#103 How to Fix Your Digestion with Digestive Enzymes - Wade Lightheart

Wade Lightheart (0:00)

Going back to Hippocrates, all health and all disease starts in the digestive system.

We said, your dietary practice, your training practice and all these things are just stuffing things into the system, but you weren't working on how the body actually converts those things into building blocks, into energy units, and your body has paid the price. So you learned how to build the body from the outside in, but you haven't learned to build the body from the inside out.

Siim Land (0:28)

Body Mind Empowerment.

SPEAKER_3 (0:30)

Get stronger, faster, smarter, quicker, friendlier, more helpful, more driven.

Siim Land (0:36)

Everything the body needs.

SPEAKER_3 (0:37)

Control your mind.

Siim Land (0:41)

Welcome to the Body Mind Empowerment Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land, and our guest today is Wade Lightheart. Wade is a three-time Canadian Natural Bodybuilding Champion and one of the founders of Bioptimizers, which is a supplement company that fixes digestion.

Wade, welcome to the show.

Wade Lightheart (0:59)

Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Siim Land (1:01)

Yeah. Can you tell us also like where are you calling in from? What kind of a region?

Wade Lightheart (1:06)

Well, today I'm in Vancouver, Canada at the moment. So it's one of the places I spend a bit of time in, you know, I bounce between here and Los Angeles and Panama usually, occasionally in Asia, but I'm in Vancouver enjoying some unusual snow today. We had some snow here, which is really, really rare.

Siim Land (1:24)

So yeah, like I was also in California for the past few weeks and I just came back to home to Estonia and we really get a lot of bunch of snow here at the moment. So it's been also quite, quite an awesome kind of enjoying the last last, last weeks of winter.

Yep.

Wade Lightheart (1:40)

It's a big contrast for sure. Yeah.

Siim Land (1:42)

But it's good for like adaptation.

Wade Lightheart (1:46)

Absolutely.

Siim Land (1:47)

So like, what is your backstory? Can you like give us a brief overview about how did you get involved with, you know, optimizing your digestion?

Wade Lightheart (1:57)

Sure.

So I'll start off. I'm just an ordinary kid from Canada that grew up in rural New Brunswick, which is a small province on the East Coast. You know, so the weather and everything, we're very much like Estonia, you know, cold winters, short summers, that sort of thing. And, you know, everything was pretty normal. You know, played hockey, went to school, nothing is particularly unusual till I became, when I was 15 years old, three interesting things happened to me.

One, my parents moved to a very rural place. It was five miles to my nearest neighbor, kind of this mountain. So they were caretakers of a lake. So I was really removed from my friends and my social influences significantly. I have to take a snowmobile out to the bus and all that sort of stuff.

Also at the same time, my sister was diagnosed with cancer, which was a form of Hodgkin's disease, which is cancer of the lymph nodes.

And over the course of the next four years, I watched her go through the medical model of cancer treatment with chemotherapy, radiation, and bone marrow transplants and catheters and all that horrific stuff that happens to people before she died at 22 So she was four years my senior. Now, before that, at the same, almost all of these things started right around 15 And the third thing that happened is she gave me a magazine, a bodybuilding magazine. And on it had the cover of Mr. California, Troy Zuclato, and two pretty girls. And I remember thinking to myself, wow, maybe if I had some muscles, I would be healthier and maybe I would get these girls seeing my sister who was struggling with her health. And so in a very naive kind of way, I decided I was going to start training to improve my health and my strength and this sort of thing. So I built a gym in my barn and started out training. And I went to university the year my sister died in 1990 And then I started studying exercise physiology. I wanted to know how the body worked. There was so many questions to me because when I looked at the treatment she was receiving, she just kept getting sicker and they would give her poisons that would hopefully kill the disease. And I thought that doesn't make sense to me. If you want help, you would think you'd do the things that would make you healthy as opposed to that. And I'm not here to condemn the medical model, but I had these questions that I wanted to unravel. And so I started my career, I got out of the university and I really wasn't impressed. I had a good background of information, but I didn't have any synthesis. And at that point I started seeking out mentors, studying access, continuing on my career. I hired bodybuilding coaches and so on and so forth, worked through the industry in various levels, became a nutritionist, all these different sort of things that a lot of people could probably relate to that goes in the industry.