My health journey didn’t begin with a diagnosis. It began as a child with countless trips to the emergency room that seemed to end the same way:
“Your labs look normal.”
But I didn’t feel normal.
As the years went by, my symptoms didn’t disappear. They became more disruptive, more complicated, and harder to ignore.
By my 30s, things had only gotten worse. There were periods when I was bedridden for weeks, and sometimes months, at a time.
I was exhausted by being sick.
And I was exhausted by not knowing why.
When “normal” wasn’t good enough anymore
Eventually, I started digging deeper and taking ownership of my health.
I began looking beyond the conventional medical system that had repeatedly failed me to explain what I was experiencing. I turned to online communities, looking for anyone whose story sounded like mine.
For the first time, I began finding people asking the same questions I was.
That search eventually connected me with some incredible functional medicine practitioners. We tried to understand what was happening beneath the surface, and over time, I began undergoing increasingly intensive treatments.
There were restrictive diets. Surgeries. Endless supplements. Ozone IVs. Hyperbaric chambers. Sauna. Lifestyle changes. And countless hours spent researching, experimenting, tracking symptoms, and trying to understand my own body.
Some things seemed to help.
For a while, it felt like we were at least slowing the decline.
But we weren’t reversing it.
After years of treatments, protocols, appointments, restrictions, and constantly trying to fix myself, I reached a point where I was done.
I stopped.
And within weeks, everything changed.
The more diagnoses I collected, the more I questioned whether I really had that many separate problems, or whether they shared a deeper root cause.
The moment my health journey became a fight for my life
I became severely ill with bacterial pneumonia and sepsis and was hospitalized.
After years of cleaning up my diet, prioritizing sleep, reducing external stressors, and doing everything I knew how to do to support my health, I was still lying in a hospital bed dangerously close to death.
There were so many times when the pain made me question if a life like this was really worth fighting for anymore.
But that day, my survival instinct kicked into full gear. I told my body over and over:
I am strong. I am healthy. I am resilient.
I knew there had to be another piece of the puzzle.
And I knew I couldn’t keep putting off finding it.
For years, mold had been the can of worms I didn’t want to open. Anyone who has gone down that rabbit hole knows why. We’ve all heard the horror stories of being displaced, going bankrupt from remediation, only to be more sick after leaving the mold. I was a single woman with chronic illness, laid off from her job and now too sick to work. How was that going to work?
I decided that money doesn’t really matter if I’m dead. This wasn’t ‘another experimental supplement. This was mold and I knew it was killing me.
After I was released from the hospital, I was ready to open the mold can of worms.
So I hired a mold inspector who worked with a mold-detection dog.
The dog never made it inside.
Before bringing the dog into my house, the inspector looked at the situation and told me:
“I can tell you that you have a big enough mold problem that I’m not going to bring my dog in here, and with your health conditions, you shouldn’t be in here either.”
I grabbed a bag.
And I left.
Leaving the house wasn’t the end of the story
Five months later, my home was finally deemed safe.
My body didn’t quite get the memo.
Some of my symptoms had decreased, which was encouraging. But the flares were still frequent and intense enough that I couldn’t live my life the way I wanted to.
That’s when I began looking at my previous years differently.
For so long, I’d been frustrated that all of the work I’d done hadn’t been enough to make me well.
Looking back, I began to see it another way.
I believe those foundational changes, improving my nutrition, sleep, stress, environment, and other lifestyle factors, along with the care and treatments I’d received, had had actually been saving my life.
But there was still plenty of work to do.
My body had spent decades under extremely toxic burdens. I couldn’t expect it to undo that overnight.
I needed to stop thinking only about eliminating symptoms and start thinking about what my body needed in order to rebuild.
Then I found nutritional therapy
I began working with a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner.
And slowly, things finally began moving in a forward direction.
The difference wasn’t an overnight disappearance of every symptom.
I started noticing more energy.
I recovered better.
The flares became less consuming.
I started having good days.
And then, little by little, I began having more good days than bad ones. I was finally able to get back to thing I love – climbing, trail running, volunteering for my local search and rescue team, spending time with friends.
After spending so much of my life measuring health by what was going wrong, I finally started noticing what my body was capable of doing again.
That experience fundamentally changed the way I thought about nutrition.
Food wasn’t simply “healthy” or “unhealthy.”
Nutrition was information. It was raw material. It was one of the foundational ways I could support the systems my body relied on every single day.
And the more I learned, the more I wanted to understand.
From receiving help to giving it
Over the years, I’d been told a time or two that I had a healing energy.
For a long time, I was the person who was often on the receiving end of help.
But somewhere along the way, I knew that if I ever became well enough, I wanted to use what I’d experienced to make someone else’s health journey a little shorter.
I know what it feels like to sit in an exam room desperate for an answer, to get poked and prodded asked the same question by every practitioner only to be herded out of the room quickly for the next patient.
I know what it’s like to hear that everything looks normal when you know something isn’t.
I know the exhaustion of researching symptoms late at night because you don’t know where else to look.
I know what it’s like to spend enormous amounts of time, money, and energy trying the next treatment, the next diet, the next supplement, or the next protocol because maybe this will finally be the thing that changes everything.
And I know what it’s like to want your life back.
That desire eventually led me to the Nutritional Therapy Association.
Through the NTA program, I was able to take a lifetime of lived experience and build upon it with formal education in nutritional therapy and the foundational systems of the body.
I earned my certification as a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner.
And after spending much of my life on the receiving end of help, I was finally in a position to be on the giving end.
My experience shapes the way I work with clients
My story doesn’t mean that your story will look like mine.
Actually, it taught me exactly the opposite.
There is no single protocol that works for every person.
I don’t assume the food, supplement, lifestyle change, practitioner, or treatment that helped me is automatically what you need.
I want to know your story.
What happened before you started feeling this way?
What patterns have you noticed?
What have you already tried?
What makes you feel better?
What makes you feel worse?
What does your day actually look like, not the idealized version of it?
And most importantly: What is keeping you from living the life you want to live?
Those questions matter to me because I spent years wishing someone would look at the entire picture instead of one isolated piece of it.
I believe in foundations before perfection
The wellness world can make getting healthy feel like a full-time job.
Eat perfectly.
Take dozens of supplements.
Avoid an ever-growing list of ingredients.
Buy the newest wellness device.
Follow the perfect morning routine.
Never miss a workout.
Never get stressed.
That isn’t the kind of nutritional therapy I want to practice.
I’ve lived through complicated protocols. I’ve also lived through seasons when simply feeding myself appropriately and giving my body what it needed was an accomplishment.
My approach is about identifying the foundations that may need support and creating realistic strategies that work within your actual life.
Depending on the individual, that may mean looking more closely at nutrient-dense foods, digestion, blood sugar regulation, hydration and minerals, fatty acids, sleep, movement, stress, and other lifestyle factors.
And I want you to understand the why behind what we’re doing.
My goal isn’t for you to depend on me indefinitely.
It’s for you to understand your body better than you did when we started, take ownership of your health, and start to learn what helps it function best.
Lived experience matters. So does scope.
My personal experience gives me empathy for complicated health journeys.
My education gives me tools for supporting clients through nutrition and lifestyle.
Neither makes me a physician.
As a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner, I don’t diagnose or treat disease, and nutritional therapy isn’t a replacement for appropriate medical care. When something is outside my scope, I believe one of the most important things I can do for a client is recognize that and encourage them to work with the appropriate licensed healthcare professional.
I also believe there’s room for both.
My own journey has involved emergency medicine, conventional medical care, functional medicine, nutritional therapy, and other modalities at different points.
They don’t have to be enemies.
Sometimes the most important question is simply: What kind of support does this person need right now?
Why I do this work
My health journey isn’t a perfect before-and-after story.
I’m not interested in pretending it is.
I wish I could say healing was linear, but if you’ve read this far, you know that it’s not.
It took decades for my body to get to its lowest point. Healing has required patience, curiosity, consistency, and a willingness to keep learning.
But today, I know what it feels like to watch the balance shift.
To have more energy.
To recover better.
To make plans because I expect to be able to keep them.
To have more good days than bad.
And to begin trusting my body again.
That’s what ultimately brought me here.
I can’t promise anyone a shortcut to perfect health. No ethical practitioner can.
But I can offer something I desperately wanted during my own journey: someone who will listen, ask questions, look at the bigger picture, explain the why, and help you strengthen the nutritional foundations that support your body.
I’ve spent a lifetime learning how complicated health can be.
Now, I get to use what I’ve learned to help someone else navigate their own journey.
And that feels like coming full circle.
If you’re tired of trying to piece everything together on your own, let’s chat.
