Yohans’ Health Journey
Pitfalls, Victories & Learning Curves.
“The last 9 years of my life have been
about turning my biggest weaknesses
into my greatest super powers.”
“The last 9 years of my life have been about turning my biggest weaknesses into my greatest super powers.”
Through years of struggling to fix my chronic health issues, I would often wonder, why me? Why could other people eat what they liked and not have their skin burning red, tearing up and breaking out into huge cystic zits? Why would most people be so energetic after sleeping 7-9 hours a day but I would sleep for 11-13 hours and still yawn endlessly and feel lethargic? Why could my peers go to the gym and get jacked whereas I would train harder and longer but still stayed skinnier than ever…?
Once my health issues were triggered, they progressively got worse. It started off in school with an extreme form of dandruff and breakouts on the face. Then eventually the dandruff spread to my face, neck and chest. My face was always red with flaky white scales which happens in a condition called as seborrhic dermatitis. Along with that I had huge cystic acne breakouts all over my back, extreme chronic fatigue and burping throughout the day. As if dealing with these physically was not bad enough, these issues also wore down my mental and emotional health, with shame and embarrasment taking over me on many days.
Every kind of chronic health issue comes with its set of challenges. With chronic skin issues, the battles I fought were centred around confidence and self esteem, people always asking me, “tu humesha laal kyu rehta hai?”. The cystic acne on my back were extremely painful and would sometimes leave blood stains on my t-shirts. Activities like swimming were dreadful for me, I’d always try to hide my back or even wait till sunset to get in the pool. If I had to go in the day, I’d always get stares and questions for wearing a t-shirt in the pool unlike other boys. Often, my friends would touch my back and ask me about the bumps.
My health issues also made me worry about my future prospects. I wanted to be a content creator (which I did) and I wondered how would I get in front of the camera with this skin. As I struggled with my own health issues, I realised that sickness is omnipresent. I witnessed my grandmother descending with her dialysis treatment. She was stripped of her life force and all she would do is go back and forth the hospital, sleep, lay down on the bed and not speak much. My father also landed up with an auto-immune disease called myasthenia gravis, wherein the immune system starts attacking the muscle receptors which makes the eyelids droop and can eventually progress to paralysis of voluntary muscles or become fatal.
Seeing my immediate family face these medical challenges, while going through my own health issues made me fear spending my life in sickness. This fear became a catalyst for me to start researching more and taking control of my own health. I learnt about the root causes behind the diseases my family members and I were suffering from. However, before I got into properly researching medical subjects, I had a spiritual awakening that made me question everything – who I am, the nature of this reality, who really runs the world, the nature of god v/s evil, life after death and much more.
Discovering my Purpose
My soul gravitated towards learning, understanding and uncovering everything that has been kept hidden from the masses.
This truth-seeking endeavour led me to discover that our modern medical system was set up and run by certain powerful dark occult families. Hence, it never really focused on finding and fixing the root cause of disease development; instead, it spawned a medical system dedicated to symptomatic suppression with major trade-offs in terms of side effects.
I intuitively knew this was not the way in which healthcare was supposed to work. From then on, I began my quest of trying to learn everything I could about the human body, how it worked, what were the real causes of different diseases and symptoms, and how I could go about fixing them. All of my experiences over the last decade make complete sense to me now. As a general law of existence, it is necessary for us to go through certain life challenges so that we can gain the wisdom and knowledge and use that to help and guide other people. I knew I was destined to be a healer who would help many people with their chronic health issues, and this could not have been possible until I was forced to go all the way into understanding our bodily anatomy, physiology, gut microbiome, blood, urine, metabolome, genetics, hormones, and so much more. My health issues which were constantly on display for the world to see, gave rise to my burning desire to learn as much as I could to fix myself. And I was determined to do all of this without going to a doctor – this required me to develop all of my medical knowledge by self-directed learning.
Academically, I graduated with a Bachelors in Accounts and Finance, and had a DJing career for five years. All of which I left behind to pursue my dream of bringing about a mass awakening in society and raising peoples’ consciousness. Not having any academic background in medicine forced me to start from scratch. I started watching documentaries, listened to podcasts and read books that made me understand the huge role played by diet and lifestyle in disease development and reversal. This comes across as a commonly accepted fact to most of us today, but just a few years ago a top doctor from one of India’s best hospitals told my dad that diet didn’t have anything to do with his autoimmune disease.
NAVIGATING THE
NUTRITIONAL MAZE
On my hunt for solutions for myself and my father, I experimented with all kinds of diets and lifestyle changes over the years.
First, I went purely organic, then I went vegan for a year, then I did a ketogenic diet for 1.5 years, cyclical keto for 6 months, carnivore for 2 months, and then an animal-based diet for a year or so with mostly animal foods and simple carbs. Along with this, I would make it a point to get sunlight everyday, go to the beach, ground my feet, practice meditation, eat only organic food, and just keep learning as much as i could everyday. I would make sure i consumed atleast 1 health podcast every single day.
Every diet I would delve into would make me an evangelist for it, whenever I follow something I make sure I go all in. Along with physical shortcomings, there were a lot of mental challenges I had to overcome which taught me a lot about human psychology and how the mind works. Most people are not genuinely interested in finding the truth and make choices based on their social situations, group dynamics, peer pressure, the need to fit in, the need to be part of a community, the fear of being outcasted for changing their mind, etc. I am glad I went vegan and became a hardcore evangelist for it. I became a part of the vegan community, debated with people and made quite a few social connections based on it. Because when I left veganism (as it wasn’t the panacea that so many online documentaries, influencers and vegan doctors made it out to be and made some of my health issues worse while not fixing others) I was forced to learn how to deal with the guilt, embarrassment, disillusionment, lack of belief in my intelligence, mockery, and much more. It was the universes’ way of testing me to see if I was really sincere in the pursuit of truth or I would give up after making a half-assed attempt. There were a couple of months after leaving veganism where I did not know who or what to believe anymore, so I indulged in eating the foods that I had left, and developed a fear of expressing my opinions.
After this phase I came back more determined than ever to figure out health and nutrition. This whole period taught me so much about cults and the mental dynamics of people who buy into a certain group ideology. I learnt lessons that would help me tremendously as I ventured into other avenues of health knowledge. After my veganism saga I turned keto and became a huge Dr. Mercola fan, and started imparting low carb and keto knowledge to everyone I met. This made many aspects of my health better, but it made my skin issues way worse. I still stuck with it for a year and a half, as I wanted to give it a proper shot. Eventually, I gave up and the same kind of disillusionment set in; but, this time it was way easier for me to cope with it after having gone through this with veganism already. This pattern repeated with other diets I tried as well (cyclical keto, carnivore) where each of these would make some of my issues a little better while not do much for others or make them worse.
After experimenting with all the diets and lifestyle hacks that I could get my hands on, 70% of my symptoms were still on the table. I also had some really unfortunate incidents where I burnt myself by experimenting with things I heard about on podcasts. This one time I overdosed on Vitamin B3, and seriously damaged my health. I had white scales all over my face and body, my face swelled up like a puffer fish, I got conjunctivitis, fever, and allergies! It was bad enough for my then partner to have a break down looking at my face. Later, I figured out that I had sucked up all of my body’s methyl groups and developed an under methylation crisis, which took me many weeks to completely recover from. At times like these I was really tested, crying to the universe, wondering why me, why so much struggle, why did nothing fix my health no matter how hard I tried or how deep I went.
A HAPPY ENDING!
After all of these experiences, I finally made the decision to go all in guns blazing, and decided to pursue a Bachelors in Nutrition Science and get a certification in functional medicine from one of the best functional medicine education programmes in America designed by Dr. Bryan Walsh. I came to understand that trying to fix ones health without mastering diagnostics is like shooting in the dark. Each one of us has millions of factors inside our body that make us radically different from the next person and everyone else. From there on I embarked on the journey to learn and understand as much as I could about diagnostics through blood tests, microbiome and metabolome tests, genetic analysis, hormones, and so much more.
I started applying this knowledge to myself and tested way more blood markers than I knew about before, and analysed them with the right optimal ranges that are not available conventionally. I tested my gut microbiome, organic acids, amino acids and genetics, and that is how I discovered the root causes of my issues. I discovered that my acne was a result of androgen excess, low omega 3 index, glutathione, zinc and vitamin A deficiency, mold toxicity and much more; my seborrheic dermatitis was due to dietary triggers unique to me like coconut and dairy, fungal overgrowth, and a lack of various B vitamins; my chronic fatigue was due to mold, mitochondrial dysfunction, iron deficiency, arsenic toxicity; my inability to build muscle was due to a severe B6 deficiency; and my tonsillitis was due to a strep infection and oral dysbiosis. Looking back, I would not change a single thing about how my life has transpired. I feel so proud to say that today I have none of the issues that I started out with: no dandruff, no acne (face and back), no red rashes and dry skin patches on my scalp, face and chest, 8-9 hours of sleep, immense energy, no tonsillitis and nasal drip, no chronic burping and a normal ability to put on muscle.
I remember going to a dermatologist many years ago to get a diagnosis on which subtype of acne I had. He told me that I would have to take isotretinoin (accutane) without which I would not be able to see much results as it was one of the most severe cases he had ever seen. I even told him about the link between gut dysbiosis and acne proven through several studies published on it, to which he said that it was not a part of his medical curriculum or training. This is the problem with conventional medicine, the practitioners aren’t trained to dig in and find out the root cause imbalances that lead to these issues. So, we can’t really expect them to approach the body from a functional medicine perspective. Some of the doctors I respect the most in the space were trained in conventional medicine and then pursued their education in functional medicine. I hope that honest and sincere doctors (of which there are many) who genuinely got into medicine to heal people will have their aha moments and study functional/integrative medicine.
In closing, I do not want all of my years of turmoil and struggle to only serve me, which is why my dream is to bring functional medicine to the mainstream. My vision is to create an impact both on an individual and collective level to solve people’s health issues and train people to use this knowledge to heal others. A lot of professionals in the functional medicine space lack scientific precision and nuance and operate solely from their biases. A lot of claims are made just based on theories from animal and cell studies, interventions are done without appropriate dosing, reference ranges are used which aren’t really backed by actual evidence, and tests are run from labs which are not accurate. All of this leads to misdiagnosis, frustration, confusion, precious time lost and money spent in the wrong places.
If this resonates with you and you are motivated to go all the way to the depths
of scientific accuracy, both in terms of diagnosis and treatments, then join me
on this journey to transform your life and the future of healthcare!
