a reason today. And she started telling me this story about her five-year-old daughter. Now this woman started noticing Issues with her daughter around two years old. She started noticing that she was delayed with speech delayed with walking all these functional delays and that they weren't getting better. And so about three or so years ago, she started on this journey to find a diagnosis for her daughter and she was getting emotional. And I was getting pretty emotional too. She was showing me videos of this beautiful little girl and some of her episodes, she had been to every doctor in town and she just couldn't get a diagnosis. She couldn't find that one practitioner that says, hey, I know what this is, and I can help you. As a matter of fact, the door was closing on her everywhere she went. And like she told me the story about how she went to see a world-renowned epilepsy doctor, a neurologist pediatric neurologist. And that person was like, you know, did some film studies. And I was like, I can't help you. And she just was dejected. She was telling me she didn't feel like a good person, that she was letting everybody down. She's losing sleep. She was spending all this money on all these appointments and she's going nowhere. And I said, honestly, you know, it was good that the doctor told you that she couldn't help you because rather than go all the way through that diagnosis process, just to rule it out, the doctor told you right away that it's not epilepsy. Okay. So that means it's something else. And as I started to talk, she started to listen because what I had been doing while she was talking to me with typing different key words into Google on my phone, I wrote down rare disease neurologic metabolic. Providers and I just started doing this combination of key words. And as she's talking, I talked to her a little bit about Phoenix as a town, and you guys may live in a city like Phoenix too. So, you know, Phoenix is not a hub of rare diseases. We have some really good doctors here. Right. And but rare disease specialists, Arizona's a tourism town, right? So a lot of what we have coming through here is going to be either geared towards the aging population or regular medicine, regular evaluate and treat stuff. You know, rare diseases tend to be more in medical hubs. And Arizona has wonderful doctors. It's just not what they see here. So I knew as she was talking to me that she wasn't going to find what she needed in the local service area. So as I'm Googling stuff, I find this hospital in Washington, DC, that treats children, a pediatric hospital treats children around her daughter's age for rare metabolic diseases. I found the number of the admissions person, the person that you would call if you want to consult, because this woman had done all her homework, she had all the medical records. She had all the film studies. She had all the lab work. She had all the doctor's notes. She had everything she needed.

https://youtu.be/dxItcN1XdEM Hey everybody. It is Matt Cavallo checking in with you at the end of week four of my weight loss journey. Just to recap, in week one, I started at 243 pounds by BMI and body fat percentage standards. I was obese. I had a problem area, which was belly fat. Belly fat’s a dangerous fat because it can cause all kinds of serious health problems like heart disease. Week two, I started to show some progress. Week three I reached a major milestone. I even shared the Skilly, or skinny Philly, a diet dish my wife and I created. You can see these videos and more on our YouTube channel. I was really concerned because I carry all my weight in my belly. Belly fat is a dangerous fat. It can lead to all kinds of health problems, like heart disease. For me, it caused acid reflux. Now the acid reflux wreaked havoc on my life. It was causing chest pains. It was causing laryngitis. And I also went through periods of hiccuping, as a matter of fact, this time last year I hiccuped for two weeks straight, they call it intractable hiccups and there was nothing we could do about it. So that's when I started to get serious about looking at weight loss options because the truth is when I looked in the mirror, I didn't feel like I was that heavy. You know, I had gradually. Bought bigger size clothes and the clothes fit me okay. You know, I work from home. So I was being comfortable. I didn't realize the slow increase of weight that I was having from staying at home every day from not going out and exercising from working way too close to the kitchen and the pantry. But as the acid reflux started to wreak havoc on my life, I knew I had to take action, and any change you make in your life, you have to be willing to take that action to take that first step. And the first step is the hardest before I started this medical weight loss program, actually the night before. I went out and I got a large pizza and I ate it because I was so afraid I was gonna miss pizza. Right. And four weeks into this journey, I got to smell pizza once at Costco and it was nostalgic, but I don't miss the way that pizza made me feel. I might miss the taste, but all of those foods that I love after I eat them, I didn't feel great. You know, I just want to go lay down and I'm really, I couldn't participate in any activity after I ate for a while. I need that to change. I need my acid reflux to clear up. I don't want to be at risk for heart disease. I have multiple sclerosis and I have weakness on my right side. I have a little bit of a pronounced limp. I also have hip bursitis. So when I sleep on my right side, it hurts. So I'm constantly waking up in the middle of the night because I hurt my hip. So these are the reasons that I decided to take action. So we started at two forty-three, two hundred and forty-three pounds a month ago. Let's see where we're at right now. 215.6 lbs. Wow! I am down. I can't do math really well, but 243 down to 215 is, is probably about 28 pounds in four weeks. So that means I'm averaging seven pounds of weight loss a week. That is fantastic. If you told me when I started this journey that I could achieve that I wouldn't have believed it. I wouldn't have believed that I could, could have put the food down because. I, I'm not a guy with tremendous willpower, you know, I'm I have never done anything like this in my life. And, you know, I had to get my mindset right. And I did it in the name of health. I did it because I don't want to wake up every morning, tired with aches and pains, and go through some of the health problems I've experienced since I've put on all of this weight. It's paying off too, because I can see it in the mirror. I've been wearing this shirt for each weigh-in, and I noticed that you know, my belly is definitely not as pronounced. I still have it though. I mean, I'm still about, I want to get down to 195, so I'm about 20 pounds away. But this shirt feels much better.

https://youtu.be/geC5FHhs8Fk Hey everybody. It is Matt from Situation Positive. And I want to talk to you about something that we all worry about, and that's a surprise bill from a medical encounter. Now, why might you receive a surprise bill? Let's say you go to a big physician practice. And your doctor is in-network, but they're unable to see you today. So you get seen by a provider that you've never met before that provider's not contracted with your insurance. So they are out of network and you end up receiving a surprise bill in the mail for a medical encounter that you thought was covered. That happened all the time. They just passed some legislation called the no surprises act, which aims to eliminate that billing practice and shine a light on transparency for that kind of out-of-network encounters that as a patient, you have no idea. You just think that everybody at the facility would be covered because you're allowed to go there. And let me tell you a personal story about this because I actually went through this myself. So my second son was being born. My wife was about eight months pregnant when we moved from Boston to Arizona. And I had already been diagnosed with MS. I was on, you know, a treatment that required prior authorization. So I was starting to learn about the ins and outs of the patient journey. Some of the things that I needed to do. So one of the smartest decisions I ever made was when I was moving, I knew we were scheduling a C-section. So I called insurance and I found the hospital that was in-network in Arizona I called the doctors to make sure we had the right doctors that were in-network. We scheduled the C-section and prior to that C-section, we were in prior authorization. We signed off on everybody that was supposed to be in that room and that they were covered by insurance. So come, come August 12th, 2009. We're excited! It's going to be a morning birth. Like I can't sleep the night before cause I'm about to meet my new son and we get to the hospital and it's flawless. Well for me, but you know my wife might have a different story, but I mean, I get to meet this beautiful baby boy, and we're just so much in love everything's going great. Everybody at the hospital was wonderful. Fast forward a couple of months later, I get a $6,000 bill in the mail because the anesthesiologist was not in-network. And I went and I looked up the anesthesiologist's name and I looked at who prior authorization said, was said, was going to be our anesthesiologists and the names were different. So I called the provider's office and they said, well, this is the provider. This is the anesthesiologist that your doctor likes to use. And so, you know what I did, I didn't panic. What I did was file an appeal. I went through insurance. And I went back through the steps through all the prior authorization steps through the list of providers that we had authorized and to the fact that on the day of the birth, no one communicated to us this change. So it ended up being the doctor, making that change without us being aware. And we won that appeal. We were not responsible for that $6,000. And let me tell you that was a game-changer, right? Cause we had just moved across the country. We were still getting established. I don't even think I had a job yet. So we would not have been able to afford that extra bill. You know, we were just getting by as it was. But it was some quick thinking and knowing the system, which saved us $6,000. And won us that appeal. Now, most of you might not even know that you can appeal a medical bill. It says it in small print, usually in the upper right-hand corner of any bill, it will have a 1-800 number to the billing department and you should have some instructions on how to appeal. If you don't feel you need to pay for the charge, let's fast forward to today's landscape because that no surprises act that was just passed in the legislature pro...

https://youtu.be/OVhPYf47oP4 Fitness expert, champion bodybuilder, and MS advocate, David Lyons, teaches Matt and Tara the importance of community when starting (and sticking to) a fitness routine when you have a chronic illness. David talks about mindset, goal setting, and the importance of joining the right program. David shares tips from his Optimal Body Personal Fitness program. You can find David on Facebook where he shares awesome fitness tips and videos. This is part three of our interview with David. The transcript is below. You can also watch the video or listen to our podcast. [00:00:00] Matt: Hey everybody. My name's Matt and this is Tara, and we're from Situation Positive. We're here today with our good friend David Lyons of Optimal Body Personal Fitness. Um, we're here for a special workout because we joined the program and we wanted to learn more about it. David welcome to the show. [00:00:24] David: Thanks for having me guys. So I appreciate it. And you know, something I'm going to get you guys in top shape and I'm going to get you guys feeling better but more important than that, I'm going to get your brains connected to those muscles of yours. [00:00:37] Tara: Alright, so we're ready to get started if you are? [00:00:45] Matt: And once it becomes that part of your every day, like when you put me in the proper form, I did what three of them? I was feeling feeling tired because I haven't done anything like that one. It was much easier to do it the wrong way. How long does it take before that goes away? [00:01:03] David: Everybody's different. So it's like when somebody says to me, I, you know, I'm in a wheelchair, how long is it going to take me to get out of that wheelchair? Or I have a rough time lifting my arm up all the way. How long is it going to take? There's no answer to that. Unfortunately, we are all different in our limitations, in our disability, in the condition we have how our body responds. Our body, everybody's body will respond to this, but depending on how much you actually do focus, how much you actually keep your mindset on what you're doing and not thinking of something else, how much you're actually doing the exercises correctly, that's going to determine it. It took me guys a year and a half of this type of training to go from not being able to move my fingers, to be able to squeeze and do this with my hand. Okay. That's because my brain is connected to my muscles. I didn't do any specific movements or exercises to train my hand. I'm just worked out with this type of program. And then it created that connection all over my body. It took me a year and a half. I'm working with people that are in the program. And two months later, they weren't driving a car before and now they're driving a car cause they could move their legs. Why did it take me longer than the people that are in my own program? Who knows? My body might've been more damaged from the MS attack that I had. We don't know, but I will tell you this will work over time. [00:02:36] Matt: Well, um, I'm glad you brought that up because one of the things I was thinking about, and I think it may have taken you longer because you created programs. So you probably had to try, oh, this works, this doesn't work. That kind of stuff, but. I was thinking about like, I can get real negative. I can like try this a few times. And I'm like, oh, I don't get it. And I'm not coming back. How can I stay positive of this stuff? Even if I'm not getting the results that I want right away? [00:03:05] David: I created a community okay. On Facebook for all of my members. So in that community, you have everybody talking to each other and encouraging each other. You have some people that go on there and say, you know what? I had a really bad week. I didn't follow the program. And immediately you've got a hundred people jumping on your gone, come on, Karen, you can do it. You know,

https://youtu.be/mKpydK7EJoQ Hey everybody. It's Matt from Situation Positive here, watching the tide roll in and out, kind of like Otis Redding did. Listening to the sound of the waves crashing, feeling the spray at my back. These simple moments in life helps us know that we're alive. So, if you're feeling limited. If you feel like you've lost all control, go out to the ocean. Go be in nature because then you'll see the beauty of the world. You'll know that, hey, maybe you can't do what you once did, but you can still enjoy the things around you. Stay positive, everybody. Do you have an experience or story to share? Check out our Positivity Project to learn more. For more tips like this, please follow us on social. Please like and subscribe to our channels to help us grow. Thank you so much for your support!

https://youtu.be/pu2AtrONHSQ Hey everybody. It is Matt Cavallo checking in with you at the end of week three of my weight loss journey. Just to recap, in week one, I started at 243 pounds by BMI and body fat percentage standards. I was obese. I had a problem area, which was belly fat. Belly fat's a dangerous fat because it can cause all kinds of serious health problems like heart disease. Week two, I started to show some progress. I even shared the Skilly, or skinny Philly, a diet dish my wife and I created. You can see these videos and more on our YouTube channel. For me, it caused acid reflux. I had bad symptoms like hiccups, laryngitis chest pains. It even was my, my stomach was pressing on my lungs and, and I was getting asthma as a result. And I hadn't had asthma since I was an early teen. So, this weight gain that I've experienced was really wreaking havoc on my life. I decided to take action. Over the last year, I had tried intermittent fasting. I had tried a couple of different diets and I would yo-yo; I would drop down a couple of pounds here, a couple of bounds there. But then I would bounce right back. And so, I decided to enroll in a medical weight loss program. I wanted the medical weight loss program because it's run by a doctor. I have multiple sclerosis and I'm on immune-suppressing treatments. If I'm going to take any medication, I like to have the guidance of a doctor just to make sure that everything's okay. It's just peace of mind. And that doctor prescribed two medications. One was a hormone. Yeah, that helps accelerate your metabolism. And the other was an appetite suppressant. So, I've been on that for three weeks. Now, today is the end of three weeks. And throughout this journey, I've had some accelerated gains and I've hit some plateaus and those plateaus are where you kind of stay at the same weight for a little bit. But I'm trying, I'm really trying to get to 200 pounds or under my stat sheet says my ideal weight is about 194. And because I had problems I have with walking and, and hip pain, and it really just weakness on my right side because of MS. I really want to get down to my ideal weight just to kind of. Take some of the pressure off of my right side. And then I can maybe start a strengthening routine and maybe see if I could correct some of those deficits that I developed with MS. So this weight loss journey. It has taken a change of mindset to accomplish. I'd been really good so far. I've followed the diet program to a T I have not strayed the one time that I don't want to say I was tempted, but I went into Costco cause we needed some egg whites because I can have four ounces of protein in the morning and I choose egg whites. And I could smell their fresh, big pizza. And if you watch the first video, you know, I think pizza is the most perfect food. Right. And nothing beats the smell of fresh-baked pizza. And for, for just a quick moment, I was like, I really want a slice. But then I quickly focused and I said, Hey, that's not the goal. We're working on the program. And you know, I was able to kind of enter an environment where there were temptations and just walked past it. And I think that's the key, right? Is you're not only doing the diet by taking the medications or eating the right food, you're doing it by adjusting your mindset. You know, you have to really put it in your mind that you can accomplish this. Right. You know, I, in the past, I might've said, Hey, you know, it's the weekend. Let's just take a little break. You know, and I would give myself excuses of why I could go eat the things I wanted to eat. Right. And it wasn't until I put it in my mind that I needed to make a change for my health. That, that I really started doing it. And now you know, I, I, I'm not even really concerned with what the scale says because I'm just looking here. I'm starting to feel like I look younger almost like I used to,

Why it took 12 years for Savannah to get a diagnosis https://youtu.be/YEPQd_SpcRg Savannah Hunt knew at a young age that there was something wrong with her health. The problem was that the doctors could not pinpoint an accurate diagnosis. For 12 years, she was in and out of doctors' offices, labs, imaging studies, and hospitals without ever receiving a diagnosis. She began to think her ailments were normal. That is until a night last year when her kidneys started to fail. 12 years after first being seen for her condition, she learned she had lupus and lupus nephritis. Tara Tingey sat down to interview Savannah about her chronic illness journey. Read the interview below. You can also watch it on YouTube or listen in on your favorite podcast channels. [00:00:00] Tara: Hi, welcome to Situation Positive, a positive community for those affected by chronic illness. I'm Tara, your positivity partner, and I'm really excited to jump into our interview today, today with Savannah hunt and Savannah, how are you? [00:00:18] Savannah: Good! Hi! [00:00:20] Tara: We are so glad that you're here with us. I know a little bit about you just from what you've been posting on social media, but why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself. [00:00:29] Savannah: Yeah, my name is Savannah Hunt. I live in Arizona, San Tan Valley area. I am 23 years old. I'm married. I have three kids. I have a toddler who's three, and I had had a set of twins for one. So it's definitely busy. There's never a dull moment. They're always running around and into everything. So, yeah. So that's who I am. That's where I live right now. I have, I just got diagnosed with lupus last was it last week? A couple of weeks ago. I just barely found out that I've been living with lupus all these years and I have lupus nephritis. [00:01:06] Tara: So you just found this out. So. So to kind of bring us through your story from kind of when you started up until just a few weeks ago when you got your diagnosis. [00:01:16] Savannah: Yeah. So it's a long story. I'll try to keep it as brief as I can without missing the important details. But, so I started having problems at 11 years old, there was a night where I was playing basketball at church, just with a ton of other young girls. And that night I came home, not feeling well. So I went to bed and I was like, Hey, this is weird. I don't really feel good in the middle of the night. Like I got this really high fever and my neck was stiff and I had all this joint pain and all my joints started swelling. And I was like, this is, so this is so weird. So my dad took me to the emergency room and they ran all this blood work. We were there till like five in the morning and they were like, oh, we'll just send you to your family doctor. And I was like, okay, sure, whatever. We go to my family doctor and he's like, oh, I've seen this before you have septic arthritis. And we were like, okay. So he put me on all of these antibiotics. So I was on these shots. Morning and night they gave me shots every day on my bum. So I'd go into the doctor's office twice a day as a young teenager. So I was 11, 12, 13 when this was all happening around those years. And I would get shots on my booty every day because they thought I had septic arthritis. So I was on this really high dose of antibiotics. So anytime I was on antibiotics, I felt fine, but the minute he took me off the antibiotics, all my swelling came back. All my joint pain came back. I wasn't sleeping very well at night. I had all this anxiety because I wasn't sleeping and I was like, what's going on? So that kind of happened when I was younger. And then at 14, 15, we were like, okay. Every time we're done with the antibiotics, it comes back and it's not going away. There's nothing we can do. I saw at that time specialists, but they were like, oh, like there's obviously some type of virus, but we don't know what it is.

https://youtu.be/LVO5QV1auxE Hey everybody. It's Matt from Situation Positive. Earlier this week, I was telling people that I had an inconvenient vacation coming up. I had so many things going on at home. I had so many projects I had to do. And it just wasn't the right time for me to go on vacation. But now that we've landed and now that I've got to soak in some sun, I realized that the vacation was the perfect remedy. And so if I were you, and you were putting off, going out there and taking a break from it all, and de-stressing, I'd recommend you take that vacation because you'll never know how good it feels until you get there.