Today's track: Modern Leper

Good Morning,

This is going to be one of the weirdest newsletters I ever write. And yes, I’m going there. Fair warning.

No real estate today. No markets. No deals. Today I’m talking about the dumb, embarrassing, hiding-in-plain-sight things that were quietly wrecking my health for years while I was too busy being an overweight guy who thought he was fine.

Spoiler: I was not fine.

I’m sharing this because about seven or eight years ago, I wrote a Facebook post about one of these things, and it ended up getting over 200 likes. My friends — a group of moms from my office that we affectionately call the Mother’s Club, the ones I grab lunch with — told me it was “the most tasteful post about morning wood in the history of Facebook.” I have that framed in my mind. No trophy I’ve ever won means more to me.

But here’s the part that actually matters: eleven men who read that post went and got sleep studies. Seven came back and told me they had sleep apnea. I gave one of them my machine. That one awkward, oversharing Facebook post might be the most impactful thing I’ve ever put on the internet — and it started with me talking about something most guys would rather chew glass than say out loud.

So here I am again. Older, lighter, slightly less of a disaster. Let’s get into it.

Part 1: The One About Morning Wood

I’m 5’6”. At my heaviest, I was 225 pounds. A power running back basically.

I wasn’t sleeping well. I was exhausted all the time — the kind of tired that doesn’t go away with coffee, energy drinks, or lying to yourself about how you feel. I was falling asleep at train tracks. At red lights. Not drowsy. Gone. And here’s the crazy part — people around me still told me I was full of energy. That’s how well I was masking it. Or maybe that’s just how low the bar is for men. We push through it, because that’s what guys do, right? We’re busy. We’re grinding. Sleep is for people who don’t have closings. Normal sleep? That’s for everyone else. Not made for me

Here’s the thing I didn’t know: roughly 80% of people with sleep apnea have no idea they have it. That’s nearly 70 million undiagnosed Americans walking around exhausted and thinking it’s normal. I was one of them.

Colleen also pointed out to me that women get sleep apnea too — and it often goes undiagnosed because it doesn’t always present in the normal loud snoring ways. Sometimes it’s teeth grinding, fatigue, headaches. A dentist can actually catch it before you ever suspect a thing. So if you’re a woman reading this and any of this sounds familiar, it might be worth looking into.

Finally, I got a sleep study. They knew something was wrong so fast I didn’t even have to come back for a second night — they did the whole thing in one visit. Turns out I was waking up 78 times per hour. That’s once every 46 seconds. All night long. My body was pulling itself out of sleep before it could ever actually rest. I wasn’t sleeping. I was basically running a marathon lying down.They gave me a CPAP machine. I strapped that beautiful, unsexy thing to my face, went to sleep, and woke up the next morning feeling like a completely different human being. Everything came back online. My energy. My head. And — yes — my morning wood. That’s not a joke — it’s one of the clearest clinical indicators of proper REM sleep and healthy oxygen levels overnight. When your body finally cycles through all four stages of sleep the way it’s supposed to, everything resets. I felt like I was 25 again, except with better credit.

I started making better decisions about food — not because I suddenly developed willpower (I didn’t), but because my body wasn’t desperately searching for energy from calories it didn’t actually need. When you’re sleep-deprived, your body floods with ghrelin — the hunger hormone — and your leptin (the one that tells you you’re full) drops. You’re not weak. You’re fighting your own chemistry. Once the CPAP fixed my sleep, the cravings quieted down. I shifted loosely into keto, and the weight just started falling off. I went from 225 pounds to 158. That’s 67 pounds. On a 5’6” frame, that’s a completely different human being walking around in the same skin. My BMI went from 36.3 — clinically obese — to 25.5, right at the edge of normal. I lost so much weight that eventually I didn’t need the CPAP anymore. These days I’ve evolved into what I call an “un-serious carnivore” — mostly meat, not too strict about it, and it works.

Gentlemen — and I say this with all the love in the world — if you’re not waking up with morning wood, something might be off with your sleep. I know that’s a weird sentence to read in a newsletter. But it’s one of the clearest signals your body gives you that it’s not recovering the way it should. Other signs: you snore loud enough to wake your partner, you wake up with headaches, your mouth is bone-dry every morning, you’re irritable for no reason, or you can drink three coffees and still feel like you’re underwater by 2 PM. Any of that sound familiar? Don’t ignore it. Don’t tough it out. Don’t be the guy who falls asleep at a train track before he admits something’s wrong. Go get a sleep study. It might be the most important appointment you ever make.

And women — if your partner is snoring like a freight train, exhausted no matter how much they sleep, or just off in ways they can’t explain — this could be why. Sometimes it takes someone who loves you to say the thing you can’t see yourself.

Part 2: The Seltzer Water Incident

Even after the sleep thing was sorted, I kept waking up around 3:30 in the morning. Every night. Like clockwork. 3:34 AM, eyes wide open, stomach in knots. Not gas — nothing anyone else would ever notice. This was all internal. Cramping. Urgency that I will describe very politely as “you better be near a bathroom.” Most mornings were... let’s just say I was grateful to be self-employed and working from home. I’ll leave it there. But if you’ve ever mapped out the nearest restroom in every building you walk into — you know exactly what I’m talking about. Normal stomach? That’s for everyone else too, apparently.

One day my friend Colleen was hanging out, and she watched me crack open yet another seltzer water. She looked at me the way a doctor looks at an X-ray and said, “Do you drink anything besides seltzer water?”

And I realized — no. I didn’t. I was chain-smoking seltzer water like it was my job. All day, every day. I was basically a La Croix-powered anxiety machine.

Here’s what I’ve learned since: carbonation introduces CO₂ directly into your digestive system. Your body has to process all of it. Drink enough of it — and I was drinking a lot — and it irritates your gut lining, disrupts digestion, and for people with sensitive guts, it can trigger symptoms that mimic IBS. Research shows that consuming more than about 300ml of carbonated fluid at a time is where gastric distress kicks in. I was blowing past that number before lunch.

So I stopped. And a lot of my stomach issues just... went away.

That’s it. That was the whole fix. I was wrecking my gut with carbonation, and I had absolutely no idea. It took someone on the outside looking in to point out the most obvious thing in the world. Sometimes the thing that’s hurting you is the thing you do so often you don’t even think of it as a choice anymore. It’s just part of your day — until someone who loves you has the nerve to point at it and say, “You know that’s the problem, right?”

Part 3: The $12 Miracle

This one’s recent. Even after ditching the seltzer, my stomach still wasn’t right. Not terrible — but not right. The kind of situation where your morning routine involves more bathroom time than you’d ever admit at a dinner party.

A little while ago I got sick, and while I was recovering, I ordered some psyllium husk powder to get more fiber in. Just a teaspoon mixed into four to eight ounces of water. Stir it up, chug it, chase it with regular water, then coffee. That’s it.

It changed everything.

I don’t say that lightly. Within days, my stomach evened out completely. But it wasn’t just that. My skin cleared up. The acne I’d been dealing with — gone. My energy leveled out in a way I hadn’t felt before. I just feel even. Settled. Present in my own body in a way that’s hard to describe if you’ve been running on a messed-up gut for years without realizing it.

There’s actual science behind this. Psyllium husk is a soluble fiber — it absorbs water in your gut and forms a gel that regulates everything moving through you. But here’s the part that blew my mind: it’s also a prebiotic, meaning it feeds the good bacteria in your gut. Those bacteria produce something called short-chain fatty acids — specifically butyrate — which reduces inflammation throughout your entire body. Researchers call the connection between your gut and your skin the “gut-skin axis.” When your gut lining is inflamed or compromised, it shows up everywhere — your skin, your energy, your mood, your brain fog. Fix the gut, and the downstream effects are almost unbelievable.

I’m not here to sell you psyllium husk. I don’t have a brand deal. I think the bag cost me like twelve bucks. But I genuinely believe now that gut health is the foundation most of us are ignoring. When your gut is off, everything is off — your sleep, your skin, your mood, your focus. Fix that one thing and the rest starts falling into place.Here’s why I’m telling you all of this.

I’m not sharing this to look cool. Trust me — nothing about talking about your gut, your sleep, or your morning wood in a newsletter is cool. I’m sharing it because I want you to learn at my expense instead of your own. If even one of these things helps you feel better in your body, then all the weirdness of writing this is worth it.

Your body can only handle so much stress in a day. Think of it like a budget — there’s a finite amount of energy your system has to fight fires, repair itself, stay sharp, and keep you moving. When your body is burning through that budget on broken sleep, a wrecked gut, and carbonation it can’t process, there’s nothing left. No reserves for the things that actually matter — your immune system, your mental clarity, your ability to show up for the people who need you.

Every one of these small fixes — the CPAP, dropping the seltzer, adding the fiber — didn’t just solve the obvious problem. It freed up capacity I didn’t know I was missing. My body stopped spending all its energy just trying to survive the basics, and started actually working for me. That’s the part nobody tells you. You don’t just feel better. You feel like you finally have room to handle life.

I spent years walking around with problems I didn’t know I had. Not because the problems were hidden — but because I wasn’t paying attention. I was too close to my own habits to see them clearly. It took a sleep study tech, a friend with a simple question, and a $12 bag of fiber to change my life in ways I didn’t think were possible.

None of this was expensive. None of it required a radical overhaul. The best things I’ve done for my health have been free, or close to it. They just required me to stop, listen, and try something different.

It’s Friday. I always tell you to head into the weekend looking to improve, grow, or relax. This week, I’m going to ask you to do something a little different. Take some time this weekend to sit with how your body actually feels. Not how you think it should feel. Not the version of fine you’ve been telling yourself. The real answer.

Are you sleeping well? Are you waking up rested? Is your gut right? Is there something you do every single day that you’ve never questioned?

Sit with it. Talk to your AI about it — seriously, ask it to help you troubleshoot what’s going on. Make a game plan. Try one thing. Just one.

If even one person reads this and goes and gets a sleep study, or puts down the seltzer, or picks up a bag of psyllium husk and feels even a fraction of the difference I felt — then every bit of awkwardness in writing this was worth it.

I know this isn’t my usual lane. But the whole point of this newsletter is sharing the things I’d want someone to tell me. And nobody told me any of this. I had to figure it out the hard way, one embarrassing discovery at a time.

I believe the more honest we are with ourselves and with each other — about our bodies, about aging, about the stuff that’s not working — the more enriched our lives become. We spend so much energy pretending everything’s fine. And for what? The moment I started being real about what was going on with me, my life got better. Not just physically. All of it.

So here’s me being real with you. And if any of this resonates — share it. Send it to a friend, a brother, a parent, anyone you know who might be dealing with something similar and just needs a push in the right direction. That’s how this works. Eleven guys got sleep studies because one awkward Facebook post gave them permission to pay attention. Maybe this email does the same thing for somebody in your life.

Have a great weekend. Take some time for some introspection and reflection.

Warmly,

Rob Bergeron

Owner–Realtor at Award-Winning Winner Realty

OffMarket.deals | Property Partner Data Company

PS: Hello Spring. Special thanks to my 48 monthly listeners on Spotify! This truly proves there is a niche fit for everyone. Just put yourself out there. Have fun!