My whole life I’ve always been the guy that’s “up for it”. A spur-of-the-moment 5-mile hike - sign me up! Getting up before dawn to catch the sunrise after flying in on a red-eye - sure why not! Want to snowboard from when the slopes open until they close - is there any other way?

Then one day I realized I’d started saying no and making excuses like “I’m too tired”, “that’s too far”, or “I’d be soo sore after that”. I knew it was time to start asking questions, but who should I ask?

For the first 26 years of my life, a doctor was someone you went to because you needed paperwork filled out or because you broke something (yes I do have screws in a bone). For better or worse, I never built a proactive medical routine with a primary care doctor or even getting regular physicals. We moved every couple of years and routinely changed insurances so finding new doctors who were in-network seemed like too much work.

This all changed a little over 3 years ago when I started having fairly consistent GI discomfort. I did the whole classical medical process: find a primary care doctor, get referred for special tests, wait a couple of weeks for test results, get referred to another specialist, wait some more, then proceed to be told by all of them that I’m one of the healthiest people they’ve seen in a while and there’s nothing wrong with me.

But I didn’t feel like I was healthy.

The answer came from a nutritionist friend who recommended starting a food journal of everything I ate, looking for commonalities, and then one at a time eliminating things from my diet for a month at a time. A few weird months later having figured out that by removing dairy and eggs from my diet I felt great, and questioned the 4 figure medical bills I was paying from all my tests that couldn’t do what a simple journal helped me fix.

Simply put, I was starting to trust doctors to fix me, but not necessarily to help me feel my best.

Earlier this year I jokingly commented to my friend when we both turned 30, “It’s all downhill now that we’re old”. And even though it was total sarcasm at the time, within weeks I pulled a groin muscle playing a casual game of tennis that to this day hasn’t healed properly.

After 2 months I finally decided I needed to see someone. I followed the only medical playbook I knew (and had done a few years before): search for an in-network PCP → a 10 min conversation with a PCP → tests → wait → results & new specialist → repeat → “You’re healthy”. By that point, I noticed that the PT I was doing was making me more sore, like my body wasn’t healing like it used to.

And even though I said it sarcastically, at 30 years old I shouldn’t feel like I’m 50+.