Hi, I’m Ray! I teach busy professionals with chronic conditions how to lose weight, become more active, and increase energy without painful workouts or restrictive diets.
My Story
Hey there, I’m Ray.
I’ve spent over a decade in the fitness and wellness industries searching for answers to a painful chronic condition I was convinced was “all in my head” by almost everyone I trusted to help me.
Since my early 20’s I was living with Interstitial Cystitis and the pain of a kidney stone lodged in the lining of my bladder, only knowing what it’s like to live pain-free since May 2018. In 2011, when things were at their worst, I made a promise to myself.
“If I ever get better, I will become the guy I’ve been looking for all these years”.
I had just woken up on the bathroom floor after passing out again from the pain and exhaustion of my condition. If the metabolic disorders, chronic pelvic pain, disabling fatigue, and brain fog weren’t enough. Then there’s the guilt of living with this kind of condition and trying not to burden anyone else, while still needing to ask for help. It’s a balancing act like nothing I ever want to experience again.
Living with daily invisible chronic pain and everything that accompanies it, is something I’m very familiar with.
What I didn’t fully understand was the role of stress in my experience with illness and in 2010 I came home from work one Tuesday morning to find my fiance’ paralyzed and suddenly unable to communicate.
This was her initial episode of Multiple Sclerosis and I was fully unprepared to deal with it. Soon after, we split up and I would continue to go down a rabbit hole of illness that would take me years to recover from.
Not because I wasn’t trying as hard as humanly possible, but because it seemed no one understood that I was already at my limits, and I didn’t have room for more of anything. I needed someone to meet me where I was and help me from there, not where they expected me to start.
I couldn’t find anyone to help me the way I needed to be helped, so I committed myself 100% to getting well by emerging myself into the fitness and wellness industries, looking through the eyes of someone that lives with chronic pain and unexplained illness every day.
My Values & Beliefs
The 4 pillars of Thrive Theory
1. Mindset –We can only heal to the greatest version of wellness with different beliefs and values that are learned in the midst of illness.
2. Meals – I don’t believe there’s a specific meal plan for everyone. I do believe you can create your own best meal plan based on the foods you already love.
3. Move – Making an effort to move in ways that bring you joy is at the heart of Thrive Theory. You won’t find punishing workouts here, but you will find effective ones that serve to improve your mobility and increase activity in painless ways.
4. Massage –Massage and bodywork are an important part of the overall healing process. Learning important and simple self-care techniques that have a lasting impact on your body and mind through massage and bodywork is imperative to thrive in the midst of illness.
Look for the linchpin
There’s a lot of value in looking for our root causes, however, that’s often a long and tedious process that requires giving up more control of the outcome in terms of medications and diagnoses. In my experience its a lot more fun and rewarding to look for a linchpin or something that will help right now and continue leading us on a path to those root causes.
We can have anything we want, but we can't have everything.
We all want good health and increased wellness, but wellness comes with a cost. That cost is letting go of the thought that we must do all things and be everything to everyone. We can’t create space to rest if we’re constantly saying “yes” to everything we want to do.
My Approach
In Thrive Theory we use a 6 step approach to ensure you will thrive in the midst of illness, not merely survive. Starting the very first day, you’ll begin to learn how to creating more time in your day to do the things you love, give yourself permission to rest, invest in yourself, create a positive vision for your future and express yourself in a way that serves you and those around you better.
In creating space to thrive, you’ll lose weight, eat meals you love that love you back, move in a way that serves you instead of hurts you, and discover self-massage recovery techniques that serve to put your given right to heal yourself, back in your control.
