The long way round
I did it the hard way first.
I can read my own history now, though I could not read it while it was happening, and closing that gap for other women is most of what I do.
I’m a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner, and I was a patient a good deal longer.
I live in Oregon with my husband and our four children, whom I homeschool. I spent my twenties as a nomad and was hosted in something like twenty countries, which is not a normal way to spend a decade and I know it. I ferment things. I collect spices past the point of reason.
The women I work with have rarely been anywhere near a souk, and that has never once mattered. What we share is the years of trying to mother well from inside a body that had stopped cooperating.
It started long before anyone called it anything.
Achy joints and digestive trouble from childhood, and nothing ever came of it, as I was an athlete and a farm kid, and farm kids in the Pacific Northwest do not have gluten problems or react to seed oils and shortening and sugar and dyes. Everyone knows that. I can map those symptoms now, which is a skill I did not have at fifteen and did not have for a good while after fifteen either.
The parasites came in three separate goes. Mexico was the first, on an exchange after high school, though I did not find out until I was back at college and found a worm in the toilet, which explained why I had been sick every four weeks on the clock. Nine stool panels turned up Blastocystis, H. pylori, worms and a good deal besides, and nobody around me knew what to do with any of it, so I told my sweet old doctor that we dosed the horses with ivermectin for this exact thing and he wrote me a prescription. One dose and some herbs took the edge off without ever going near the root.
The second go was the mission field, based in Scotland and traveling constantly, and I collected more in Morocco, Turkey, Ethiopia and Cambodia, where I was out in the boonies teaching people to dig toilets and telling them about Jesus, eating whatever the women there cooked and put into my hands, and there was not much choice in it, and I would have eaten it anyway. One country’s worth is probably survivable. Twenty ecosystems all looking for a home in the same body is not.
I met my husband on that same mission field, both of us based in Scotland at the time, and years later his work took him to Ireland at the very end of December, the week after our visas were denied on Christmas Eve. Our youngest was just four and a half months old. The children and I did not get there for another eleven months, and that stretch is when my body came apart, as I was eating largely vegan at the time, before I knew I carry variants that make plant omegas and iron close to useless to me, so I was running down without understanding why. A replacement amalgam took the feeling out of my arms and put me in A&E for an MRI, and we came home to Oregon not long after.
I have run two hard seasons on my own body, and I had a doctor watching both.
The third go was a camping trip the summer after we came home, and that is the one that took everything. Between August and September I lost my food a little at a time until bone broth was the only thing I could eat without pain, and then I ended up in hospital, dehydrated and with my heart running away with itself. God told me while I was lying there that the parasites were still in me, and I said so to my naturopath as soon as I was out. We ran no panels that time. We simply started cleansing, and it went four months, and I stayed within reach of a bathroom for all of them, and it was every bit as miserable as that sounds and it was also working. Better out than in. He was right to run it.
Not long after, once I had worked that hard to heal, my body fell apart all over again, and that came when we moved off the farm into a house we did not know had mold in it. Living in that was miserable. What did bring relief was the infrared sauna and the binders and the coffee enemas, and I credit that stretch with enough healing that I found myself pregnant eight years after I thought we were finished.
I am not against any of that, and I would do both again. What I am against is a pile of herbs handed to a depleted woman with nobody watching, which is most of what I see, and it is not the same thing at all as a hard season run on purpose by someone who knows what they are doing. The order is what matters. Drainage first, with minerals and hydration and digestion and bile and bowels moving before anything gets stirred up, and readiness before intensity, because a body that cannot carry things out has no business mobilizing them. If you are already in the deep end with a doctor beside you, I am glad to walk alongside that.
There has been loss since, and a season where I stepped back from this work before I came back to it. I am not going to be coy about that, and I am not going to make it about me. Grief is clumsy, and I have been clumsy in mine. What I can do is be present, hold space, and be honest with another woman that it is painful. There is a togetherness in shared grief that I have found nowhere else in being human, and it is tender and beautiful even while it hurts.
How that shows up when we work.
Autoimmune disease is the reason I do this work, so it is the ground I know best. I read symptoms as signals rather than the problem itself, and I look at the terrain underneath them. When a case gets harder I go further back rather than further out, because the answer is usually protein and minerals and digestion and sleep before it is anything elaborate.
I use functional labs and I read them as one voice in the room rather than the verdict, as normal is not the same as optimal and a pattern across markers tells me more than any single number.
Sometimes the root is trauma, and nutrition is not the tool for that. It does not mean I stop working with you. It means a clinical therapist walks beside you while I take the nutrition and the foundations, and neither of us pretends to do the other’s job.
I also think fear costs a body something real, and that a woman moving toward joy heals differently from one being frightened into compliance. I cannot hand you a mechanism for that. It is the direction I push all the same, and I would rather invite you into joy than scare you into anything.
Where I trained, and where the line is.
Certified Nutritional Therapy Practitioner through the NTA, certified Nutrition Coach through NASM, and a Bachelor’s in Political Science that I shelved almost immediately to go where I felt sent. The degree turned out to matter anyway, as I was a journalist before I was any of this and it taught me to chase a question until I find answers.
A Nutritional Therapy Practitioner does not diagnose, treat, or replace medical care. I work alongside your doctors rather than against them.
What I’m not.
I am not a weight-loss coach. Weight often moves once the assaults are removed and a body is fed properly, and I am glad when it does, though it is not my aim. I am working toward a woman who feels well and has some appetite for her own life again.
I am not a guru, and I do not have a secret anyone is keeping from you. I am a fellow traveler who has done a great deal of this on her own body and is still doing it.
I am not a replacement for your doctor.
Where to start.
My one-to-one practice is closed just now, though a couple of spots should free up as our school schedule shifts this year. The letter is where I teach in the meantime, and it is where Groundwork, my twelve-week group program, opens first. No dates promised until they are real.