My health has been a silent struggle for as long as I can remember. As a child, I was a picky eater and remember always having low grade tummy pain. In high school, I developed out of the blue exercise-induced asthma and skin issues like eczema and acne. Prescribed all of the lotions and potions, antibiotics. antihistamines and steroids - nothing ever improved my symptoms. In college, playing two DI sports at Georgetown, I continued to push my body to its limits and while I could perform on the field, my nagging health issues continued to haunt me - my acne got worse, my constipation was constant, and new period troubles surfaced. I thought all of this was completely normal. Diagnosed with PCOS, polycystic ovary syndrome, I added another pharmaceutical intervention to the pile with the birth control pill and continued to disregard that there could be any connection to my diet.

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In my twenties, as a high school English teacher and field hockey and lacrosse coach, I continued to lead a high stress lifestyle with little attention paid to my diet and added psoriasis, bloating and thinning hair to the list of ailments, and a whole new host of bandaids to my medicine cabinet. At 30, my life changed as my husband’s job sent us to the UK. Taking a sabbatical from teaching, I returned to school abroad to study something I was interested in: health and fitness. Upon graduation, I worked as a personal trainer and nutrition coach for 7 years in London and then in Brighton. While I loved coaching people to achieve their goals, I saw so many of my health struggles in them and had a deep desire to learn more about the body from a biochemical standpoint so I could truly help people reverse their symptoms. I wondered: why did some dietary approaches work for some and not others? 

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While living abroad for seven years, my GI and skin symptoms improved. I wondered - what is different about the food here, the environment, my lifestyle?  A life changing answer came to me when in the London grocery store with my 2 year old daughter and I stumbled upon the American food section. Lucky Charms, Skittles, Pringles, Aunt Jemimas syrup and Pop Tarts lined the shelves. When I picked up a box of Kraft Mac N Cheese, I found two warning labels on it like it was a pack of cigarettes. WARNING: Contains GMO’s banned in Europe and Warning, WARNING: contains food dyes, linked to hyperactivity and cancer.  I realized that every single food on that shelf was smacked with warning labels which meant that nearly every single food that lines the middle aisles of every grocery store in the US would be banned in the UK. I didn’t realize it at this moment, but this would be a turning point in my health journey and catalyst for my future career.

 

Upon returning to the US in 2017, I worked as a trainer and nutrition coach at Balance in Chestnut Hill, but my health started to take a dramatic turn for the worse as I returned to the Standard American diet. Added to the list now were extreme bloating, brain fog, fatigue, chronic hip pain, vertigo, Raynoud’s syndrome and new scalp rashes. I was fed up with bandaids to my symptoms and was ready to dive deeper and connect the dots. I returned to school in 2019 to the Institute for Integrative Nutrition to become a holistic health coach. Learning about functional medicine and getting to the root cause of disease, I finally found the answers I had been seeking. I became my first client - putting the pieces together for a lifetime of symptoms. I learned every single one of my symptoms was a product of leaky gut, poor digestion and food sensitivities. I had developed Candida and SIBO (small intestine bacterial overgrowth) as a result. All of my skin issues were an external manifestation of what was happening on the inside. I removed my food sensitivities including dairy and gluten, began to heal my gut, added in strategic supplements and after 35 years, my GI symptoms began to melt away. Working with a functional medicine doctor and running labs I wish I knew had existed twenty years ago, I got the final pieces to the puzzle: I had chronic lyme and EBV and high levels of mold as well as many nutrient deficiencies from a lifetime of poor digestive health. 

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As we remediated the mold in our home, I slowly shifted my diet and addressed the chronic infections I had, I could feel the inflammation in my body reduce as I healed my gut- my skin was no longer itchy or blotchy, my rashes were gone, my hair was growing back, and my mood and cognition improved. My energy returned after treating the chronic EBV and mold and the chronic hip pain I had always chalked up to an old field hockey injury I’d have to live with was gone as I treated the lyme. My children who also had developed strange symptoms living in mold began to heal. Given half the chance, the  body can heal. 

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The final piece to the journey was for me to return to school one more time to become a functional nutritional therapy practitioner in 2022, the culmination of my health journey and calling to help others. I bring a wealth of experience and a relentless detective spirit to my work with my clients - to help them get the answers and the healing they deserve.