So, I just wanted to share my story with you so that you know how I got into all of this health stuff. It all started several years ago when I had so many symptoms! I had IBS, I had a constant stomach ache, severe allergies; I actually saw an allergist to get allergy shots twice a week for five years, which was miserable and never really worked.
I took everything under the sun and I had absolutely no energy. I was super fatigued and I can remember going to a play park with my son and my husband and having to sit down and have my husband go into the playground with him because I had no energy to even get up and go and play with my toddler.
I was in my early 30s at that time, so I definitely should've had a lot more energy. I had no energy to workout whatsoever, I had little rashes all the time, severe itchy eyes, and I got to a point where I felt like I couldn't eat anything.
I just felt like I was allergic to every single thing that I ate. I just never felt well, and that goes back many many many years ago as early, as I can remember even if I think back to being a kid having stomach problems and constipation, and just even symptoms back then that I can remember.
How did I get here?
"I just felt like I was allergic to every single thing that I ate. I just never felt well."
I had a really hard time getting pregnant and had to do IVF in order to have my son. So I just never felt well and started to see doctors, especially for the fatigue. They would run labs and everything would be normal, even though I was hoping they would find something so that I would know that I wasn't crazy, and that there was a reason for all of this. Then maybe I could fix this and I could get better again.
I tried to go to an allergist figuring out why I was allergic to everything and my seasonal allergies were so bad. I just really wanted answers, and so my cousin had called me and had said that she had been diagnosed with an autoimmune condition called Hashimoto's disease. That was the first time that I had ever heard of that , and that's why I wanted to look into that.
So, I went and had my doctor run thyroid testing which I had done a couple of years prior and they had told me that everything was normal and fine.
I also struggled with infertility
I finally ran lab testing for my thyroid again, and my thyroid TSH was absolutely really really high, so I absolutely did have hypothyroidism. Of course they didn't want to run an antibody test for Hashimoto's because they pretty much give you the same thyroid medicine whether it's going to be an autoimmune condition or not. I figured out that I could run it myself, it was only $30 to see if I had antibodies to my thyroid. Turns out that I did it was in the 200s, which is quite high, so I started digging into autoimmune.
After this my husband was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis as well, and so he had numbness down the right side of his body. The fact that we both have autoimmune was really really alarming, and I just didn't know how we could both have autoimmune.
I started wondering if it was where we were raised, or something in the environment, or something that we were eating. So I just started to dig into autoimmune diseases and was reading a lot about how gluten could be a big trigger for autoimmune disease. It was actually the first proven trigger to start autoimmune disease, and so I started looking at that.
I was eating a lot of gluten, as most people do.
Breakfast, lunch, and dinner were pretty much full of gluten. So, I gave it a try! I was going to just commit to it for three months and see how I felt. Within a couple of weeks a lot of my symptoms started to go away, which is crazy! I started to have more energy, my allergies started to lessen, and my IBS symptoms were going down and I did take notice of that. I was all of a sudden starting to feel better just after three months!
I reran the test for the antibodies, and they had gone down to an 18. That was really huge to me, to see that my antibodies and my body wasn't currently attacking my thyroid, and the only thing that I had changed at that point was to stop eating gluten.
So of course I started digging deeper and deeper into this and gave up gluten completely, I had my husband give up gluten since he also had autoimmune, and then also my son got him on a gluten-free diet. He had ADHD which is now lessened quite a bit and he doesn't have the H any longer. So, he doesn't have the hyperactivity anymore and is just doing so much better than he was years ago. I think gluten for us was a huge part of that!!!
Of course I was so into all of the health stuff that I decided that I just needed to dig deeper into this and I wanted to help other people. How can people not know about this?
I chose FDN and became a certified FDN practitioner so that I could run functional lab testing, and really learn how the Body works overall. When you start eliminating inflammatory foods in your environment and sleeping better the body can pretty much heal itself. So I finished the course quite quickly, and six months later I had the course finished. But I still just wanted to learn more, I was just so so interested in all of it. I continued and I went on to do a few other certifications, I became a certified Gluten practitioner through Tom O'Brien.
I am still learning and still wanting to learn more, I just love it! I'm certified in those three courses and just love helping people. Now I help people all over the world and virtually running functional lab testing. I'm helping people get to the root symptoms of their health issues. With this course it's something that I could give to everybody that I work with, just to make it easy to talk about diet. This can all be overwhelming, whenever you do something even something as simple as removing Gluten from your diet. I just wanted to explain why these things are important and how to implement them safely and effectively and very easily. So here we go.