Why Chronic Symptoms Get Chased Instead of Traced

What We Need to Grow, Episode 036: The Score and the Concert. A Founder Talk conversation with Martin Pytela, Founder of Life Enthusiast. Cleaned for readability; the words are the speakers' own.

Caleb Pedosiuk: All right. So, Martin, first of all, welcome. There are a number of things that you have been building that I am really curious about. I consider myself to be a health conscious person. I do not know if that is fair to say, but certainly my wife and I and our family, we try to make the best decisions possible. Age-wise you are a little bit further down the road than myself, and so I look to you already with a certain amount of wisdom. You came to Canada, and from our earlier chat, you not only have come to understand the importance of health, but you have made it your life's work and purpose to make those resources available to others, to help others to age well and live well. So please share a little bit about what you are building and some of the story behind it.

Martin Pytela: Okay. The story behind it, I think, is kind of relevant. I grew up in a family where my father was a veterinarian, in 1950s and 60s Czechoslovakia, post World War Two, East bloc, backwards. I did not know we were poor. In my relation we were rich, because we had plenty of food, and I was living in a village and I had fields and forests and everything else in my childhood. It was all good.

But reaching maturity, I realized that I could not possibly live out my life in the communist police state that I was living in. So I just finished my university, I took computer science and business administration, and ran for the hills together with several other people, and landed in Canada.

The first thing that happened, I took a job as a strong young man in forestry in British Columbia. Physical work, but paid well, a unionized job. Ninety days in, I had health insurance, including dental coverage. I walked into a dentist's office for a checkup. I did not know that I was a little lamb coming in for fleecing. A fellow maybe three years older than I, I really trusted him implicitly. He had the white coat and the diploma on the wall and all of that.

I walked out of there with twelve mercury amalgam fillings. I asked, is there any difference between the silver ones and the white ones? And he said, well, the white ones only last half as long and they cost you more. So I said, well, I am not vain, I will take silver. I did not know that I was saying yes to silver mercury amalgam fillings. Mercury being the most toxic thing you can put into a human body.

I suspect that he simply believed what he was taught. He came from a school, he was still a naive young dentist who did what he was taught. So I do not hold him responsible for what followed, which was a total crash. Mercury affects your connective tissue and your nervous system. So many symptoms. Plantar fasciitis and carpal tunnel syndrome and a bad back, so horribly. I was crawling on all fours from my rocking chair to the bathroom and back, because it would just go out. I would completely lose it several times a year.

Once I managed the language, and once I managed to put myself into some economic advantage, I went and joined the microcomputer revolution. So the next twenty years I spent in sales and teaching about the PC revolution. I have had a very successful sales career. I did well financially and economically. I was fine. Health-wise it was a disaster.

Caleb: I am just curious, and maybe you are about to get to it, but at what point did you put two and two together, realize it, and then start to make changes?

Martin: The ten years from when I started failing and crashing was a series of me trying to get help. I went to the orthopedic surgeon, and I found a chiropractor, and I found a naturopath, and I just kept trying and asking for answers. And all of that was really clearly symptom chasing. The chiropractor was licensed to manipulate me. He was not licensed or allowed to tell me anything about the nutrition. Just boxes and silos.

So eventually the business consultant mind took over. Martin, you are an analyst. Analyze this. And the answer was, these people are symptom chasers. They never ask what we do in business consulting, which is, can we measure it? Can we control it? What is the cause of it?

So I went into books. I started reading. That was 1989 to 1992 thereabouts, in books, reading and studying. At some point I was smart enough to keep pace with the naturopaths and chiropractors, because I simply ingested the books. And then I had the answers. The answer was, it is the mercury, stupid. I had the test to prove it. I remember taking a hair analysis test, looking at it and saying, high in mercury, where did that come from? I did not connect it to the teeth at the beginning.

Well, then I went and found solutions. Once I found solutions, I was reversing my problems. The allergies went away, the back pain went away, all the tons of symptoms, all related to this industrial age toxicity that overwhelmed my immune system and my physical body. So I was undoing the symptoms. At age thirty-five I hit bottom. At age forty-five I was back in the saddle.

Caleb: You have to get those fillings replaced. I am assuming that was part of it.

Martin: I took them out at age fifty-five, because that was my Freedom 55 gift to myself. A funny thing, the filling goes in costing about a hundred dollars each. It comes out costing about a thousand dollars each. Never mind the in-between suffering.

Caleb: So at what point did you begin to recognize the need in the market for, let us say, well-being solutions? A lot of the quote unquote healthcare system, and I have lots of friends that are connected to it, and certainly trauma care is really important and incredible, but a lot of healthcare really genuinely is sick care. I do not mean that disrespectfully, but the system is set up so that the only way, in most cases, that you can get an appointment, certainly in certain systems around the world, is if you are sick. And so then they care for you when you are sick. At what point, and I am interested to see where it ties into some of the products you have created and the solutions you have made available through education, to say, hey, look, if you want to be well and age well, here are things you should be doing. At what point did that become more than just a personal endeavor?

Martin: This was about the year 1999. I would have been forty-seven. Y2K was a thing. I do not know if you have heard of it, but we thought that there could be disruption, because we were not sure whether the computers were going to work or not, or whether the problems would be fixed in time.

So I moved my family, my two daughters at that point teenagers. I thought, let us go move to a small town. We moved from a big urban area to a town of three thousand, where the nearest Walmart was an hour and a half drive away and the nearest airport three hours away.

And I needed to make a living, and computer consulting was not happening in a small town. So I decided to be my own client and build a website. And of course, what am I going to talk about? So I decided to talk about what I understood, to share this.

Caleb: So that would have been about the time of the dotcom boom. All the conversation about brick and mortar dot com, the world is changing.

Martin: E-commerce was possible, and it was somewhat easy. I was there in the early days, but I was not smart. I did not know what I know now. I built a website. Well, here is what I understand. The thing that I know can help anyone reverse any chronic degenerative aging related inflammatory problem.

But the regulatory system is set up in such a way that you cannot talk about it. I cannot name an illness. I cannot tell you that I know how to fix cancer. I cannot tell you that I know how to fix arthritis. That will immediately get me in trouble with the regulators. So all I can talk about is that I can build health. I am a health coach and I can increase your wellness. I cannot claim to decrease your illness.

That is the regulatory environment and the box that I am put in. Which was funny. People would ask me, hey, are you a doctor? To which I replied, well, if I were a doctor, I would be forced by the licensing body to tell you what a doctor is allowed to tell you. Now, if you want those answers, go see a doctor. If you want real help, let us talk. But I am not a doctor.

Caleb: So how does that work? Has it always been the positioning that you just described? Has your business, Life Enthusiast, life dash enthusiast dot com, your website, always been like that? Have you been coaching for a couple of decades?

Martin: Yeah. Well, the stupidity of my design was that I did not know that long tail is the winner. If you declare yourself to be the lawyer who fixes legal problems for thirty-five year old journalists, all thirty-five year old journalists are yours. I did not do that. I set up ten, twelve different answers. So jack of all trades, but master of none. That is not a good metaphor. It is just that I was not the winning solution on the web, because I was offering health. I was not offering a solution to the stubbed toe.

Caleb: So it was too general. You needed to niche down more.

Martin: Yeah. So that was a mistake of my business design, but I stuck with it for many years, and now it has so much momentum that I do not see a reason to change it, other than I now need to build twenty different silos, each of which has its own answer. Except the answer is always the same, which is that chronic illness is based on, I categorize it this way, toxicity, malnutrition, stagnation and trauma.

Toxicity is the presence of things that society brings you that you should not have in your body. Malnutrition is missing things that you should be getting but are not, because of the food growing practices and whatever else goes on. And stagnation, that is the sedentary lifestyle of modern people, just what you and I are doing right now, sitting at a computer rather than being out in the field working, or rather than stalking some deer somewhere.

And then trauma, finally. That is the invisible assaults. They could be emotional stress, a stressful life. Driving a car for ten hours can put you in a serious state of stress, because you are supposed to be five minutes of danger and fifty-five minutes of relaxing about it. That does not happen when you are driving a car. It is three-sixty awareness, waiting for the kid to run out from between two cars.

Caleb: So do you have an entry point or a suggestion that you give to people to say, look, if you are looking for a starting point to make progress in these categories? Is there an assessment? Is there a general, one size fits all for everybody?

Martin: When I started back in 2002 online, I did not know what I needed to know in 2012. I got myself certified as a metabolic typing advisor, which is an understanding that our ancestors, having lived in a specific geographic arrangement, had access to specific foods available there, and their genetics pre-selected them for living there. So somebody from Africa will be on a very different diet from somebody living in Tonga. Or for me, the Eastern European experience is different from living inland versus living on the coast.

So all of this genetic will predetermine, and it is categorized and systemized, and we now know how to understand how people gain weight or lose weight. We understand how people become more acidic or more alkaline, which is supremely important, because the acidity drives anxiety while alkalinity drives depression, and you want to be somewhere in the middle. You do not want to be stuck in the margins, you want to be in the middle. But each person individually needs to use different strategies to stay in the middle.

Here is a point. Seventy-five percent of prescriptions filled in Canada are for changing your mental states, either dealing with anxiety or depression. Let that sink in.

Caleb: And I wonder what that number would be in terms of the financial number or the volume number.

Martin: Well, the pharmaceutical companies love it. It is the machine that keeps on going. They have the standard line, cure a patient, lose a customer. They do not like to cure anyone. They like to put you on a prescription that you are on for years. They never offer a solution. They only offer a tweak.

Caleb: I think that is undeniably part of their business model.

Martin: That is the business model.

Caleb: So maybe share a little bit more specifically about where things are at with Life Enthusiast. You have actually manufactured about a third of what you sell. Can you talk a bit about that?

Martin: Yeah, true. Life is kind of unpredictable and interesting. Here is what happened. Of the brands that I have supported, I found people over time. A product made by an inventor is usually made to fanatical standards about the product. And it usually is made not with the focus on the bottom line, but with the focus on the efficacy or the results.

So I have been meeting these types of creators in my career as the Life Enthusiast, distributing products to people. And several of them have passed on. But before passing, they asked me if I would carry on their work. So I now have a line called Exsula, with a production facility where we make these superfoods. I have had my hand in the latter maintenance and design and tweaking of the products, but I was not the founder of it.

And likewise another fellow left behind a line we call the Earth Friend herbs. It is a line of herbal tinctures. Again, same idea. The fellow knows he is going, he leaves me all his recipes and all his manufacturing methods and says, please carry on with my work. So that is how we ended up owning much of what we sell.

Caleb: So how do people typically find you, your customers?

Martin: Well, word of mouth has been bigger than anything. Up to about 2019 we had no problem getting traffic. I used to have something like three thousand people a day on the website. But then Google did this major purge. I do not know if you remember, Joseph Mercola got caught in that, where his traffic went from two million a day to ten thousand a day. My traffic went from three thousand a day to three hundred a day. We became fringe. All of a sudden my traffic went away.

And if it were not for a healthy in-house mailing list, we would be out of business. But we already had a lot of people that stayed with us because they were getting results. So repeat customers are a big deal for us. About half of people who buy once stay for years.

Caleb: And then you mentioned niching down. Where would you say your niche audience is, if you had to put a bullseye? There can be outer rings, but what is the center?

Martin: This is the funny part too. I thought that everybody was my potential customer because I can help everybody. But that is not so. It is the people who have woken up to the fact that the mainstream, or the pharmacological approach to health, is a failed method. So my ideal customers are those who have already had plenty of frustration at the hands of the mainstream and are now understanding that going to the other side is what is going to work.

Caleb: So no matter what age, or would you say that you have a certain demographic that sits in there, fifty-five, sixty-five?

Martin: Well, the demographic is, have they suffered long enough? Are they ready to walk on the other side? It could be early, but it could take a while. My typical customers are two to one female over male, and over forty versus under forty. That is because it takes time for people to realize that they need help.

I would love to work with thirty-five year old people who want to do better than they are today. The same tool that takes you from sick to well takes you from well to phenomenal. It is the same vector. A man who has just run a marathon wakes up feeling about the same way as a woman who has chronic fibromyalgia. All beat up and needing help.

So where do I find the people? They find us now. I am all over social media. I have all kinds of podcasts out. So we try. But it is a shifting terrain right now. The AI has entered the scene. I am trying to be relevant in that terrain too.

Caleb: Well, the good news with that is that it is less guesswork. It is more objective. That is the center of the bullseye for us, because to be the answer that surfaces, you have to have done an array of criteria properly at the machine layer. And then there is an aspect of that that requires ongoing disciplines, much like you would look at a healthy regimen to become fit. There are some people, just like businesses, when it comes to these areas, that are just on the spectrum. Some are completely off, out of shape. There are others that are okay, they just need to adjust some things. And then there are others that are top performers, and when you make those adjustments for a top performer, sometimes those unlocks are even more powerful, because they already understand the fundamentals.

Martin: Yes. And of course the answers are readily available. They are out there, but they are not readily known. The same answers that I can give you about your health, you could probably give me about the health of my business or of my presence online. It is just that they are not advertised in the mainstream. It is like a secret society, if you will.

Caleb: Fair enough. So what would you suggest, if someone is hearing some of this? You mentioned different body compositions that respond differently to food, that you want to be in a balanced state, not too acidic, not too alkaline. What would you suggest for people specifically? Is there a blood test? Is there something that is needed?

Martin: Secret sauce, right? We have a tool. It is called the metabolic typing test. It is a quiz. It asks you about a hundred and twenty multiple choice questions. And once you give us the answers, we come back to you with two categories: how you gain weight and lose weight, and how you alkalize or acidify. Which gives us all the tools you need. It is like having a gearbox and a steering wheel. With those you can control the car. You can control your body, you can control your outcome. You can drive it toward health or towards the ditch.

And you will know, with knowing, having controls. It is like getting a user's manual to your body. Which in the mainstream, nobody gives you.

Caleb: Which seems preposterous, actually, when you think of it. So many things just seem, when you look at it later, you just think, why do more people not wake up to it? But that might just be part of life.

Martin: I want to say something important, which is this. The mainstream people are chasing genetics. You will see a lot of offers about, we will run your genetic tests and we will tell you exactly what to do. The main point is epigenetics. What you are born with is sort of like the score that the composer wrote. But the epigenetics is actually the concert, the playing of the music. So are you going to play this tune in the style of the Rolling Stones, or in the style of a string quartet? How are you going to interpret the sheet?

Caleb: Very interesting. I love that analogy. But epigenetics, that is what you are inheriting when you are coming in?

Martin: Now, genetics is what you inherit, because that is the father, the mother, the genes. Those are the genes. That is the score. The epigenetics is the lived experience. You are picking stuff up. Some of it is toxins that you get as a child. Some of it is the shots that they gave you, and the toxic things that you were exposed to, and the lack of nutrients.

Look at these fingers. See how they do not go straight? In your childhood you had a deficiency of essential fatty acids. That is how this happens. You see guys with legs bowed, especially from the knees down. That is vitamin D deficiency in childhood. And on and on and on, I can keep going. You are born, you grow up in a certain way, and you just develop these challenges. And then you have to live with them, and compensate for what is going on.

Caleb: With the way you play the sheet music you have been handed. Interesting. The website is life dash enthusiast dot com, and I am assuming the information on that metabolic test or profiling would be there, as well as the supplements that you mentioned. Thank you very much for sharing this information. Is there any other spot that you would suggest people follow on social media, or other places to learn more?

Martin: The YouTube channel is L I F E N T C O. Same for TikTok, or X dot com, and same for Telegram. L I F E N T C O.

One big thing is we offer a fifteen minute free consultation. So anyone who is curious enough can come in and book a time with either me or one of the other health coaches present at the business. We will help you understand where you are and what you need to do, give you a trajectory. I see myself as the guy with the flashlight who can shine on the terrain so you can step on the stones safely, going through the swamp as you need to cross.

Caleb: Is that just in person, or do you also do remote versions of it?

Martin: Oh, it is all remote. We do not see people face to face. It is all online, just like this conversation as we are recording it now.

Caleb: Well, Martin, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

Martin: Yeah, it is my pleasure. Thank you.