When Is It a Lifestyle Change or Something Deeper?
You are not feeling your best. You feel sluggish, tired, exhausted most days, unmotivated and have an overall feeling of blah.
The question you ask yourself is, “Do I need a lifestyle change or is there something deeper going on?
I’ve been there!
My Lifestyle Changes: January 2018 ➡️ June 2018
Let me take you back to January 2018. Up until that point, I had been struggling off for 9 years (since the birth of my son) to lose the 40 pounds of “baby weight.” I would lose 10 or so pounds, only to regain it again. I was still living in the “diet culture” mentality until I learned a better way.
I was introduced to the 30 Days to Healthy Living Program by my Pilates instructor Georgie and it changed EVERYTHING for me! Seth Perry, my Health Coach for the program and Executive National Vice President with the Health and Wellness company Arbonne International, guided me through the 30 Day program. Those 30 days acted as a reset for my body where I focused on pausing on the most inflammatory foods, increased nutrient intake, properly hydrating my body, getting quality sleep, and restoring healthy gut function.
Within the first 2 weeks of that 30 day program, the bloating, gas, constipation, and overall digestive distress I had been suffering from since I was teen started to subside. I had thought those issues were just “normal” for me, but that was not true! I learned that certain foods I was eating were the actual culprits.
Not only did I start to feel better, slept better, had more energy; but I also lost 12 pounds that first month because pausing on those inflammatory foods for my body allowed my body to rest and restore. This gave it the opportunity to release and shed the unwanted weight because I brought down the inflammatory response my body was continuously in.
While losing 12 pounds was wonderful, I still had 28 more pounds to go to get to a reasonable and healthy weight for my body, so I just kept going. I continued to see progress as the months went on. Some of those victories were not reflected on the scale. My clothes were looser and I just overall felt amazing, so I stopped focusing on the scale. I shifted my focus to how I felt. I fueled my body with the foods that worked best for me (everyone is bio-individual) until I got to where I felt my best.
I achieved this through making simple lifestyle changes and I maintained this for 3 years because I was never “dieting.” I was simply eating nutrient dense foods, avoiding the particular foods that didn’t work for my body and prioritized water, good quality sleep, and moving my body in a way that I loved.
Now, everything changed in early November of 2021, which triggered the “something deeper” many months later.
After eating a lettuce wrapped burger after my son’s soccer game on a Saturday afternoon, I began feeling awful. I was in major digestive distress, so I thought perhaps the lettuce was tainted or something was off with the burger, but as it turns out, by Sunday night with no relief from anything I tried, I ended up in the ER with a case of appendicitis.
I had laparoscopic surgery that next morning to remove my appendix, only to be told a few days later they had found a “nicely contained” cancer tumor at the end of my appendix, (which freaked me the f*ck out) but was declared “all good” and sent home with a round of antibiotics.
About 4 days after I finished my course of antibiotics, the right side of my abdomen began to hurt again and rather than waiting like I had when my symptoms first started, I immediately called my surgeon and he recommended I come in to see him the next morning.
After a quick assessment and me being VERY CLEAR that he could not touch my abdomen because of the pain, he sent me straight to the ER. After a few tests I was quickly diagnosed with a liver abscess and a raging infection, due to having had a perforation in my appendix at the time of the removal. I was told that once I had finished the initial course of antibiotics, which kept any infection at bay, the infection just took over. I learned that when there is anything like that floating around your body, when you lay down, it travels towards your liver. The liver is one of the most amazing organs in our body. It wants to “clean up the messes”, therefore creating the liver abscess.
I spent 6 days in the hospital, 3 1⁄2 of those days were without food because they didn’t know if they were going to have to do a needle aspiration on the abscess, if they would need to open me back up, or if the IV antibiotics would beat back th infection and the abscess would shrink. Thankfully, the latter occurred, but to be safe, the Infectious Disease doctor ordered a midline (shorter than a PIC line) to be installed in my left arm from the inside of my bicep up to my shoulder. Think of installing a straw in one of your veins with 2 ports dangling from it. An incredibly unpleasant procedure.
In any event, once they determined the lines were all good, they released me from the hospital and sent me home the next day with a week's worth of self-administered IV antibiotics. Having to learn to flush my IV line and self-administer the antibiotics was traumatic, on top of the hospital stay.
The following week I was re-scanned and re-tested and declared the infection was gone. After another week, without antibiotics, the checks were performed and I was once again declared “all clear” of infection. For the next few weeks, about every 2 or so, I would have another blood test to ensure the infection didn’t come back and I was “good.”
Once those final tests were done, or even after the first “all clear” post antibiotics, there was NEVER ANY sort of “after care” to rebuild my depleted body. For nearly a month I was given very intense antibiotics, which I’m so grateful for because modern medicine literally saved my life. It was in the “aftercare” where the breakdown occurred.
How are we supported after a health event? The answer is clear. We are not!
I went back to my normal day to day, I resumed my probiotics, eating mostly healthy, with the exception of relying on wine, some added sugar I normally don’t indulge in because I was experiencing major PTSD afterwards. That first month after being released from the hospital I would cry at the drop of a hat. Looking back, it was a really tough time. I had been super scared I wouldn’t recover as my mother never came home from the hospital after contracting an infection after her health event. While being scared, I also willed myself to be thankful, grateful and appreciative to all that cared for me and the life-saving antibiotics that pushed back the infection.
Now, here is where the “Something Deeper” comes into play.
It’s typically never just one root cause, it’s almost always a few things happening, creating a perfect storm.
Over the next 18 months post-infection, I experienced huge changes.
I began a steady increase of weight gain.
I started experiencing 30 day + long menstrual cycles.
I had a random rash on the inside of my left palm.
I started noticing how sensitive I was becoming to sugar and I just had an overall feeling of depletion.
The drain was so slow that I didn’t even notice it right away, it kind of sneaks up on you and the weight gain I was attributing to the overly-used generic term of “menopause”.
It’s widely accepted that when women are in perimenopause or menopause it’s normal for them to experience prolonged bleeding or excess weight gain, among other symptoms, but it’s not! Any symptoms that are not ‘normal” are signs of an imbalance somewhere in the body.
When I saw my gynecologist for my prolonged bleeding, her solution was a pill or a procedure, never moving further to investigate the “why” this was happening.
I was frustrated and just DONE!
In late summer of 2023, I began working with my dear friend and Functional Practitioner, Kim Hope. We began some testing that quite frankly, should be the standard of care for everyone.
Intuitively what made the most sense to me was to test multiple pathways of my body to get a clear aerial overview of what was going on with my body. When asked to test my hormones with my gynecologist, I was dismissed as we often are by conventional medicine, instead being offered a pill or a procedure as I mentioned above.
I chose to start with a food allergy blood test because the foods I prepared and ate were the simplest and most immediate thing I could control. Sure enough, it revealed foods that were causing an inflammatory response.
Next we moved on to a very comprehensive blood test, way more robust than our normal yearly annual checkup blood tests. It’s important to note that the “ranges” in conventional medicine are very wide. Either side of that acceptable range isn’t necessarily the healthiest. Functional medicine ranges are much tighter and geared towards optimal health. Many of my blood test results were ‘signed off’ by my doctor as within normal ranges, whereas when measured against the functional ranges, they were either on the low or high sides as was the case with my fasting glucose levels.
Then we moved on to a stool sample test to check for any gut dysbiosis and as we suspected, I had an overgrowth of bad bacteria in my gut, also known as Candida, as well as virtually zero stomach acid, which is vital to help breakdown foods and absorb nutrients. It’s worth reminding that when we are given any sort of antibiotic it will completely wipe out both an infection/bad bacteria, but it also kills off any good bacteria that we need. That is why it is absolutely vital that we focus on rebuilding the good bacteria.
Finally, I took a DUTCH test which is a dried urine test to measure how my body was converting my hormones and what hormones were exiting my body. Through this process I learned that measuring hormones in blood is only one way to gauge hormones. Blood reflects what hormones are being made, but the other side of that is how your body is converting the hormones and what is actually exiting the body. That’s the other side of testing your hormones and this is not done on any regular basis and yet, it should be a standard of care to get the full and complete picture of our hormones.
This test revealed a major problem which contributed to my excess weight gain and more than 30 day long periods. All 3 of my estrogen markers were off the chart high and my body was essentially ‘recycling’ the excess hormones and not clearing it, therefore being stored in the extra fat my body was creating to store it. Being that most cancers are estrogen driven and the fact that I had already had cancer show up in my appendix, it was a major wake up call and quite frankly scared the shit out of me.
Once we had the full picture of what was happening in my body, the “something deeper” that went WAY BEYOND LIFESTYLE, Kim and I got to work on formulating a plan to get my body back on track.
I immediately went on a no sugar eating plan to bring my blood sugar levels back to within an optimal functional range, as well cut off any fuel that was feeding the overgrowth of Candida in my gut. I ceased all alcohol consumption (except indulging at Christmas because we had family in town for 16 days) because I learned through my Health Coaching course that when we drink alcohol, our liver will process the foreign toxin of alcohol over processing any excess hormone. I began a regime of Chinese Herbs (not pharmaceuticals) to help push back the excess estrogens. I stopped the excessive bleeding and my energy levels started coming back. My inflamed and overtaxed body is beginning to heal and while I’m not yet where I want to be, I’m well on my way.
My Something Deeper: June 2023 ➡️ My Journey Back to Health: February 2024
I know that had I been given a proper post-health event care plan, all of this could have been avoided. With that said, I am a believer that things happen for us and not to us, so with this situation, I’ve gained so much experience and wisdom that I can now bring in to my Health Coaching to help guide you on how to fill that gap of care we, as a collective, are not being offered
This just motivates me more and just within the last month of me sharing my story in conversations and on social media, I’ve had countless women come forward to say they are experiencing similar symptoms or they’ve been dismissed by their doctors too and they are looking for answers.
We all deserve a better standard of care. We deserve to feel our best and sometimes it’s as simple as a lifestyle change, but sometimes it’s something deeper. Either way, I am someone you can count on to help guide you to find the answers you need.
If you know a lifestyle change is needed or if you feel intuitively it’s something deeper, reach out and let’s talk it through. My style of coaching is not to tell you what you need to do, it’s to discuss the options and let you decide what’s best for you as you know your body best.
Let’s get started! Book your discovery call here.
