Food Isn't Always Enough

Healing Hypothesis Introduction

You’re ready to change your life. You can reclaim your health.

There is a set of concepts we use to help you change your life. Together, they make up our Healing Hypothesis. Everyone is unique and has a unique protocol. Applying these concepts to your case is what guides me in developing that protocol.

I want to share them with you so that you understand what you need to consider in order to finally get your health on track.

They are:

  • Health begins in the gut

  • Your body is built to heal itself

  • One size doesn’t fit all

  • Food isn’t always enough

  • Your unique biochemistry

  • A holistic approach

  • Your custom supplement protocol

  • Your custom diet

These concepts form our Healing Hypothesis, and they are the outline of the roadmap we use to bring you relief from your health problems, feel better, and help you meet your health and wellness goals.

Each concept helps us move the needle forward, and together they form the powerful, and holistic approach you need.

I know this because these concepts represent the lessons I learned along my healing journey, and are the things I did to get myself, and my health, back on track.

Here’s the deal. Chronic and complex health conditions have root causes. Finding these root causes is where we have opportunities to improve, and possibly even resolve them. My Healing Hypothesis guides us through identifying and addressing these root cause issues.

As a functional and clinical nutritionist I do not diagnose, or treat any condition. My job is to teach you what you can do to heal, feel better, and to help you identify root causes of the health problems you have. The kind of root causes I’m talking about lead to imbalances in your body, and long-standing ones can cause chronic and complex health problems. We can address imbalances with natural means like diet, supplements, and lifestyle interventions, and prevent long-term consequences.

The Problem (Part 1)

Likely until now, you’ve been fumbling through the maze of conventional, Western medicine.

You go to your doctor, you describe your symptoms, and they do some lab tests. There are two scenarios I see often. The first is that those lab tests come back normal, but you still don’t feel well. You are dismissed and led to believe your illness is all in your head. The second is that your labs are not normal and you are prescribed medication.

Let’s address this first issue. You don’t feel well, your labs look fine, and you are dismissed, and led to believe it’s all in your head.

What didn’t happen is that there was no exploration of what root cause issues (imbalances) may be contributing to how you are feeling, and causing the symptoms you have. You feel sick, scared, alone, and now think you are crazy and there’s nothing really even wrong with you in the first place.

You spend your time searching Google for answers, and find there are droves of others out there, going through similar challenges, all desperately searching for solutions to claim their health, and their life back.

Some have had success with this, that and the other, and you try these interventions, with no luck. Or maybe you have some minimal relief or notice some small changes, but it’s not enough to make much of a difference for you.

This is because everyone is different. Your biochemistry is as unique as your fingerprint, so what works for someone else may not work for you.

Also, interventions have synergistic effects. That means they work together, and combinations of interventions often work a lot better than individual ones.

This is why you’ve tried X, or Y, or Z and none of them have worked. Maybe you’ve even tried X and Y, Y and Z, or X and Y and Z, and still can’t seem to get results. X, Y, and Z are just three options.

Think of it this way, what if you take the entire alphabet, all 28 letters, and try to piece together what will work for you? It’s basically impossible (unless you're really good at probability... would that fall under 'probability'?).

That’s what this process is like, without the support and guidance of our Healing Hypothesis, and someone that can help navigate your journey as your copilot.

I was that person. I suffered many, many years with GI issues. Conventional doctors did what they knew how to do. For me, it didn’t help. My problems weren’t anything that conventional medicine could fix.

Even though I have the training, background, and experience in the kind of help I did need, I still had to search for my own answers, consult with other professionals in my field, and go through a lot of trial and error.

This process has inspired me to share my lessons learned with you. My lessons learned are the 8 concepts that form my Healing Hypothesis.

The Problem (Part 2)

Here’s that second part of the issue, your labs are not normal and you are prescribed medication.

How many medications have you been prescribed because of your health problems?

I spent some time on a SSRI (antidepressant medication) in my mid-20s after I had a breakdown. The stress from graduate school, feeling my life was out of control, I was in a severe dietary restriction phase at the time (one of my lowest weights, about 98lbs, and I’m 5’6” by the way), and I’m sure OCD, PTSD and the depression of course didn’t help the situation.

I didn’t stay on the medication long. It did help, but it numbed me and I wasn’t myself. It did get rid of the OCD. I would clean a lot, and when I was on the meds, let’s just say things became very different. Not in a good way, it was gross to be honest.

I still deal with OCD, PTSD and depression, however I’ve found lifestyle strategies to help manage it (I do read self help, motivational books and blogs for example), and so does nourishing my body rather than starving it. Our neurotransmitters that regulate our moods are built from amino acids, and the pathways that make them need vitamins and minerals to do it. We need to put the fuel in, and the best way to do that is with whole, real foods.

Back to my take on medications, what do they do? They help with symptoms, if you’re lucky.

There are medications that save lives, and of course we need them from time to time. Antibiotics do save lives, when they are used appropriately. My issue with many medications that are commonly prescribed is that they mask symptoms. The symptoms you are having are your body’s cries for help, that there is, or are, underlying root cause(s) creating imbalances in your body, that over time, result in chronic and complex health problems.

If you mask symptoms with medications, root cause imbalances are still there, and they can continue to wreak havoc on your body. Now that you don’t have symptoms, you don’t know this is happening so root causes and imbalances are left unchecked and unaddressed. Before you know it, you have more symptoms. Something new and different starts to occur. Your doctor gives you another prescription. And the cycle continues.

Many of these medications mask symptoms by interrupting, altering, and shutting down biochemical pathways in your body. This is a problem because all systems are connected, so when you interfere with one pathway, others will be affected.

My favorite example is the use of statin medications for cholesterol. Statins are one of the most prescribed medications today, and they are one of the biggest money-makers ever for pharmaceutical companies.

Research shows that for some people, statins can be beneficial. They may help reduce blood pressure, and may be useful for secondary prevention of heart attack and stroke (meaning if you’ve already had a heart attack or stroke, statins may help prevent it from happening again), however, research also shows that they can be very harmful for others, and lead to rhabdomyolysis, cognitive loss, neuropathy, pancreatic and hepatic dysfunction, and sexual dysfunction.

Statins work by shutting off a step in the pathway that makes cholesterol in your body. The problem is that we need cholesterol, and that pathway does other things, including make CoQ10, an essential nutrient needed for energy production in your body.

 What do we need cholesterol for? Just for example, it is necessary for making steroid hormones including your stress hormone cortisol, and your sex hormones (testosterone and estrogen), and cholesterol makes up a good part of the structure of cell membranes in your body. If your body can’t function at the cellular level, you certainly won’t be able to.

I’m not saying to stop taking your prescription medications (statins or others), I am saying make sure you ask your doctor questions, and educate yourself. Often there are natural ways to better manage your health issues that have no risk of adverse side effects.

You can start by exploring the root cause(s) of why you are having symptoms in the first place. Remember, symptoms are tied to systems and all systems in your body are connected.

If you’ve been struggling with health issues, you need a different approach to resolve them. Our Healing Hypothesis is that approach, and what I used on my own health journey.

Health Begins in the Gut

The concepts that form our Healing Hypothesis are:

  • Health begins in the gut

  • Your body is built to heal itself

  • One size doesn’t fit all

  • Food isn’t always enough

  • Your unique biochemistry

  • A holistic approach

  • Your custom supplement protocol

  • Your custom diet

Now we’ll break down these concepts and explore each individually, starting with health begins in the gut.

Health begins in the gut. This means that literally whatever chronic, complex conditions you have, impaired gut health may be involved.  

Most of us have heard the famous Hippocrates saying, "All disease begins in the gut.” Guess what? It’s true!

Impaired gut health adversely affects the body in a variety of ways.

If your gut health is impaired, you won’t be able to digest and absorb nutrients from the foods you eat. This means that even if you eat a perfectly healthy diet, it won’t matter much because your body won’t be able to use those nutrients from those healthy foods, and you can end up nutrient deficient. All of the biochemical pathways in your body, which make your body function, run off of nutrients from foods you eat. These nutrients are the fuel for your engine. Without fuel, your engine won’t run, and over time will break down, leading to illness and disease.  

Not so concerned about nutrient deficiency? You should be. During my last (and final) severe dietary restriction phase in 2016, I was down to about 98 lbs, at 5’6”. My lab work was off, but my GI doctor couldn’t figure out why. I couldn’t either to be honest. I had weird symptoms like boils on my body, and my labs showed low thyroid function and high liver enzymes. My body was slowing down and breaking down because I was starving. There was no fuel for it to run on, it started eating itself.

There are other ways impaired gut health is a huge problem for your overall health. Eighty percent of your immune system is located in your gut microbiome. If your gut health is impaired, your immune system will be too.

Impaired gut health leads to inflammation in the gut, which can cause increased gut permeability (leaky gut). When this happens, toxins and food particles escape the GI tract and enter your blood stream where there are not supposed to be. The result can be autoimmune disease, food allergies and sensitivities (food sensitivities are a symptom, not a cause of your health problems), asthma, arthritis and join aches and pains, mental health and neurological disorders, skin conditions, hormone imbalances (such as estrogen and thyroid hormones), and much, much more. As you can see, many of these issues are outside of the gut, so while you may have impaired gut health, you might not even have any gut related symptoms.

Gut health is often overlooked by conventional, Western medicine as an underlying cause of chronic and complex disease, and this is these conditions remain chronic. Addressing gut health, even if you don’t have GI symptoms, is an integral part of the healing process as we explore root cause issues, and this is in fact where I start my scavenger hunt to find reasons why you have the health problems you do.

Your Body is Built to Heal Itself

Your body is built to heal itself. Our job is to remove obstacles that prevent this from happening. Together we can identify these obstacles, and get them out of the way so your body can heal. We do this by using our Healing Hypothesis.

When you cut yourself, if you keep the wound clean it heals. If you break a bone, it heals as long as you take care of it and give it a chance to do so. If you come down with a cold or the flu, you get over it (heal) with rest and maybe some chicken soup. These are obvious insults to the body that cause pain or discomfort, so they are easier to pay attention to, and therefore we are more likely to do something to promote their healing.

Chronic inflammation on the other hand is something we don’t often directly feel. It festers under the surface, and results in chronic and complex disease over time, and we usually do not attribute our chronic and complex diseases to an underlying problem. We are led to believe our health problems developed spontaneously and the only way to address them is with prescription medications, which couldn’t be farther from the truth.

 Masking symptoms with medications allows the underlying inflammation, and the cause of it to continue and over time this will lead to additional health problems.

Your body can heal from chronic and complex disease, only if you remove the barriers preventing this from happening.   

We touched on gut health, the larger effect it has on the body, and why making sure it’s optimal is necessary for overall health and wellness, and to prevent chronic and complex disease. Impaired gut health is a barrier that prevents the body from healing itself.

Other triggers that interfere with your body’s ability to heal include: 

  • Nutrient deficiency: Biochemical processes in your body that do everything, including healing, run off of nutrients that we get from foods we eat. We need our guts to function appropriately to digest and absorb nutrients from foods we eat.

  • Food allergies and sensitivities: These trigger immune responses in your body, and a chronically heightened immune response weakens the immune system leaving you open to getting sick more often and to developing all sorts of health problems. Food allergies and sensitivities result from impaired gut health, and gut inflammation that causes leaky gut.

  • Poor/inadequate diets: This leads to nutrient deficiency, and the issues previously noted.

  • Gut dysbiosis (abnormal gut bacteria) and gut infections: Imbalances and infections in the gut microbiome (natural bacterial and fungal populations living in your gut that when healthy keep you healthy) cause inflammation in the gut, leading to leaky gut and its downstream effects.

  • Even stress, and emotional imbalances can adversely impact your health status. Stress can cause chronic inflammation as well.

These are just some examples of barriers that may be preventing your body from healing. As you can see, they involve gut health (health does begin in the gut). Everyone is different, and therefore has a different set of barriers to address. One size doesn’t fit all.

Food Isn't Always Enough

Food isn’t always enough. This is part of our Healing Hypothesis because we aren't just what we eat. We are what our bodies can do with what we eat.

We need to make sure your body can digest, absorb and use nutrients from the foods you eat. You can have the perfect diet, but if your body can't use those nutrients, your perfect diet doesn't matter much, and won't help you meet your goals, and it certainly won’t help you heal from chronic and complex health problems. This is where gut health comes into play.

If you eat a diet of whole, real foods, and a variety of them from all sources, and suffer with health issues, a deeper look at your gut health is in order.

If you are on a restrictive diet because of your health problems, and it’s not helping much, or at all, a deeper look at your gut health is needed.

If taking foods out of your diet does give you some symptom relief, again, we need to take a closer look at your gut health.

Do you sense a theme here?

Food isn’t the problem.

This was all happening to me when I was experiencing my GI issues.

My diet at the time included healthy foods, and nothing processed. In all honesty it wasn’t balanced between all food groups, I was fearing carbs at the time. I was also restricting certain other foods, like certain fruits and vegetables because symptoms were worse when I was eating them, but my symptoms were still pretty bad even without those foods.

Here’s the problem, reactions to food are a symptom and not an underlying cause. We need to find out why you are reacting to foods (hint, your gut health is impaired). If we don’t, your diet will become even more restrictive over time, and this can lead to nutrient deficiencies and imbalances, and make your health status even worse. On top of that, dietary restriction can lead to disordered eating behaviors, as I experienced first hand.

I’ve talked a lot about exploring your unique biochemistry. There are important differences between conventional, standard lab tests and functional tests. The latter are what I use to get to know you better, from the inside out, and they allow me to develop a plan that is customized for your needs to help you meet your goals, and feel better.