The Meat Mafia Podcast

Dane Johnson: what's happening, brother? Welcome to the me mafia podcast. What's up, guys. Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to dive in and help James some lives. It's going to be a good one.

Brett: Yeah, we're, uh, we're so pumped to have you on. And we were saying a little bit, Dane, prior to recording, you know, a big focal point or origin story of the show was podcast.

A commonality that you and I both have is that we both suffered from ulcerative colitis at a young age. And we've actually connected before because when I was trying to go through my journey of healing it holistically, there were very few people that were publicly talking about this. Obviously, you know, Jordan Rubin had written The Maker's Diet.

And then I had seen a couple of podcast appearances that you were on. So I listened to your, your podcast appearance on Primal Kitchen, and I just thought you had this incredible balanced approach. Your story is unbelievable. When I was going through my process of trying to get off some of these [00:01:00] intensive biologic drugs that were, I think it was 400, 000 a year for eight infusions.

You are one of the go to resources that I turn to. So it's very cool to be able to host you on the show. And I think that a great starting point, Dan, would just be to tell your personal healing journey. I know you've told it extensively in public, but it's such a powerful story. I think it will give a lot of people hope and inspiration that they can also heal themselves.

Um, so I think that would be an

Dane Johnson: amazing starting point. Thanks Brett. And thanks guys for having me. And for everyone out there listening, suffering right now, I hope this conversation is life changing. I will give you as many aha moments as much that you can shift now to get these results because I know what it's like to be in your shoes.

And it's my mission to help us, um, all come together and find a solution, no matter our creed or culture, our diet preference, um, we can all heal. We all have that ability and we all share that, that superpower. So with me. You know, the most important thing when I tell my story is, is two things that others can [00:02:00] relate and know how, you know, even if it gets so bad, it can get better.

And number two is the core principles of getting out of that hole, how to get out of that hole, chronic hole, that prison that then you feel like you're stuck in by yourself. Yes. So I really want to start with that feeling of my mom couldn't relate. My dad couldn't relate. My sisters couldn't relate. My doctors could not relate.

The functional doctors, the functional medicine practitioners I saw could not relate. Did they know tons that they'd done tons of research and, and had protocols? Yes. Couldn't relate. So, if you're dealing with IBD or other types of gut health issues, We can relate. Brett can relate. I can relate. We know exactly what it's like.

I know that emotional journey. So, at first, I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, and then I went to get another, um, [00:03:00] a perspective from another doctor at another hospital, and the doc the hospitals I was going to were UCLA and Cedars Sinai. Those were the two main hospitals in LA. I lived in Los Angeles.

I was diagnosed in Virginia, but when it started getting really bad, I was living in Los Angeles, building out a career, and... You know, God really had blessed me with the ability of doing this crazy thing. After college, you can be an actor and do commercials and modeling. I'm like, what really I get to do?

I'm a small town kid from nowhere gives me this huge, this thing. And no one found me in a mall. I didn't do Zoolander and someone's, you know, said, put a red, uh, you know, red, red carpet out for me. I went and built the system, but at the same time I'm diagnosed with severe ulcerative colitis. And then the doctors at Cedars Sinai were saying.

Um, it might be gastritis as well. Then UCLA goes, no, no, no. This is Crohn's disease. And then Cedars Sinai goes, no, no, no, no, this is ulcerative colitis. No, no, no. I'm certain this is Crohn's disease. So that's eventually where I came to Crohn's colitis. And really it was just widespread. It [00:04:00] started in my colon.

The first time I ever had problems, it was like, I think around seven centimeters of inflammation on my left side, like left side of colitis. So then it just spread and got worse and worse and worse. And when I first got diagnosed, I'd never heard of it. I was, you know, 22. I got my first symptoms at 19 years old.

I got blood in the stool. Coincidentally, I started getting blood in the stool when I started trying to get in the best shape of my life. I was cutting carbohydrates. I was eating very restrictive. I was working out to a day. I was doing HIIT training, high intensity training, and I was doing dehydration stuff, just trying to get my body in the best shape.

I don't know what happened, but that whole thing of trying to look like a statue, I kind of tried to do that when I was 20. And uh, it backfired on my gi health and I was under a lot of stress And that's when I started getting some of those symptoms as I backed off some of those stresses. It did get better, but then it eventually got worse and worse.

22, 23. During that time, I started noticing more diarrhea, more blood in the stool, more mucus, harder to gain weight. I started getting acne, bacne. So little bits of acne [00:05:00] on my back and my chest, and I didn't know what was causing it, but it just kind of kept coming. So I started buying more Neutrogena products, you know, better skin cleansers, and And then the doctors, I'd go to the doctors and say, just put me on whatever you need to put me on.

I've got a life to get back to. Just, just do what you got to do. So prednisone, acetyl. Yeah. Well, that's cool. I got to take two, three caps, three times a day. That's just getting a little annoying and it's not really working. And then we went over to Lyota and the prednisone did help at first. So all of a sudden I'd look down.

I didn't see blood. I didn't see much mucus. My bad ones went down to four day, three a day from seven to eight with blood. Okay, great. Thanks guys. Get back to my life. Then month after month after month, I'd have to come off the prednisone symptoms would come back. My ALDA wasn't working. Then they were trying to give me um, enemas.

Well, a 22 year old kid with no prior natural medicine experience trying to do enemas. Good luck. Okay. I'm like, you want me to stick this in my butt every single day? I don't know if I can do this. So I [00:06:00] had a lot and I didn't have any training. I had no one who'd been going through this. And my I could tell my mom's voice.

She was really worried about me, but I wasn't really looking on the internet I was just I was focused on my career was focused on living my life and freedom Then it got a little worse and worse and they said okay this prednisone this 5 asa mesalazine is not working We need to go on 6 mp. They give me 6 mp And all of a sudden i'm waking up in cold sweats.

The whole bed is soaked. I can't even sleep in it I mean I got to change The covers, the sheets, I got to put lay down towels. I wake up all the, now all the towels are soaked through. I wake up, I just lost seven pounds. You know, you guys, you know, might fluctuate, especially men, right? We fluctuate two, three pounds all the time, seven waking up and you're looking skinny gone.

All of a sudden I'm not really having the energy to work out. I got to go back on prednisone. So I'm on and off prednisone long story. I'm on and off prednisone for four years. Okay. Now my whole mission was to be in the best shape of my life. I just got signed with four models, Wilhelmina [00:07:00] models, Osbring commercial agency.

I got an acting agency. I'm booking commercials. I booked a national commercial. I'm doing, you know, Crocs and I, all of a sudden I got Patagonia booking me. I've got all these big brands booking me for national campaigns and I'm just, remember I'm just a kid from a little small town farmland. Who grew up with two regular nine to five parents and knew no one in this world.

I just flew out here myself and try to make it happen. I've always been kind of entrepreneurial spirited, but now at the same time, God giveth and God taketh. Right? I, I, all of a sudden I'm pooping. I can't keep weight on. I'm so tired. I can hardly work out. I'm chronically needing prednisone to keep it up and some of the pictures, if you ever see of me guys in shape, I did men's health magazine, a few other things looking real in shape.

I'm on 40 milligrams prednisone. Hmm. In magazines posted being the cool hip fit guy. No, no, no, no, no, no. That was a mirage. That was fake. I remember I did good day LA live with Tommy Hilfiger [00:08:00] and he's showing the suit off and I'm literally losing my vision on live television. I don't know if I'm going to collapse right there on live, live good day LA.

Wow.

Brett: So you look at the peak of aesthetic health and your stomach, your internal gut, they're just, it's telling a completely different story than what you're

Dane Johnson: portraying to everyone else. I didn't even look at at this point because a lot of that world in the commercials, the acting modeling, you know, I'm wearing shirts to cover up, you know, I was losing weight.

I went from 185, 175 pounds. Down to 160 to 150 to 130. My lowest was 122 pounds. Couldn't walk. Couldn't go upstairs. I had such muscle atrophy. I had to be in a wheelchair. So, but it just, I was trying to keep this up because look, I was so lucky, man. I like, look at this small town kid. And the thing about that career is I, it allowed me to work three, four, five days, make all my money in that time and then work on my health or [00:09:00] just be free for 25 days.

If this didn't work, I'm back on my dad's couch or with my mom on disability. Back to a whatever crap job. I didn't want to go back to that job. I wanted to stay in California I wanted to and then I was so lucky. It's such a young kid to have this blessing So, you know, that was the mask of it and then it just kept getting worse and worse 6mp It got worse and then methotrexate wasn't working and then remicade and when I'm when I remicade I never wanted to be on remicade Intuitively, when they told me, you're going to be on this for the rest of your life and it's just maintenance.

And then they were talking about there are side effects. It could cause certain types of cancers to come up later in your future. I never saw myself as a sick person. So for me to accept a lifelong biologic was for me to accept that I'm just a sick person. Now that's my, that was what was going through my brain at 24 years old.

I'm not saying what was right. I'm not talking about whether you should be on them or on them. We can get to that. That's just what was going on. So I never wanted to be on. I think that also affected their [00:10:00] efficacy because I think when you naturally don't want something, it probably won't work as good. I had anxiety with the every infusion I was thinking, man, how long do I have to keep this up?

I just felt I didn't feel good inside myself. And so it got worse and worse and worse. And all of a sudden I've got, I'm looking, you know, I'm a hundred, I dropped to like a hundred and 40 pounds. I'm getting kicked off set. It's obvious now. Six to 135 pounds. I don't fit close. Um, I, I cracked open my head.

You guys might be able to see it here. There's a scar right there. See that? Yeah. That's actually me just walking down, walking down. Now I was in Vegas showing my buddy Vegas. He was from the east coast. He's never been out here. I'm having water and a banana. That's it. And I just lose my vision, crack my head open, eight stitches.

I was in the ER room all night. I mean, I was losing vision. I couldn't get up. I was so tired, so anemic. Um, you know, just constantly having eight, 12 bound movements a day, blood, you know, years like this. Prednisone did help, then it came back. And then [00:11:00] Remicade, it didn't help. It didn't work. And And then my family started spending lots of money.

We're a middle income family. We don't have a lot of money. We got enough to spend, but not a lot. Right? So we, we were started hiring different natural paths. We started trying different diets. We bought a city diet, a link God shawl. And, you know, and half the problem is looking back on that for anyone who's looking at these famous diets.

I wasn't ready to do them. I was a young kid. I wasn't ready to be empowered over my health. I wasn't ready to be disciplined. I also didn't have a coach, there were no programs out there in 2011, 2012, you know, it was just kind of even more scarce than what we're doing right now. So I kept failing the diets, I'd do them for three or four weeks, I'd lose more weight, I'd get more tired, I wouldn't see symptom relief, I'd give up.

I tried the bone broth diet, I'd give up. I started making my own homemade yogurts, that didn't really help and I got tired of doing it. I went on pureed carrots for four days straight as a reset, as an IBD reset, lost weight, I would sit there and just binge Netflix. And my bowel movements might drop the moment I start [00:12:00] eating, eating food again, it get worse.

So I just, I was in this monotony of depression, diets, not working, supplements, not working naturopaths. I was working with giving me really good basic stuff, fish oil, a random probiotic, a vitamin D, you know, um, just, you know, simple stuff, vitamin C, electrolyte formula. And it wasn't enough. I wasn't hitting root cause.

I was tired. I was lost. I was angry. I was going into depression. And it was just that it went on for about three or four years. So we can talk about what I learned and why, but in my story, something shifted. I was backed into a corner where I've been losing my career. I've been losing my ability to be free.

I lose my ability to be social. Um, even eating restrictively, I still wasn't getting better. I was getting worse and worse and losing more weight and more weight. And so I was backed in the corner. I really felt like my, I was losing my life. Biologics weren't working. And then something snapped inside of me.

And, um, I decided that. [00:13:00] I had to become the CEO of my health and it was going to be no one's responsibility, but my own to heal myself. And I call that fault versus responsibility. So it was never my fault I got sick. And because it was never my fault, it was really never my responsibility. And I think everyone listening right now to mine, that's the first takeaway I want you to know about how to start healing this in my journey.

Was that was a big shift. Fault versus responsibility. It was never my fault, so I never took full responsibility. Yes, and that took me about four years to figure that out. It was my mom's responsibilities. My dad's responsibility was the doctor Is my gi doctor? He's the one he's the doctor. He's the guy who went to school for this He keeps telling me diet doesn't matter.

He keeps telling me there's nothing I could do about it He keeps telling me I have an incurable disease Once you enroll a patient in that truth if a patient accepts the truth, then what's there to talk about? You're a victim. Yeah. The, one of the core problems I saw with the doctors is, and this is just a core emotional or spiritual philosophy.

I disagree with you. Don't give the patient any responsibility for what's happened. [00:14:00] You don't need to change your diet. You don't need to do any research. You don't need to get any training. Just take these drugs. That's all you can do. That's essentially what's being said. And that we, we, if it was one thing we've learned in life over the millions of years being alive, humans have to be self accountable, self empowered, self responsible for all of it.

We can't rely on outside forms all the time. Yeah, the idea of being a CEO of your own health in such a dire situation is a really power, powerful testament to taking ownership of your health. And I feel like both of you guys, I've heard Brett tell his story numerous times. There's just this power that comes when your back is against the wall.

And I'm just genuinely curious. For both of you guys, when did you guys start to actually believe that you could heal yourself outside of what medicine could provide? The big thing for when I say an emotional shift is I didn't want to take responsibility. It was too overwhelming. It was too big of an issue.

[00:15:00] And you know, 15, 20 years ago. I was conditioned and raised around just eating food, not even organic food and all this. I was just raised. And I think we're in a really a big renaissance right now in our, in our culture of self accountability and self responsibility. I think Brett maybe realized it quicker than I did and just saw it and attacked it.

You know, I took me a long time to get there to say, I'm going to own this. And I didn't, you know, and I needed a leader. I needed a mentor. And all I had were pages and books. I didn't have anyone to talk to. I didn't have these podcasts. There was nothing out there like this. And I was angry and I was depressed and it was so bad.

Other people were getting results that wasn't working for me. And so really for me, it was an emotional shift. that I just decided I was in so much pain. I was so angry for so long that I walked in the door after a trip out to Ohio to do a job. I lost control of my bowel movements. I was having just the same old problems over and over again.

Something snapped inside of me that I said, [00:16:00] I just. I was no longer willing to let my doctor lead me. I wanted him on my team, but he was not going to be the leader of my health. My parents were not going to be the leader of my health. I was now going to be the leader of my health. I was so angry, just something snapped inside of me.

I remember the day. It just snapped and the problem was whenever I read the books about healing, it felt like only 1 percent could do this. It felt so impossible. I was raised on gluten. I had cereal and 2 percent milk every day growing up. I was so conditioned just to be your good old Virginia boy. Like this was so ridiculous and no one I knew had ever attempted to do it.

Not, I didn't know one, no one, I didn't know anyone at 22 years old doing carnivore, paleo, gluten free, intermittent fasting, meditation, doing their own lab work, journaling on their health, making their own food. No one cooked their own food. Today, when everyone out there, if I looked and talked about those things, a lot of us who are listening are [00:17:00] saying, yeah, I don't do any of those things.

And I, it's, it's hard for us to mentally take them on. And that's part of the conversation is how do I approach these problems and integrate them? We've all heard a thousand times to get rid of certain gluten or glyphosate or inorganic foods or all this stuff. But how do we integrate it? That's, that's really what we do at Crohn's Glyce lifestyle is we're the coach.

We help integrate, we help get results. But in that, I want to finish my story because I know it's a big part of, of Brett. We wanted to go over is even when I took accountability, I did. That's when I started getting results. So when you said what happened, well, what I did is I started doing intermittent fasting.

I only ate two meals a day and I only ate what I cooked and then I meditated and I did prayer every single day. So I just said, what can I control? I can control deciding to let go of anger, pain, fear, and depression. So I just said, you know what? I'm going to give it up. I started praying. You think I was praying before?

No, not at all. I just, you wonder why I prayed everyone out there. Here's why I want you to pray because it can't hurt. It can only help. Here's why I want you to meditate because it can't [00:18:00] hurt. It can only help rule of thumb. If it can't hurt and it can possibly help do it. And if it could possibly hurt.

And maybe help, maybe hold off for a second. That's an unknown variable. Start with your variables that you can control. So I said, I can do that. What's another thing? Well, if I cook what I eat, do I control the variables and it can help better than eating someone else's cooked food? Yeah. So I'd started with things that I could control.

So that was it. It was started with the mind. I decided I'm going to be the, I'm going to be the CEO of my health. Everyone else is going to work for me. I'm going to own this. So I went down and I made a journal. I called it 40 days and 40 nights because I just watched the movie by Josh Hartnett 40 days and 40 nights where he was abstinent.

I thought it was funny. I needed comedy in my life at that point. Okay. So for 40 days and 40 nights, I was not going to eat gluten fast food. I wasn't going to eat like my buddies. I wasn't gonna have beer, nothing. And, and then I said, I'm not going to eat until like 10 or 11 just so I have time to like process how I feel [00:19:00] because when you give yourself space, it's easier, easier to control the variables of how you feel.

You're too overwhelmed. Everybody, you're too overwhelmed. Control the variables. I ate two meals and I journaled every day and all of a sudden after about two weeks, I started sleeping through the night and which was, I was chronically waking up to have a bowel movement for about nine months straight. I started sleeping through the night, my pain went down and then my blood went down by 30%.

Another thing I did is I actually, I actually wrote out one to 10, how much blood I was seeing in a day on average. And I just guesstimate 10 is the worst ones, the best zeros eliminated, right? So I was at like a nine when I started eight, nine, and within two weeks it was down to a six or five. So I started being able to control what success was.

So many of you out there right now, you either have success. I'm a hundred percent cured. Or I'm a hundred percent sick. There's no middle. You need to learn how to celebrate 30 percent healed. [00:20:00] I'd call my mom. I was so tired of my mom, bad news and making her anxious. Cause I knew how much I was hurting her calling up saying I'm still sick.

I'm still hurting. When is this going to go away? Help me help me. To, hey, guess what? I saw 30 percent less blood this month. How do you know? Because I was, I was marking down that I was getting about a 10 bad. Looked like a crime scene when I went to the bathroom. Now, I'm only seeing a little bit on the toilet paper.

I'm seeing only a little bit on the stool. And I only went four times yesterday. Instead of eight celebration. Let's

Brett: go Yeah, the way they started cut you off, but I just wanted to say personal um encounters with you The way that you food journal is something that i've personally done for the last four years And it's had an unbelievable impact on my own stomach health and the thing that's so effective about what you do is it's so much more than just listing out the actual foods that you eat, which does have an incredible benefit from an accountability perspective.

But you're talking about [00:21:00] detailing your sleep, your energy levels, how did you feel after you ate a meal? And then the kicker being like, how were my bowel movements after I did that? And the thing about detailing so thoughtfully in the journal is that it allows for that pattern recognition. So for me, part of how I encountered paleo approach to eating.

With the food journal that you were recommending, I was noticing, hey, when I have these precipitous greens, I'm actually having issues going to the bathroom. What if I actually cut out the greens and just focus on the fat and protein? And that was what had a huge benefit for me. But most people don't take that extra 1 percent to do that detailed food journaling.

Because it seems so simple, but then you can actually like track those patterns. And then you're sitting there 14 days later and it's like, yeah, nowhere near, near healed, but it's 30 percent better than it was two weeks ago, which is incredible.

Dane Johnson: I mean, imagine if, if imagine if someone gave you 30 percent growth in your company, imagine someone give you 30 percent more, uh, muscle density in two weeks, three weeks.

Imagine if you were [00:22:00] 30 percent happier. Yes, 30 percent is a big number. It's part of the training that we're either perfect, good, normal, because this is what we've been taught or we're sick, like a light switch. And so it's a trauma we have to work out, even though the journaling feels like 1 percent to you now, when you actually think about, I'm going to journal my stuff, it feels like climbing a huge mountain.

Cause now I have to think about what I'm eating. Now I have to think about how many bowel movements I've had. So it was emotionally, it was a huge shift for me. I was not ready for a long time. And here's the big kicker to what you're saying, Brett, because everything Brett said is a hundred percent true.

If you're going to get empowered, the reason we call it the shield program is so that you can respond to adversity. If you're going to get empowered over your health, you've got to understand your body. You've got to have stronger intuition on what works, why, and how to pivot around adversity. When Brett [00:23:00] journaled every day, he was sharpening his intuition.

When Brett journaled every day, he learned about how he could better sustain getting the freedom or getting the results or getting the bowel movements to look the way he wanted. If I ask you how many bowel movements any of you listening right now had seven days ago, you don't know. If I was talking to Brett four weeks into his plan, he did.

Yeah. Brett got results. If we're not getting results, shouldn't we model those who got results? So and I actually got, cause Jordan was jubilant in the maker's diet. He was journaling and I actually ripped out his prayer out of, out of it, out of the maker's diet. And I just read his prayer. You can actually cherry pick from a lot of people.

If you have the discipline and the willingness, now you have to just work on your faith. What is faith? Faith is walking into the unknown. If you know what's scary about the unknown not data collecting If you're doing stuff for a month without [00:24:00] data collecting and you're doing it in faith, i'm lost man I don't know where I turned i'm in the middle of the woods I I don't have any day.

I don't even know, you know But if you're going through the jungle, you're gonna maybe want to put points like okay, this is Two hours in we, we, here's a mark. I'm going to, I'm going to, you know, paint this tree metaphorically, right? If you data collect, the faith is rewarded with, with information and vision and, and, and self awareness.

Remember, okay, everyone write this down. If there was a cure for Crohn's and colitis, it would be this, the cure for Crohn's Crohn's and colitis is not to eradicate. the possibility of adversity. It's not to eradicate it. The cure for Crohn's and colitis is the ability to respond to adversity. See, when you journal, you're building your ability to respond to something going wrong.[00:25:00]

When, if you walk into this saying, I want to eradicate Crohn's and colitis. Well, I'd ask you what in the world can you eradicate? Can you eradicate a bad day? I want to eradicate the chain. I want to eradicate. Never. I never want to have a bad day again. I never want to be angry. I never want to be depressed.

I never want to get bad breath. I never want to get bloating or gas. I never want to get arthritis. I never want to get a migraine name. One person in the world has been able to be successful at that. At any of it. I can't give you one. Could you, could a synonym of eradication be cure or incurable? What's the context?

What's the merit? What can we cure? That's one thing I'd ask anyone who's all upset and really stuck on this idea of any curable disease. I just ask you this and I'd ask you to ask your doctor, what can you cure, sir? If I stop brushing my teeth, will my gingivitis come out of remission? Will it flare? What about if I stopped taking care of myself?

I stopped saying I love you to my wife. Will it, my marriage [00:26:00] flare up and divorce happen? I mean, where do things not need nourishment and need care? We're bumping up against just the balance of life. The gut needs care. We don't eat from farms. We don't eat clean animals. We don't breathe clean air. We eat, we have things with toxic chemicals and heavy metals and glyphosate and impurities in our water.

Maybe turning the frogs gay. Who knows? I mean, guys, take it out of the context here. We are not, we are human. We are earthlings not living connected to the earth. You don't think there's, there's issues with that. I call it the convenience tax where things are convenience. There's usually a health tax. Yes.

You'd package food. There's a tax. Eat something you didn't grow and you didn't build yourself or kill yourself. There's probably a tax. It's the convenience tax. That's the era. A hundred years ago, your great grandfather ate from a local farm and he only ate what they cooked 99 [00:27:00] percent of the time. You don't think there's a tax involved with getting rid of that system.

So you know, and I want to finish my story here with that just to go on that. So even when I learned this and I said, Oh man, I started getting results. A lot of people don't know this, but a year and a half later is when everyone knows my story. That's when I nearly died. After I got result, my first results with natural medicine, why I hadn't learned, I hadn't really learned what I think I was supposed to learn yet.

Um, I started traveling again. My career sort of taken off. I moved to New York, which is a tough place to be into health and wellness, meaning there's no nature. There's hardly an organic food. I'm in the harshest winters. Um, I'm not Uber.

I lived there for two and a half years. And, uh, I went through some really hard emotional things and when I went through this hard emotional things and I had a hard breakup and I was, I felt lost. I didn't feel connected to acting and stuff like that. I wanted to be in a natural medicine and, [00:28:00] and, um, that's when I almost lost my life.

I, I, I was, I had to drive myself to the hospital. I was losing my vision. I could hardly walk. I was having severe. fevers, severe night sweats, you know, my visions, I was taking emergency. I, I, I drove myself to the ER room and I literally, it was worse than a DUI. Honestly, I shouldn't have been driving. I just was alone and I thought I was going to need an ambulance.

So I just drove myself to the hospital and I'd stop and get emergency package just so I could stay conscious. And then I got there and I stayed at the hospital for six weeks and nearly died. And the reason why, um, that happened, I'll get to the why of what I found later on, but I was on morphine. It wasn't strong enough.

Then they put me on Dilaudid. Um, Dilaudid is about seven times stronger than morphine. I was like, I worked up to three grams a day. So I was on legalized heroin about six weeks, but I had to work myself off of, I had to went on TPN feeding tube. I couldn't eat. And so it didn't matter. It didn't matter what kind of restrictive diet I was doing.

I was going down bad. And, um, I was having 15, 20 bloody bowel movements today, [00:29:00] lost 60 pounds in that hospital, uh, TPN, uh, feeding tube. I went on Ambient. I went on the Dilaudid. I was on 200 milligrams of infused prednisone, four antibiotics infused, um, didn't help, wasn't getting better. And then I eventually went on a chemo, an antiviral chemotherapy that actually helped save my life, which actually taught me a little bit about my root cause.

The root cause that got me deathly sick and got me in the ER, which I think a lot of us need to know, that even if you're carnivore, even if you're vegan or whatever you're doing, if some of these root causes hit your body, It doesn't matter what diet you're doing, you're going to go south and that's what happened to me.

And it was actually cytomegalovirus, so CMV virus, and this was under extreme stress. I was also doing a lot of pre workouts, caffeines, two a day workouts, traveling a lot for my career, um, going through a little bit of a sadness and depression with a breakup and, um, just feeling very lost in life. And it was within about two weeks of all that kind of maximizing.[00:30:00]

That I had to go to the ER room. So I think emotional stress is something that we have to be aware of and balance in life and adrenals, I think my adrenals were shot, which is going to regulate your, your cortisone and help regulate the, um, inflammation in your body. So, you know, that's where I. I, I was able to start recovering.

So the only reason I think that helped save my life, it was a doctor in Florida who had done a colonoscopy, but I traveled around and talked to a lot of doctors and he did a colonoscopy on me. And he took samples multiple times. And in one sample out of all of them, he only found one, he found a little bit of cytomegalovirus in there.

So he called up the ER doctor and said, Hey, I'm a. I'm a GI down in Florida and I found a little Saito in his colonoscopy about three, four years ago. I think I had to put him on an antiviral. We called the health, the insurance company. We basically said, you know, the doctor, this, I was not conscious during any of this, but my mom was at the hospital lobbying the insurance company to say, you got to give him a sample of this antivirals or he's not going to live.

They gave me the, the sample, it was like a [00:31:00] 5, 000 sample. And, uh, within 24 hours, I woke up. Became conscious. So that's when they said, okay, we got to do. So it was a very severe from there. I was housebound for one year. I had to retrain myself to walk. I had lost it. It wasn't, you know, I had a nervous system problem.

I had such muscle atrophy. I couldn't flex my foot. So I couldn't walk up a stair. So my, my sister, my mom took turns living with me for the first like three months. It took me about two to three months to be able to walk again. And I mean, walk, I was practicing like 20 yards a day. Type thing so that where I could actually get my own groceries.

I could bike I could you know, start making my own food I could get up and walk to the bathroom took about two three months and then I was housebound for about Ten to twelve months to rebuild my body and then during that time I walked I worked myself off in tibio methotrexate prednisone ambient Painkillers and Misalazine [00:32:00] I think, and then, um, I think that was it.

And I was doing low dose naltrexone LDN, but that was making me chronically depressed and giving me nightmares to where I was talking very dangerous. So I came off that too. So, yeah, it was a, it was a journey. I that's why I'm here. That's why I'm so mission driven. That's why I built this company and I've spent so many hours building this.

That's why I'm so passionate about impact that when we work with people, we get results, we're like a dog on a bone. Um, you know, um, I won't scale my company if I, if I, if it, if it. If it hurts impact, um, and you know, I went through so much pain, my parents went through so much pain, my family went through so much pain that I think that God gave me a special gift to be able to relate.

Not just for late, but also know what it takes to get out, what it takes to crawl on your hands and knees and get back to life. And I haven't taken a drug in eight years. I never got a surgery, even though I was told I need to multiple times I got so sick. They wouldn't even do the [00:33:00] surgery anymore. I mean, more is beyond the recommendation.

It was like, you can't even do it anymore because it might kill you. And, um, since then I've been able to bench 310 pounds. I've been able to run 10 miles straight. I don't worry about where a bathroom is. I weigh 182 pounds, 185. I can eat a broad variety of food. I eat whatever I want. That's something I'll teach you guys about here in a second.

That statement is an empowering statement. I'll teach you about it, but I can eat whatever I want. I don't have a. diet. I have a lifestyle that makes me happy and healthy at the same time. I choose what I do and how I live. I run my own lab work. I work with multiple functional doctors. I've seen well over a thousand Crohn's colitis clients myself.

Uh, my, me and my team, we see 120 Crohn's colitis patients a week. And our success rate is extremely high. We have more testimonies than anyone in the world. Our impact is insanely good. And, um, and we've built our whole solution, not just being unscalable. Anyone who's an entrepreneur out there knows what I'm saying that it's not, it's not money based first.

It's not scalable first it's [00:34:00] mission driven impact first. And we grew up from there. Yeah. And I think

Brett: so, Dane, something that our pastor says a lot to us that's always resonated with me is that God's plans are so much bigger than your own. And I think the reason why it's so important for you to tell your story in such detail is that it, it adds relatability to people where if someone like you that was literally able to crawl, like literally crawl yourself out of the depths of hell was able to heal.

What can the average person do when they're in that same situation? And I'm sure it's something you think all the a ton about of like, probably the ultimate curse at the time ended up being the ultimate blessing where it's like, now you actually have this relatability you have this ability to heal yourself and now you're impacting thousands and thousands of people and giving like literally for me like being a beacon of hope of like, Look, if I can heal holistically, let me give you the playbook so you can do your own things too.

But at the same time, it does seem like it starts with that level of personal responsibility and accountability, which is very [00:35:00] intimidating to people because I remember when I told myself I wanted to get off these drugs. My GI wasn't telling me how to do it. No doctor was telling me how to do it. So I'm just curious, Dane, do you have any recommendations for people to kind of own that?

I am the CEO of my health mindset when no one else is telling them how to do these things and heal on their

Dane Johnson: own. Great question. The first thing you have to realize is that you can do it and that other people who've done this out there are not smarter than you. Okay. I am not, my IQ is probably not that, it's probably run the same as yours.

Everyone out there listening. Look, it's not that I was a genius. And what Brett did doesn't, it doesn't make them a genius. It's willpower. It's conviction. It's making up your mind and walking forward in the fog. It's a faith based walk. That's why I talk about God because I believe you've got to have some kind of spiritual [00:36:00] anchor to take on something so scary.

It is scary. The doing. It's actually the easy part. It's the willingness and the conviction to say, I will not give up. I will move forward. I will not fall into depression. How this is an emote. This is probably a bigger emotional and spiritual battle than the physical. Because when you get down to it, if you looked at what I did, when I started getting an, I call it in flow.

When I started manifesting healing, when I started really enabling my cells, Brett, you probably the same, what you did on a day to day wasn't implicated. It's not even mine. That was different than Brett's. And then Susan and Craig and Billy and, and Rebecca, one, you get a figuring out what to do is difficult.

Just proving it works is difficult, but actually integrating it and doing it is, is 90 percent what you're not doing in 10 percent about what you are doing. [00:37:00] And so where's the battle. It's what am I going to do? Why? How can I be accountable with this? How can I do this with my friends, my family, my school?

I got a wedding coming up. I want a job promotion. I got to travel. It's the integration of it. And so you got to start with saying, look, here's what I want. Write this down. My goal is to make it simple, simple equals successful, hard equals failure. LeBron James makes it look easy. Michael Jordan made it look easy.

People who have, who are able to accomplish great things, make it look easy, just continue to build it. So it gets easier. That's what I did. When I started, when I got that conviction and I locked myself in my house and I said, that's it, I'm going to stay here and I'm going to do this for 60 days. Just do it.

Do it for 30 or 60 days. That's it. Okay. Start with 30 days and say, I'm going to be gluten free or I'm going to do carnivore. I'm going to do this plan for 30 days [00:38:00] and just journal five minutes in the morning, five minutes. Now you've got 24 hours, five minutes in the morning, five minutes of night. I want you to be Dr.

Self and I want you to see patient self. That's I say, I'd say, okay, Dr. Dane, I'd be, I'd turn in the doctor. I mean, you play it out. All right, Dane, you're an asshole who can't do what I tell you to do. I'd literally write that in my notes, just a joke with myself. All right. And then I'd write, okay, grapefruit is obviously not working.

You did not do well with that grapefruit yesterday. Maybe calm down on how much you eat. Okay. Like you probably. overindulge a little too much. So reduce how much you eat by 20 percent try to meditate for a full 10 minutes before you eat. Cause you want to get yourself salivating and you want to get yourself into the parasympathetic before you eat.

Cause it'll help with the digestion process. So I would just give myself little critiques. What would a doctor say to you? What would your naturopath say to you? What does that book say? And then every day when I was trying to get myself to be the answer, I would read. I told myself to read 20 minutes, but I became so [00:39:00] excited about what I was reading, especially when I was like, Oh my God, aha moment, aha moment, aha moment.

I found myself reading four hours some days because the book was just, Oh, you ever read a book like that? It's just so on, especially if you're stuck in this prison and you can't get rid of the blood and just cramping and pain, get, get a book on healing. You should only be reading about healing. Go download my book, six tips to healing Crohn's clots link below in the, uh, uh, uh, me mafia podcast.

Okay. Just start reading certain things. Try certain things, then journal on it. So you got to make it simple, ABC, ABC, and just realize that none of these people out here are smarter than you. They've just got more experience. If you've got to see, if you have a, someone who's going to take you up a mountain, it's not that the person's smarter than you.

It's just, they've gone up the mountain 20 times. You need practice. That's the biggest thing that's holding you back. You are not being accountable to getting your reps in and without reps, you're not going to get good. That is just how the universe works with any becoming a master of anything. Get your [00:40:00] reps in, simplify it, and then if you're getting overwhelmed, make it easier.

Next thing I want you to write down, consistency is worth more than perfection. Stop trying to be perfect. If you can't be pure carnivore, then don't be pure carnivore. Go 70%. You can't do keto. Don't do it. Maybe just use a monosaccharide fruit as an isolated meal and try that three hours away from the carnivore stuff and then see how do I feel with both of them.

Okay. So you can look at mixing and matching, but if you isolate where you do things, then you might get more intuition on what you're going to journal. A lot of it. You're not organized enough in your day. I can be happy. I can laugh. I can give hugs. I can party with my friends and eat nothing and do nothing.

It's fasting. I can go for walks. I can read books. I can listen to this podcast right now. I can give my mom a hug and say, I love you. I can say what up to my buddy all while I'm fasting. Most of what you want in life, you don't need to, you don't need to do anything. Yes, except get your mind [00:41:00] right get your head out the gutter.

That's what see I'm talking the way I'm talking to you Is how I talk to myself right now? Dane's brain. This is how I talk to myself when I was journaling. Hey, you got to get out of this depression, buddy Dr. Dane stop being depressed get happy. Yeah, you can't eat this stuff. I don't care Dane get happy All of a sudden, what's coming on?

I want to love you and treat you right. I got Bob Marley on. I got the windows open. My house is organized and clean. I'm calling up someone day. I'm making their day better. I'm going for a walks. I'm getting my feet in the ground. Hey, I live in California. I pay these taxes for a reason. I'm getting my feet in the ocean.

Oh, but Dane, this is what I'm tell you exactly what's going on with me. But Dane, you might poop your pants. Okay, fine. Whatever. I want to be in the ocean. Wear two pairs of underwear. Make sure you go to the bathroom. Don't drink any water. Get out to the beach. I don't care. Shame. I don't need you. I want freedom.

I'm willing to [00:42:00] risk shame for freedom. That's where my, my, I've just opened you up to Pandora's box of my mind. I can relive that year. Right now I can put myself right there. Okay. One thing they teach you in acting class, right? You got to be it. You can't act it. Yeah. So you got it. So that's the thing. I, I lived this.

I've been in your shoes, make your life simple, make it something you can be consistent with, do it first thing in morning, first thing at night and integrate it and then take notes and pivot. That's essentially what we're doing in the shield program. It's the compounding effect of everything, everything that can get a result, right?

Supplements, herbs, imagination, exercise, lifestyle, diet shield. Supplements, herbs, imagination, exercise, lifestyle, diet, the six pillars of health that you can implement to your personal plan. You can critique each one, how you need to get a compound healing effect, imagination. How are you going to get out?

I, so I use my imagination to get happy when I was sick. A lot of the times you're just not happy. You don't need alcohol to be happy. You don't need alcohol to [00:43:00] have your, to give your friends a high five or go to even go to the bar. I would go with water, no ice and a little, one of those black straws with a little lemon.

And I just sip on that and I'd be home by 11, I'd get there at nine 30, 10. I'd stay for an hour, say hi to everybody. And then I'd be home by 11 in bed, wake up at eight o'clock, make my bed every day, listen to good music, get in the sun, call people. I'd only watch comedies, turn off the dramas, get dressed for the day.

When I was sick, I would live in my pajamas. I had a beard out to hear long hair like that. I looked sick. Stop looking sick. You don't want to be sick. Stop acting sick. No one told me this. I meditated into a, a healthy enough mindset that I could then tell myself you, if you're walking around under depression, you can't even, you can't even do the obvious stuff because you're walking around in a fog in your brain.

You, so you got to, that's why I'd say meditation when she's you to meditation to clear your mind and start just clear the fog and say, [00:44:00] Whoa, what do I got to do to get happy? What do I got to do to get, get myself right? Cause you can't think right. If you're depressed or you're angry, upset, or you're acting like a victim, that was me for four years.

So I'm talking to myself. This is how I talked to myself. I'd meditate and say, I got go shave, Dane, go shave, like go shave, take a shower, get out. Yes. Your clothes are too big on you. It doesn't matter. Get your clothes on and go for a walk and okay. You might poop your pants. Okay. Go walk around your house and just do laps.

Practice doing laps because I had to retrain myself how to walk. I would just walk around my house three, four times. Go make a new playlist. This is all stuff. I just, I just curiously made up. If any of this is going aha to you, I made this up and then I would read books also for ideas. Go make a playlist right now.

Call it my healing journal or I'm done being sick. No more sick. I'm already healed. Call it. I'm already healed. That's manifestation talk. I'm already healed. Put 20 [00:45:00] songs that make you feel excited, that make you wanna sing along, that make you, that get you outta your head and get you that dopamine.

Here's the deal, if you find yourself skipping a song, you have to delete it and add a new song that gives you the dopamine. Yes. Okay. I, I just came up. I just, I got convicted and the imagination of my shield, I got convicted of, I've gotta feel good every single day. I'm tired of being depressed. I'm tired of being angry.

I'm tired of being upset because if I don't get that dopamine, I'm going to be really down with the fact that I can't eat my cereal anymore. I can't have the breads anymore. I can't have my roast beef sandwich anymore. I can't have the macaroni and cheese anymore. I can't crack a beer with my buddies anymore.

That's going to overwhelm me. So how do I, how do I get something else? So you start with the mind, get yourself healthy, and the more you feel good, the easier it's going to get strict. Like if you're with your guys ever had that, like, when are the times when you decided like when you really stuck with, I'm going to run, I'm going to run 20 miles a week, or I'm going to lift weights five days a week, or I'm going to read a book.

I'm going to read 20 pages a day, or I'm going to meditate. If you've ever give, if you've ever [00:46:00] been someone who tried to give yourself that goal and stuck with it, the only time you even said, I'm going to do it is when you had a lot of good energy running through you. Like your friends were backing you up.

Your family was backing you up. You were on holiday where you got to rebalance yourself from being overwhelmed from work. You got balanced enough that then you then gave yourself that goal. A lot of us are saying, I can't, I can't do the goal yet. I can't do the goal yet. Cause you're out of balance. Start with the balance and then integrate a simple solution.

That makes sense. And start with a proven system. When we start, we have a system we've used with thousands of people. So we'll start with that proven system and something that might help. I'll give you this, these hacks. I think we should roll into some hacks for what to do now. If you're thinking carnivore and you got IBD or gut health issues.

Okay. Now I'm going to make the, I'm going to put a little cherry on top for anyone out there. What is good for IBD is good for the human gut. Yes. Oh my god, this saved me. This saved me when I was chronically sick thinking I, I've got to do this because I have an [00:47:00] alien IBD gut. Oh, you don't understand. I have IBD.

I can't eat that. Oh, you don't understand. I've got IBD. That won't work for me. Wait a minute. I've got a human gut and what heals IBD. Does that also help heal normal people? Absolutely does. Do normal people get gas and bloating, cramping, do normal people get diarrhea, do normal people get acne, depression, do normal people have hormone issues, maybe connected to the gut or lack of fat, fat malabsorption, affecting absorption of vitamin A, D, K, E.

Or building of cholesterol, making testosterone. Yes. What you are about to do and everything you're, if you have IBS, any gut health issues, IBD, what you're about to learn and do will be impactful for every human on the planet. They should probably consider doing these things as well, especially if they want to lower the risk of any other disease coming their way in the future.

It's preventative medicine, medicine at its finest, and it will [00:48:00] help to increase your natural energy. It'll help to increase natural hormones. It'll balance your adrenals. It'll balance your, your blood sugar, your metabolics. Everything you do for IBD, IBS is good for every human alive. Now you might have to do a little bit more to fix something that they don't have to do, but it's still good for humans.

So that's the thing. Get rid of this idea that you're an alien, that you're outside of the norm and that everything you're doing is actually just empowering. And I learned this because I started seeing over the years, normal people saying, dang, how do I get rid of the bloating? How do you get rid of the gas?

Cause they don't identify with the chronic disease. Like a lot of us have had to like, you know, Brett got stamped on the forehead. Same with me. Yes. So people, I call normal people, people who aren't stamped on the forehead. But they still got core problems. I run a stool analysis or an organic acid test or a viral load panel or a heavy metal load, toxic load or parasite test on normal people.

I find problem, problem, problem, problem.

Brett: Day not to cut you off, but in some ways what we had [00:49:00] almost as a blessing in disguise because you were forced to develop that intuition because you so visibly get signals of like, Hey, if I do these things, if I go off track. My body is going to show me that these things aren't working where most people, it's like they're not really showing these signs as drastically.

So they just let these things go on for so long or for us. It was like, if we don't change, we will literally be dead. Um, and also I know that you're going to get the tips and tricks, which I'm so pumped for. I actually, I think I figured out on this podcast what makes you so good at what you do. And I think it's your ability to articulate the actual mindset shifts that are necessary around healing.

And what I realized with myself was that when I finally drew a hard line in the sand, I was supposed to do a half Ironman with Harry. I came back from Columbia. I had a flare up that was so bad that I literally had to do the race. So he did the race. I couldn't do the race. And that for me was my line in the sand of like, I no longer care about not drinking.

I don't care about not eating pizza. I don't care about needing to sleep five [00:50:00] hours a night. I'm literally just going to focus on the process of healing because if I know that I don't, I'll never be able to enjoy those things. So I almost feel like. It's super empowering hearing, hearing you speak because I almost felt like that year period that you were describing.

There's almost like this healthy addiction around getting yourself into the best possible shape and health that you can be in. And I feel like that is like the secret sauce of like, stop focusing on the shit that you can't do and focus on what you can become if you just get your health in

Dane Johnson: order. Amen.

Hey, everyone listening, just take what Brett said and listen to that like three times. Yeah. Because Brett just dissected a lot. We could sit here for another 30 minutes to talk about what you just said. Yes. My superpower, I believe is that I have a lot of normal average skills, but I have the ability to take hard things, digest them, and then spit them out as simple integrative approaches.

And that's how I succeed. And what you said is you simplified [00:51:00] it. Here's the line. And I got to get to that line. All of success is taking complicated things and making them simple. Yes. That's really, that's the, that's, that is the equation of success no matter what you're doing. And you can see, you can rinse and repeat it for your health, marriage, finances, physical abilities.

You've got to take complicated things and you've got to make them simple. What you said is an empowering spiritual shift I 100 percent agree on. Crohn's and colitis is the best thing that ever happened to me. That is my truth. And I will go to my grave with that truth. Why? Because I want it to be my truth.

And truth is merely a perspective. Truth is merely a perspective. What is true? Am I happy? Am I sad? Is it a good life? Is it a bad life? Is it a good day? Are we rich? Are we poor? Oh, Americans, we don't have enough money, but yet we're, we have. 10 times more than people in Africa. What is truth? It's perspective.

Choose perspective that empowers you. It is. And I'll tell you how [00:52:00] true that statement is. I would also recommend Peter Asha's book outlive. He's going to talk about preventative medicine and the four horsemen that are going to most likely kill us. IBD and IBS is the most scary thing about it is we think it's going to turn into colon cancer.

or cancer. That's one of the four horsemen, right? But if we were guaranteed that it didn't turn into Crohn's, uh, cancer, Crohn's and colitis will never kill us. It's more of a nuisance. Yes. Okay. It's more of a nuisance and we're scared. It's gonna turn into cancer when you get Crohn's and colitis. And if you make these shifts, what are the chances of the real diseases that can kill you?

We'll go down diabetes, heart disease. Right. Yeah. Even things like Alzheimer's, other forms of cancer. If you act now and you're twenties and you're thirties, you act now, what are the chances all these other things that will actually probably kill you won't kill you. [00:53:00] That's the catalyst. You wake up to realizing that health has to be a number one priority.

It makes you. It makes you more of a man to understand the pros and cons of beer. It makes you more of a man to understand the pros and cons of inorganic food and fast food and eating quality food. Take care of your body is your temple. It is your superpower. And here's, I'm going to let you in on a few of the mindsets.

These are things that I choose that empower me not to feel like a disabled person and feel like a, like a martyr or a weak person. I do not allow the world to see me as a weak person. I do not accept empathy for anyone from what I've been through. I inspire. And the only person who inspires me is someone who's happier and healthier.

If you are not happier and healthier than me, you do not inspire me. Okay. Okay. And no one has empathy for me. Cause I just, I, I just put out inspiration. I don't, I eat like a, here's how I do it guys. And this is just, this feeds me and gives me strength. So take it or leave it how it is. I eat like a king. I eat like a king.

I don't eat like a [00:54:00] peasant. You see what I'm doing here? I eat organic, local, clean, good food. I do not put poison in my body. If I was worth a billion dollars, if you were everyone listening, if you were worth a billion dollars, would you, would you put poisonous, toxic crap food in your body? Or would you make the best food in the world?

More convenient. It's funny. It's funny. You say that our product noble, the whole concept is around treating your body like nobility. Yeah. Eat like a queen, eat like a king. And then when people say, do you want this? When I say no things, I'm really saying I don't put trash in my body because I want to live strong.

I'm going to get more powerful. I want to be more free. I want to feel more good. I'm going to look my best. I'm almost 37 years old. I'm more shredded than I was when I was 17. I'm stronger. Way less work. Way less work. I don't even do abs anymore. I don't need to. My, my, my nutrition plan is so [00:55:00] clean. See, I don't eat a diet because diet means short term imprisonment.

For a fear based goal. That's really what diet if you break down diet It's a short term imprisonment for fear a fear based goal If I go to it like the people who are best around lifestyle I see like carnivore or vegan if I look at someone who's let's say vegan for Because they don't believe in killing animals and all that right all that game, right?

I know a lot of you are snuffin. Just hear me out for a second If I look at a vegan, they don't consider themselves on a diet. They're doing it because it's part of their belief system So your nutrition needs to be part of your belief system. Once it's part of your belief system, it's a lifestyle. It's not a diet.

A diet is for short term imprisonment that's fear based. Once you get over that, like Brett might be, he might have got into carnivore as a catalyst to Crohn's colitis. But now, do you believe in the carnivore lifestyle, Brett? Do you believe in what meat can do to nourish your body for the rest of your life?

I absolutely [00:56:00] do. Then that, then he's not on a diet. That's his proven and chosen lifestyle. And then he might have to get, if there's any fear around, can I eat a carrot or broccoli or can I have some bread or cake? Like you can always, he can always go and say, I'm going to celebrate with that to prove I'm not made of glass.

That might be an emotional thing. Right? Some of us need to, might need to emotionally prove we can do it. Like a vegan doesn't, is not scared of eating meat. Most of the time they just, it's against their belief system. So there's a fear based thinking and there's a, and there's a desire belief system. So get to a place where it's desire and then eliminate the fear.

And now you have a lifestyle. You can eat whatever you want. Yeah.

Brett: Yeah. The mental constructs about diet would be fat, diet, food philosophy, et cetera. It'd be fascinating to discuss with you because I think a lot of people, because I have spoken out so much about carnivore specifically with Crohn's colitis, they just assume that I'm on that diet year round.

And the way that I describe it is I view it as an incredibly effective tool. Like if you [00:57:00] want to really take autonomy of the food you're putting in your system, I think it's an amazing experiment for 30 days, two weeks, maybe even longer if you feel like it, like you need it, but, but I'll have people that'll be like, oh, well, how do you feel about greens?

Or how do you feel about fermented foods? I'm like, well, do they sit well with you? Do you enjoy them? I incorporate these things strategically because I feel like I have a permeable gut now and I can handle those things. But if I ever go off on vacation and I'm just eating whatever I want for two weeks, I go back to carnivore as my way to kind of reset my baseline.

But I take the morality around out of like a lot of those other foods. And I do feel like that's one of the mistakes that a lot of people in the carnivore community make is they're like, Oh, it's not an animal product. Like it's sacrilegious. I can't touch it. And I don't, I don't know how we break that mold, but it's, it's something I've been spending more time thinking about.

And it seems like you have a really good philosophy

Dane Johnson: on that. Oh man, that, that is the core issue to all of this is most of us are looking for a leader. We're almost looking for [00:58:00] religion in a way like we follow this thing, and if it's not in the book. Then you can't do it because that's where we get our safety.

That's where we feel like we have our feet on the ground. This is where you have to become self empowered. This is why I built the shield program to solve this problem because it's your shield. Some of my even members will say, Hey, Dana, I've been doing, uh, your, they'll be talking to me and they'll say, Hey, Dana, I've been doing your shield program for two months.

I'm feeling really good, but I'm still missing this. I go, well, it's not mine. It's yours. We, okay. I want you right now to write this down. Take ownership. It's yours. It's yours. Build it how you want and then get the training to feel confident with your system. You need a place to get trained and self empowered.

Stop trying to like go around the problem and just have someone else tell you the solution without taking. Full accountability for that system. Nothing in healing and nothing [00:59:00] in life is linear. It's not a plus B equals C. You have to be able to shift. Life requires shifts. Imagine doing the same old thing in a marriage.

Imagine doing the same old thing in fitness. Muscles need shifts to adapt and to grow everything in life. This is called universal law. There are certain laws that no matter what you're talking about, the law is still true. Okay. There has to be the ability to shift. It can't be just a playing a plus B equals C.

Things are going to happen in life. And if you do really well with carnivore, eventually going to come to me and say, Dan, I do really well with carnivore, but I need out. I need, I need, I'm out of wedding. Uh, there's alcohol. There's nothing to eat here. I'm stuck at the airport. What do I do? What do I do?

That's why I built the shield to metaphorically say. I'm going to train my body to get so strong. It can take the stress of these plant foods, of these inorganic foods, of this alcohol, of this sugar, um, of these things that might build candida. And then I don't cheat. So this is where you have to work it out and say, eliminate the [01:00:00] idea of cheating in your diet right now.

Eliminate that word. I want you to replace it with celebration. You celebrate. I only want you eating things outside of the norm when you're actually celebrating. Okay. And another thing is when you're eating really clean, you should still be celebrating because a lot of us, our fear and worry is I eat really clean, but I'm bored.

All my 2am party with my friends, best, best, uh, memories of my life. I'm not having those when I'm eating clean. I'm not having prom night when I'm eating clean. I'm not having the best Friday night of my life when I'm eating clean. So we associate eating good with taking care of herself with boredom and missing out FOMO.

Go take care of yourself and then go have the best time. So this is, these are all mental things. I know a lot of times in these podcasts, guys, I want to give you do this, eat, take this, eat that. But we're hitting on such big points. Own your plan and then cherry pick and make the carnival an asset. Make it a gun on your Batman belt.

I've loved, I love the metaphor of Batman, right? You got to become [01:01:00] Batman. Batman's parents were killed in front of him at 10 years old, cold blood, and it drove him to a terrible place. Imagine the killing was Crohn's colitis metaphorically or the IBS that then became a catalyst for him to save the very city that killed his parents.

Let Crohn's colitis, IBD, IBS be the catalyst to use turning your body into a temple and becoming that one of the healthiest people on the planet. Be healthier than the healthy, skip normal, be healthier than the healthy. You gotta do that emotionally. You gotta do it physically. You gotta do it spiritually.

That's what we've been talking about today. You gotta do it everywhere. And when you do it emotionally, spiritually, then your integration will be easy because what you're gonna actually do gets easy and you need it repeatable, which means you do it every day. It means you don't have to shift. Then you make small pivots based on labs or what's happening in your life, right?

So make those. Now, Batman also had, he didn't have one weapon. The coolest thing about Batman is he had 30 things and every movie he'd have a new cool thing to fight the bad guys. Go out there and I call it stay on the offense. Keep learning, keep growing. Is it [01:02:00] ozone? Is it ozone therapy? Is it peptide therapy?

Is HBOT? Is it intermittent fasting? Is it, is it, um, working in different types of fibers? Is it colon healing therapies? Is it using a colloidal silver? Well, wild of oregano. Is it doing a parasite cleanse? Is it castor oil packs? Where are your tools? If you, if I just said those things to you and you have no idea what I said, you need a plan.

You need a community. You need a program. Build your Batman belt. Yeah. Get out there and learn. That's what Brett, I guarantee. One of the things Brett's obsessed right now is learning about new biohacking, new things to try and do, because once you get into this world, you get addicted to how to empower yourself.

Brett: Well, that's the beauty of shield is that it encompasses so many different disciplines and so many different tools. And that does make me a little bit worried about the nutritional community right now in regards to IBS, Crohn's, Pilates, et cetera, is that people are so singularly focused on the diet where it's like, if I go carnivore, it [01:03:00] will heal me.

And it seems like there are so many other things that you need to be experimenting with if you really want to get to the root cause of that healing

Dane Johnson: process. Right. Let's yeah, let's talk about carnivore. I was talking with a 67 year old woman today who has been carnivore for one year and I have many friends who've been carnivore.

I have done pretty close to carnivore for months, um, with a little bit of pureed low sugar vegetables and, and then sauerkraut. That was like my jam for like six, seven months. When I first got a result, it was like, and I'll teach you about it. Um, one thing is I did is little hacks for that. I did only grounded meats because I had to cook them on lower temperatures and high temperatures can make it harder to digest and reduce bioavailability.

I can cook it with more water and not have to focus as much on oils. So I could put it in a skillet with a little water and put a top over it and steam it and keep it really juicy and soft. If it's juicy, it's more bioavailable. If it's dry, it's not so bioavailable. So it's not just the meat, it's how bioavailable.

Then I reduced my red meat [01:04:00] at first because the iron was causing severe any kind of red meat was causing tons of Uh diarrhea and cramping and blood a lot of people who say they can't do carnivore A lot of times if I just watch out for red meat in the beginning, it calms it down in the beginning Okay, so some people need to start with fish chicken turkey Um ground beef is the first red meat if you're having the iron problem people with A lot of people who say I cannot do the red meat.

I've even had some clients In our program who can't do meat at all. They have serious reactions to meat. We use plant based foods and then we start with white meats. So example, so watch out if the iron, a lot of us, it's not as big of a deal, but for some of us that can absolutely be a problem, Brett, I'm sure it wasn't a problem for you, but we're all different in this, right?

So grounded meat, make it juicy, make it soft, start adding in natural herbs might also help things like adding in a little, um, tumeric or adding in cinnamon or adding in basil sometimes, or even oregano leaf. Some of these things can also calm down the gut, calm down [01:05:00] the inflammation. Um, and so I felt that that was helpful for me and I started adding those in as I started handling the meat better and I did better with grounded meats and fish.

I did really well with eggs. A lot of people don't do well with eggs. I personally did well with them. Then I started adding a little bit more pureed, uh, low glycemic vegetables, no seeds, no skins. to be able to start handling tiny bits of fiber that my body did okay with. And then I started, once the bloating and gas started going down, because fermented foods are going to exasperate the bloating and gas, they're going to make it way worse.

Then I started doing a little, a little bit, a little bit. I started with like a half a teaspoon of just the liquid sauerkraut, fermented sauerkraut. And then I started increasing it within like six months, I could handle a ton of sauerkraut. My bowel movements, that really helped with the formation of my bowels.

cleaning it up, but you don't have to do that. Just getting rid of the sugars and carbohydrates might continue to reduce any of the bacteria overgrowth, which it probably will help. So just eliminating those things can continue to get rid of that SIBO, that Candida, that fungus. Um, and, and [01:06:00] really rebalance the microbiome.

So that was something that was really big in the hacks of carnivore for me, but the core problems I do see with a lot of people who are failing with carnivore is you cannot break down the fats. If your liver and gallbladder is backed up, you might have a consistent problem with the fats. That takes me back to the woman I was talking to today.

She's been carnivore for one year. She got rid of her brain fog. Her energy went way up. Her gas and bloating almost went completely away. And then I did a stool analysis on her. One of the things I love, I do a lot of stool analysis. I've done hundreds. And a lot of times in carnivore, I see really clean microbiota and stool analysis in carnivore.

I see really cl, I see the dysbiosis go way down. I see the calprotectin go way down. I see a lot of it get a lot better, and I'm surprised because, and it goes back to some of the research, if you look at fasting and intermittent fasting, that the microbiome could actually get better. It's like, wait, how is the [01:07:00] microbiome getting healthier while fasting?

A lot of people. on the plant, on the plant world will say you need all that fiber to build the microbiome, not necessarily. There is some research to show that just fasting or taking things out, the microbiome can start working on itself. So that could be also beneficial for the carnivore theories, right?

With the microbiome growing. And I've seen a lot of healthy microbiomes. I mean, to my, me almost surprised with people who are carnivore. I think in the last two weeks, I've seen about Five people have been carnivore who, who've been carnivore for eight months, two years, five years. And I tend to see really good balance of microbiome.

Um, I still tend to see problems around liver and gallbladder and detox pathways, lymphatic system. And I, and for this woman, the core problem is she could not release toxins. Her lymphatic system is completely backed up. Her liver and gallbladder did not seem to be doing well. And over the last year, she still dealt with chronic diarrhea.

So how do you deal with chronic diarrhea if you've, if you've been only eating meat [01:08:00] only for a year and she got a lot of great results, but that's where we had the talk. And so if you are having problems with carnivore, the two things I'm going to look at that are safe for you to focus on and can keep you carnivore is your stomach acid.

So digestion, pancreatic enzymes, stomach acid. So that's going to help the carnivore or ketosis work better if I can increase the stomach acid and pancreatic enzymes. And uh, the second thing is going to be the liver gallbladder. I need my liver cleansed so it can produce more bile and any more bile, uh, hanging out my gallbladder so that when I get that mass amount of fat and protein, I can break it down properly in the duodenum.

Um, Brett probably had that working for him. And so his body was saying, Hey, I can do great with this fat and protein. You take away those sugars, you take away those carbs. I got the rest. So some of us were really sick. We can't do that. So those are my two safe guys for everyone who really wants carnivore and keto to work.

Those are your safe places. If you optimize that part of the engine. You'll probably get even better results [01:09:00] with carnivore in, in keto. Okay. Liver gallbladder, pancreas, okay. And stomach acid, things that you might want to look at for that. Mastic gum, deglycerized licorice root and aloe vera can be great to heal stomach ulcers.

Okay. And that can also help with the natural stomach acid getting better. Obviously work on salivating, um, getting rid of adrenal fatigue, sleeping better, getting yourself salivating before you eating can also help build that up. Digestive bitters. Okay. Fennel ginger. Peppermint oil. These also can help build them up.

A lot of times there might be low stomach acid because there's still an innate problem in there. So I might add in mastic gum. I love mastic gum to start working on healing the gut lining. It also helps to kill off H pylori. H pylori is notorious for causing low stomach acid, and it can be hard to find because it lives in the stomach.

Remember, what's found in a stool analysis is [01:10:00] predominantly bacteria from the colon. Seeing what's going on in the small intestine is extremely hard. Stool tests don't do it that well. I usually go on what your body's telling me. So that woman who had been carnivore for a year, I said, okay, I want you to work on those things.

And then we want to start working on the stomach things. I'd like to work on the stomach. If there's still some bacteria growth, if there's biofilm buildup that hasn't been able to be properly reset pancreatic issues, I want to look at things like maybe some water of oregano, maybe colloidal silver, maybe a deglycerized Lysteric with mastic gum.

There's a product I use for a proprietary by designs for health called gastro mend space HP for H by Lori. Now that you need a coach, you need a customized plan. Don't mess with this stuff. You don't know what you're doing. I just put a shotgun in your hand. You need training. Okay. So start with those things, the safe space, get your digestion up, make sure your fat is working, your fat, uh, you can break down fats and proteins properly.

Make sure your pancreatic enzymes are optimum optimized. You can go to the doctor and [01:11:00] ask for your elastase one ELA S T A S E, space one, and your studio crit, S t E O, oh God, how do I spell this? S T E O T R I C T. That's basically fat, fat metal absorption in the stool. So I wanna see what those two markers are.

Lo and behold, the carnivore diet, she had no calprotectin. It was. Undetectable. A year of carnivore, her calprotectin was undetectable. That's the local inflammatory marker in your stool. It's mostly closely related with IBD. Normal. Congratulations. I think carnivore had a lot to do with that. Her pancreatic enzymes were in the crapper.

I didn't even look at her labs when I told her this. Her pancreatic enzymes were crap. She's got chronic diarrhea for a year. And she goes, Oh, Dan, I know I have low stomach acid. Well, how did I know you'd be carnivore all you want? It's not necessarily going to build your stomach acid. You might need a shot of apple cider vinegar might also help digestive enzymes.

You should probably use a digestive enzyme with a little bit of betaine HCL, ox bile and [01:12:00] pancreatic enzyme support. Take three or four. Then the last one is you have the great debate over fiber. When it comes to plant food, the biggest thing I want to incorporate with car carnivore, if you agree, if you want is, is fiber.

What about fiber? If you cannot get a form stool. Okay, if you can't properly eliminate a lot of times, I'm seeing what I call hidden constipation. I'm seeing clients having three bowel movements a day, but they're not properly releasing that carnivore woman. I told you for a year straight with no cow protecting.

When I put a binder like Benson, I claim when I put a binder in her body, she started pooping out weird colors. She started getting weird stringy thing coming out. She was having only liquid bowel movement. She couldn't poop normal stuff. Yeah, she's had chronic diarrhea for 10 years. She said she's like 67 That's crazy.

You see i'm saying guys we have the the chessboard changes it crones and colitis The [01:13:00] chessboard changes every every single person. We got to learn how to use our chess pieces I'm giving this as an example for you to realize when people say all of our cases are different You don't understand what they do with that information You've got to look at the engine and say, how do I take apart the engine?

How do I put it back together? How do I make it simple? So I don't have to become a doctor myself. You need training. You need a coach. You need to become simple. So I'm looking at detox pathways, digestion, gut lining, microbiome diversity, colon, like where are the core problems? Is it the colon? Is it the ileum?

Is it the, is it the duodenum, jejunum? Is it the stomach? Is there, is there a cytokine reaction? Is it a cellular toxicity issue? Intracellular toxicities. Is it, is it, is it a methylation problem? So you got to understand those engines. And then as you do that, remember, that's how it's going to be the catalyst to be the best thing that ever happened.

You remember we said when you learn these things, now you're reducing the chance of all this. Because if you look at metabolics, another great person who went carnivore, Dana White from UFC, UFC, you put them on a keto carnivore diet. He had metabolic syndrome, [01:14:00] right? His metabolics were working. His insulin levels were all messed up.

His metabolism was messed up. He put them on keto. He put them on HBOT. He had them ground. Okay. He had him sweat and he had him work out and his body just released these detox pathways. Right. Ionic charges is getting rid of the sugars and carbs that were able to get as they reduce fungal loads in his body, like Candida, like mold and reset his microbiome, reset his metabolics.

So that's the thing is like you can do these simple hacks, but if you don't understand what you're doing, you're going to get to a wall where you feel lost and you feel overwhelmed. And so I could do the same thing with a vegan. I work with vegans all the time. And I just look at the risk versus reward.

So if you say, Hey, Dane, I'm doing carnivore. I would like to be able to handle some bean or some vegetable or some fruit. I would say the first thing you might want to start with, and this is generic guys, everything I'm saying, remember, it's generic, but if you get a lot of GI symptoms, when you add something in, [01:15:00] I'd probably start with a little bit of low sugar fruit and see how you do like a green banana or a wild blueberry.

Okay. Now green bananas are high in resistant starches, but lower in sugar. They can really help with formation of the bowels, like that's why high carb health got some merit. You guys might see that there's a lot of people who say they eat 20 bananas a day and have gotten good. Yeah, well, they just full of shit.

Or is there something that we can cherry pick from them? That's what I did in the SHIELD program. I just cherry picked, I met with David Klein plenty of times. I tried the Fruitarian diet and I've also done a i p, I've done low fodmap. I've done s e d, I've done carnival. Learn to cherry pick. What are they saying?

What is what? What is good about the vegans? Why do I have X GI doctors? Who now specialize in eliminating colon cancer saying you got to be vegan. Yeah. Are they crazy? Stop. We got to stop, you know, pulling out our six shooters against each other and start saying what is a value about that? And that's [01:16:00] the, I call it the great debate.

It comes down to fiber. The vegan doctor who says to reduce colon cancer, you'd need to get more five plan. It's talking about fiber. You need the volume to properly clean out your GI tract. You got 28 feet of GI tract, 18 feet small intestine, 8 to 10 feet is your colon. It needs to be properly evacuated or those toxins are going to build up.

Yeah. Oh, go ahead. I was just going to say and that to each person, I'm just looking at the engine. I'm just looking at your lab work. I'm not here to argue with you. We got to get past the argument. Show me, show me the labs.

Brett: Your message is so interesting because like there's this dichotomy of there's things that you can do that are so simple that will work in every set.

Everyone's chessboard and checkerboard is different and there's so many different intricacies depending on the person. different approaches, different habit formation tips. So I'm just curious, like one of the things that I'm empowered by is that with the SHIELD program, with Crohn's colitis lifestyle, [01:17:00] there's this decentralized form of medicine that exists where they're actually pairing you with coaches that can really address the root cause and give you very tailored specifics.

So I'm just curious for the listener, because I think there's going to be a lot of people that are listening that want to understand how they can connect with you and learn more. How can they kind of get their hands dirty

Dane Johnson: and get involved with SHIELD? Wonderful. So what you can do is I'm going to give a link to, uh, to, to Brett, where you can click that link.

Um, you just put your, your email address in, okay, you just give us your name. Email phone number. We need your phone number to be able to call you. We're going to give you a free session Okay, so you have to fill out an intake form It is an application because we have hundreds of people writing us, right?

There's eight million people in the world with crohn's colitis Give or take right eight million demographic we can help about 40 people a month. So we get hundreds of these calls. We have to, we have to fill out an intake form based on that. Then we're going to do a 45 minute session with you. In that session, we're going to go over your current medications, your symptoms, your natural medicine experience, what we think might be potential root cause, [01:18:00] and then do, you know, build integrity and trust around a game plan that we think we can do to get results and tell you about the shield program, like the specific.

So I'll give you like a few highlights that make us so unique. They make us one of a kind, and I believe the best in the world. Number one, every program is customized to you. We can do it all. We, you want to eat meat. You don't want, we build that with you. It's customized to you and it's refined with you.

Okay. Everyone gets a private coach. We don't, we believe you need a one on one coach to do this. This person has Crohn's and colitis. They've healed Crohn's colitis. They only work with Crohn's colitis. They're IBD specialists. Okay. Um, every single person gets, you'll go through a patient portal, get that customized plan and each plan is refined as you go.

So it's not like a one stop shop. Wait for it to work. We refine as we move. And then we teach you how to move like a chessboard. So basically we sit in the chess match with you. We move, we teach you why we're moving. We teach you what's happening when the opponent, Crohn's colitis is moving and start working and you're getting self empowered.

You get a lifetime membership. It's a one time investment. And, uh, you get weekly calls live with me forever. So I do like a podcast form once a [01:19:00] week live where I go into depth. Like tomorrow I'm gonna do the secret of, are you having a, a, are you having hidden constipation is the call I'll be having tomorrow at 9am.

So you get to get those once a week. You can talk to me once a week, plus you get your private coach, plus you get a specialist who acts kind of like he's a concierge HR person. Plus you get 25 to 40 percent off our IBD supplements. We have a warehouse in Florida. We ship internationally and you get 15 to 40 percent off for life.

I can give that to you because I don't. I don't have major, um, overhead where I give you these real discounts. They're not marketing. It's not fake. It's real right out of my pocket. Then you get access to lab work for life. So I get, I don't make a profit a dime on lab. I never will. So at any point you can turn around and say, I want a food allergy test sent to my house.

We can get you the lab test and we can interpret and we can show you those results and we can put them in your patient portal where you always have a cloud of all your results. We can do food allergy. We can do cytokine blood analysis. We can do organic acid test. We can do, uh, we can do quantitative PCR genetic stool testing.

We can do viral panel to find underlying viruses and bacteria. We can do heavy metal [01:20:00] analysis. We can do mold analysis. I can do all of this in Dubai. I can do it in Canada. I can do every country's a little bit different. You and I would say, I got you. You're in the right place. Canada. I can get 80 percent of that Dubai.

I can get 70 percent Australia. I can get 67%, uh, Western Europe. I can get 80 percent of that. Um, you know, Eastern Europe, maybe 50, 60%. We can do Mexico. We have clients in Hong Kong. We have testimonies in Africa, India, China. Uh, all, all over North America. We put out a testimony of completely reversing someone's symptoms once a week.

And it's again, because we're not scalable. We do have a coach, you have a program. And once you join, you can talk to everyone in the program immediately. It's not like we hide everyone else. You can be like, yo, what are your results? Yeah. Why? Because we're have high integrity and trust. So we have over a thousand members, all diagnosed with Crohn's colitis.

We've got five year old kids, seven year old people, post surgery. People who've been on biologics for 40 years. All in the program. We got a guy who just wrote [01:21:00] today. He's had chronic diarrhea for 10 years. Okay? He'd never, he never jumped into a program in our community. He was just doing the same old thing.

He's two weeks in, he just wrote and said, I cannot even believe it. I got, my diarrhea's gone. Two weeks. Can I guarantee that? No. But I'm Sammy Sosa up to bat. I dare to throw it down the middle. So, you know, that's it. Like I can't guarantee anything, but we do cut. That's how you get results. You need to customize plan.

You need a private coach. You need people who specialize in Crohn's colitis. People have already been through it. You need a, you need a community. You have access to talk to, you can DM, you can hit up and learn from each other and you need weekly live trainings. You'll always have access to me. And then you can do more.

Okay. It includes three months of coaching. That's a, that's included in the program. Plus when you join, I'm going to throw in a 350 gift card. Okay. So when you join and you say, Oh man, are there other hidden costs? No. Cause any supplement I'm going to tell you to take, I'm going to pay for it. It's already included in the program.

It's a one stop shop. Now I can't afford lab. I can't include the lab test because labs. The kind of labs I get, they [01:22:00] are uber expensive, like 400 bucks, 500 bucks, things like that. So you can order them whenever you want. But if you're on a budget, we don't want to spend money on labs right now. We want to spend money on compass consulting and where we're going and what are we going to integrate?

Cause once you do those two things and the rubber meets the road and you get results, the labs are going to be more high integrity anyways, because we're seeing what's actually left over when you've actually made these common, easy you know, shifts in our brain. Cause what's easy for us is maybe. Uh huh.

And huge for you. Right? So like, just like Brett, Brett, you know, what didn't have to do 500 labs to teach him to go carnivore, to teach him some of these things he did and eliminate some of the stuff. So we want to focus on where the rubber meets the road. And then we build a plan with you on where to do labs.

If you're thinking, okay, what's my budget, what do I need to do afterwards? You meet with your coach and you talk. If you are, if you are on a budget, we trim the fat. We build a plan based on what you need. We're not here to price gouge anybody. We're here to get results. We're here for you to say, this is the best choice I ever [01:23:00] made.

And I'm gonna tell all my friends and family about it. Cause it's a win win and we're trying to build a community for life. Like there are 8 million of us guys. There are 8 million people around there with IBS, IBD, IBS. We're talking, I don't know, 300 million. There's a hundred million in America. So we want to win, win.

We want to grow as a community. We want to build more scalable systems. My mission is to build, to help the world have access to a global solution for gut health problems, specifically IBD. Um, at it, no matter where you are in this world, nor creed culture, you know, goals, diet preference. Well, Dan, I think you hit the

Brett: nail on the head of like, when you do have IBD, you really do feel like you're on an island, especially, you know, there's so many men in their early to mid twenties that have this type of stuff.

This is how you get off of the island. We're talking about programs. We're talking about private coaches that also holistically heal this stuff, you know, supplements, the ability to connect with other people and share through the power of anecdote. I mean, these are life changing things that you're doing for patients.

I mean, I [01:24:00] feel like this is one of those types of podcasts where it could go on for three hours because there's so many intricacies to discuss. That's one of the things that's tough about podcasting is you're kind of constrained in this like 60 to 90 minute window. But I mean, for us, man, this was so impactful, super educational.

We appreciate you just leading by example. Like I said, you've had a huge impact on me and my own holistic healing journey. And I'm just excited to see all the things that you and the shield team go on to accomplish,

Dane Johnson: man. God bless. Thanks guys so much for having me, Andy. I get so enthused about it. I feel like I can talk about it forever.

It's gone by, by lightning. I hope you guys had some aha moments. And, um, you know, last thing I'll leave you with is it's hard. Yes. It's hard. Nothing's going to change that. Learn, get self empowered, get a community, get access to labs, get a customized solution, and then just get the reps. Once you have the experience, this will be the best thing that ever happened to you.

God bless. Thanks, Dan. Appreciate it, Dan.