Hi everyone!

My name is Jay, and I’m the owner of Savvy Supplements. I wanted to share with you some of the things in my life that led me to start this business. So here’s a little more about me, my life, and what led me down this path.

My backstory

I grew up playing sports my whole life. Baseball, basketball, tennis, golf. I was always up and active, training or practicing for a sport. And that continued through college playing baseball. When I was done with baseball, that’s really when things started to change. Being a baseball player is probably what I identified most with in my life. It got me to college. It gave me structure. It made me work extremely hard. It made me work towards achieving something together as a team. And then it was all just... gone. Along with all the other great things that went along with it.

Playing baseball also forced me to workout and stay in shape. I always liked working out, lifting, training. But at that point with baseball gone and nothing really to train for, my physical health started to go downhill. I still worked out fairly regularly for the next 2 or so years, and then in the summer of 2012 my friend and I signed up to do a Tough Mudder. I’d still been lifting somewhat regularly, but was basically doing no cardio whatsoever. And I was far from the shape I was in for my baseball playing days. I got through the Tough Mudder (barely), but after that my physical health started to really go in the wrong direction. And looking back now, my mental health did as well.

Over the next few years, I’d do a workout here or there. Play some tennis or golf. But that’s about it. Never anything consistently. And my body paid the price. The last year I played baseball when I was in the best shape of my life, I was probably somewhere in the 215 pound range. As the years went by and I knew I was starting to get really out of shape, I figured I’d solve the problem by just not weighing myself. You can’t really know how bad its gotten if you don’t know what the real number on the scale is. But I knew it was bad. Finally towards the end of 2014, I knew I had to start making some changes. I got back on a scale. The number I saw when I stepped on a scale on January 1st, 2015 — 331.8lbs.

That year I made it my goal to lose 100 pounds. I knew it would be extremely difficult. I thought if I put my goal out there publicly, I’d be more motivated to make it happen. So I started off 2015 with the intention of blogging about my weight loss journey. I started out the first few weeks pretty strong. First month came and I wrote a recap for January. Then I started losing momentum. I wasn’t really losing the weight I wanted to. The last monthly recap I wrote was for February of that year. The weeks turned to months, then the months turned to years. And I was still nowhere near my goal of losing 100 pounds.

When you gain that much weight, it doesn’t happen overnight. I never really thought of myself as obese. I’d always been the big guy. I’d tell people how much I weighed, and they wouldn’t believe me. People told me I “wore it (the weight) well”. So I started to believe them. I had a couple times when my back would really flare up and give me trouble. I chalked it up to bad genes. It would happen about once every few months, and about once a year, I’d barely be able to get out of bed. After a couple weeks it would slowly get better, I’d start to feel alright again. And I wouldn’t change anything I was doing.

But it kept happening. And more frequently. Then one morning last May, I woke up and went to get out of bed. As soon as I tried to move, I felt excruciating pain in my back. I figured it was the same thing again that had happened before. I made it through that day, and the next couple weeks with very minimal improvement. Usually it would have been better by now, so I was starting to get frustrated and concerned with what was going on.

For the entire summer of 2019, I could barely walk. Sitting was extremely painful. Driving a car was the same. By the beginning of August, the pain was almost constant throughout the day. At night, I would wake up crying in pain. The only way I got a little relief was to lay on my stomach on the floor. During that time, I started to evaluate a lot of things in my life. I finally realized I had been trashing my body for the last 8 or so years. I made a vow to myself that if I ever got better, I would make a change for good and see it through.

I listened to a book on Audible that I’d found people talking about online called “Healing Back Pain”. I started trying to go on walks at that point, because that seemed to help somewhat. I was listening to this book on my walk, and I could feel my back getting better as I was slowly hobbling along. There was some improvement, but I was nowhere near back to normal. I started looking into injections, surgery, all kinds of stuff. But most of the things I read were horror stories about how the surgery didn’t help or made things worse, and often times ended with people also getting addicted to pain pills in the process.