Well, hello ladies and gents, Robert Sykes Keto savage.com to Dev get special guest Vince Pitstick on the line. He is the man behind so many of the waves done in the functional medicine space. He's in the coaching space, started off as a bodybuilder, went to integrative medicine and is totally been changing the world and changing people's lives in the process. Thoroughly enjoyed this
conversation. We have a lot in common and not on the bodybuilding background, but also OCD and just a lot of similar mental approaches to things in life, our extremist attitude. So I really resonated with a lot of things he was saying. Like I said, thoroughly enjoy the conversation. I've got no doubt that you will take something from it regardless, you will leave this conversation feeling fired up, so definitely give it a listen. Let's roll the intro. And we are live, Vince.
How are you, brother? I'm doing great, Robert. Good, good. I'm excited to talk with you man. So I I historically do not do any research on my guests before they come in. I just like it to be an organic conversation. But I jumped on your IG literally 30 seconds before we jumped on here. And your Last Post was talking about women specifically who are constantly chronically under eating. And that is probably the largest demographic of clientele that I just coincidentally get.
And it happens all the time. I love to just kind of flesh that out. But before we even get into that, man, just what got me, what got you in the space, because you've been doing this for a long time. Yeah, so to, to, to make a Long story short, take a young boy who gets really, really sick at the age of 7. Rare physical and mental disorder, unexplained idiopathic people didn't know where it came from. Traveled, you know, failed by the medical system. They just want to throw me on drugs.
Ended up, you know, the course of 12 years working through different health practitioners got lots of different diagnosis is one of them was like a severe like OCD. But I also had like, you know, gut issues, anxiety issues, all kinds of other stuff going on. And in the end, it ended up being a combination of holistic practitioners, cleaning my nutrition, gym therapy. And I was kind of liberated from it, but not before I started self medicating with street
drugs. So then I became addicted to, you know, St. stimulants and I had another 10 year battle with that. And so in that journey, I learned all the different layers of healing that kind of have to happen. And I worked with holistic, a lot of holistic practitioners. And you know, when I went to college, it was one of those things where I just didn't have a passion for anything but helping other people because of
my own journey. So I was in the, I was like third year in this middle of this finance a degree. And I'm like, what the hell am I doing? I got about a class. I never look back. I'm like, where am I going to start helping people? I was like, well, I'll start as a trainer because I was already in bodybuilding. This is like 20 years ago now. And I'll start as a trainer and we'll we'll see where it goes
from there. Ended up building if a full membership training program that included holistic services, blood work from a hormone Dr. And everything was like included. That program took off near Chicago. And then I got picked up by a global Health Organization called Metagenics, where I got the trained under some of the best doctors in the world and
functional medicine. And when you take my bodybuilding background, fat loss nutrition, athletic nutrition background, and then you combined all the functional medicine tools and training that I had, I made AI, made a good medical consultant for doctors all over the country. So I was the guy behind the guy of some of the biggest doctors in the country for many years. And I saw the inconsistencies in the medical field. But I was the guy that sat in on
the cases. I was the guy that got the call, you know, at 8:00 AM or 8:00 PM if something wasn't going right. And I would help practices build out their protocols, build out their cash pay services, fat loss services, holistic health services. And so I learned about every method from every kind of doctor you can think of. There's, there's not like a therapy I don't know about, haven't seen treatment with or know how to do a protocol
around. And so I, I, I accumulated this infinite amount of wealth or of knowledge in that, in that area. And, and then one day I said, you know what, I've learned all the best things. And what's missing is that what really needs to happen is that they need to be coached through all of these tools and all these tools need to be put into one program. So I developed what was called
the 4F4F method. I quit my cozy job and I'm opened up in the back of a chiropractic office in Waynesville, OH. Starting with about 10 clients. And now the the, the the main business, Vital Coaching is one of the largest one-on-one functional health coaching companies in the United States. From there I launched all my other businesses so that the service could be totally contained. I can make the exact supplements that I wanted. I designed the app for the
experience that I wanted. I launched a couple other coaching companies and then I eventually launched a university and then my own medical company. So that way when you come to work at my with any one of my coaches or anything, you're a complete medical operation, even if you don't have a license. So I can, I can make any coach have all the tools that they need so that they can be a one man or female show so that they can really lead people to the true other, you know, meaning of
health. And so that, that's been my journey. And so now I'm, you know, the founder of the vital Network, which is about 7 different businesses, about 120 staff. And we're, we're all aggressively pursuing radical change in the fitness and health industry. And we think we're the tip of spear that's going to do it. So that's the, that's the short of it, Robert. I love it, man. I love it. Ambitious. I liked it. How old are you? Just turned 40. Nice man Killing it.
Killing it. What do you think the big problem is in the health and fitness space now? Because it seems to be in some ways making leaps and bounds. Another way is just stuck in, you know, no man's land. Yeah. So you got to kind of judge, got to judge in industry by its fruit, right. And so let's start with the medical field. So you've got more doctors, more prescriptions, more science, more health networks than ever before in human fit history.
Yet almost every single known human disease is growing at all time rates. By 2037, out of 10 people in the world, not just in the United States, but in the world, will be struck with some form of lifestyle disease that will significantly hamper their joy, their vitality, their life. And you have to go. There seems to be an inverse relationship between more medicine and worse health, right? And we believe it's because of
the special specialization. So let me explain, Robert, you're going to be a for just for two minutes, you're going to be a endocrinologist, you're going to work on thyroid, and then I'm going to be a gastroenterologist. I'm going to work GI OK, so you and I are both going to go to school and then we're going to divvy up everybody. You're going to work thyroid, I'm going to work gut. You're going to stay in your lane. I'm going to stay in my lane. You make your money, I make my
money. All was well, right. That sounds really wise or logical, doesn't it? Very logical. So that's why the when they call IT systems medicine, it's because they've they've divvied up the human body into they've chopped it up into eleven systems. And then they dictate a specialty for each doctor to be just live in that system. But once a condition that you have had goes past six months, it is no longer acute, it is chronic.
And when it is chronic, almost by definition, that means multiple systems are working improperly that work together to create a function. So think of like you did chronic fatigue, right? Think of chronic joint pain. Think of chronic gut issues. Doesn't matter what it is, it's not one system anymore. So for example, metabolism is a great, we could use metabolism as a good example. Where is the metabolism on your body? It was not in one place, right? It's everywhere.
And all 11 systems of the body play a part in your total metabolic rate because they're all metabolizing things in these systems. And they all have, they all have an effect on the messaging that happens to every little cell and how much that cell jostles and metabolizes that adds to the net total of your total metabolic rate. And so, you know, if I was going to work one system, if I, if everyone came to you, Robert, and was like, hey, I want to
lose weight. If you just trained everybody, you'd only be working the musculoskeletal system. Well, one system approaches do not solve complex issues, which is why medicine fundamentally is opposed to healing, because it does not happen in just one system.
It's multiple systems working together, which is why as a coach, you'll do nutrition, you probably do mindset, You're working on stress management, you're working on sleep, you're working on water, you're working on nutrition, you're working on supplementation. You're working all kinds of systems together that then create incredible outcomes. Would you agree with that statement?
100%. OK, so you all you just naturally get get it that you have to work multiple systems in order to bring alignment back to the body and create vitality and fix it from the root, which is what functional means. So when I broke out and created my career, there was no, there were health coaches that taught you how to drink water and sleep and stuff, but there were no functional health coaches that use deep functional medicine, science programming and then
fitness programming together. It didn't exist about 15 years ago and so we had to create a term for it. So we just made it up and we're like functional health coach. So and you can see on record, we were the first to just kind of get it out there because we needed something to describe what we were doing. And, and that didn't really, and
nothing really fit at the time. And it kind of picked up steam, you know, and, and So what we believe in and, and what I'm trying to do is create my own Health Network that when you come in, you see a coach, but that coach is really your guide, the guide to make sure that everything gets in alignment so that you can have the outcome that you actually desire.
So like if someone comes and sees you, you're not just going to do nutrition, you're not just going to do XY or Z, you're going to put everything in a row for them so that all the systems fall into place and the outcome happens. You don't have that in medicine. So people fall through the cracks. They'll go see the the dietitian, but then their dietitian doesn't work with their diabetes specialist or their heart, you know, doctor or or whatever. No one's talking to each other.
It's not Cleveland Clinic style and it never will be. And so everyone falls through the cracks and that's why no one actually gets better. They just manage their symptoms. And so we have we the pandemic of our time. Robert is right in front of us and it's not a comet, it's not UFOs, it's not COVID, it is us. We are going to kill ourselves.
Do you think the current standard of care and just the Western medicine system as it is, is like malicious in nature, or do you think they just kind of defaulted to, I don't know, whatever they did that made the most money and that kind of became the system that it is? I've had a lot of time to think about this because you never can tell when a when a tragedy or travesty happens, if it's ignorance or maliciousness, you
know, malice. And I think for the most part, most people that get into medicine have a genuine duty to serve, but it is beat out of them because the the real politics and the people that run medicine don't care. And so you're seeing a few people at the top who own all the businesses who just look at it like a business. So they're slightly ignorant, but they're also just slightly malicious because they're so self-serving that it's not about creating solutions, it's about creating profits.
And that's even though I'm a, I'm a red blooded American. I love my country, I love capitalism. That's where it fails us sometimes. Although again, I'm not saying the single payer government controlled system would be any better, but but I am saying that it is the problem. Western medicines 12 system approach will not solve the problems that the world has today. And it's obvious. Do you think, I mean, it's like such a big ship, it'd be kind of
hard to to turn it? Is it going to be just an implosion that acts as the catalyst for change, or what's going to happen? Well, did you not, you know, it's interesting that we talk about this. Did you not just see the, the killing in New York of the head of the insurance company and the amount of people. Now listen, I'm not for murder, OK, let's be clear. But what you should see is the reaction of the of the public, which is much different than we expected.
It's it's almost 5050 in support because people are getting sick and tired. And as pressure builds, opportunities will arise, new markets will emerge. And we saw this with the rise of nursing, by the way, you know, the boom of nursing did not exist. And then one day, Florence Nightingale created a school. She was not licensed. She was just a woman that created a process that reduced emergency room deaths by 80%, that was focused on the human element of healing.
And she created a process and then she opened a school and she trained others and there was about 200,000 nurses that were just home care, cash pay entrepreneurs. Sound familiar? Like coaches today. And then eventually it got so popular it became adopted and that led to mass adoption. And that's where the licensure came in. And nursing is the greatest technology to ever hit medicine because it's the human element of healing right up there with penicillin.
And, and I believe that coaching is the next version of that. I believe that you're either going to get AI services, you're going to enter your symptoms in on ChatGPT and then it's going to Amazon's going to drop you off a prescription or, or you're going to get preventative care or work with a forward thinking doctor and you're going to be guided by a coach. I think there's going to be coaching for everything in the future. And that's why my organization
is heavily leveraged. I'm making that a reality and functional medicine though is growing in popularity every year. The the market forecast shows 24% growth year over year on functional related services. So the demands already coming and I think we are going to see a reckoning over the course of the next, especially by 20-30 when so many people are sick and the medical system can't handle it. We're going to be looking for something new. And so that's, that's what I
believe. And so I'm heavily invested in that future fitness. You would think be should be benefiting from this and it is. But the problem with fitness is because it doesn't know enough about the functional side or how the system of the body works. They apply the same method to every single person. You know how maybe you go to a chiropractor, it just so happens that every treatment involves a adjustment. You go to a hormone specialist.
It just so happens that every treatment involves a hormone. You go to, I don't know, GI doctor, every treatment involves proton pump inhibitor. See, the whole problem is getting spent becoming a specialist. We need more generalists that kind of know how to put everything together because if you apply a caloric restriction and high resistance training to every problem, more often than not, you're going to cause more problems long term than good. Not that working out is not phenomenal.
It is, it's medicine. Not that nutrition isn't phenomenal, it is, it's medicine. But there is a time and a place to on a, on a system that you do different things to bring it back to full health and then fully stress it. There is an order of operations that gets missed and because that gets missed and people don't really know what they're doing and they think that everyone's they're training everybody like A and coaching everybody like a 19 year old male.
And, and the methods of dieting that we've been giving women I believe are making us in general worse and not better. When you look at the totality of the industry, I think it's got one of the greatest armies of people who want to help people, but I think they're misguided with predominantly fitness research only on small research sample sizes. And then they go apply that to everybody like it's the Bible and it's just not true. It is inadequate.
And so the more that fitness grows, the people still get sick at a higher and higher rate. So I don't know if we're doing that great of a job except making money for ourselves, because nowhere in the world, per capita do we spend more money than the United States on supplements, fitness programs and gym memberships. Yeah, no, I, I agree on
everything you just said, man. I feel like it's very easy for people to get stuck in their information silos and then just not be open receptive to anything outside of that. Like I feel like for me, I came from, you know, the bodybuilding space. So like I had all of that, you know, evidence backed, you know, bro, dieting wisdom, so to
speak. But then I got to the ketogenic space, which was like a very nice, you know, marrying of the two because the ketogenic space as a general rule of thumb is pretty open and receptive to the functional medicine, these alternative medicines. So like I was able to kind of took what I learned from the bodybuilding background and apply that to what I have learned in the nutritional space. And I feel like it's only opened my mind all the more. And you don't really see a lot
of that in the space. Yeah, people are afraid in medicine and in fitness to be judged by their peers. The government doesn't have to do much because the fear of public opinion keeps us strapped, keeps us in our groups. Group think we get into tribes, right, tribal behavior. And I've never been good at that. Remember, I grew up kind of boy in a bubble. I grew up looking at looking at the world from my window and I've never felt felt fit into
one group. And I, I've been on the pursuit of truth and knowledge about nutrition and it's taking me some to the, some of the most uncomfortable places that have had me what I believed was true, turns out it's only half true. And I had to expand my mind and expand my programming. Keto was one of those areas. I'm a big, I'm a big, big fan of keto. I use it in certain ways, but also fasting. I was anti fasting and I realized that it's actually the truth.
I was, you know, I was all about building muscle and I still am. Muscle's still important, but it's not as important as I thought it was in terms of there's a rate limited to health and size. And if if you're trying to live forever, getting big is not a good idea. And so there's things I had to learn and functional medicine taught me two things that we believed in. Functional medicine have changed.
And you've got to be willing to be humble and a student and continue to learn because I want to be the best in the world. I care very little to be right. And that's, that's my pursuit. So it's taking me to some really uncomfortable places. And so I, that's why I have the answers that I do today is because I was willing to do that, that we teach, that we teach to doctors and coaches all over the world in my university. I love it. I love it.
I feel like functional medicine as a whole has, you know, definitely generated a lot more momentum. Like I've had several people in the podcast from the functional medicine space and it, you know, 20 years ago or 10 years ago, whatever the time frame was like, that was kind of like the laughingstock amongst traditional Western medicine. Whereas now they they tend to play a lot better because they they've got this underlying respect for one another, it
seems. Yeah, that, well, we're starting to see a blending of fitness and functional. You're seeing that those two worlds are, are actually kind of, you got Peter Attia, for example, right? You, you got certain practitioners that are starting to embody this middle ground, which again is what we, that was
our we champion for that. Because if you take what people don't understand, if I wish the functional doctors knew that if you take the bodybuilding structure, OK, because people don't understand the structure of your programming and your lifestyle can 10X the speed of your outcome and the altitude of your outcome. So what I what do I mean by the structure? So if you go to a function medicine doctor now This is why I quit and did it for myself. They can call themselves functional.
They can run labs, they can throw vitamin D at you. They can give you a sheet of paper that shows some foods on it, say eat this and call themselves functional. Nah, Nah, Nah, Nah, Nah, Nah. That's not functional. The the framework of coaching and functional, that's when you see incredible outcomes because human beings, they first need to believe and they need to feel connected.
That's why a coach gets better outcomes than a doctor in my opinion, because a doctor sees you every three to six months. A coach talks to you weekly, keeps you in the game, keeps you at 95%. So then the things you do exponentially create outcomes faster, right? They get them to believe that they can do the thing before it you even do the thing, which is the, it's half the the damn game is the belief. It's the mind. It's not what you do physically. It's it's what happens in the
mind and your belief. And So what I found was the framework of bodybuilding is the model for medicine. So it's like I'm going to change some of your, I'm going to watch your biofeedback. I'm going to have some labs. I'm going to watch your body change over time. I'm going to be a touch point with you weekly. We're going to dial things up and down as your body adjusts. And then that's how you solve complex systems like the human
body. You do not solve it in a in a process where it's like, I'm going to look for a symptom, treat the symptom here, take this for six months, come back, let's see where you're at and try again. That's the recipe for never getting better. Yeah, it's interesting because like it's cool that we both have a bodybuilding background because a lot of people, I mean most people I work with are not competitive bodybuilders, but I'll implement a very similar protocol from like that
structured standpoint. I mean, if you can measure it, you can manage it like variable control. Basically, you just, you reach the goal much more efficiently, much more effectively if you have that standardized approach that you can manipulate confidently and accurately. And so many people have this hesitancy to approach things from this bodybuilding esque, you know, style. But at the end of the day, like bodybuilders, nothing special.
We're all human beings. Like if it works for them to reach desired outcome, the same principles would apply to you. Yeah, see what people don't understand about let's say research, for example, and this blows my mind that you get people running around beating people over the head with research like it's the Bible. Even if research has a has a strong P value, right, Which is the accuracy of the data and has a large sample size, you know, So like let's say that N is
greater than 500 or 5000, right? The date is only accurate for up to 68% of people because that's one standard deviation away from the mean. So that means that the polar edges, right? The other, what is that 32% right, which is usually the people you deal with in coaching is the people that don't fall in the standard. Those people, right, have bio individuality that is not accurate, adequately represented in the literature.
But then they're being told on social media that all they need to do is follow what everybody else is doing and what coaching allows us to do by watching biofeedback. And that's why we do genetics coaching too. So I get your genetics report. I'm looking at your microbiome. I'm doing advanced Dutch because you have, you really have about 17 hormones. You don't have three. You have like 17 with the metabolites. So I look at all of those things.
If I if, if the client has the money for it and I'm, I'm tracking your biofeedback week over week. I'm adjusting for your bio individuality, which is why my success rate, you know, the average success rate for a doctor is like 60%, but it also has about an 80% relapse rate. That's standard medicine. Our program right now has a 95% completion and success rate at six months, 6 to 8 months. So like, it accounts for the bio individuality that is not
represented in research. And that's what you mean by the coaching method. You know what I mean? And that's why the success rate gets so high. And I wish people would know that, but they don't. They're unfamiliar with coaching. Less than less than 12 1/2 percent of Americans have ever been offered coaching or functional services. So like, if you've never been offered, you can't partake. They don't know because they're not familiar with it. Their friend on the street doesn't do it.
They don't really follow those people on social media. They, they, you know, they don't know anybody. And so as this thing grows, it will, it will diffuse and become very popular. We're, we're at the beginning of a revolution, I believe. And you're going to see that all of a sudden, just like fish oil and vitamin D. Do you remember, Robert? Just this is literally, I can remember this 'cause I was one of the first, like fish oil and vitamin D was a big thing for me.
And we didn't know I was giving people D2 at the time. We didn't know D3 was. Anyway, you had to learn. But I told people about fish oil and vitamin D and they're like, what the F are you talking about, right? If you ask somebody today, 18 years later, they go, you don't take vitamin D and fish oil. You see what I'm saying? So it's a diffusion through the market and that's where
everything's heading. So if anybody's listening to this, who's in the in the health space, if you're leaning into functional, it's going to be a good decade for you. Well, beyond that, I mean like the coaching component, like that controls for the physiological, you know, individualized factor, but also the psychological component. I feel like that's where most people miss the boat 'cause if you're going to see a doctor once every six months, you get
an annual lab work done. They're giving you some generic recommendations. There's no psychological component in place there. And that's where so many people trip up. That's the number one. I couldn't agree with you more. We're, we're completely in, in alignment at my, for example, So we, we have about 40 coaches at Vital coaching and about last year, I, I totally changed a lot
of our training. I'm way less concerned if you are an expert in functional medicine, and I'm way more concerned if you're a functional or if you're if you're a transformational leader because transformational leadership is what's going to get people to follow the process much more than you know in 17 different ways to use Ashwagandha.
And that's why I found that the more letters you have behind your name, the less typically effective you are as a practitioner because you're more of a researcher instead of a doer. And I need doers. I need people. They're going to get in the dirt with you that have been through the issues like yours. That's gonna that's gonna you know, that's gonna put his hand on his shoulder and it's gonna walk you through the suck, you know? Yeah. And that's and that's what I, I believe today.
So I, I tell my coaches, stop going and getting more certifications about one more thing about microbiome. Go learn about go, go get, you know, transformational leadership courses. Go go language courses, sales courses, non verbal communication, public speaking, because those are the tools that are actually going to create the relationship and the experience necessary to get them through
the hard moments. 100% I want to dive into nuts and bolts of your curriculum and how you get that structure, but you said something the very beginning piqued my interest. So you said that you were suffering from OCD when you were younger. Yeah, so I I had many health issues, but one of them was a rare form of severe OCD. Yeah. How did that manifest itself?
In massive intrusive thoughts, I, I, I, you know, I would get the thought that my mother was going to die if I didn't do XY and Z or, you know, that, you know, I even, there was, there was even a year of my life, as strange as it sounds, that I thought my mom was an alien. Although I tell you what, that's not that weird today, considering look what's going on there. I, I had a fear of thinking. So at 7 years old, I was worried about simulation theory.
So I was worried I was living in a simulation, which is kind of weird 'cause we're, we're talking about that today, right? But I was dealing with the fear of that with no tools of how to logically understand it at 7 years old. And I'll tell you what, it really challenges your mind when you don't know what's real, You don't know who to believe, you don't know where to turn. And no one's really been much
help. And that's why I stand in the gap today for others because most people that find coaches have this desire because they're not comfortable where they're at, but they don't know where to turn. And, you know, that's why. So. So. Yeah. So a pretty rare form. And it found out I was exposed to environmental chemicals on the farm that I was at. I I lived in the cornfields as a kid.
You couldn't get me to go back inside and I was exposed to some pretty nasty chemicals that that actually got pulled off the market and that so toxic exposure mixed with a lot of family trauma. There's like a lot of early family issues, severe issues in the home. You mix multiple stressors at once on a five to seven-year old kid. That's when you start having dysfunction, right? And so that's, that's, that's how my journey started, yeah. Do you have any OCD tendencies
today? Like anything, you've been able to obviously mitigate and manage it, but any tendencies? Yeah, you, you learn to optimize it when once you the the beauty of it is that once you get the right tools, which is why I like in my program, we have group therapy. You get your nutrition, your training. We also have our own medical team that can give you stuff that will help balance it out like LDN. Low dose naltrexone is amazing for compliance.
FYI if you have clients that are non compliant it it at higher doses it's used for to help people come off alcohol but at micro doses at 5 milligrams it helps with compliance and just general feelings of balance. It's not an anti anxiety or antidepressant. It's out of your system in six hours. It has no side effects, it's free money. It's amazing.
My medical clinic. I launched my medical clinic vital Med specifically to have access to these tools and have my own doctors because I got tired of I'm not referring to doctors no more. I wanted to train my own doctors. I wanted him to the amazing people. I wanted him to do great service and and not a gouge people. So any if anybody's looking for great like hormone or just functional medicine care want to see a doctor, you guys can check out vital vital Vidal Med ME
d.com. My team is the best. They work with coaching companies and other practitioners all over the country because I just got so sick of the BS that I was getting from doctors. And so we, we pull all that stuff together. So my OCD today is a superpower. That's why my work rate, I just outwork everybody because I can get obsessed, but I have tools to make sure that I don't go too far, that I stayed relatively
within balance. And I'm, I'm glad for it today because there's just, if anybody wanted to go head to head against me, you'd have to be, you'd have to be mentally insane, literally to probably outwork me. No I love it man. And I asked this because I've had debilitating OCD the majority of my life. Like what got me into bodybuilding.
Like I remember doing like 50 Rep sets then having to double it and triple it because I would have these intrusive thoughts of like someone holding the gun to my parents head saying if you just give me 50 more reps I'm putting a bull between the rows. Like that was literally what fueled my workouts. Brother, do you know? OK, so check this out. So that happened to me, but it happened to me when I was younger. So I wasn't lifting yet.
It was in basketball. So my parents, the way they found out something was wrong is I would go out to practice and it would be full storming, tornado warnings, whatever's going on, and I'd still be out there. And I wasn't telling people what was going on because I was afraid. I thought I was like, I was broke and so I was bad kid, something's wrong with me. And so I would literally go out to just shoot just like 10
minute game of hoops. But then if I didn't make 50 shots in a row, I couldn't go inside. There was one day I shot basketball for 23 hours. Yeah, I. Totally. Totally get that man because I have the exact same thing throughout my competition preps and it was like it used to be before I got into bodybuilding. It was like germs, like I was a germaphobe, like Howard Hughes shit with the OCD.
But. Then it got into the fitness component and like whenever I'm going through a competition prep, it's like if I mess up one little thing, I've got to redo the entire thing multitude of times over to prove to myself and just prevent something bad from happening that would never happen anyways. But yeah, man, I've never really talked to people that had that same phenomena, so this is interesting. Yeah, man, yeah, yeah.
We listen. We've lived like, yeah, you that's lived, by the way, if you've never been diagnosed. I mean, that's Hallmark. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, like for sure. But it's cool because like once you realize it and you can harness it, it is totally a superpower. Like like you were saying, I can outwork anybody because once I like freaking take the ceiling off of that thing, I can direct it and I'm unstoppable. There you go, bro. I'm, I'm so here's, so I call
that. So I have a nonprofit program called Emotional Freedom Fellowship and it takes individuals of greatness because I don't know if you know this, but all people that you find interesting have some version of this of a, of obsession, compulsion, addiction. And so we call it the inner addict.
And our job is to utilize the inner attic to make us great for everyone around us, including ourselves and our society, but to put for it to not consume us. And, and so the whole program is to help you harness your superpowers. It's called EFF and I I, I, you know, entrepreneurs are all basically addicts, you know, bodybuilders are all basically addicts in, in not, I don't think out, don't think alcoholic, but just emotional addict, right?
Like, and you almost kind of got to be, to be great at anything. And, and So what I, what I've learned is that it we, we define addiction as an individual with great of greatness with the wrong beliefs and actions to meet their needs. So I used to believe that if I took one more line of cocaine, everything would be OK. So all of my thoughts, actions, behaviors were centered and focused around getting cocaine. Today I believe that if I'm able to help one more person, I've
just changed the input. So the input is helping others lives makes everything OK. So all of my thoughts, actions, and motivations are around helping other people. And so that's why I've become such a sharpened tool for good, you know, because that's all my brain does. And you know, this other people's brains are preoccupied with a lot of things. But the one thing that's kind of nice about OCD is if you get locked in on something, that's it. That's where you are.
And it creates an an ability to to just fly past everyone else while you're worried about this, that and the other whatever's going on, your thoughts are going no, I am 24/7 locked in. The problem is, is then I get isolated. I get disconnected from others and then I start becoming restless, irritable, discontent. I start judging others. I start being a little bit frustrated. I get judge mental. I lose my relationship connection to my higher power, which I call Jesus Christ.
And then when I lose that connection, I become dangerous to myself and others. You know what I mean? And and then maybe not in like, not like I'm a pull a gun on anybody, but you know, like just not treating people great, not doing the right thing. You know that right, All, all the, all the components that can go with it. So that's why I have to keep a balance. Yeah. And it's, it's like, what, what do you have in, in place in your life? Like what are some checks and balances, so to speak?
Because like I, I don't believe in this mentality of like work life balance. Like if, especially if you're OCD and you get locked in, like balance is bullshit. Like you have to be an extremist. Like you have to harness that in a positive way, ideally for the betterment of those around you and yourself. So like what what happens in your life that kind of acts as a reckoning to realize that you got a direct course? So there's no such thing as balance, but there is seasonal
restoration. So I intentionally, because I have like my team around me, like like my top dietitian assistant sitting right next to me right now. And I've got my assistant and I've got close friends and I and I make them hold me accountable. So like I would be a workaholic all the time, but I'll set an intention.
I'll say this season guys is about this launch, doing this and doing this and then I make them book out trips or I have people that hold me accountable because it is necessary that I come up for air on occasion and that I enjoy what I'm doing. And then I'm in the moment and sometimes I won't recognize that I'm not doing that. So that's one is having having a few people, a community around you that you help hold you accountable. Two, I'm lucky I have recovery.
That's why I created EFF because I needed a group of people that I could go have a sponsor. So EFF gives you a sponsor and it's just somebody that you check in with and this mentally, how you doing? Where are we at? How how are things going? You know, and that allows you to have some authority in your life outside of yourself and and just make sure you're in a good mental headspace.
And then obviously, you know, my accountability and my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, you know, I've got to answer to him. At the end of the day, I am not perfect. I'm not the Christian most Christians would want me to be. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm a different type. My, I think my walk with Jesus comes with a limp. And so, but at the end of the day, I've got to, I got to answer to him imperfect or perfect.
And so those are the things that really helped me stay stay in the track that is that's thinking about others and and continuing to try to do the best that I can.
Yeah, I think, you know, kind of with the OCD, but also just in probably with anybody that has this go getter mentality, like when you from a spirituality component, when you remove self as the highest power, like you have this sense of humility and that allows you to function at a more sustained rate for the long haul, 'cause like I used to burn it all the time at age. I used to be like, yeah, I used to just, like, flirt with death's door on a regular basis. And I like it.
That's the weird thing. Like I'm a freaking masochist, man. Like, I like that it makes me feel alive. But I recognize that that's probably not the most conducive thing to overall betterment long term, especially for those around me. And once I'm at my last prep is when I kind of got really dove into the spiritual component of it and harness the OCD, but also just recognize that I was doing things that I couldn't have done
solo, you know? And that was an eye opener for me. There you go, that was it. I mean, you took the words right out of my mouth. And I really recommend that for anybody because the problem with so I, I talk about the five stages of change a lot and they're, you're constantly in a cyclical growth pattern of the five stages of change. And the, and the fourth stage is called the cocoon phase or the process phase.
And bodybuilding teaches you this because what you learn really fast is if you want to make great transformation in a particular area of your life, whether it be mental, physical, spiritual, you have to reduce the number of things that you're doing in the chaos and, and, and, and, and get focused, which means that your world is going to become smaller.
And when your world becomes smaller, it's, it's like bringing a mirror really close to your face so that you, because you're going to come really close with your own unmanageability. And that's why most people whose nervous systems aren't really regulated, That's why when they get into that space and coaching, that's why they start getting into self sabotaging behavior because they come up close with their own unmanageability.
And in the discomfort of it, they seek comfort sex, scrolling sex or food, you know, And what I've learned though, in that in that process, though of cocoon phase, you must have the answer to compulsion is connection. So think about, I don't know if you've ever heard of the study of on rat Park, but they took a they took a rat, they addicted it to cocaine. Well, no, it's not what they did first.
Actually, they took a rat. They put it in a in a room with a lot of sexually active female rats that were that they made aroused with medications and the rat was having so much sex, they became a sex addict. Then they took the rat, put it in with water and cocaine, and it immediately chose the cocaine 'cause you can get coat addictions. So people who have gotten semi obsessively compulsed to one thing are very likely to get compulsed to another thing.
They're way more likely. Then they took the rat and they put the rat in rat park, and Rat park was just normal rats who acted normal. Put them around a lot of rats and guess what? Put the cocaine in with the water and the rat stopped consuming the cocaine and went for the water. So the, the, the, the lesson to that is is that you have to cocoon in order to create great transformation. That's why the Caterpillar turns into, you know, obviously the drag, what with the butterfly.
I'm, I'm, I'm in, I'm in my what's called my hell week. We see like 120 clients this week. It's non-stop. So I'm going all the time this week. This is this is my, this is my grind week. But, but at the same time, you can't get disconnected. And that's what happens to a lot of bodybuilders. They get disconnected and then they in in lieu of not having connection, they become obsessed. And so that's where it, it's, it's one thing to appreciate your body of work.
It's another thing to become so obsessed that you're never good enough. And so that's why when they need that, when we take young minds into a prep, we have to, we have to get them to understand the pressure that develops and the tools that they need, not just physically, but emotionally in order to successfully navigate those waters.
And I tried to tell all my body goers, because what they'll do is instead of having like good connection with friends, family or something, healthy connection, what are they going to do? Well, I know what I did. I went out and drank and got laid. That was not great because I'm on steroids. I'm, I'm, I'm doing and that's not the connection that was
going to last. So it's just going to give me a, it's going to give me a little boost and then, you know, I'm going to be back to it. But we will, we will satiate on that for quite some time, but it will never fully satisfy. And that's the problem. So then we keep chasing more and more and more instead of just pursuing our best self. It becomes about more and never being good enough. And then that's when bodybuilding, which is an amazing thing, turns very, very negative and toxic.
Yeah, no, I totally agree. Are you you married, you got kids or anything like that? No, I have not had the pleasure yet of becoming married, although hopefully kids and marriage are in my near future because I'm looking forward to. It, yeah, it's, it's interesting, man. Like it creates a whole new dynamic. And I was kind of fearful of it at first because it's like, I don't know if that's going to be conducive to my dreams and
aspiration. I thought was going to slow me down and hold me back, but it's not really had that effect. And my wife is very different than me and she kind of acts as that, I don't know, point of integration to some degree of normalcy where I have a sense of fulfillment, but it's not a detriment to my own ambitions, you know?
Yeah, that's great to hear, man. That's a good message for everybody because I you know, that is always the biggest fear because the one closest to you is either going to build you up or take you down. Yeah, totally. What? What? What's your, what's, what's your demons now, man? What are you fighting now? Man, again, my work rate versus family like like dating life. I don't particularly like
dating. It's annoying this day and age more than ever, but so like work life balance, which is always, you know, a teetering cascade. But again, on the other hand though, like nobody questions LeBron James's work great because it's like, well, of course he's going to work a lot. Well, that's that's me and my other people's expectations of my life. I do not have to hold to right. So it's like, yeah, you may not want to work this much. I do, right. So there's a difference.
It's part of what makes me happy. But at the same time, I don't know, I get into I man, I like, I liked it. I get in a little bit like nicotine pouches and stuff like that. I get into that sometimes. I don't know, I'm pretty stable and everything else, man, I, I got a pretty good consistent process. So it's, so it's just, it's just balance in the, the risk versus reward. How big of risk do I want to take in my business and in my
life? And you know, that's it, that's probably it. You know, I do, I do a pretty good job now these days. Sometimes, maybe sometimes they'll let Netflix get me on occasion, like I got to stop watching TV. So I'll, I'll pick stuff up and I got to drop it 'cause I'll get obsessed with it real quick. You know, that's why I don't play video games. I, I, I, I, I don't play many sports. I'll let bodybuilding, but I get competitive. I don't ski anymore 'cause I, I always go to the black diamond
and I can't trust myself. So, so I just, I stick to the games that I can win, you know what I mean? Yeah, no, totally man. Respect that for sure. Well, talk to me about the the university of the programming, the protocol. Like what does that look for somebody that's interested? Like, walk me through that road,
man. Yeah, imagine if somebody had figured out how in a 13 week program I could teach you 4 steps, 4, four steps in a process that could pretty much solve almost any condition in the world and also create amazing aesthetic outcomes. And you wouldn't even need a lab to do it. That's the 4F method that I trademarked and that's the base certification, Functional Health Coach certification level 1. And so my amazing team at Metabolic Mentor University, we have courses that you can buy,
you can get the certifications. They teach every strategy of dieting that you could possibly imagine. So we're a Mediterranean keto, carnivore, lions, you if, if it comes up, vegetarian fasting, intermittent fasting, because they're all tools and there's a time and place for all of those
tools. And, and then we also teach everything about peptides, hormones, if, if you're dealing with people that are older, we, we teach everything about all the different types of systems to overcome weight loss resistance, autoimmune, PCOS, you know, you name it, the list goes on. We've, we've set the bar and we can teach anybody coming off the couch.
You could be sitting at home right now hating your life, working at a 711. And in 13 weeks, I can teach you how to solve almost any problem in the world. And that's the Metabolic Mentor University. You guys can check it out or you guys can just check out my Instagram, start following some of my content. I go live every Monday answering everybody's questions too. And breaking it down. It's Vince under score pit stick. That's pit and stick.
Pretty simple Australian deodorant even though I'm German and check me out on Instagram or Metabolic Mentor YouTube. Nice, man. Awesome, awesome. What are you excited about going for 2025? Coming up at the end of the year here. Man, 2025 is going to be a big year for functional medicine. We got Robert F Kennedy that's going to be ahead of the the sounds like the you know, the that maybe the FDAI don't know where it depends where where he lands.
I don't know what the kind of czar they're going to make him. I I'm excited about the economics of 2025. I'm going to be very aggressive in my pursuit of growth. We are particularly we're we're we're launching concierge medicine. So you get a coach, but you get the doctor with it. And we're going to position it in the market that way because we have it now, but we don't sell it as that. We sell it as coaching and
there's a doctor included. But changing the framework to like try to reach more wider base of audience, not just like people who are into fitness or general health, but all people of all walks of life. And so we have a very aggressive 2025 marketing strategy. And I'm, I'm just, I'm just looking forward to how many lives we can touch. You know, right now our 4F system is in over 2000 practices across the country and reaches about 2 million people a year.
I want to get to 50. Let's go I. Love it. I love it man. And where are you located again? Well, we're virtual, but my look, my I live in Saint Pete Beach, Florida. Nice, nice. You work people all over, I mean, I guess all over the. World. Yeah, We got clients in every country, Yeah. Awesome man, I love it. I love it. Well, I would definitely link out, make these people to find you. Genuinely enjoy this conversation, man. I like, yeah. Me too, man. You're kindred spirit, bro.
I listen. I just want you to keep going out there, changing lives, inspiring people. That's what you were tasked to do. That's why you've got the OCD, bro. You've got the that's what you're that's what you're meant to do. You're doing what you're meant to do. Yeah, and likewise, man, likewise. It's cool to see people that are also, I mean, like there's not a whole lot of people that I've talked to that have literally done and gone to the exact same
thing my mind's going through. So it's cool whenever I connect with someone that is. So hats off. To each other, yeah, man. Well, you're, you're gifted and highly favored, man. It's a gift. Remember that. 100% Well if I'm ever in Florida, which I am quite frequently. What do you lift in man? You, I we will absolutely. I'll I'll shoot you my phone
number. We'll get a rocking whenever you get down here A. 100% well appreciate events, keep killing man, keep changing lives and keep in touch. Thanks man, you too. See you bud later.