Meet Steve

Today, we’d like to introduce you to Steve. Steve was introduced to us by the brilliant and talented LZS Nutrition Ltd.

Hi Steve, we’re so thrilled to have you sharing your story with us today. Maybe we can kick things off by having you introduce yourself to our readers? We’d love to have you go into your story and how you got to where you are today.
My name is Steve and I’m 54 years old. I’ve been married for 25 years and have no children. However, we do have a two-year-old Tibetan Terrier fur baby who is laying his head on my thigh as I type. Yep, he’s a Covid puppy and always likes having you close by. We also have 22 nieces and nephews that we have spent time with since birth. We have taught them to ski, taken them on trips and even had a couple of them live with us when their parents needed a little help.

I have worked in Law Enforcement for 27 years where I’ve had 13 different jobs in my career. I am currently the section commander of an investigative team with responsibilities that require regular overtime, change and cancelation of days off, and the expectation you are available by phone 24/7. I have held several positions over the last 14 years with similar expectations and a work life that regularly disrupts my ability to focus on my health and wellness.

I have been active in sports my entire life, but especially during my childhood. I always tell people I’ve been an athlete since I could walk. I played sports year-round until after college. I played soccer, baseball, basketball, football, tennis, lacrosse, skied, road bikes, skateboarded, swam, and ultimately played Division I football on scholarship in college. My competitiveness and desire to play sports came from my older brother, who was a great athlete and could have played soccer in college but turned down a scholarship to stay close to the family when our parents divorced. My little brother also pushed me athletically and was also a great athlete as an all-state football player, wrestler and Division I football player. He is the reason I started lifting weights and probably still do today.

I was a small kid and started weightlifting when I was 14 to improve my strength on the football field where I was quarterback, defensive back, and kicker. I went from 125 lbs. as an 8th grader to 198 lbs. when I graduated from high school.

After high school, I went to college at two of the top Division I football programs in the country, University of Nebraska, where I went my Freshman year, and the University of Wyoming where we were ranked in the top 20 three of my years there.

Although my mom was a great cook, she was raising four kids and working, so breakfast and lunch were put together fast and were usually the standard cereal and sandwiches with chips. These two football programs, where they talked about nutrition and fed me three good meals a day, plus snacks, is where I got my introduction into eating well and a lot. It was no longer Apple Jacks and Frosted Flakes for breakfast or nachos for lunch. The strength and nutrition programs at these schools were the best in the country in 1986. I went from 198 lbs. to 218 lbs. in little over a year and ultimately played linebacker at 6’1, 220 lbs.

My football career ended in college, but my eating habits did not. With football and competitive sports out of my life, I no longer had the daily cardio workouts I had for 20 years, but I continued to eat 3000 to 4000 calories a day and workout with weights. My body weight went up to a high of 268 lbs. I felt horrible and ultimately got my weight down to a comfortable 250 lbs. Although this sounds like a lot of weight to carry, had a lot of muscle mass and was in good cardiovascular shape, running a mile in a little over 7 minutes, I was still not eating healthy though or managing sleep or stress well.

I graduated from college with Bachelor of Arts, a Minor in Sociology, and a Minor in Psychology. After college I got a job to make ends meet while applying for my career in law enforcement, which I started in 1995. Law enforcement requires you to be physical and in good shape, so I have always felt that my strength, size, and decent cardio conditioning helped me through the last 27 years. When I began my career, my goal was to be in better shape when I left my law enforcement career than when I started it. Over the years I have gotten my weight as low as 206 lbs., but it has averaged about 230 lbs. for the last 27 years.

A law enforcement career comes with long hours, shift work, bad eating habits due to time constraints, sleep deprivation (average 5.5 hours a night for 20+ years), cumulative trauma, and various other types of stress. On top of work and thousands of hours of training in my profession, I have also completed my master’s degree at CU Denver and Completed my Certification as a Transitional and Leadership Coach from the Hudson Institute in Santa Barbara, California.

The last 27 years of bad wellness habits and a poor work life balance caught up to me in September of 2019 when I ended up in the emergency room or urgent care 4 times in 45 days. My symptoms were light headedness, vertigo, rapid heart rate, and clammy skin. At times I would be driving down the street and my heart would start beating out of my chest. As someone who had never had any health issues and thought my workouts were enough, it was a concerning time.

I had been eating what I considered a cleaner diet for the previous year and thought I was doing all the right things. I was exercising a lot, 16,000 steps a day, including weight training, elliptical, 2-3 three walks a day with my dog, hiking, skiing, tennis, golf, and I still ended up in the hospital.

I blew away the treadmill stress test, got my heart rate above 190 with no issues. The Echo Cardiogram, Brain Scan, and one month on a heart monitor showed nothing concerning. The doctor asked me about my sleep, nutrition, diet, and stress. He said the way I was feeling was most likely related to these things. That’s when I decided to call Lexi at LZS Nutrition.

I met Lexi at a charity golf tournament in June of 2019. She had donated several one-month introductory nutrition consultations to the silent auction and was out on the course talking about health, wellness, and nutrition. When I met Lexi, I could tell by her enthusiasm that she loves what she does, and she truly lives her work. After a brief discussion with Lexi on the golf course, where she told me I didn’t need to lose weight, I just needed to redistribute it, I was bidding on her silent auction consultation.

I bought the consultation that day in June 2019, but still had not picked up the phone to schedule an appointment until after my meeting with the doctor in early December 2019. As a friend once told me, “most people don’t make major life decisions unless they are in a crisis. There is a natural resistance to change, and for change to occur more rapidly and with less resistance, stress must be inserted.” The stress my body was feeling was overwhelming and I felt I had no control over how I physically and mentally felt, I was in crisis and I needed a change.

Let’s talk about your work and career – what else should we know?
As I mentioned before, I have worked in law enforcement for 27 years where I’ve had 13 different jobs. In these 13 jobs I have worked in proactive policing units that focused on violent crime throughout our jurisdiction, I have supervised the training of new recruits, managed the detectives that are the first to respond to violent crimes throughout the jurisdiction, supervised Major Crime units and the internal investigations of police officers. In addition to the assignments above, I have also coordinated a mentoring program run by my Department for almost 15 years. I have mentored drug addicted moms, single fathers on probation, juveniles with co-occurring mental health and drug addiction who are on probation, and students who are struggling with disruptive behavior in school or struggling with risk taking behavior. I have had approximately 60 clients, some for 6 months and some for 3 years. I keep in touch with several and have sadly lost some to suicide, violence, and accidents. I have also been an instructor of various classes over the last 27 years including, leadership, officer intervention, drug endangered children, prevention and response to terrorist incidents, and numerous community focused trainings. Mental and physical wellness are very important to me as I have seen so many people impacted negatively in Law Enforcement because of several negative factors we are exposed to on a daily basis, such as shift work, cumulative trauma, stressful calls for service, long work hours, and middle of the night callouts that interrupt sleep patterns. I try to emphasize balance with my teams and strongly support the many programs our Department has put in place to reduce the ill effects on wellness that a career in law enforcement can have. I am the first in my family to go into law enforcement. I chose the profession because I wanted a job with purpose where I could make a difference in people’s lives and my community. The great thing about law enforcement is you don’t have to make rank or be the boss to make a difference, you can do it from any position and on a daily basis if you choose.

LZS Nutrition Ltd have been great to us and I know you’ve got a great relationship with them as well. Maybe you can tell our audience a bit about LZS Nutrition Ltd and your experience with them.
My first nutrition meeting with Lexi was in December of 2019. When I scheduled the meeting, I wasn’t committed to a long-term relationship with a nutritionist. However, I was interested in seeing what I could learn about why I was feeling so bad and what I could do about it.

Lexi asked me several questions about my eating, sleeping, exercise, work, and nutrition history. Although she didn’t fall off her chair, I’m sure after I told her that I eat whatever is in front of me, sleep 5.5 hours a night, work too much, exercise a lot, probably too much, and had never taken a supplement in my life other than protein, she could have.

Lexi spoke at length about her nutrition philosophy. She emphasized she isn’t a fan of diets. She advocates eating 70-30 or 80-20, which means you can still eat the things you love, but you should focus on eating more of the things that are going to positively impact your health and foods that agree with your body.

After our initial meeting, Lexi started off by suggesting supplements that would address some of the health symptoms I was experiencing, such as B12, Fish Oil, D3, a good probiotic to improve my gut health, and Magnesium Calm and Ashwagandha to assist with a better sleep cycle. In addition to that, I started tracking all my food on My Fitness Pal. This was incredibly enlightening. I quickly found out that the cleaner diet I had been eating for the previous year, combined with the exercise I was doing, left me almost 1000 calories short every day. When Lexi reviewed this, she immediately upped my calories, from 2400 a day to 3200. These extra calories were hard to get in at times, but the increase immediately had a significant effect on how I was feeling. It also had a positive effect on muscle development and weight redistribution.

During our first meeting, we also discussed my sleeping habits and my exercise routine. I immediately committed to getting more sleep and have averaged 6.5 to 7 hours of sleep a night since our initial meeting. The quality of sleep I have, which most likely has to do with some of the supplements below, has also greatly improved. I generally wake up feeling rested.

My exercise routine was a little more difficult to adjust. I have worked out seven days a week in some way or another for years, primarily because it is how I cope with stress. Since meeting Lexi, I have learned the value of rest days, lifting to failure for muscle development, and have modified both my cardio routine and my weight routine. I’ve seen improvements in my cardio endurance, strength, and redistribution of weight because of the modifications I have made.

One of the hardest things for me to overcome was trusting supplements and food recommendations. I am not a detail person, I’m a doer. This impacts my ability to feel how supplements and foods are impacting my body. I have always just eaten for sustenance and never paid attention to how a specific food makes me feel. Lexi’s guidance in this area over the last two years has made me much more aware how foods make me feel, which has impacted my eating habits immensely.

When I do eat bad foods, or drink wine, which is weekly, I just limit it in my diet. This keeps me from craving foods and having binge days. Ultimately, the foods I took out of my diet, I did because I learned they made me feel bad after I ate them.

Lexi has never put me on a diet. In fact, she increased my calories. She didn’t take any foods out of my diet, she just asked me to eat similar foods, that my body would utilize better. Like Siete Chips instead of tortilla chips, Dave’s Killer Bread instead of regular wheat bread and white cheeses like Feta instead of yellow cheeses.

Another impressive component of Lexi’s nutrition expertise is her knowledge around blood work. She is a complete blood work geek and will proudly tell you so. I began getting more detailed blood work about 6 months after I started working with Lexi and it is great to see how my life and nutrition changes have positively impacted my blood work and where I can still utilize supplements and foods to improve my health.

It’s been over two years since my first meeting with Lexi and although I was not committed to a nutritionist prior to our first meeting, I am fully committed now. The goal when I started working with Lexi was to redistribute my weight. Over the last two years, after increasing my calories by 800 a day, my body weight has gone down 11 pounds, from 231 to 223, my body fat percentage has gone down almost 4.5% from a high of 21.6%. I have lost 11 pounds of fat and gained 3 pounds of muscle. My energy level is up, my gut health is noticeably improved, and most important, my symptoms from 2019 have not returned.

I had to do the work and make the commitment to achieve these goals, but Lexi has been the facilitator of the enormous change in my health over the last two years. Her nutrition and fitness knowledge, combined with her incredibly upbeat and positive personality, motivated me through the changes I’ve made. She transformed my attitude, understanding and awareness towards the foods I eat, the way I exercise, and the supplements I take.

Image Credits
LZS Nutrition