Stay Off My Operating Table

From Widowmaker to World Champ: Jeff Davis' Inspiring Journey #141

• Dr. Philip Ovadia • Episode 141

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Jeff Davis survived a massive heart attack at 63 and went on to win four world wrestling titles in his late 60s by embracing a metabolic health approach through diet, exercise, reduced medication, and mindfulness.

"I believe we can reduce the whole cardiac industry if we can focus more on metabolic health, but there's not a lot of money in salads." - Jeff Davis

Jeff Davis, 63, survived a massive "widowmaker" heart attack thanks to a nearby medical facility. Determined to regain his health, he embarked on a transformative journey:

1. Overhauling his diet
2. Focusing on exercise
3. Reducing medication reliance
4. Embracing mindfulness

Jeff adopted a low-carb, high-fat diet rich in fresh produce and healthy proteins, cutting out sugar and processed foods. He gradually incorporated exercise, starting with short walks and progressing to intense training sessions.

Under his doctor's guidance, Jeff minimized his prescription drugs as his lifestyle habits improved. He also discovered the importance of prayer and meditation for mental resilience.

Remarkably, two years after his heart attack, Jeff returned to wrestling. At 65, he began competing and went on to win four world championships in his late 60s.

Today, Jeff inspires others to prioritize their health through social media, podcasts, and his upcoming YouTube channel, "Jeff Davis GLA" (Great Life Adventure). He hopes to motivate a million people to embrace healthier lifestyles and increase longevity.

Jeff's story reminds us that it's never too late to transform our health and live our best lives. By focusing on metabolic health, staying active, and cultivating a positive mindset, we can all work towards a brighter future.

Connect with Jeff Davis
LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffdavis167/
X : https://twitter.com/jeff88kg
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Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings

Any use of this intellectual property for text and data mining or computational analysis including as training material for artificial intelligence systems is strictly prohibited without express written consent from Dr. Philip Ovadia.

Jack Heald:

Well, welcome back. It's the stay off. My operating table podcast with Dr Phillip Ovedia and Phil today is one that I'm particularly excited about, just because I'm a wrestling nerd and you know we are few and far between, so I was really. We got to talk a little bit before we started recording, so I'm not going to steal anybody's thunder, but I'm particularly excited about our wrestling connection here. Introduce our guest.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

Sounds good. Yeah, we got a great story to share today. Really excited to have Jeff Davis on with us and Jeff's story and I don't want to give it away either, but you know, recovery from heart disease to become a championship wrestler, so really excited to, you know, hear this and to share it with everyone. And with that I'm just going to turn it over to Jeff to kind of introduce himself and maybe give us the story up until you have your heart attack and then we'll go from there.

Jeff Davis:

The story up until I had my heart attack. Well, I'm a Florida boy and we were just talking about that. I come from Gainesville, florida, originally. Right now I have a 20 acre farm just north of Napa that I'm at. I sold my financial planning business in Gainesville.

Jeff Davis:

I wrestled in high school and in the state of Florida, won a couple of state championships. When I was a kid, went on to the University of Florida where I was part of the University of Florida's wrestling program, which was from. They dropped in 1979, title IX athletics. It was the beginning of how they were trying to even the playing field for women's sports and one of the ways they did that was most of the money goes in the way they have it. They do the calculations. Football outweighs it. So you see a lot of the smaller sports.

Jeff Davis:

When I wrestled at the University of Florida we had there was 170 schools in the division one wrestling. Today there's 85. So now it happened to baseball, it happened to swimming, it happened to a lot of other sports, but a lot of men's sports went away and that's what happened in Gainesville. We were the SEC champions in 1975, undefeated in dual meets. That was.

Jeff Davis:

That's one of my claims to fame and from that I stayed in Gainesville, got involved in financial planning business, became a certified financial planner, stayed involved in the sport, hosted a couple of national championships for USA Wrestling in the early 90s and that gave me the opportunity to be on the training staff at the 96 Olympics, and so I spent three weeks up there in Atlanta helping to put on the wrestling tournament and getting to spend a lot of time meeting the guys and helping them train, coach the junior national team in the state of Florida and in 2004, we didn't want to the national championship for for high school kids and Greco Roman wrestling. And and then fast forward. I had a great financial planning career, did everything I wanted to do in the in the financial planning business, and then April the ninth of 2015 came along and changed all my life.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

So you know, here you are. Athletic background sounds like you stayed pretty active in athletics. You know financial planning probably figured you were pretty healthy and all of a sudden, on April 9, 2015, you have a heart attack.

Jeff Davis:

Let me, let me go back a little bit then.

Jeff Davis:

Yep talk about because, you know, I've got a couple of decades of sobriety and as part of that, you know, one of the things that that happened is I. I looked for other forms of sugar and in 2010, I got up to 280 pounds. Okay, I was chubby, no question about it now. And and I remember going to one of my friends who was complaining about my back problems he said it's not your back, it's your front. And so I I started working on losing weight. I started training with a guy named Zach Sadellis, who was a well known football player at the university. He's now an actor, a successful actor, but Zach helped me get in shape and by April the ninth, I was down to 235 pounds.

Jeff Davis:

Now, six months before that, I had thought I was going to change my doctors because I was getting healthy. I'm really focused on getting all of the numbers right, doing everything I needed to be doing. I went to see this doctor she she was a good friend I've and she turned out to be a good friend because she gave me some bad, some good advice that scared the hell out of me. She, my blood test came in and she threw it on the table and said you're a heart attack waiting to happen. Everything was red. So I, I went into over the next few months, I, I did everything. I did the stress tests, carotid artery tests, I, I did all of the tests necessary to, you know, evaluate where I was in my cardiac journey journey, and basically the idea was you know, you're on the right track, we just needed to tweak a few things. So this was January of 2015. I'm that's, I get the footage finished with the tests and they tell me that that's that's. You know, we're on the right track. You're down to 235 from 280. You're getting in shape, you're eating better. Blah, blah, blah.

Jeff Davis:

And then April, the ninth of 2015, was my birthday. I turned 63. And I, I, my, thank God, my sweetheart, who was living in Tampa at the time, was up to see me and we went out to dinner and came home and my son's kind of teased me because, you know, I, your legacy could have been you fooled around and died dad. But you know, about 10 o'clock that night, you know, we're, we're, I'm laying there. And I had a little pain on the top of my shoulder. Now, in the 1976 Olympic trials I landed on the shoulder, blew it apart, so I've had pain on this side of my shoulder and chest all my life and I just thought, oh, I've pulled a muscle, I've done something.

Jeff Davis:

And it was then my lab, who was my best friend, went everywhere with me. Her name was Madison, she came to the side of the bed and she was not going to let me lay there, and so I finally said okay, I, you must have to go out, the door is open, but I'll get up and I'll walk you out to the back. And I'm working on my shoulders. And I walked about 10 yards and what I've been told is the heart pumping again, seated, whatever was the cloth that I had in my the and blockage, and I felt like somebody had shot me. I mean, I went to my knees and we've got the 911 tape and you know my, she, my girlfriend, yelled out are you okay? No, what's? What's the matter? I think I might have a heart attack.

Jeff Davis:

I'm calling 911. And you know 911, what's the emergency? Is it breathing? We're on our way and I got to the couch, sat down on the couch and I sat there and, as I found out, it was only six minutes. It sure seemed like hours because a lot of things went through my head as I'm evaluating okay. Well, this is what it's like to die.

Jeff Davis:

The good news at that point in my life, because of my business I'm a certified financial planner I had wills done. I had, you know there was because of my life. There were no secrets in my past. Nobody's gonna open up a closet and go. He did what. Everything was okay. There was plenty of insurance for my kids and I remember just saying putting it in the hands of God, and when I did that, I had this enormous peace and serenity that came over me and I was okay. If this was it, I remember thinking that you know, okay, nobody's.

Jeff Davis:

I'm never gonna be able to tell anybody what this journey's like, but I'm always been curious. What is it gonna be like in those last few minutes on earth? You know it doesn't go to a black light, go dark. Is my mom gonna be waiting for me there? You know when I go to heaven and you know I'm an Italian kid like Phil, and you know I'm a mama's boy, so I wanted to know if my mom was gonna be there. When I got there and then I heard boom, as the EMTs kicked in the front door and these big old boys they're not small and they're coming through that and my dog was sitting there. She wasn't gonna let anybody near me. One of those guys picked her up, threw up in the back door, threw her out, closed the door. They start putting the things on me. And then I heard the term you never wanna hear when you think you're having a heart attack and they put those electrodes on you. I think we're having a STEMI event. A what? Ah? The doctor will explain that STEMI event, yep.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

So what we call an ST elevation, MI, myocardial infarction, so STMI, and it means it's a bad one. Oh, Ha, ha, ha, ha ha. People yeah, the background is there. You know, people think all heart attacks are the same and they're not. And they have kind of the real bad emergency ones, which are the STEMIs. And then they have what we call the non-STEMIs, which are, you know, I'm not gonna say they're not bad, but they're not as bad as so Jeff was having the big one.

Jeff Davis:

Well, they told me that you know, looking back at it, 90 to 95% of the time the kind of heart attack I was having, you know survive. You know get through the first three hours and I was a mile from the best medical so I like to say the best medical facilities in the state of Florida, because I'm a Gator, but that's the University of Florida's medical school. So two and a half hours after it started I already had a stent in my heart. I don't remember a lot about things after the. I know what happened from people telling me, but once the EMTs and those folks came in and you know probably too much information, but you know one of the first now I've got a little white hair on my head. Yeah, have you taken any Viagra? Yeah, well then you don't get this. You know they can't give you any of the nitroglycerin. If you've had any kind of ED type of ED drugs so C, alice or Viagra, any of them make sure you tell your if anything happens to you. Don't be embarrassed. You gotta let them know because you've already taken a vasodilator and your blood pressure could drop even more. I act like I know what I'm talking about and I'm just parroting what I've been told over the years. But they started me on morphine and so I have times when I can remember things that I know that one of the opportunities, if it happened.

Jeff Davis:

Where I live today I live in rural Northern California, in the mountains I don't know that I could survive what happened to me. I don't know that they could get to me in time. It'd probably take them 15 or 20 minutes at least, yeah, to even get to my farm. So it's not, I'm not easily accessible and when I moved out here I knew that. But they got me in that and I remember them getting me through the house and into the ambulance. And my sweetheart God bless her soul she didn't wanna go. She grabbed a pair of Jim Schwartz and a T-shirt which is she never wore, but that's what she grabbed because people are coming and she's I'm gonna go get put, change my clothes, I'll meet you at the hospital. And they looked at her and said you don't have time, get in. And I remember that and I remember there's a rush. I was told that when we got there because they had been communicating with the hospital from the time this event started, which I didn't know that they could do, but they were already getting instructions from the cardiology folks. I went straight to a hospital that the emergency room. I went into that emergency room and I was going right to a cath lab. So there was a team waiting for that to come in. Now, later on in my life I've been in the hospital for and I've heard Code Red, stemi event and everybody leaves. They left me and everybody was rushing to make sure that they could meet this and that's what happened to me. They were ready for me.

Jeff Davis:

I know that she sat in the corner and I thought back as we were preparing for this conversation. I really probably never given her enough credit because the impact of everything that was happening that night I've always been thinking about myself but just to have been a partner watching that happen into the ambulance don't have time into the emergency room and people working on me and I'm unconscious. I remember waking up and somebody asking me if I have a face over my neck. That said, are you in pain? Yeah, I'm in a little bit of pain and next thing I'm unconscious again. They woke us up just before they took me into the cath lab for her to talk to me and they had told her this is really, really serious. We don't know what we're gonna find, don't know what's gonna happen, but this is what we think. But be prepared.

Jeff Davis:

I went into the cath lab and the only thing I remember is it was cold, and so I remember it being really cold and I remember, all of a sudden, a flushing, this heat, just and apparently, as I understood it, as I said what was that? I woke up, what was that? And that was we're taking out your blockage. And I understand that when that happens, a flushing event happens and you get this real heat and I said, well, just, you know, he said you did a really good job of it. That's a hundred percent blockage. I said, just tell me, it wasn't the widowmaker. Oh, it was the widowmaker.

Jeff Davis:

And I don't remember much until I got back up into recovery, couple of hours of recovery, and then I remember waking up in the recovery room and saying, gosh, I feel good. You know, I probably got some meetings this morning. I probably can make those meetings. You know, I didn't know it was gonna be nine months before I could really go back to work. It was just devastating. You know the whole situation after and trying to get back on my feet, and I know that's what we wanna talk about. Also, I'm not sure where we're at in my conversation and whether you want me to go ahead and finish this part of it. You want me to go ahead, phil.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

Well, let's actually pause there for a minute. You know we've been doing this show for what? Two and a half years now, jack. We're 140 episodes in.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

I'm a heart surgeon and we've actually never really talked much about what happens during a heart attack and what some of the things that Jeff experienced are. You know, and one of the things I think would be good to mention is we do talk a lot on this program about how the medical system fails, but this is a situation where I think our medical system is really tops. You know, when you have an acute problem, when you're having that heart attack, you know our system, our healthcare system, is really designed to fix that problem and so, just like you said, you know the ambulances are in communication with the emergency rooms. They give the heads up. We got a STEMI coming in the cath lab. You know staff. If they weren't already in the hospital, they were called into the hospital, and one of the Quality metrics that hospitals get graded on is what's called door to balloon time. What it means is, when someone is coming in with a STEMI like Jeff, how long is it from when they hit the door of the emergency room to they have a balloon inserted to open up that blocked blood vessel like Jeff had.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

So all of that worked right and that's why Jeff is with us today, because it sounds like kind of what I guessed when you were telling your story that you had 100% blockage, a complete occlusion of what we call the widow maker, which is the left anterior descending artery, the main artery that runs down the front of our heart, that supplies blood flow to about 60% of our heart muscle. So 60% of your heart muscle was getting zero blood flow essentially, and if that goes on for any period of time, you're not around to tell the story. So I think that's interesting for people to hear and know, because I think there are a lot of misconceptions about what a heart attack actually is and people may not understand that there are certainly different types of heart attack and you had the bad one and you are in the minority of people that survive that. So that in and of itself is an amazing story and if it ended there it would be an amazing story. But it doesn't end there.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

I do just want to go, before we get to what happened after the heart attack, understand a little bit more about because, like you said, you had a full evaluation, it sounds like with a cardiologist a few months before this and they basically said okay, some of your blood numbers look bad, but we think you're okay. And then here you are having a heart attack a few months later. Do you remember the day due what's called a coronary artery calcium scan? I?

Jeff Davis:

did.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

Okay, they did. And how did that look? What did they tell you?

Jeff Davis:

They told me that it wasn't. And they did also scan of the carotid artery and they told me I didn't have that bad At that point they didn't think I had that bad of blockages or that my numbers they had actually improved from September until January. So I had been on a path, it was red and everything was negative or I guess positive is actually what you would say, right, I mean, I just rang every bell on that first test in September. I was a little bit in January.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

Yeah, so that sounds like they're talking about your lipids, your cholesterol levels Very warm and those improved and yet you got worse, which is why I often talk about that. Cholesterol isn't really the whole story, it's just a small part of it, but, yeah, some interesting stuff. So, okay, you have the heart attack, you get your stent, you get out of the hospital, talk a little bit about what your thoughts were then, what you were experiencing and what the kind of road to recovery looked like.

Jeff Davis:

Initially I couldn't believe that it had happened to me. That was probably my just trying to get your head wrapped around the Now, because I hadn't had A lot of folks. They have these heart attacks that seem to be. They drive themselves to the hospital. I hear about that. They've been walking around for a week or two before they finally go to a doctor. That wasn't my experience at all. My experience was a cute boom, you're down. I was down on my knees and it happened like I didn't shot. So why did that happen and how do I make sure this isn't going to happen again? Well, I'm going to do everything they're going to tell me.

Jeff Davis:

I'm a guy that did not want to take any medication. I still don't like taking it. I take as little as I can, but I took everything and all of a sudden I went from one medication to 10 or 12 medications. I mean, they're just all the blood thinners, ace inhibitors and blah, blah, blah. But, phil, you know what. You can discuss this a whole lot more than I can, but I just know that all of a sudden I went to that and I found myself sleeping all the time and I was scared. If I do too much, am I going to? Is this going to happen again? Laughingly, I look back and one of the first questions I remember my girlfriend asking them was will we ever be able to have sex again as soon as you can walk up two flights of stairs? That was the nurse told her, and so I say, okay, well, life is, there is an opportunity to get healthier. What do I need to do? And then they introduced me to cardiac rehab.

Jeff Davis:

Now I just didn't have any strength. I was tired all the time and I think some of that came from the drugs I was taking and everything was. My heart wasn't beating as hard, it was healing. I've got nine years of experience that I've been following. I read everything. I'm one of your Twitter fanboys or I guess it's ex-fanboys and so I read all of the things and you and I are on the same page. I mean, you reinforce everything that I think about all of the things that I have experienced.

Jeff Davis:

It was nine months before I went back to my office. When I went back, I was having a reaction to Crestor Specifically, that was the statin drug I had been taking, and I was in so much pain I could hardly get out of a chair With the other things that were going on. That was when I decided I need to sell my business multiples of revenues and I wanted the highest revenue I could for my family, and so I made the decision. I didn't think that I had a long life ahead of me at that point, and so I wanted to capture what I could for my family. And then they took me off Crestor. The pain went away within days. So my experience one that some people have with statin drugs they get the statin drugs and they're going to have pain in their connective tissues, and that's what I had, and it evolved into polymyalgia rheumatica. So I did what Sorry.

Jeff Davis:

Poly rheumatica, poly rheumatica polymyalgia, pmr.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

Yeah, pmr polymyalgia rheumatica.

Jack Heald:

Squane please.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

Yeah, so this is a condition basically where you essentially you just get chronic diffuse pain, like pain everywhere, and you know the medical system kind of throws their hands up and says we don't really know what's going on here. So oftentimes this will be. There are other names for similar things, like complex regional pain syndrome and fibromyalgia. You know they're all kind of in the same family. Polymyalgia rheumatica is supposed to be an autoimmune condition, but it turns out that medications like statins can induce something that's very similar and oftentimes kind of gets mislabeled as the autoimmune condition when it's actually a drug effect aside from the medication.

Jeff Davis:

And you know my friends who were, I had a lot of clients who were physicians, so everybody was cheek checking on me and so if I had a question, I knew I had plenty of people to ask and what are we going to do about it? Well, there's nothing, you do that. You got to get into the rheumatologist no tests, you know they're not going to give me any drugs. And so I get to the rheumatologist it was probably four to six weeks later, you know, and he said, well, we're going to put you on prednisone. And they said you know? I said, well, they told me they weren't going to, they couldn't give me prednisone until you gave me a test. He said that is the test. If I give you prednisone and you get better, you know the pain goes away, then that's what we've got. Is PMR? If it doesn't, then I've got to go start looking at lupus. I got to look at this. I've got to look at, you know, all the autoimmune issues and I immediately got better. And you know, today I don't really have any other problems with it. I know that it lingers, but I haven't had any problems and and but that was, you know, that became, that became the big issue that I had a lot of problems with. You know, because of the blood thinner I was getting bloody noses all the time Another side effect of some of these drugs that we had to take and I couldn't keep weight on. I dropped from probably 235 down to the you know, 210, 215. And about. So about a year after the heart attack I still couldn't walk 100 yards without stopping and having to rest. I mean, I was, you know, I didn't think that I had much of a future. And then I met a doctor by the name of Preston Green up in Gainesville who sat me down and he doesn't do surgery anymore, but he we spent an hour talking about what I was eating, what I was doing and I see that big book behind your head there Ketogenic I essentially. He took me and put me on a low carb, keto like diet. I did eat a lot of protein and crushed the sugars what sugar? Get it out of here. You know, don't take any of it. No more of this, no more of this, no more. You know, I'm a sugar addict, I love sugar, and he took all that, as much of the sugar, out of my life as he could and I started to feel better by November of 2016. So we're talking about 20 months after the heart attack.

Jeff Davis:

I walked my son, I turned over he was an all American wrestler up at UT Chattanooga turned over our little wrestling club up in Gainesville to him and John said you know, the kids just want to know if you're alive, dad. I said, oh okay, you know, just come and walk around so people see you, because everybody's, you know, worried that you're dying on us. I walked in and I got ambushed. You know, my son, you know, by the practice was over, he grabbed me. Okay, let's do a little of this, you know. So we spent about 15 seconds pushing on each other and I was done. But it was exciting to smell the Resolite. You know I'm a. You know the NCAA wrestling tournament's going on right now. So you know, I'm glued to my TV for the next two days watching wrestling. I love the smell of Resolite in the morning. And so I came back on Thursday and, you know, we pushed a little bit. We pushed a little bit.

Jeff Davis:

December rolls around for Christmas and my two sons are both all American wrestlers. They handed me an airplane ticket and said dad, to Las Vegas, the US opens in April. Here's the airplane ticket, here's your entry fee, and we've already got you registered for the and got you a USA Wrestling Card. Get ready to wrestle. And that became, you know, with the combination of diet and exercise. I started this process.

Jeff Davis:

I went to the first tournament in April of 2017. And, you know, I had a pretty successful college career and I looked and I didn't recognize any names in the weight class of people that were around. So, you know, and I watched a few videos and said, you know, I could do this, I could beat those guys. I got a minute in me. I'll beat them in a minute. Well, the first day is Greco Roman and I wrestled my first match and I'd be glad At some point. I'll share it with you, jack, the video of it, because it's a minute into it. I'm purple and that was. You know, that's it, I'm done. I, you know I couldn't, I can't wrestle anymore. I can't breathe. You know. I can stumble off the mat into a corner and everybody's, everybody's surrounding me thinking I'm about to have another heart attack. I didn't feel like that. I just I was. I couldn't breathe, I was, I was purple. And the second match no, no, real quick.

Jack Heald:

What weight class are you at at this point?

Jeff Davis:

I was wrestling 211 and a half pounds.

Jack Heald:

So you dropped what Close to 70 pounds.

Jeff Davis:

Yeah, at that point Now, but I was running around 220 after, after I started the diet, that that that I had been put on back, you know, almost a year ahead. So I had actually gotten. I was feeling better, I was much better I, I was healthier, I was a little heavier, and so I cut down to 211 and a half for that tournament.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

And, if you don't mind me asking, how much medication are you still on at that point?

Jeff Davis:

Almost none. Okay, Almost none. I think that I had one and I'm going to abuse it as HTZ or HZT.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

HTZ. Yeah, Hydrochlorothiazide so that was the medication yeah.

Jeff Davis:

That was what I was taking. And no, I was off of all. I wasn't taking any more blood thinners. They had taken I think it was metropolol that had been keeping me from getting my heart up, my heartbeat up. So they'd taken me off of that and so I was. Virtually I'd gone from 10, 12 to one in about 10 months With the dietary changes.

Jeff Davis:

Yes, sir, and I start with dying it's diet, then it's exercise. Diet, exercise, prayer and meditation are the keys to what I think of as the success that changed my life. Nobody wanted me to come back for freestyle the next day, but I was determined. You know I hadn't been on the mat since 1976. I knew, just walking out there to compete, that adrenaline dumped the first day and all of that was that was behind me. I had to wrestle. I got to wrestle a guy who was a world champion in my first match and I knew I had a minute, minute and a half of wrestling in me and he walked into a headlock and another move and I checked him 11 to nothing in about a minute and 20 seconds and I said you know what I can do? This? This was. That was fun.

Jack Heald:

Okay, I feel like you left out something important and you, you were obviously doing something between the last time you were an NCAA wrestler and you got out on the mat. You don't walk into a world champion and tech him by 11 points with laying off for 40 years.

Jeff Davis:

Well, I'd been on the mat coaching kids. Okay, all right, I'm wrestling. I'm wrestling little kids all my life, you know. Okay, and we had a rule in our house Both of my sons were ended up being 189 pounds state champions, you know, as soon as they scored points on me, it became a fist fight, and so you know when they'd attack me, you know, from anywhere. You know, walking down the hall of a sudden somebody's got you, pulled you and we're fighting. You know. So I was. I was battling with those guys, okay.

Jack Heald:

So you had two state champions that you were regularly keeping your, your, your chops refined with yes, okay, all right, it makes more sense.

Jeff Davis:

Now I'll give you the story I was well in between that part, Jack, you know I went to the University of Florida's athletic hall of fame. I'm the only wrestler of dummy gate, what they call a gator great. So you know I had a pretty good career and I went into the national wrestling hall of fame in 2004. So you know, I have a background in the sport and I stayed, you know, I stayed at the edge of the mat but I was actually wrestling and I and we've got videos of it but you know, I started wrestling two or three days a week with my older son, who was an all American at 184 pounds. Now he was 210 pounds and he would. He just gave me a beating but he coached me up and I really wasn't that good. I knew a couple of moves and I caught this guy in those moves. I, you know, just to be honest, hurt my knee in the finals, but I had such a good time. I said you know, this is the way I'm going to get healthy again, because I feel better than I've I've felt in years Two.

Jeff Davis:

2018 of April, I went back and I wrestled again, didn't win. I want some matches placed but didn't win the tournament December of 2018. So we're two and a half hour what we're, three and a half years after the heart attack. Now I went to my first world championships and I won a world championship in Greco Roman and I won a silver medal in freestyle. 2019, I was on the USA team. I went to Warsaw, poland, and I won the world championship in freestyle and in Greco Roman. Um. 2020, there was no wrestling. 2021, we came back again and um, I had the guy who was the world champion at the age you below me had moved up. He hadn't lost to an American in 15 years, so he knew that he was going to beat me and, interestingly enough, you remember the I told you about the first match in turning purple. It was a good well.

Jeff Davis:

I wrestled the same guy all these years later and I beat him in the finals and won my last world world championship in freestyle wrestling in 2021. So I won four world championships two in Greco, roman, two in freestyle. For an old man, I told my man that had a heart attack too.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

Um, you know which I think is? Uh, it's very, very impressive, obviously, um. So I do want to go back because we kind of we glanced over it a little bit. But you know, you have, you have your heart attack. You're following the advice that your doctors give you. Like you said, you know you were willing to do whatever it took to get better, to get better, and you're following the advice that your doctors are giving you. And, um, you know you're alive, but it sounded like you weren't really getting better.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

Uh, and it was only when you came across this other doctor who you know, started talking to you about what you ate, uh, and uh changed your diet that you really recovered.

Jeff Davis:

Absolutely.

Jeff Davis:

You know he started out. The conversation started out about sourcing my food, which I thought was one of the most interesting conversations and one that I have with people all the time. Um, what you know he said you know my grandfather ate fried chicken. You know he's we're Southerners. He ate fried chicken and potatoes and salad up until and he was working in the fields until he was in his eighties. And you know what the difference was, jeff, the chicken ran around outside the house, the sad. The lettuce came from Mrs Jones's garden down the road. The potatoes came from over here. You know you didn't get them from the grocery store. They were where they've been sprayed with this, they've been given this um, the quality of the food, just the sourcing of the food was, I think, an important change, in addition to the fact that I really focused on, you know, uh on on eating more, uh, a lot of raw fruits and vegetables.

Jeff Davis:

Um, I went to um eating a lot of fish. I had me. I haven't eaten red meat since 1976, which I think probably helped any all of this to, to, to survive. But I, I I'm eating good fish, especially um salmon, um, and and eating good healthy chicken, um, but again small. Maybe four to six ounces of protein was all I was eating. You know, I'm not, I wasn't eating a lot. Everything else was going to be what I could put in that big salad of mine, you know, carrots. I wanted as much color as I could put in there. Now I'm putting in. I wanted to eat an avocado or two every day, and those are the kind of things that I wanted to try and do in terms of my diet.

Jeff Davis:

Um, and you know, cutting back on the sugar. Um, I eat a lot of eggs, um, but, but sugar was a big thing for me because I was such a sugar addict. Um, all of a sudden, you know, I haven't had an Oreo cookie. I used to be able to eat half a bag of Oreo cookies all by myself, with a big glass of milk. Um, you know.

Jeff Davis:

And now say the last one. I had, crispy came. Cream donuts is a big thing in Gainesville, florida, and boy, that hot donuts sign came on there. I had an app on my phone that told me when the app, when that was going to be. And you know, I had head down for, you know, a dozen for the family and a dozen hot glays that I could eat, you know, on the way home, because they were just pop them in your mouth and they were gone. So I haven't had, you know, donuts or something that's I've taken out of my. I've done all the things I can to reduce the sugar. Um, my, uh. My girlfriend made a pie the other day and you know it was all fruit very little you know, I got to put a little bit of sugar.

Jeff Davis:

Don't put my sugar on it, you know, okay, okay, you know it may not be as sweet and I don't like I, I, my sweet tooth is gone, in the sense that if I try anything that I can tell if it's got a lot of sugar. Whoa boy, is that that sweet? I mean my, you know it feels like my body tingles from the sugar. Um, so you know the, the, the, the change in diet was absolutely essential for me. Um, that drinking I went to, I started drinking a lot more water, so I tried to drink. I don't drink the gallon, but I tried to drink a half a gallon of water every day and I tried to. To make sure I pounded that down and then I was using uh, all through um, the uh, my friend, michael Lang, who we talked a little bit before um, helped sub, gave me some supplements pre, pre workout and protein that I used during my whole um wrestling career and I still use to this day.

Jeff Davis:

I, I, if I, I train four days a week and I don't think of it as working out. You know people say you go. Oh, I mean you can work out and get healthy in 20 minutes. It's training to me. It's going to be training till the day I die. I'm I'm going to spend an hour and 30 minutes of cardio and 30 minutes of I'm 72. Now I absolutely believe that you could pick things up.

Jeff Davis:

I, you know, and, and all of this you know, considering what happened to me at 63, I, they, I had a friend who does studies of biolog looked at the number what is your biological age versus your chronological age? My biological age came out to 53. There you go. Yeah, you know I. I like to say that I reversed heart disease because, if you, I've tracked every one of those, but I know that as a cardiologist, I got a stent in my heart. I can't get that out. I, you know you can't reverse that happening, but I know that when I all those lipid numbers that you were talking about are coming out green now and I tried to make sure that I I do that every three to six months at a minimum. I'm getting those blood tests and I keep them, I look at it's.

Jeff Davis:

It's to me a study that is important to evaluating what kind of health I'm in and because I have a goal of inspiring and motivating people over 60 to be able to to live. My goal is to live to a hundred. And how do I do that? You know, one of the things that we talked about, how we talked about and I just popped in my brain, is this whole concept of biohacking, which is something that I, you know, I've been really hot hacking into your biology and then if you take a bite of it, you're biohacking, you're, you're, you're doing things that are going to help you live longer. And it's not just about, you know, the lifespan, it's the health span. I want to live.

Jeff Davis:

And then I'm you know, phil probably has heard this before because, like I was my grandmother used to somebody would die over in their sleep. It was the kiss of the angels, that's a battalion saying, and that's that's the way. The way, if I would have died the night that I had this heart attack, that's, that's what I hope. It just comes to an end. Boom, we're done, boom. I want to have a healthy life right up until so. How do I do that? I do it through diet, I do it through exercise, I do it through prayer, I do it through meditation. That's what we call the great life adventure. That's what we call this whole thing.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

Exactly.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

You know, the phrase that I like best is I want to die young as late as possible. Right, oh, what a great one. That's not mine, I can't remember where I heard that, but that's the best way I think I've heard it described. So when you went and met with this other doctor who, you know, got you off of sugar, basically put you on a low carbohydrate diet, if you can kind of remember, you know what were your thoughts then. Because here you are, you know you had the heart attack. You're meeting with all these cardiologists who I'm sure all they were telling you was, you know, avoid cholesterol. Avoid cholesterol, low fat.

Jeff Davis:

We're going to crush it.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

Yep, low fat, low salt. And then here's this guy saying you know, basically, you know, we want you to eat a high fat, low carbohydrate, low sugar diet. What were your thoughts when you're kind of hearing that from him?

Jeff Davis:

Well, I bought into it right away because it made sense to me. The way he approached it from the sourcing of food made me say, ok, well, that makes sense. Maybe this makes sense. And this isn't getting anywhere. I don't want to keep taking all these drugs. They have side effects to every drug that you're putting in your body. So the fewer drugs that I can put in my body, the better off I'm going to be. That's my belief. It's still my belief. I know that. You know I do take an aspirin. That was my concession to my cardiologists that I would keep taking an aspirin as a blood thinner.

Jeff Davis:

But one of the things that I do you may have heard of this concept bulletproofing your coffee, and if you haven't heard of it, it's ah, you're shaking your head and to me it's delicious. I put in butter, I put in coconut oil and then you mix that up and the good oils are coming in. I don't put sugar in it anymore. I'll put in a little bit of honey, just as a concession to make it get a little tastier for me. But that's how I start every day. And those are fats. I can remember my mother God bless her soul swapping lard for Crisco back in the day and then thinking she and she was an RN and she was a good Italian mama, I tell you. And then it was butter went away and we were going to eat margarine. You know, we might. I mean, she did the best she could, but to me both of those are poison.

Jeff Davis:

I put butter on things and people say, why are you putting butter on that? Yeah, you know, it's a potato. I like a little butter on my potato, but you've had a heart attack. No, you have to understand. You know grass, bed cows making this butter from them. This is the best. The more of this I put in my life, the better off I feel. Yeah, maybe I'm wrong, but one of the things you asked me earlier was that first tournament that I wrestled at 211 pounds. I kept working out, I kept training. I won all my world championships at 193 and 1 half 88 kilos. Today, this morning, I weighed 192.7. I'm still on the scale every day. I don't put on weight because of what I eat. I eat. You know if you can eat as many vegetables as you want, and I believe that you can eat an awful lot of fruit and you're not going to put on weight.

Jeff Davis:

I don't, and I've got more energy than people that are around me. I mean, I feel bad for these people that are in their 60s and they can't get out of their chairs. They don't want, oh, I can't, go and do that. The cans forget about the cans. We've got to be able to do any. You know you've got to lift weights. You've got to pick up heavy things and move them from one side to the other for the rest of your life so you don't become fragile.

Jeff Davis:

How many people fall down and break things? How many people who are in their 70s fall, can't get out of a chair unless they push themselves out of a chair? It's one of the things that I do. When people ask me about if I'm talking to a group. One of the things I'm going to have them do is have everybody stand up, stand up, and can you just touch your butt to the chair and stand back up? You know about half of the people can and a lot of younger people they can't. Their butt hits that, they're in the chair and then they've got to work themselves back up.

Jeff Davis:

If you fall to the floor, can you put your hands over your head and get up off the ground without using your hands. If you can't, you need to learn how to do that. You need to do exercises and practice, because all of us fall, we trip over something and, at night especially, we're going to the bathroom and all of a sudden we trip over a hair on the rug and can you get back up? If you can't, and you're 75, 80 years old, hopefully somebody's there to be able to help you get up. Otherwise, you're going to end up on the floor all night waiting for somebody to come and help you. We've got to be independent. I'm sorry I'm preaching here, but you've got to be independent enough that you can get up and take care of yourself. You've got to be able to reach above your head and be able to put a can of soup on the can of something on the shelf or be able to take it off of the shelf.

Jeff Davis:

These are the kind of things that I see people who are older not being able to do, and they're taking 18 drugs. I'm taking nine drugs. I'm taking this. Why are you taking all of that? I mean, sometimes I guess there's going to be things that are absolutely necessary, but if it's not absolutely necessary, I'm one of those people that thinks that the pharmaceutical industry. Look at the cardiac drugs. I'm talking to the cardiologist sometimes you look at the cardiology drug, for all the statins and all the drugs that they've given people for generations, has cardiac deaths gone down? No, these people. How am I doing?

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

They haven't gone down, still number one yes.

Jeff Davis:

So if those drugs worked, it wouldn't be. Stay off of your table. The stories you tell in that book. I read the book. I really. I mean I went yep, yep, oh, there's another one. Well, he didn't know me before he wrote this book, otherwise I'd be in there too. But you're our spot on with the things that you're telling people from my perspective, and I can only tell you that I've treated myself as a small experiment.

Jeff Davis:

I've experimented with all of these things. I've experimented with the drugs. I've gone to cardiac rehab and it didn't work for me until I went on a low-carb, keto type of a diet. The diet changed everything From the diet eating healthy fats, eating a lot more fruits and vegetables, small amount of protein good, healthy protein. I'm not eating things that have got antibiotics in them or any of those other things, all of those things that are helping me to get healthier.

Jeff Davis:

I look at where I've got more energy today than I probably I remember having, and I don't run out of energy. I got great sleep pattern. Now I track everything. I become a geek. I've got an aura ring, I've got a Fitbit, I've got other apps that I use and I'm looking at everything every day. My girlfriend thinks I'm a little bit insane, but I love to see these numbers. I want to see how I slept. I want to go to bed on a routine. I want to go to bed, get up at 6.30 every morning. I want to go to bed by 9 o'clock. I want a good night's sleep. I think it's. Another essential piece that we don't spend enough time talking about is getting in there and getting that good, healthy rest. How am I doing?

Jack Heald:

I'm sorry you got me wrong you know it's really cool because we are our typical guest is a professional with deep expertise in some of the technical parts of being metabolically healthy. It's rare that we have somebody on who's kind of on the other side of the table the folks just the layperson who's experienced the bad side and has come over to the side of health. We had an 18-year-old on the show a couple of months ago and she didn't say anything new. She didn't say anything that we haven't heard, but the fact that it was an 18-year-old who'd been doing the research and talking to her friends and realized what was really going on it actually carried far more impact than the research scientists we've had on who've actually done the original research, and I was just thinking this has so much more power because of what happened to you in 2015.

Jeff Davis:

Yep, it's the way I feel about it.

Jack Heald:

Jack, a national champion college athlete, who ends up, just because you happen to be a mile from the hospital, not dead from a massive heart attack. Right, talking about the same things that we talk about over and over again on this show, but it hits differently, it lands differently when it's a medical professional.

Jeff Davis:

There's a movement about metabolic health, I feel like and maybe it's because I read and I catch these things but I'm hearing more and more professionals starting to say the same things that Phil's talks about. I think he's a pioneer in talking about these things. He's cutting a swath and I imagine that there's more than one other professional that has criticism over the things that he says and thinks he does. But I'm seeing a growing body of knowledge about metabolic health and the recognition that metabolic health is one of the most absolutely essential parts of this whole process and we can reduce cardiac I believe we can reduce the whole cardiac industry if we could focus more on metabolic health. But there's not a lot of money in salads.

Jack Heald:

Sorry, Comment Phil.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

That sums it up pretty darn well. Yeah, I mean, from my perspective, I am encouraged because I do think this is being paid attention to more and it's really been a patient first experience because the vast majority of the doctors who are into metabolic health that I now talk to one of two things happened. Either they had their own health problems that weren't being addressed by their traditional education and they came across this, or they had a patient like you who wasn't being benefited, did their own research, changed to this to metabolic health, got amazing results and the doctor was open enough to learn from that. Now the unfortunate thing I see is a lot of doctors aren't open to that and someone like Jeff will go to them and say I've gotten all of this improvement from doing this and the doctor will either just shrug it off as a one-off and not really think about it or will say, well, that still has to be killing you because it's going against our traditional advice, and I'm sure you've probably encountered that somewhat.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

But more and more it's getting accepted, I think.

Jeff Davis:

I fired the cardiologist that I met up here. I need a cardiologist because something happened. Well, our first conversation, and we're telling them well, no, no, no, there's no such thing as healthy fats and no healthy oils. I said whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute, We've got a problem right now.

Jack Heald:

We have here is a failure to communicate.

Jeff Davis:

Oh, boy, and yeah, I know it was his answer for everything was. Here's another drug. No, I'm not going to start taking. I haven't been taking them. Why am I going to take them?

Jeff Davis:

My cholesterol is not high. My triglycerides were just a little bit higher than they should have been, but that's my own fault. I believe that that's because I eat more sugar than I probably should. I'm a recalcitrant sugar eater. The addict in me came out on that one. But I believe I'm watching it. I've got more energy.

Jeff Davis:

I'm looking at this guy who's six years younger than me and you're not in the kind of shape that I am. Why am I taking advice from you? You need to take some advice from me, because this is what happened. Well, you can't do that.

Jeff Davis:

So Phil's absolutely right and, being a professional, it must be even harder for him to colleagues. Not all of his colleagues are on board with metabolic health. And here's the other part of metabolic health. If I die today, the quality of my life has been so much better than I'm. I mean, we're not all going to live forever One of my best friends who passed away from prostate cancer a couple of days ago health had been a healthy man up until the time this happened, worked out a incredibly spiritual man I just missed. I'm going to miss him, but we're all going to die and I'm going to die. So how do I live? Be as young as I can, as long as I can, and die at the end of a cliff, and I'm going to have a better chance the way I'm living today than the way I was living.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

Very well said.

Jeff Davis:

Sorry, you got me all wrong. I got the lectures.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

We can't really say it any better than that.

Jack Heald:

Can't say it any better.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

Yeah, give people, if they want, to, which I'm sure they're going to want to find out what you're doing follow you, talk to you. Let them know how they can do that Well.

Jeff Davis:

I have. I'm on, I follow you on X and you can find me at Jeff88kg 88 kilos. And on July, the first we're premiering. We're creating a YouTube channel and the first one is kind of a little bit of this story.

Jeff Davis:

You know what happened and I want to talk about what happened, what I did to get healthy and what I do now to be able to try and live to 100. It's called Jeff Davis GLA and that stands for the Great Life Adventure. That's what I call my this adventure that I've been on over the last almost 10 years now, and the goal of the Great Life Adventure is to inspire and motivate a million people in the next 10 years to embrace healthier lifestyles and longevity through diet, exercise, prayer and meditation. That's, that's my goal. I think that's why I lived.

Jeff Davis:

It's taken me a while to get, get out here and and focus on on doing that for the rest of my life, but that's what I'm going to spend most of my time doing is trying to inspire and motivate people through podcasts like this, things that I do on my own either through, and you can also find me on Facebook at Jeff167. Jack, it's interesting, you know you're going to find a lot of anytime. You see it Jeff167, jeff118, jeff1545, those are probably wrestlers and they're and we're taking our weight classes on the back of them. So I was 157 pounder in college, so it's Jeff167 on Facebook and I post videos a couple of times a week talking about how to live to 100., I loved it, Phil Another great road.

Jack Heald:

This is, yeah, this has been good, all right. Well, I'll just remind our audience that we always post these contacts in the show notes, so don't wreck the car while you're trying to write it down. It's right there in the show notes. Jeff Davis, thanks for being with us today. Great story, and we look forward to learning more about the great life adventure.

Jeff Davis:

Thank you guys. I'll be in touch and I appreciate everything you've done to try and promote metabolic health. It's it's the difference maker in cardiac life.

Jack Heald:

We believe it is.

Jeff Davis:

It is For.

Jack Heald:

Dr Phillip Ovedia for Jeff Davis. This has been the Stay Off my Operating Table podcast. We'll talk to you next time.

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Dr. Philip Ovadia

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Jack Heald

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