About Cadence

I'm Brady Thistle. I've been in the gym since I was 14 and coaching people since I was 20. This company exists because of what happened to the person I love, and what it took to get her back.

When Kaci and I met, I was getting ready for a bodybuilding competition and she had already been sick for close to a decade. Stomach pain, constant issues, no explanation, just a growing pile of prescriptions that each new appointment added to. She jumped into my lifestyle with me, consistent meals, the gym, a routine, and for the first time somebody was paying attention to her whole picture instead of writing one more script.

The first thing we had to do was untangle that pile. One of those medications was tied to serious liver problems that put her in the hospital more than once, at one point she was jaundiced. So we worked carefully, slowly, one thing at a time, until her body wasn't fighting the treatments anymore and we could actually read what it was telling us.

Then we did the most boring thing in the world, and it changed her life. We tracked. She ate simple plan food all week, chicken and rice, vegetables, fruit, and once a week she had a meal off the plan so she wasn't giving up every food she loved. Week after week the same pattern showed up. She felt good Monday through Friday, and every weekend after that one off-plan meal she was sick again. So we lined those meals up side by side and asked what they had in common. The answer kept coming back gluten. After a decade of “we can't find anything,” a notebook and a pattern found it: celiac disease.

But ten years of not knowing leaves a bill, and hers came due in her gallbladder. When the stones started, we sat in ER after ER with her in immense pain, and the answer, over and over, was to go home and take a Tums. It took relentless pushing to get a scan. The scan bought her a same-day surgery, and days later she was still in serious pain, and we were back in the ER being told, again, to take a Tums. On the third all-night visit I told them we were not leaving that hospital until somebody looked at what was actually going on. They looked. The surgery had left debris behind, she had a serious infection, and she was going into sepsis. She spent the next two weeks in the hospital on the strongest antibiotics they had. If we had gone home and taken the Tums, she would have died.

Those antibiotics saved her life and leveled her gut on the way out, so we rebuilt, from the ground up, with help, with patience, and with real care over everything that went into her body. Through every chapter of this story I kept notebooks. Theories, tests, dead ends, what helped, what did nothing. Not because I'm precious about notebooks, because having the full picture is the thing that kept finding answers when nobody else was looking for them.

I'll say this part plainly, because I earned the opinion in hospital waiting rooms. I watched prescriptions get handed out like candy, a new one at every visit, nobody looking at the whole picture, and I watched the pile make the person I love sicker. I don't believe in Band Aids. I believe in finding what's actually going on and giving your body its best chance to find its way back to normal. Nobody should feel like their life belongs to a pile of prescriptions, and if your goal is to need less, that's a real goal here. Track it, build your case, and walk into your prescriber's office armed to have that conversation. Any change to your medications belongs with the provider who prescribed them, your job is to show up to that conversation with proof instead of a feeling.

Cadence is those notebooks, grown up. It keeps your whole story, checks in with you every day, tests one thing at a time, spots the patterns you can't see from inside your own week, and turns months of your real life into one page a doctor can read in ninety seconds. It will never tell you it's all in your head. It arms you to prove it isn't, and to be the person in the room who doesn't back down. It never diagnoses you and never changes your medications, Cadence is not medical care and doesn't pretend to be.

Not every story ends in a tidy diagnosis like ours did, most end somewhere better than where they started, actually knowing your own body.

I built this to help people. If any part of Kaci's story sounds like yours, Cadence was built for you, and I'm one email away.