Let’s find your voice together!

“Heeeyyyyy Yooouuuuuu Guuyyyyyysss!”

That’s what my body had been shouting. Somewhere along the way, it had lost its voice. It tried to tell me along the way with small, kind reminders that something was not okay. At first it was little things: minor gut issues, mood swings every month during my cycle, and some typical skin problems. Eventually, my body just started yelling. My overall health took a nose-dive. I had developed a number of autoimmune disorders, I had chronic fatigue syndrome, and insane hormonal imbalances.  Maybe I wasn’t listening. Maybe I didn’t want to take the time to listen. Maybe I didn’t want to spend the money. I had stopped paying attention to all of the warning signs.

I remember laying in my bed in that season, staring up at the ceiling at the 1950’s chandelier in our San Francisco flat. It had a crack down the middle. It was old, decrepit. I felt like it represented my whole body. It wasn’t just the face swelling. I had horrible joint pain, exhaustion, blood sugar issues, food sensitivities, irregular cycles, pain in sex.  I was like an old light going out. I thought, ‘I am still in my 30’s, how can it be this bad?’. I realized something had to be done. I had a lot of life to live, and I needed to find out what the underlying cause of all these symptoms was.

I knew that I couldn’t walk this road alone.

​​This hill was too steep to climb by myself. I needed to find someone I trusted to help. But where could I go? I had seen so many members of the mainstream medical community over the years, all well-meaning in their efforts to help me. But most of what I had experienced was puzzled looks, or someone who only wanted to spot treat one area of my body to the neglect of others. I needed a wholistic, integrated approach. That’s when I found a functional practitioner; someone who would get to the root of my illness, treat the whole body, and create a comprehensive plan to help my body do what it was designed to do; self advocate. This process involved using objective functional labs that created a roadmap for me to get well.

I was astounded by what I learned through that process. It all begins in the gut. If you remember nothing else from my story, remember that. Most of what I was experiencing turned out to be symptoms of leaky gut syndrome. I had heard of leaky gut, but I didn’t really understand what it was or all of the health problems and risk factors associated with it.

It turns out that my immune system was shutting down because the tight junctions in the lining of the small intestine in my digestive tract had been compromised. Undigested food particles were leaking into my bloodstream causing an immune response. This caused chronic inflammation to occur in my gastrointestinal tract, which was slowly eroding my gut lining. Years of eating a standard American diet full of GMOs, food dyes, and manufactured sugars had caused nutritional deficiencies and allowed bad bacteria to thrive in my digestive system.

My health practitioner taught me how to reverse all of the damage I had done to my GI tract through lifestyle changes, attention to my diet, eating whole foods, removing harmful substances, and going on supplement protocols that included probiotics and digestive enzymes. I had to look at what chronic stress I had in my life and make some serious changes in my work, life, and social relationships. I learned about the gut-brain axis and how my mental health was directly tied to what I was putting in my body.

Within 6 months, I was back to a regular-sized unicorn.