25 Days: A Proven Program to Rewire Your Brain

25 Days: A Proven Program to Rewire Your Brain

Why twenty-five days? you ask. Let’s just say I’m partial to numbers that finally
work in my favor.
If you’ve ever heard of the notion that death always comes in threes, I can
personally vouch for that. In my case, death came three times for me in the same
night. But instead of losing my life, the experience changed it, affecting the way I
would view health and fitness from that day forward.
It was October 4, 2004, midway through my twenty-one-year career in fitness
and nutrition, when, while I was seated at the computer, my heart—
simply—
stopped—
beating.
Thirty seconds later, I recovered on my own, only to have my heart fail again
minutes later. I had no pulse. I wasn’t breathing. I was officially dead for the second
time for about six minutes before being revived by a paramedic, who plunged a big
needle full of epinephrine into my heart and defibrillated me three times.
My heart was beating, but I had been without oxygen to my brain to the point
where my lungs had already shut down. I had a pulse but no lung activity, so they
hooked me up to a ventilator and rushed me to the hospital. That’s where my heart
quit on me a third and final time. It took a minimum of ten defibrillations to bring
me back to life before I fell into a coma for three days. But that night, I made the
history books in a way I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
I died three times in three hours and became the world’s only known medical
case to survive three consecutive sudden cardiac arrests (SCA) without any kind of
implanted defibrillator.
When I woke up, I began to pull out all of my intravenous tubes because I didn’t
understand where I was—all I knew was that I wanted to get out of there. They
sedated me and removed me from life support, but I had no short-term memory. I
didn’t know who my parents were, or my girlfriend. You could tell me something,
and ninety seconds later, I wouldn’t know what you were talking about. But it
wasn’t amnesia. It was simply the inability to retain anything. In fact, to this day, I
have a blank space in my brain and can’t recall anything from October 4 until
Thanksgiving—two months of my life are still missing from my memory.
After enduring a week’s worth of tests and having a cardio defibrillator device
implanted in my chest, I was sent home with no real answers. The medical
community was surprised that I had survived and shocked that it had found
nothing wrong with my heart or any evidence of damage. The only two things
doctors were certain about was that a “random” electrical malfunction—most likely
stress—had caused my SCAs and that my being in shape and living a healthy
lifestyle were behind the fact that I was still alive.
Even though I left the hospital with what seemed to be a normal working brain,
I knew something wasn’t quite right. Due to the lack of oxygen flow to my brain
during my SCAs, I couldn’t stay focused and even found myself suffering from
clinical depression. It wouldn’t be until much later, after being diagnosed by Jeff
Ricks, MD, one of the world’s foremost experts on mass trauma management, that
I would discover I had battled what is known medically as mild brain trauma. But
at that moment, I just knew that the way my brain was working was not working
for me.
Up until my incident, I had been working as a personal trainer for ten years and
had been working extensively with NFL and NBA athletes in their off-seasons.
During that time, I trained both myself and my clients using very strict routines:
carefully planned workouts designed to prevent plateaus by gradually changing the
intensity, specificity, and volume over the course of twelve to twenty weeks. The
diets I relied on were even more complicated, involving three separate twelve- to
twenty-week phases.
I was a measurer, a calorie counter, and focused on every single nutrient level in
every single food. I even wore a watch and set alarms to remind myself to eat at
exact times, just to try to capitalize on my body’s hormonal functions around
whatever stimulus I was getting by eating a particular food. If all that sounds
confusing, trust me, it was. In fact, it was nauseating.
But after my SCAs, I was suddenly someone who had to monitor his stress, so it
was unhealthy for me to follow complex and frustrating programs anymore. I was
also still someone who couldn’t remember what he had just done minutes before.
Sometimes my watch would go off, and I wouldn’t know what meal I was on.
Sometimes I wouldn’t even know what day it was. It was unbearable and undoable,
which was why I decided to stop everything I was trying to do and simplify it. I had
to work around my brain to keep my body from falling apart.
Instead of trying to focus on exercise and diet programs lasting twelve to twenty
weeks, I started focusing on one meal at a time. One snack at a time. One workout
at a time. And for each time I ate healthy or finished a workout, I gave myself a
grade of 100 percent. At the end of the day, I would sit down and go over
everything I had done—even if I didn’t remember doing half of what was on my
list. If I managed to do everything and I scored 100 percent on every meal, snack,
and workout, I considered myself successful.
And the next day, I would do it again. And the day after that.
At the end of the week, I added up my total score to see how successful I had
been for five days straight. After five consecutive blocks of five days, I added up my
score again, just to have a sense of the past month. Eventually, as my short-term
memory slowly returned and my depression lifted, within months, I was a changed
man—both physically and mentally. I was imminently aware that something felt
better about the program compared with methods I had used in the past.
Beyond getting back into incredible shape, the first thing I noticed was how
calm I became. I was no longer as worried about how my meals were balanced, and
I stopped weighing and measuring everything. Instead, I took an eyeball approach
with all my servings. I knew I was still eating healthy, but I took a very general
preventive health approach to my diet, instead of the very strict, hard-line approach
I had been used to following.
I also noticed that I was no longer that person who was hard to go out to eat
with, so my friends no longer had to kill themselves trying to find restaurants that
could accommodate my crazy dietary habits. Suddenly I could eat anywhere. I
accepted that every meal wouldn’t be perfect but so long as I ate certain foods,
everything would be all right.
I returned to work as a top trainer three months after my incident and started
using 25Days with clients immediately. But to be honest, I didn’t start them on it
because of the amazing results I had seen in myself; I did it because it was the only
way I could keep track of their programs! I had them carry journals and grade
themselves at every meal, snack, and day I wasn’t training them, so I always knew
exactly what to do and where they had slipped along the way.
It made my training job easier and made their outcomes more enjoyable for
them by streamlining my approach to diet and exercise into a twenty-five-day block
of time. By having them focus on what really mattered to get results, and asking
them to grade themselves each day, it left my clients feeling equally relaxed and as if
they were kicking life in the ass each and every day. And then an interesting thing
happened.
Before my SCAs, I had always had a great success rate with all my clients in
getting them to get onto the difficult-to-manage nutrition programs I was
suggesting. But even though I had a really high success rate, it wasn’t maintainable
practically in a real-world situation. Suddenly my clients weren’t just hitting their
fitness and weight loss goals faster and more often, they were making positive
changes within other facets of their lives—and feeling like a success every step of the
way.
So . . . Is Your Life Worth Twenty-five Days?
For me, 25Days didn’t start as a choice—it began as something I needed to do to
overcome an obstacle.
I can’t eliminate my obstacle. I see it every day when I step out of the shower
and notice the scar on my chest. I’m reminded whenever I look down at Lucky, my
heart therapy service dog who works with me twenty-four hours a day. I’m aware of
it each time I offer him my palm to lick to make sure I’m doing okay—and any
time he gets me out of harm’s way if he senses my cortisol levels going through the
roof unexpectedly.
No, I can’t eliminate my obstacle, but I have no fear of it anymore. I’ve become
stronger than my obstacle—and so can you. So tell me, what’s your obstacle?
I know you have one, or you wouldn’t be reading this. We all have some kind of
barrier to becoming the best version of ourselves. And for many, that obstacle is
usually doubt or fear of failure. Either way, it makes them feel that they can never
be successful.
So I challenge you with this: Is your life worth twenty-five days?
Is the effort of putting in just twenty-five days too much to risk to eliminate
that obstacle for the rest of your life?
If, after twenty-five days, you begin to uncover a way to be consistently healthy
so you can live a life of full potential, then isn’t it worth it to try doing away with
that obstacle? I want you to have the best life possible, and the way to do that is
through the same commonsense, straightforward, no-nonsense approach that saved
me and has been successful with all of my clients. That’s what the 25Days program
is really all about. That said, take a deep breath. Now blow it out. If you’ve failed
every other time in your life or you’ve never tried for fear of failing, I want you to
relax. This will be the time you succeed. This is the way to be able to stay healthy
for the rest of your life. This is the way to rewire your brain to make it effortless to
make the choices necessary to live the life you deserve.
This is so much easier than you think it is. Just give me twenty-five days to show
you.