If you or a loved one is struggling with rheumatoid arthritis, you might be unknowingly worsening your symptoms through daily habits. In this episode, we’ll explore key lifestyle changes that can help alleviate joint pain and promote a healthier life.

• Rheumatoid arthritis flares are not random but are often reactions triggered by your actions.
• A plant-based diet supports a healthy microbiome, providing fiber that beneficial bacteria need to thrive.
• Foods high in cooked oils, meat, dairy, and processed items can exacerbate RA symptoms due to poor gut health.
• Regular exercise and building physical strength help boost glutathione levels, reducing inflammation.
• Emotional well-being is crucial as stress and depression can exacerbate RA symptoms.

If you’ve got rheumatoid arthritis, there’s a very good chance that a lot of your joint pain is being created by what you are doing. I know that’s a strong statement, but in this video, as you walk with me around this beautiful park, I’m going to explain exactly why that is the case and tell you what you can do to change things immediately so that your quality of life with less pain begins today.

My name is Clint Patterson. I’ve had rheumatoid arthritis for 20 years, and for the last 15 years have been helping people with this disease. I did a TED Talk around 2013, which you may want to go and have a look at Clint Paddison, TEDx. And we’ve got hundreds of success stories published on this YouTube channel, which is Rheumatoid Solutions and also on the Paddison Program YouTube channel. And we have a podcast called Rheumatoid Solutions, and it’s an amazing resource if you want to listen to success story after success story after success story.

So how are you creating your own inflammation? Well, first of all, we have to understand where the inflammation is coming from before we talk about how you’re exacerbating it. So the inflammation is coming from a reaction. So we often hear about flares and flares being, you know, random. Well no flares are actually reactions. And these reactions can come from what is happening through the stimulus of your actions. One of the mechanisms behind rheumatoid arthritis is intestinal permeability. Intestinal permeability is where particles that are meant to stay in the bowel do not stay in the bowel, and can cross over the gut barrier and stimulate an immune reaction because 60% of your immune system is just on the other side of that gut lining. So that’s part one, we’ll return to that in just a moment. Part two is that we have an antioxidant system in the body. This antioxidant system balances the free radicals that are created with antioxidants that act as a protective mechanism so that our cells aren’t damaged. And this needs to be in balance for us to have health and for us not to have worsened inflammatory condition. And thirdly, our nervous system plays a huge role. Our emotional state, driven by our thoughts, our thoughts create emotions. Emotions change our nervous system and our nervous system impacts our digestive system. And so when we’re worried and stressed, those folks are associated with worse RA outcomes. Worst of all, depression. So your default or your general emotional state plays a huge role in the outcome of your disease. Or you’ve just heard very simply said, if you’re stressed, you have more pain.

Okay, so if we know that we’ve got a case of leaky gut causes inflammation. Our antioxidant system is associated with inflammation and our nervous system. Our moods are associated with inflammation. How then is your lifestyle contributing to this disease? Okay. Well first and foremost, we’ve got to reduce the amount of intestinal permeability, the amount of this cross barrier activity. And the way to do this is to eat foods that support the growth of an abundance of healthy microbes in the bowel, because your microbes have the capacity to create a beautiful environment for themselves. So they have byproducts when they ferment food that ends up in the bowel, and the good byproducts can repair and nurture and restore the gut lining, as well as create a hostile environment for pathogens. This hostile environment comes in two ways. One is through antimicrobial peptides, which tend to downregulate pathogens, and by lowering the pH. Because an acidic bowel is a good thing as a healthy bowel and the production of short chain fatty acids, which are one of the currencies of a healthy bowel. And these are very, very healthy restorative substances for that gut lining. So how do we do that? Well, if your lifestyle is rich in cooked oils and is not abundant in fiber, has little polyphenol content and is Heavy in meat, dairy and processed foods. Then your lifestyle is not helping to create the bowel environment that is needed to stop particles getting across that barrier. So this therefore becomes a self driven inflammatory state. And if you’ve ever missed a meal or had a period of time where you’ve under eaten or like I’ve had in like about 22,009 or something, an incident where I had food poisoning, I purged from both ends for a day or two and cleared my body of food entirely. You will notice that when your body is in a disrupted state with the foods that you’re eating, you get a different pain outcome.

Now, the best way to restore health to your bowel, which it probably hasn’t had for many, many years. If you’ve developed rheumatoid arthritis or had ongoing inflammation in your joints for a long time, because these slow deterioration of the bowel can take many, many years. What you want to do is to give the bacteria their favorite foods, which is fiber. So the healthy bacteria in the bowel love to ferment fiber just like a compost heap in the backyard. And so if you go and put a lamb chop into that compost heap next day, you’ve got scavengers. You might have mice overnight, you might develop flies and maggots and things that come to that compost heap. But if it remains plants, then the bacteria break down those plants and create substances that are good for the garden. There’s the exact same way that in your bowel, your bacteria ferment the fiber to create substances that are good for the bowel. So we need to eat a plant based diet if we want to have an abundance of bacteria that create byproducts that support a healthy bowel.

Now, if you want to retain some non plant based foods, that’s fine. But just keep in mind that plants is what the healthy bacteria thrive upon. And we believe as a business, let’s give the environment as much chance to succeed as possible. Now a thousand questions come up around. But what about this. What about this on a plant based diet? And most of them are answered in a very short period of time. And I won’t go into all of them right now, but just don’t fear a plant based diet because of things like lectins and, and oxalates and nightshade vegetables and all of these anti-nutrients. It’s all a load of garbage. Bottom line is it’s healthier for you. Cut out the crazy objections and just do it. Because the answer is not that it doesn’t work. It’s that you don’t want to do it. So just do it. Okay. Now, within the plant based process, what works is to move through steadily from a low fat plant based diet, eventually into a higher fat plant based diet, or basically a plant based diet where you can enjoy an abundance of nuts and seeds and avocado and olives and so forth. But in the early stages, it’s best to keep it low fat. Now we have a whole program where we take you through specifically which food and which order to promote generally, the best types of bacteria that are known to be most restorative to the bowel. And it’s not an exact science, but there is definitely a sequence that works best for rheumatoid arthritis clients because we’ve helped over 20,000 over the last 15 years.

So if you’re interested in that, then obviously you can check out a link below this video. There’ll be a link. You can go and speak to myself or one of my team members after filling out a little application and see if you want to talk to us and work with us, we can help you through that process and a whole bunch of other things as well, not just the diet. Um, but the sequence is very, very, very important. So this alone can change your inflammation. So what this may do for many people is reduce their number of affected joints from, say, you know, let’s say you have eight affected joints. Just getting everything right with your foods can reduce the inflammatory activity by half. It doesn’t get rid of it. Just doing the diet, even when it’s done perfectly, doesn’t get rid of all your pain because there are still residual problems. Remember I talked about the antioxidant system and remember I talked about the nervous system. These are very, very crucial aspects as well. So it’s not just all leaky gut. Okay. So there is an now we’re talking about the antioxidant system. A key antioxidant is called glutathione. Studies have shown that glutathione levels are such an indicator of inflammatory activity in people with rheumatoid arthritis that they can clearly predict based on if the measurement comes from a patient having low glutathione. They know inflammation is going to be high and in the presence of a patient with high glutathione, predictably, inflammatory activity like C-reactive protein is low.

Okay. So that’s how important glutathione is. It’s an antioxidant. And it gets depleted when we are exposed to an inflammatory state for a very long period of time because the inflammatory activity creates free radicals. Okay. So your body, in addition to the heat, the swelling, the stiffness, the warmth in the joints is producing free radicals. So how are they neutralized? They are neutralized through antioxidants. And the master antioxidant in the human body is glutathione. And it gets depleted because it’s constantly trying to put out this load of free radicals to neutralize them. So as we deplete our glutathione, we then have less defenses against the free radicals. Inflammation can rise accordingly. Hence, you see that relationship. So how do we get glutathione? How does this tie back to how you might be contributing to your own disease? It’s because when we’re inactive, we are not creating more glutathione resources in the body. Glutathione is best stimulated through movement, through getting fit, through getting strong physical activity. So having a sedentary lifestyle leads to an invitation of more inflammation. So when we’re inflamed, we feel tired. Okay. We feel discouraged. We aren’t motivated to go and do things that can elevate glutathione, which is going to help reduce inflammation long term. We think I’m having a rest day. I don’t feel good. My joints hurt. I don’t want to potentially worsen my joints by doing exercise that may hurt them or I don’t know how to exercise or I just don’t want to do it.

That lifestyle, unfortunately, is going to lead to bad outcomes long term. So the lifestyle approach that works is to become physically fit and strong. And you might say, but Clint, how do I do that? I’m got this pain and that pain and this pain. Correct. Which is why we have a physical therapist in our coaching team who works with every client, helps them over several months to be able to develop strategies to Unlock inflamed joints. Because while the dietary process helps to bring down inflammation, some joints become like a closed loop. And no matter what you do with your foods, in fact, even fasting, sometimes the inflammation still remains in that joint. And so if fasting doesn’t get rid of it, then how do you expect eating any kind of food in addition to like above, a fasting state to magically turn that around? It’s a closed loop. The answer is to drive it out through the right physical therapy. And so a lifestyle in which you’re moving your body regularly and you’re building strength as you develop more and more tolerance to the movements, gets you over that threshold of clearing the inflammation in that joint. Okay. So it’s not about pushing through pain. It’s about doing movement That’s within a threshold of discomfort. The right exercise and then scaling the amount of resistance that’s done for every joint that hurts right down to your little fingers, because every joint benefits from this kind of intervention.

And the third part of it is being worried, taking steroids, which increase like the, uh, the nervous system dysfunction and being depressed and essentially just having low mood states. This exacerbates the disease. Long term outcomes of people who are depressed have more joint deformities. They have more joint replacements, they have higher C-reactive protein and more medication dependency. Having negative mood states exacerbates the disease. And you might say, but I feel crappy. So like, how can I not feel like this. We’ve tried many, many things over the years with clients, from meditation to nature walks like I’m on right now to comedy films, all sorts of stuff. What works best? And this if you learn one thing from this video, what works best is just to see the evidence of getting better. Because no matter how much apparent joy there is in your life of like a child, you know, getting first in their, in their, you know, high school exam and this joy and that joy. Something doesn’t feel totally joyful in life whilst you’re still getting worse with this disease. But the moment that you see the evidence of improvement, we tend to extrapolate what that feels like into the future and say, if I can just continue to improve like I’m now, wow, like I could be, I could normalize my CRP, I could get out and get a pain in my my joints within like three four months from now, whatever it might be. And that feeling produces endorphins; that feeling produces dopamine. And these are very, very powerful hormones in the body, which are strongly anti-inflammatory. They’re even trying to develop drugs around these particular types of anti-inflammatory hormones for rheumatoid arthritis patients, because they’re so effective at being an anti-inflammatory. So if we can see the evidence of getting better, what happens is we get excited. And Lord knows, once we’re getting excited with this disease, we develop a snowball effect of momentum improvement momentum. We want to do the exercises more. We want to scale them. We want to build more on those. We want to exercise more joints, want more strength. We love the diet. We’re like, thank you God. Now I know what to eat. Now I know exactly the food combining and when I should eat, and how much I should eat, and which foods have the biggest impact on my body in terms of pain relief. Which ones are easy to prep? And now the family’s eating the foods, and you develop this healing groove, as we call it. And this healing groove is precious. And you want to stay in this healing groove and ride that thing for as long as possible. So if your lifestyle is one in which you’re eating freely, or it’s some kind of basic approach from like a naturopath of just some kind of paleo diet without processed foods or maybe just going gluten free, it’ll never get you euphoric results with this disease.

You’ve got to forget about eating for you. You’ve got to eat for your gut microbiome. Give them their favorite foods in the in the perfect order. Life will change. You’ve got to understand that movement is king. That strength defeats inflammation with rheumatoid. It’s not. If you don’t use it, you lose it. If you don’t use it all the time, you lose it. Okay, so the letters RA should really stand for really active because that’s what we need to become. Your diagnosis is that you are now really active. Okay. And if you don’t, you default back to rheumatoid arthritis. And then finally, you’ve got to get your mindset around getting better, taking control, taking self-responsibility. And when you do that, and when you see the evidence of improvement, it’s game on, baby. It’s momentum. It’s happiness. It’s joy. I know the feeling.

I hope this is helpful for you. We do this all the time. You can see I love talking about this. This is second nature to me. We help people all the time through our coaching program. So I’ve had the blessing of having a medical doctor on my staff. A physical therapist who’s incredible. A dietician, psychologist and our team help our members go through month after month after month of support. Live calls go through a curriculum that’s laid out step by step so they can implement every little piece of the puzzle so not one stone is unturned. Right down to the omega six three ratio that’s measured before and after and the oral microbiome. All the blood important blood markers, every aspect of this so that we get as much alignment as possible to maximum health. And that’s the mission, maximum health. So when people start with us, some people want to get off drugs, other people trying to avoid drugs. Some people are don’t care about the drugs. They just are in pain. Still want to get out of pain, whatever it might be. If you have this disease, there’s so much to learn and so much you can implement. And to loop this all the way back to the title of this video. Your lifestyle right now is almost certainly in some way contributing to your disease state. And so implement what I’ve shared with you. Or if you want help, we can fast track you all the way there and, uh, and make this whole thing a wonderful life changing project for you.

So if that’s something you’d like to do again, look underneath this video. There’ll be a link where you can just speak to myself or the dietitian or another member on our team and find out if you know your set of circumstances is a good fit for our coaching service, but I’m going to enjoy the rest of this walk. I’ve enjoyed sharing my thoughts with you today, and I hope this is helpful. And I’ll see you in another video.