Interview with Ollie Matthews: 21-Day Brain Fog Blitz

Hey Ollie,

Thank you for taking part in this interview.

We recently met through a paid forum called Dynamite Circle, and I immediately resonated with your content around fatigue and brain fog.

We discussed my previous symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome and how you have helped your clients combat similar conditions.

You kindly gave me access to your 21-day brain fog blitz course, which contains a wealth of information to get your health back on track.

I would like to go into more depth to discover more about your functional medicine healthcare background, nutrition therapist, elite trainer, author and international speaker who started in the fitness industry in 2006.

You transitioned into the health world in 2015, working with high-achieving entrepreneurs, busy professionals, and world-champion athletes from around the world on the impact stress has on their day-to-day life.

So, thanks again, Ollie, and let’s jump into our first question.

I would like to get some background information from where you were born to where you live today. What’s your backstory?

I was always that overweight kid who had no real interest in being physical, getting bullied for being overweight, and going into the health world was the last of my career ideas, but it did happen.

One big changing point was my dad passing away suddenly when I was 15, he suffered from stress due to work, getting migraines and other symptoms.

When he was 47, he went to the hospital with a migraine, he then had a stroke, and 6 days later, we had to turn off his life support machine.

It was this moment which was going to push me into the health world in a massive way.

I kept going through my last school year and then college and music college before finding the gym and dropping over 100lbs and getting onto the bodybuilding stage doing 7 shows between 2008-2012, it is something I am glad I went through but ended up giving me an obsession with training in an unhealthy manner.

I ended up being offered a role back at a company I worked with in the corporate world before getting messed around. I had panic attacks and anxiety before turning back to fitness as an occupation in 2014, leaving the role.

From there, I worked to build my presence by working with a lot of people wanting to transform their physique before turning to the endurance world to become a performance nutritionist with people who’d competed in the Tour De France, Olympics and even coached the Ultraman World Champion, these were the extremes, but something wasn’t clicking.

I was helping professionals pay their bills, but it was about speed, going from A to B as fast as possible with an afterthought of health.

I started working with two entrepreneurs, one named Ron then another called Rick, it was when I was with Rick in Nashville that things clicked.

We were standing in his kitchen with his 15-year-old daughter, 13-year-old son, and his wife Jill he said, ‘you’ve given my wife back what she married 10 years ago.

I couldn’t help my dad but I could make sure I do everything I can to get make sure people don’t get killed by stress, the rest is history.

You were a competitive bodybuilder back in the day, how did you get started?

As mentioned, I had dropped nearly 100lbs, I didn’t know how much this would change my life, but I had the confidence to get on stage and show off my hard work.

I did my first shows in 2008, then some in 2010 and 2012, they did run my whole life and nearly cost me my job as a manager in a fitness center but they taught me to persevere.

When I finished competing, I thought I was confident.

Still, I had developed an eating disorder, exercise bulimia, and excessive clean eating, even taking broccoli and chicken to the cinema for a first date when it was my off-season!

I weighed everything and never cheated until I had full-on binge outs making myself physically sick.

I had to do a lot of inner work here involving hypnotherapy, mind work, life coaching, and more to get my confidence truly deeper than just on the skin.

Although I am much better, I still suffer some symptoms of chronic fatigue, so I am interested to know your experience and how you overcome it?

Chronic fatigue is something many people are driving their bodies closer and closer to each day and I truly believe that we’re going to see this being one of the most common health issues around, the problem is that it shows up as so many different things though that many just don’t get diagnosed quickly enough and get the right treatment.

I work with many people who have suffered from chronic fatigue or are suffering from chronic fatigue, and there is one big thing we need to look at that many get wrong.

What is the root cause of fatigue?

As in, where does it stem from? We may see a symptom of low libido, migraine, poor sleep, energy dips, etc., but that is the outcome, where does this start?

It will come from cellular health and usually also signaling of the cells down to the brain, so we have to ask the right questions to make sure we’re treating that root cause and not the symptom, I want to stop the symptoms whilst we fix the cause.

Many people focus on the symptoms, and therefore they come back after a short period of time.

Discovering more about your background, what stood out is your background in “functional medicine”. How does this differ from a registered nutritionist?

Functional medicine is a powerful thing that looks at health as a more overall root cause rather than a system to system approach we see in the more conventional medicine model, it will look not just at nutrition but stress in the environment, relationships, the mind, and more alongside nutrition too.

The goal for me as a functional medicine practitioner is to get to the root cause of the symptoms and not treat just the symptoms, but we do have to have the foundations in place and good nutrition, as a result, looking at deficiencies and needs of the body day to day.

A registered nutritionist is someone who will make sure deficiencies are catered for and specific needs of nutrition but less of the actual western medicine approach, this is my view of the difference between them.

There will be some crossover, a lot of the things I work on involve nutrition and making sure we get good quality food into our protocols but we may add some supplements, although I am not a practitioner that dives straight into the supplement side of things for everyone with generic protocols.

What’s the #1 mistake you see with lifestyle habits that affect day-to-day energy levels and fatigue?

I would say not prioritizing sleep with the world we live in is ‘go, go, go’ it’s easy to get light exposure at the wrong time and push your sleep to the side.

Still, if you’re not getting consistent, good quality sleep, waking refreshed and recharged after 7-8 hours of sleep, then there is no way you will continue to perform at your best day in and day out.

What’s the #1 game-changing lifestyle habit you have seen make the biggest improvements in health?

Sleep is a big one as you can see from the previous question, but also one big habit has been to stop the caffeine first thing in the morning and let the body wake up naturally first, not to demonize coffee, I love it!

But push it back 90 minutes or 2 hours from waking and see what difference it makes over time to energy through the day and sleep at night.

Your previous experience with burnout, brain fog, and insights from functional medicine has seen you put together a course called the 21-day Brain Fog Blitz. What can people expect from it?

The 21-day Brain Fog Blitz was a process I was working with clients on time after time which I decided I needed to put into a program to make available for people to do in their own time.

It is 3 weeks of habit-building through 17 videos. However, you can work through it in a time frame that suits designed to allow you to build the habits to blitz the brain fog truly, it may take longer to get the habits in place. Still, the goal was to break down what we were working on with clients into 3 weekly areas in easily digestible videos that will not overwhelm people.

After the videos have been completed and you’ve implemented the things spoken about, you will start to notice brain fog clearing effortlessly.

All within the 21 days of implementing the videos.

I’m quite proud of the information that is in the course and looking forward to having more people implement what is inside to get their brain fog blitzed once and for all.

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Over the years, you have had great success working with elite athletes and, more recently, with entrepreneurs helping them to become high performers. How can you get in touch with anyone looking to know more and work with you?

I am on social media, but you can contact me on my website.

I also have a free presentation, ‘Is This Burnout?’ which will go into a little more depth about what I have discussed here today.

Check out 21-day Brain Fog Blitz
MASSIVE 40% DISCOUNT: Coupon “ADAMWRIGHT”