Helping you identify possible nutrient deficiencies, food sensitivities, and lifestyle practices that may not be serving you well - and uncover other factors that may be impacting your health - in order to restore balance and proper function in your body. In functional nutrition, we evaluate the specific impacts of nutrition and lifestyle on your unique body in order to achieve optimal wellness. I liken myself to a detective, looking for clues in your story that will help me piece together the “whys” that brought you to the current place in your health journey so that together we are able to bring your body back into balance. My role is part investigator, part educator, and part guide; and my desire is to walk beside you as we navigate your way back to your ideal state of health. Being healthy means different things to different people. For many it means being free of disease, while for some it means feeling your best most of the time, or for others it may mean being strong and fit – at the top of your performance game. The concept of health is very subjective…and individual, just like our bodies. Also like our bodies, our idea of what healthy means tends to evolve over time. I know it did for me. Growing up I didn’t think much about health, except as it related to family members’ illnesses or when I myself got sick. Even when my younger brother was diagnosed with cancer during my senior year in college, I failed to connect health or healing to lifestyle or nutrition. In those days we didn’t have ready access to the information that’s available to us now, and these things were never included in doctors' recommendations or treatment protocols. Nobody connected those dots for us. My college lifestyle was not health-focused, nor was my early adulthood. Working in the music industry after college brought lots of late nights and travel. I lived out of a suitcase much of the time and ate on the go at odd hours. I never connected my frequent strep throat infections, stomach pains, insomnia, or skin issues to what I ate, how I lived, or my stress levels. My shift began after I was married, when my husband and I joined a gym and began working out seriously. As we began considering pregnancy, my focus and approach shifted to eating with nutrition in mind. It was a gradual progression, but I recognized that the better care I took of my body, the better I felt. However, it wasn’t until my son was experiencing health issues as a toddler that I got serious about my family’s health. I cleaned up our diet, removing all additives, preservatives, and artificial ingredients while adding more fruits, veggies, and whole foods into the mix. I began buying organic and reading food labels for ingredients, rather than calories, fat, and sugar. I was a gym rat and very focused on my fitness, to the point that being the strong, fit, tough girl became my identity. At 42, I was in the best shape of my life and feeling better than I ever had. I was the picture of good health! What I didn’t realize at the time was that over-training and eating only one meal a day was not the best way to serve my body. It wasn’t until I donated a kidney later that year and struggled through a difficult recovery that I realized I hadn’t been nourishing my body the way it needed to be nourished…in order to flourish. In fact, when my doctor advised me two months before surgery to increase my food intake in order to increase my reserves, I honestly thought he was unenlightened. The reality is that my body wasn’t prepared for the assault of losing a healthy organ, and I paid the price for many years. Despite eating a clean, organic, whole foods diet, I was in fact undernourished. So began my serious quest for answers. What was wrong with me? Why was my body betraying me when I was eating all the “right” things and taking good care of myself? The aches and pains; inability to train as I had before; hormone dysregulation; migraines; fatigue; anxiety; and even mild depression continued to plague me for the next decade . . . and nobody could figure out WHY! During this time, I was reading, listening, watching webinars…doing my own research and gathering clues. I never suspected gut issues, as I don’t typically suffer from GI symptoms; but the more I read and heard, the more focused I became on gut health and its impacts on overall wellness. I learned that every sign, symptom, or diagnosis has its roots in the gut. When gut integrity is compromised, our bodies are unable to absorb and utilize the nutrients we consume, no matter how clean and well-balanced our diets may be. This knowledge was an epiphany, helping me connect my symptoms to my body’s inability to assimilate nutrients. After much digging and the help of a functional MD, I learned I had autoimmune gastritis, non-celiac gluten sensitivity, and the MTHFR genetic variant – all compromising my digestive function. At long last, somebody had taken the time to listen to me and investigate, rather than telling me I was perfectly healthy because all my labs were “normal,” while I continued to suffer. Once armed with this concrete information, my next challenge was learning what to do with it. This was my call to action! From my experience, practitioners most often want to prescribe a certain protocol or medication regimen based on a particular symptom or diagnosis – the “pill-for-an-ill” model. Not only had this model failed me, I had friends and family members who’d been suffering for years from various ailments who also couldn’t find answers or achieve resolution. I knew I wanted to be the change I’d always hoped to see in healthcare, to help lead people toward better health and wellness. Fortunately, a friend led me to Functional Nutrition Lab and Andrea Nakayama. Studying and training with Andrea and her team, learning the Full Body Systems and the way each system affects every other, was transformational for me. Andrea’s mantra is: “Everything is connected. We are all unique. And all things matter.” This speaks directly to bio-individuality and the importance of every person’s story; it’s why being a detective makes a difference in client outcomes. My mission is to share this knowledge with others, with the goal of helping them transform their health journeys into those of healing and optimal wellness, however they define that for themselves.
