Medical Emergency: This Happened Today

Despite the really per­sonal details, the fit­ness author Jon had a near — fatal event in the gym and I wanted to share his story with you. I was blown away by what he did in the name of “pre­ven­ta­tive med­i­cine”… so read this. It may just save your life.

Some­times you have to nearly lose it all to real­ize what you truly have.

I can hon­estly say that I have come close to death sev­eral times in my life. I’ve had my share of acci­dents, med­ical emer­gen­cies, and a near-fatal acci­dent while driving.

But there was some­thing about just lay­ing on the gym floor today with two doc­tors hov­er­ing over me that gave me seri­ous pause.

Time for some major reflection.

Now, before you get too alarmed (for those who know me, or just think I’m a pretty good guy… ; )… fear not. I did not have a stroke or any­thing like that, thank goodness.

What I did have was a major drop in blood pres­sure… so much that I came dan­ger­ously close to enter­ing the “coma” zone.

I kid you not.

And trust me… I felt like I was slip­ping fast.

My girl­friend was there with me. I had her kneel down and, just like Spock in an old episode of “Star Trek”, I had her slap me sev­eral times in the face. Hard!

“If my eyes roll back, hit me harder.”

The doc­tor prob­a­bly thought I was nuts… but I know that’s one way to ele­vate my blood pressure.

So, what hap­pened? Am I falling apart at the rel­a­tively young age of 46? Is my dietary and exer­cise advise dan­ger­ous after all?

No… and here’s why:

I actu­ally VOLUNTEERED for this.

Before you think I’ve totally lost my mar­bles, hear me out. If you lis­ten to the rest of the story, you’ll see that not only has my advice been of great value when it comes to exer­cise and dietary strat­egy… it actu­ally ended up sav­ing my butt!

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Really Bad Genet­ics Meets
The Cath Lab: A Wild Encounter
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First, the “vol­un­teered for this” bit needs explain­ing… right? Right.

If you read my first book, pub­lished in 2004, called Fit Over 40, then you may recall that I went into great detail about my poor genet­ics and hor­ri­ble health in my early and mid-30s.

Since then, and know­ing exactly how bad my genet­ics are for such things as high blood pres­sure (oh, the irony!), heart dis­ease, and stroke, I adopted the dietary plan and exer­cise rou­tine I use to this very day. The very ones I cover in The Every Other Day Diet­plan and 7 Minute Body.

Now, let’s get real folks: Dietary power and exer­cise MAY not be enough to over­come really bad genet­ics when it comes to cer­tain dis­eases. And being ever curi­ous, I wanted to know exactly how my own health was doing on my plan. So a month or so ago I paid a visit to the hos­pi­tal to have some tests ran. All my yearly check-ups were okay, but I wanted a closer look at my heart… and I mean “literally”.

I wanted to be “cathed”… this is where they insert a cam­era into your heart, going up the femoral artery in your right leg, and take a look around. If they find any­thing dan­ger­ous, like a clogged artery, they can fix it right then and there with a stent. A stent is a metal device that presses plaque against the artery wall and opens up a clogged artery.

Of course I hoped I would not find such a thing… and cer­tainly noth­ing worse. I mean, can you imag­ine? “Mr. Ben­son, you need a quadru­ple bypass!”

I could not, that’s for sure… and I was for­tu­nate because, as you prob­a­bly guessed, I didn’t hear those words from my doc.

It’s hard to get a catch done as it’s a risky pro­ce­dure. I can’t even tell you how I man­aged to pull it off … that’s how touchy the hos­pi­tals are when it comes to this kind of stuff. After wards, I vol­un­teered to do 5–10 work­outs at their heart care facil­ity so I could hook myself up to some nifty gad­gets. I get to watch my EKG (how my heart is func­tion­ing dur­ing car­dio and weights, and it works like a charm!) and really nice doc­tor folks come by to check my blood pres­sure (which is always low) dur­ing the workout.

Yep, the doc and I wanted to put my work­out plan to the test, I guess you could say. I wanted to do it just to make sure I was 100% healthy dur­ing my train­ing. You never really “know” I sup­pose, so I was up for it. And my doc­tor wanted me to do it just in case what he found dur­ing the cath was seri­ous. There’s a lot to this process, and there’s some details I don’t wish to cover for pri­vacy sake… but any­way, back to my story.

It’s long, but it may save your life too. : )

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The Good News… The Bad News…
And The Stu­pid Jon News!
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Turns to find out I made a few mis­takes, some pretty costly mis­takes but (get this) none of them had to do with my dietary or exer­cise plan.

Dur­ing the cath, here’s what the doc said:

“Jon, your heart’s two pri­mary arter­ies look good… hardly any obstruc­tion at all. And they are nice and thick from exer­cise.” For a guy who has had a cho­les­terol level of over 400 before, and a his­tory of heart dis­ease in the fam­ily, this was really good news.

“How­ever, your genet­ics are catch­ing up to you in one of your arter­ies.… and you need to be more aggres­sive with your drug treat­ment to make sure we don’t have to go back in here one day!”

Er… what??

Yep… turns out that the only thing that saved me from a BYPASS (that’s right) was what the doc­tor called “an enor­mous amount of periph­eral arter­ies formed from years and years of weight train­ing and exercise.”

Wow.

“Look right here Jon…” (He showed me my beat­ing heart on cam­era, freaky…) “See all these arter­ies? Well the aver­age per­son doesn’t have them. You do. Con­grat­u­la­tions… you earned them.”

Wow again. And remem­ber, I only work­out with weights 3–4 times per week and my work­outs are rarely over 21 min­utes (time under the weight.)

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What I Did Right… And What
I Did Wrong… And Why This
Could Save Your Life
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So, lis­ten up folks as I’m about to tell you every­thing I did wrong for the past sev­eral years, how it ALMOST cost me dearly (a bypass?… no thanks!), how I man­aged to pre­vent it and how I ended up on the gym floor today with doc­tors all around me.

It’s all related. And again, sorry for the novel-like email, but (again) this may save your life.

First, here’s what my excel­lent car­di­ol­o­gist said I did RIGHT:

1. Exer­cise: “Jon, your exer­cise plan, to put it bluntly, saved you from a great deal of pain, in fact it prob­a­bly saved your life as these block­ages would have been far worse with­out it.” With it, I had only one artery with enough block­age to war­rant the drug ther­apy that I should have been on for years, more on that in a second.

2. Dietary plan: “Jon, your diet is per­fect for this con­di­tion, low in carbs, high in pro­tein and healthy fats is all any­one can do in order to help fight this genetic killer.” Yep, again, pre­ven­tion in the form of diet­plan saved my butt. Or rather my heart. : ) But it wasn’t enough, at least for one artery. How­ever, it WAS enough to pre­vent them from hav­ing to do surgery on me.

“Jon, the take-away here is sim­ple: Exer­cise and dietary plans, even the very best, may not be enough for super high-risk peo­ple, but in your case your lifestyle saved your life. And it cer­tainly pre­vented you from hav­ing to have any seri­ous surgery to cor­rect a truly bro­ken heart.”

Talk about EXCITING news, yep, you CAN beat this killer, even when you have MY hor­ri­ble fam­ily genet­ics. How­ever, like me, you may need some help, more on that in a second.

3. Blood pres­sure: “Jon, your blood pres­sure is excel­lent. Your lifestyle and very low-dose diuretic has kept your for­merly sky-high blood pres­sure (it was 200/110 when I was 32!) to an excel­lent 118/78.” But you know doc­tors even “excel­lent” isn’t enough and they rec­om­mended a stronger BP med for “my intense weight training.”

So, I lis­tened and ended up on the floor today. You see, many doc­tors do not real­ize the POWER of weight train­ing com­pared to car­dio. My blood pres­sure never budges dur­ing car­dio, but less than 3 min­utes into a resis­tance (weight-training) ses­sion it goes down like the stock mar­ket after a bad news day.

I mean SHOOTS down. I tried to explain this by let­ting the doc­tor see the veins in my legs… “Doc, my veins are MUCH larger than the aver­age person’s… trust me, my pres­sure is fine.” “Jon, just try it for a few weeks.”

Bad mis­take.… like I said, I ended up on the gym floor today with a blood pres­sure of 72/45. If I hit 40, I’m lit­er­ally in a coma. 5 points away… very scary. Need­less to say the doc took me OFF these meds and let me do it my way: With my Every Other Day Diet­plan (low-carb most of the days) and good-old exercise.

If you have high blood pres­sure, I URGE you to take up weight train­ing or resis­tance (body-weight or band) train­ing. Of course, ask your doc about it first… but I’ve seen first hand for three weeks now how pow­er­ful my weight train­ing ses­sions are com­pared to intense car­dio sessions.

They are night and day folks… weights RULE. Car­dio is good, but weights are best. Both of course would be the best course for ulti­mate health, but most peo­ple do far too much car­dio and far too lit­tle resis­tance training.

—————–
Oops…
—————–

Now, here’s what I did WRONG:

1. Cig­ars: “Jon, you can­not afford to smoke cig­ars, ever. They have low­ered your pro­tec­tive HDL to a dan­ger­ous level. Stop NOW!” That’s all it took folks. Yes, I smoked cig­ars for many years, but for­tu­nately I was never an addict. I quit that very day.

Guess what? 10 days later my HDL DOUBLED (no kid­ding)… and with­out drugs. Of course that’s not all I did.

2. Fat too LOW: “Jon, you’ve low­ered your dietary fat too low… this affects your HDL.” Yep, I nor­mally eat about 35% dietary fat and I cut it down to 20% to help me get ready for a photo shoot. Now that I put it back to where it belongs, I still have my abs (yep!) and my HDL is rais­ing as I type.

3. Stress: “Jon, you are sim­ply work­ing too hard not to do some form of med­i­ta­tion or de-stressing.” So I dove back into my med­i­ta­tion CDs. (I’ll tell you more about Holo­sync and my hyp­no­sis CDs in my next email, very cool stuff.)

4. Advil: “Jon, you take 4 Advil before you train? You’re nuts! That stuff can cause sticky plaque for­ma­tions!!” You know, I may never even had an issue if I had known this (and not smoked cig­ars) a few years ago. Live and learn!

5. And finally… oh, this hurt to hear… no drugs! “Jon, if you want to make sure you beat this thing, you sim­ply must take some meds to help.” Okay, I resisted any form of statin drug for the past 15 years (drugs to lower cho­les­terol.) I opted to try nat­ural stuff… but unfor­tu­nately for me I was never too con­sis­tent. And I paid the price.

So the doc and I came to a com­pro­mise: I would take the LOWEST dose of statin along with 400 mg of CoQ10 (scary, but this was my idea, not his, and statins deplete this heart-friendly enzyme!) But I wanted a nat­ural solu­tion to the real issue: small par­ti­cle LDL. You see, I’ve known for years that I carry the gene that makes LDL “small”. LDL is not dan­ger­ous unless it is small… that’s why “total cho­les­terol” means noth­ing to me. I’ve seen folks have heart attacks with a cho­les­terol level of 130. No joke. But their LDL was super-small… like mine.

And guess what? Diet­plans can­not really help this. Well, they can HURT it (too many carbs, too many toxic fats, etc.) but they can­not shift the LDL from small to large.

For that, you need plain old niacin. Just a sim­ple B vit­a­min but in not-so-simple doses. In fact it’s con­sid­ered a drug at the dose you have to take, and you should NEVER take niacin over 50 mg with­out a doctor’s super­vi­sion as it can be very toxic to the liver.

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The Con­clu­sion: The Power
Is In Your Hands
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In con­clu­sion, I’m A-Okay… my heart pumps and func­tions “like that of a strong 20-year-old” (my doctor’s quote) thanks to the extra arter­ies I devel­oped from my exer­cise pro­gram (how cool!) … but in order to keep that one artery in check, I’m tak­ing his advice and tak­ing much bet­ter care of myself than I have been.

Today I learned that this does NOT mean tak­ing blood pres­sure meds, thank­fully… : ) But I had to make some changes. Some of them were “stu­pid” changes, sure, I know cig­ars are not good for you. I know you need good fats in your diet­plan. I could have used com­mon sense and fig­ured out that 4–8 Advil on work­out days was, well, stupid.

But the good news, which is what I choose to focus on, is this: In the areas that 95% of peo­ple NEVER change, I didn’t have to change much at all.

Dietary plan and exer­cise — turns to find out that what I was doing works great and it did, in fact, save my heart and quite pos­si­bly my life.

Thanks for read­ing, and I wish all of you good health!

Yours In Fitness,

Jon Ben­son

P.S. I got lucky in many ways, but espe­cially so when it came to my doc­tors. Both of my doc­tors are young and savvy enough to be up on the lat­est research on nutri­tion. They know NOT to buy into this “low-fat” non­sense for heart health. (I’d use a harsher word, but kid­dos may be read­ing… : ) That only works for about 10–15% of the pop­u­la­tion. The rest of us need to lower our CARBS, not our fats but the way I do it I get to keep my favorite carbs in my diet­plan every week.

The lit­tle that I do eat keeps me happy as a clam, and keeps my heart nice and healthy too. A lit­tle bit of bad food will not hurt most peo­ple, but eat­ing it every day can flat-out kill you.

Please, take this seri­ously. I promise, my diet­plan and exer­cise rou­tine is a PLEASURE to fol­low, but if you don’t fol­low it then find one that IS enjoy­able for you to fol­low and do it.

Life is too short, you know?