The Beginning
My parents divorced when I was six. What followed were years of instability that no kid should have to navigate. By the time I was fourteen, I'd nearly failed out of school, been diagnosed with major depression, and gotten into enough fights that my dad sent me to Camp E-How-Kee, an Eckerd Youth Alternatives outdoor therapeutic program in Brooksville, Florida. That experience broke me open in a way I needed to be broken open. It was the beginning of a spiritual and personal search that I'm still on today. But before any of that began to take shape, I was the fat kid. That's not self-pity. It's just the truth.
Growing up, I carried about 75 extra pounds on a frame that hadn't figured out what it was supposed to look like yet. I had severe acne. I was sick constantly. And I had a stutter bad enough that ordering food at a restaurant felt like standing at a podium in front of a thousand people.
I don't tell you this for sympathy. I tell you because that kid is the reason I do what I do today.
At fifteen, I started training at the Suncoast YMCA. A personal trainer named Brad taught me proper form, how to breathe through a set, what progressive overload actually meant. Something clicked. Not in a dramatic, movie-montage kind of way. It was quieter than that. I just started making different decisions. One meal at a time. One workout at a time. One small habit replacing one bad one.
Seventy-five pounds later, I didn't just look different. I was different. The stutter lingered, though. It followed me through high school and into college, the kind that makes you rehearse sentences in your head before you say them out loud. I joined Toastmasters. That helped. Then I took a door-to-door sales job with Vivint, which is about as close to exposure therapy as you can get without a clinical license. On my very first knock, I sold the most expensive home automation package the company offered. I finished the season as Rookie of the Year. Somewhere in those thousands of conversations, the stutter loosened its grip. Confidence isn't something you find. It's something you build. I built mine one rep, one doorbell, one uncomfortable conversation at a time.
That experience taught me the most important lesson of my career, long before I ever stepped into a classroom: the body and mind are not separate systems. Fix one, and you create space to fix the other.
The Diagnosis
At 19, I was doing everything right. Training hard, eating clean, building momentum. But something was wrong and I couldn't name it.
The brain fog was relentless. Not the kind where you forget your keys. The kind where you sit in a lecture hall and the words on the board look like they're underwater. My energy was nonexistent. My motivation, which had carried me through a 75-pound transformation, was evaporating.
I got my bloodwork done. Testosterone: 63 ng/dL.
For reference, the normal range for a male is 300 to 1100. I was 19 years old with the hormonal profile of someone whose endocrine system had essentially shut down.
I started testosterone replacement therapy, and within weeks, the fog lifted. It wasn't subtle. It was like someone turned the lights on in a room I'd been stumbling through for years. I went from barely functioning to becoming President of Phi Beta Lambda at the University of South Florida. I earned Rookie of the Year at Vivint. I built businesses.
That experience didn't just change my trajectory. It fundamentally reshaped how I think about health and the human body. Because here's what haunts me: what if I hadn't gotten that blood test? What if a doctor had looked at a 19-year-old with fatigue and brain fog and handed him an antidepressant? How many people are living diminished lives right now because nobody thought to look at the root cause? That question drives everything I do.
The Injuries
By 2014, I was deep into competitive bodybuilding, carrying about 272 pounds on my frame. That year, I ruptured my right patellar tendon in a longboarding accident at USF. Complete tear. Surgery. Months of rehabilitation. Within two weeks, I lost my girlfriend, my job, and had to withdraw from school. I went from 272 to 210 pounds.
In 2015, on the exact same day, one year later, I ruptured the left one.
I'm not superstitious, but the universe has a dark sense of humor.
What followed was nearly a decade of chronic, debilitating knee pain. The kind that reorganizes your life around what you can't do. I tried everything conventional medicine had to offer. Physical therapy. NSAIDs. Rest. More physical therapy.
It wasn't until years later, during chiropractic school, that I came across BPC-157 and TB-500 in the research literature. Peptides. Compounds that promote actual tissue regeneration, that most doctors had never heard of and most patients had no access to. I ran a targeted protocol, and within months, my chronic pain decreased by roughly 80%.
I went from someone who had to think twice about climbing stairs to someone who could train again. Not just exercise. Train. The difference between those two words matters to me.
That experience is directly responsible for the peptide therapy protocols we use at Delphi Wellness. I didn't read about peptides in a journal and think "that's interesting." I lived the transformation. And now I make sure my patients and fellow practitioners have access to the same quality compounds that gave me my knees back.
The Grind
My path to chiropractic was not a straight line. After college, I worked in executive recruiting, then healthcare staffing where I earned my first six-figure income selling to hospitals across the country. I launched a security staffing company in Tampa that was gaining real traction until COVID shut down nightlife overnight. I traded options for a while after that, experienced dramatic gains followed by a devastating loss. Through all of it, life kept redirecting me toward something I couldn't see yet. My wife Jamie's grandfather, Dr. Harry Brown, founded Arrowhead Clinic in Atlanta nearly fifty years ago. When I pitched him on joining the practice, he told me he loved the idea, but I'd need to earn my Doctor of Chiropractic first. There was one problem: I had zero science prerequisites. None. Not a single chemistry class. So I drove fifty miles to Life University, brought four dozen Krispy Kreme donuts to the admissions office, and made my case. I told them I would outwork every student in the program if they gave me a chance. They let me in.
Here's what that looked like in practice:
I commuted 100 miles a day. I was a new father. Johannes was born during my first year. Leonidas during my second. Adonis during my third. Three sons in three years of doctoral education.
I maintained my physique. I maintained my coaching clients. I maintained my sanity, most days, through meticulous optimization of my own biology. Mitochondrial support protocols that let me operate at a high level on 5 to 6 hours of sleep. Strategic nutrition. Disciplined training.
I graduated Cum Laude.
I'm not saying this to impress anyone. I'm saying it because it's proof of concept. The protocols I teach my clients and patients aren't theoretical. They're what I used to build a life that, on paper, shouldn't have been possible. I am the experiment. And the experiment worked.
I believe the human body is the most sophisticated system ever engineered. And I believe most of the conventional approach treats it like a broken appliance.
Something hurts? Suppress it. Something's off? Medicate it. Something's wrong? Manage it.
I reject that model. Not out of arrogance. Out of evidence. Out of lived experience. And out of grief for a mother who deserved better than what that model gave her.
My approach is simple: find the root cause. Address the root cause. Give the body what it needs to do what it was designed to do. Support it with precision. Optimize it with intention. Respect it with humility.
The body wants to heal. The body wants to perform. Our job is to stop getting in its way and start giving it what it actually needs.