About Me
I was ten years old when I was diagnosed with IBS or irritable bowel syndrome. It's not exactly something you want to run and tell all your friends about! After being diagnosed, I was given a list of foods to avoid, and of course, among them were my favorites: soda, chocolate, bread, dairy…and the list went on. Thus started my tumultuous relationship with food.
As I entered adolescence and got my menstrual cycle, I began to look at food with a sense of fear and question whether or not this or that was going to break me out, bloat my stomach, or cause the gas and cramping that often led to me feeling lightheaded. I felt frustrated by my symptoms because sometimes a given food would cause debilitating symptoms and other times, I’d feel just fine.
Like many of us, I found ways to cope with or just “deal” with my symptoms, often involving over-the-counter pain medication, constipation, and gas relievers. In my late teens, early 20’s, I sought out doctors to help me deal with the acne I was experiencing, the rashes, digestive symptoms, and the painful periods. I was recommended things like birth control, antibiotics, and steroid creams and assured nutrition was not a concern. Unfortunately, these only provided temporary relief and caused a host of other issues to arise.
It wasn’t until I had been married for several years without being able to conceive that I began seeking out alternative approaches through Naturopathic care and Functional Medicine. I will never forget sitting in the office of a Naturopathic Doctor who specialized in gut health and, after hearing my story and everything I had tried over the years, gently said, “Wow, it sounds like you have been doing a lot of work, and I can tell it's been an exhausting and hard journey. I want you to know that you can trust me to take this on for you so that you can breathe and focus on healing. I am here to support you, research for you, and create a plan.” I cried in that session. I felt so seen, validated, and heard.
This was the beginning of discovering a love for the body and a passion for the power of nutrition in helping women like myself, gain freedom from debilitating digestive symptoms and hormonal irregularities.
After working in the medical field for over five years as a Physical Therapy Assistant, I began to embark on a new journey to pursue training that would enable me to give women the same hope I had been given. This led me to the Nutritional Therapy Association and Continuing Education through Restorative Wellness Solution to provide functional lab work that could help me create more individualized protocols for clients to optimize their results. I learned invaluable skills working in hospitals, outpatient clinics, nursing homes, and in-home care, and as a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner, I have an even greater respect for how resilient our bodies are and just how foundational whole and nutrient-dense foods coupled with healthy lifestyle strategies can be.
We are more than a diagnosis, and we can take an active role in our health journey. How we feel today is not how we have to feel forever, and we do not have to walk this road alone. It can sometimes be hard to believe in the moment, but we are designed with beauty and intention by our Creator, who longs for us to partner with Him and believe that we are worthy of healing and living our lives fully. As we support the foundations of health, starting with stress, hydration, sleep, digestion, blood sugar balance, and promoting proper detoxification through nutrition, lifestyle, and appropriate supplementation, we can begin to see the body regain balance and thrive.
