The Wellness Industry is Sick... And I’m Done Pretending It’s Not

Why I Left Functional Medicine, Coaching, and the Biohacking Cult to Build Something Real

Jul 19, 2025

I remember the exact moment I knew I was done.
A client came in with a shoebox full of supplements, a $500-a-month wellness plan, and a body—and mind—still breaking down.
She had done "everything right."
And she was still lost.

I couldn’t lie to myself anymore.
Wellness wasn’t working.
And worse… what was once a movement had mutated into a monster.

The Big Idea
The $1.5 trillion wellness boom has become a parody of itself.
We’re spending more than ever... and we’re sicker, sadder, and more stuck than ever.

The truth?
We don’t have a health crisis.
We have a consciousness crisis.

The wellness world has become just another limb of a broken system—offering overpriced pills, pop psychology, recycled biohacks, and false promises wrapped in spiritual bypassing.

I know because I helped build it.
And five years ago, I walked away from it all.

The Breakdown

I Didn’t Start Here to Sell Sh*t
In 1998, I was headed to ECU medical school.
But something in me rebelled.
They had no training in nutrition. No focus on psychology. No respect for movement.
It was all drugs, diagnoses, and disease codes.

So I took a different road.
I enrolled at one of only four U.S. universities at the time that trained naturopathic doctors—physicians educated in lifestyle medicine before it was a hashtag.

We were the pioneers.
The original functional medicine docs.
We taught that the body could heal... if you treated the root cause.

For nearly two decades, I lived that mission—as a licensed physician, coach, counselor, and educator.
Back when the wellness world was underground and unpopular.
We were called "quacks" and "weirdos." And I wore it like a badge of honor.

But now?
Now the very movement we built has become the monster we were fighting.

The Wellness Industry Has Become What It Hated
What started as a rebellion against Big Pharma has become a new form of elitist medicine:

Supplements instead of prescriptions
Ice baths instead of introspection
Hormones for everyone
Coaches with zero training selling six-figure salvation

We replaced white coats with influencers.
But the arrogance? The ignorance? The empty outcomes?
Same shit. Different branding.

Let’s be honest—most of the solutions don’t work.
Not long-term. Not sustainably.
Not at the level that matters.

And I’m not innocent here.
There was a time when I sold the same bullshit.
I marketed and moved millions of workouts... but I did it in ways that slowly poisoned my soul.
I didn’t realize I had become the thing I was trying to fight.

The Real Reason People Don’t Change
I spent years trying to fix people’s health through biochemistry.
Hormones. Gut health. Fasting. Keto.
I even wrote bestsellers on it.
Hell, I wrote one of the first books on hormones and weight loss in 2008.

But here’s what I eventually realized:

It’s not behavior.
It’s not habit.
It’s not metabolism.
It’s identity.

If you don’t change the story a person lives inside...
You’ll never change the life they live outside.

That’s why so many people relapse, rebound, or just burn out.
Their outer actions are trying to outrun their inner architecture.

From PNEI to CPNEI: What the Industry Missed
Most functional medicine and wellness models center around the PNEI system:
Psycho-Neuro-Endocrine-Immune.
And yes, it matters.

But I discovered it was missing something fundamental: Consciousness.

Welcome to CPNEI: Conscious-Psycho-Neuro-Endocrine-Immune.

The body doesn’t just follow biology—it follows belief.

Identity. Intention. Interpretation.
These shape hormones, immunity, digestion, even gene expression.

Think of CPNEI like this:
Your thoughts shape your hormones.
Your beliefs impact your immune system.
Your story determines your stress response.
This isn’t woo. It’s the biology of belief.

In other words:

Belief is biology.
Story is physiology.
And change begins at the level of consciousness.

The Hidden Engine: How Stress Becomes Sickness... or Strength
Here’s the part no one in wellness wants to talk about:

Stress isn’t the enemy. Your story is.

Stress can make you stronger.
Or it can make you sicker.
It all depends on the meaning your nervous system attaches to it.

If your story says:

I am safe
I am free
I am worthy
I belong
I have purpose

Then stress becomes fuel.
It makes you resilient. Focused. Alive.

But if your story says:

I’m alone
I’m not enough
I must prove my worth
I can’t rest or I’ll lose everything

Then stress becomes a slow, silent killer.

It’s not the event.
It’s the narrative.
And until you change the narrative, you’ll keep trying to fix your health at the symptom level while the root stays rotten.

From Trauma to Drama to M.U.D.
We don’t need more trauma work.
We need to work with the drama we never grew out of.

When people hear "trauma," they think of car crashes and abuse.
But most of what shapes us isn’t headline trauma—it’s emotional micro-bruises repeated over time.
A parent who ignored you. A teacher who shamed you. A coach who made love feel conditional.
It’s not trauma with a capital T... it’s drama we never grew out of.

And let me be clear—this isn’t about minimizing trauma.
I’ve seen what real trauma does.
But for most people, it’s not one massive event that broke them—it’s the accumulated emotional erosion of unmet needs, misinterpreted moments, and unconscious conclusions made in childhood.
That’s drama. And it’s just as deadly when left unchecked.

That’s what I call M.U.D.—Misguided Unconscious Decisions.

These are the stories we wrote about ourselves as kids...
"I'm not safe."
"I'm not enough."
"I have to earn love."
"I must be perfect or I'll be abandoned."

They’re not conscious. But they run your metabolism, your emotions, your relationships, and your results.

Until you clear the MUD, nothing sticks.
Not your habits.
Not your healing.
Not your happiness.

The Harvard Longevity Truth Bomb
For all the people chasing peptides, sauna stacks, fasting windows, and cold plunges, here's the punchline:

The longest-running study on longevity out of Harvard found the number one predictor of a long, healthy life is... relationships.

Not green juice.
Not six-packs.
Not perfectly optimized circadian rhythms.

But here's what that study didn’t say... and what no one seems to realize:

You can’t have deep, secure, fulfilling relationships without Essentia.

If you're pimping, posturing, peacocking, and popularity-seeking, you're not building intimacy.
You're performing.

And performance is the opposite of presence.

Which is why healthism has run rampant.
We made it about image, not integrity.

So yeah... even the data says we’re full of shit.

And I include myself in that critique.
Not from above. But from within.
I was in the system. I sold the dream. I believed the hype.
But now I see it.
And I’m not letting myself off the hook—and neither should you.

Why I Walked Away
About a decade ago, I started noticing the cracks.
Clients doing everything right and still not getting better.
Protocols that promised results... but never delivered.
An industry obsessed with biohacks and bandwidth, but allergic to soul work.

So I quietly started pulling back.

Five years ago, I stopped pretending.
I quit the model entirely. At a time in the height of the pandemic where I could have leaned in and made even more money off of the fear and misinformation.

Not because I stopped caring.
But because I care too much to keep selling broken solutions.

What I Chose Instead: Becoming a Human Architect
I founded Next Level Human not as a rebrand...
But as a revolution.

I no longer train coaches.
I train Human Architects: Part coach.
Part clinician.
Part counselor.
But most importantly—consciousness-first healers.

They don’t start with tools. They start with identity.
They don’t obsess over lab tests. They go straight to the story.
They don't treat the “illness.” They awaken the inner architect.

This is not behavior change.
This is identity evolution.

The Final Truth: You’re Going to Die... And That’s the Secret
I’m not talking about religion. Or woo. Or dogma.
I’m talking about reality.

Life has a 100% fatality rate.

We’re all going to die.
And ironically, this fact—the one everyone’s trying to hack their way around—is the actual secret to fulfillment.

While the world obsesses over longevity, peptide stacks, and the latest blue zones bullshit, it’s sicker than ever in the head.

Because it’s not lifespan that matters.
It’s soul span.

And health? True health?
Isn’t found in a lab result.
It’s found in alignment—when you’re living in integrity with the reason you’re here.

That’s what I call Essentia.

Essentia: The Spiritual Immune System
Essentia is not your purpose.
It’s deeper than that.

Essentia is the directive force of your becoming.
It’s the inner whisper saying: “This is who you were born to be.”
It’s your purpose potential—the alignment of passion, pain, personality, and power into a life of meaning and mission.

Essentia isn’t your job or your personality—it’s the whisper under the noise. The part of you that knows what you were made to do, even when you forgot. It’s your soul’s GPS.

When you ignore it—when you sell your soul for success, status, or survival—
You may still look fit. You may still make money.
But you’re sick.

It’s a cancer of the soul.
A metastasis of inauthentic angst.
And no supplement can fix it.

You heal when you remember why you’re here...
And start living like it matters.

Practical Takeaway
This isn't about not getting sick or not dying.
It’s about living well for however long you’re here.

That means:

Returning to your Essentia
Architecting your identity
Clearing your M.U.D.
Living in service to your mission

Because healing isn’t the absence of symptoms.
It’s the presence of alignment.

So if you’re lost, tired, or burned out... don’t chase another diet. Come home to your damn self.

Closing Thought
I didn’t leave medicine because I lost faith.
I left because I found it—in a deeper place.

In the quiet space beneath the trauma.
In the beliefs no supplement can fix.
In the stories still shaping our stress, our metabolism, our meaning.

That’s where real healing lives.
And that’s the frontier the wellness world never dared to enter.

I’m already there.
And I’m not looking back.

PS: I’m not here to sell you another system. I’m here because I know what it feels like to outgrow the old story and have no idea what comes next.
If this article spoke to something deep in you... and you’re ready to begin the work of realignment, of becoming, then I’d be honored to walk that road with you.
Explore the Next Level Human Architect experience here:
👉 nextlevelhuman.com/human-coaching