Hello everyone! I hope your 2025 is off to a good start. It’s hard to believe we are already pretty much through January!

We recently enjoyed some much-needed sunny weather in the Phoenix area with Alec’s dad / brother and family. We thoroughly enjoyed the sun, hiking, and time outside relaxing! When we got there and were standing in the parking lot going in to get groceries, I was like ahhh… feeling this sun for one moment alone was 100% worth the trip. When it comes to winter, I really don’t mind the cold, but hate the cloudy days upon cloudy days we tend to have in Michigan!

I was originally going to combine this post with a usual end-of-month eating recap, but then realized I had so much to share I should make two separate posts so it isn’t a billion words long! SO, a typical Everyday Eats post for January will be coming at the end of the week!

BUT FIRST, today’s post regarding my own personal health and food journey lately.

If you’ve been following the blog for a while, you may have noticed that some of my usual eats look a bit different than they used to.

For example, I’m no longer doing my favorite overnight oats, which was my go-to daily breakfast for ~15 years!! To say that was a difficult transition (to find a new, just as good go-to breakfast) at first is an understatement. Thankfully I now have a couple of new options I like even better!

But why the changes? We will chat more as to why that is!

Today’s story starts with a rewind, backing up about two decades…

I’ve had various “weird” health symptoms ever since puberty, which make more sense to me now that I’m understanding some of my gut, food sensitivity, and autoimmune vulnerabilities.

One main thing that stands out is the amount of acne I used to have in middle school. I had terrible acne all over my shoulders, chest, and upper back, unlike anything I’ve ever seen in another female. (I’m sure other women out there struggle with this, but it was nothing even close to anything I ever saw in any of my friends or anyone else at school for that matter). I played basketball growing up and was so horrified by all the acne that I would always wear a T-shirt under my jersey.

None of the typical topical acne “treatments” worked, and I didn’t know what else to try. I also started developing dark hair (hirsutism) on my toes, chin, and belly button area. Again, odd, embarrassing, and bothersome for a teenager to say the least!

The chest and shoulder acne thankfully went away in high school, I think mostly due to the hormonal shifts (aka hormones shutting down) when I started developing my eating disorder. I would still get a significant amount of acne, now on my chin, jawline, and cheek area, which remained an issue up until recently (!).

(The hair issue has persisted ever since and is something I am hoping will resolve once I make more headway in the health work I am doing now. It does seem like it getting a little better.)

No doctors have ever been helpful with my skin issues, repeatedly just suggesting I go on birth control (a complete band-aid “solution”!) or take spironolactone (again, not a solution that is actually resolving anything…) despite my persistent questions seeking real answers and solutions.

After my main anorexia recovery journey, my hormonal and GI symptoms got worse in a lot of ways. GREAT, now this to deal with, after the difficulty that was recovery. BUT, this makes sense, because disordered eating REALLY messes with your gut and entire body.

Important side note: disordered eating and gut & autoimmune health / inflammation / overall health go both ways (i.e., they are bidirectional), as any pre-existing health imbalances (such as in our gut or brain) make us more susceptible to developing something like an eating disorder… which then makes matters worse…

When I finally restored my period in college after experiencing anorexia and 6 years with no period (my lack of period lingered for years after the main anorexia resolution), it was TERRIBLE for me symptoms-wise. The normally smooth and shiny hair on my head literally felt “crunchy” (I didn’t wear it down for an entire year it was so bad), my face acne was worse, my digestion and GI system were clearly off, I felt inflamed in general, and I had a number of micronutrient deficiencies (such as zinc) that wouldn’t ever improve with supplementation. (Hint: due to my GI & inflammation issues, my body wasn’t absorbing said supplements!)

I did some researching online and learned about functional medicine (this was back in 2013 when it was less common of a thing), and saw a couple of different functional medicine practitioners during and after college, including going to the Cleveland Clinic multiple times all the way from Ann Arbor. Can anyone please help me figure out what is going on and how to get my body back on track??? 

Working with these practitioners helped a little bit (thankfully the crunchy hair was no longer…), but I never got the extent of help that I needed. So, the same issues persisted as the years went on, although generally more manageable.

Fast forward to the past couple of years, and my health started falling apart more.

For one, my sleep has been miserable for several years, which obviously makes everything worse! There are a number of reasons why my sleep has been so bad, some related to our current living situation, the fact that I am an extremely light and sensitive sleeper, and some related to my gut and liver dysfunction. (After years of waking up at 2 or 3am and usually not falling back asleep, I am FINALLY sleeping through the night more!! More on the reasons why as you read on).

In addition to the debilitating insomnia, about a year and a half ago I started developing terrible eczema on my hands, as well as an autoimmune disorder that causes my skin to be so incredibly itchy that it would be impossible to sleep when it would flare up at night, which was when it was the worst (another lovely reason for my sleep issues, lol).

My gut health also got worse and worse, including awful gas (TMI!), constipation and diarrhea (more TMI!), and last spring, stomach pain (with occasional vomiting) that would come on so badly an hour or two like clockwork after dinner that I would be on the ground for hours, telling Alec that I would have to go to the ER asap if it didn’t resolve soon!! (Thankfully I never had to go to the ER, as for better or worse, my pain tolerance and persistence can both be quite high!)

Given how badly things were getting and given the fact that I would like to be healthy enough to have kids somewhat soonish given my age, it felt more and more pressing for us to start to resolve our health issues (Alec also has a number of chronic health issues he is wanting to fully resolve, too, and is thankfully on the same page with how we think about health). I am also well aware of how a mother’s microbiome directly impacts her child’s, and don’t want to knowingly “gift” any potential children a mess of a microbiome, knowingly setting them up to be more vulnerable to a lifetime of health issues because of it.

Additionally, I was (am) well aware of my own genetic vulnerabilities for developing further autoimmune issues given that my mom has history of Graves’ disease (an autoimmune disease of the thyroid). I am realllly trying to avoid further / worsened autoimmune issues! Once you have one autoimmune condition, if you don’t do anything to resolve what is driving it (i.e., inflammation and leaky gut), more are likely to come your way.

I knew the type of root-level functional health work that would be helpful for us, and for a while the main barrier was cost, as (unfortunately) this type of *actually helpful* healthcare for chronic health conditions is typically not covered by insurance. I generally think our mainstream healthcare system is great for acute scenarios, but woefully terrible when it comes to chronic health and resolving (not band-aiding) what is driving said chronic health symptoms.

I had been following my friend Allison’s health journey and career getting going as a Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Practitioner (FDN-P). From listening to her podcast each week, I knew THIS is who we needed to help us! As someone who has listened to a lot of health-related podcasts and followed a lot of practitioners over the years, I really felt like Allison was going into a degree of depth unlike anyone else I had heard before, when it comes to how she helps her clients and thinks about root-cause healing.

Last September we decided to invest in getting going with her signature program, the Better Belly Blueprint. It’s amazing what Allison has done to create a cost-effective way of healing and restoring your gut health. And side note, gut health effects absolutely everything, so by working on your gut you are helping many, if not all, of the symptoms you may be experiencing!!

As part of the program, Alec and I each completed 5 functional lab tests — way more in-depth and different from anything a typical doctor would order, know about, or even generally have access to. You WILL find things to work on (that are driving your symptoms) when running labs like this. For those who are interested, we did the DUTCH test (hormones / cortisol / other markers), OAT test (mold / mycotoxins / oxalates / candida / other markers), HTMA (mineral statuses & imbalances), GI-MAP (gut health), and a food sensitivity + several food zoomer tests (by Vibrant Wellness).

After getting my lab results back… I’m like… IT’S NO WONDER I FEEL LIKE CRAP! The fact that I have been going on how I have been for so long!

Good thing we have Allison’s expertise and in-depth protocols as a roadmap to reverse course.

We are in the middle of working through our customized protocols / health plan (all based on our personal lab results). We’ve gotten going doing the liver detox, and once we started that, my sleep IMMEDIATELY improved. The hours of 1-4am are sometimes known as “liver hour,” as our livers are most active during that timeframe. If you’re waking up during that timeframe repeatedly, it’s a good sign your liver is working overly hard detoxing things out of your body, waking you up in the middle of the night. (Some bacteria are also more active in the middle of the night, which is another thing I think has been contributing to my insomnia).

When we think of what drives a lot of chronic health symptoms, we want to be thinking about toxins. We can think of our “toxic load” like a bucket, with water flowing in and then out. When our bucket is overflowing and water is entering in more than it is leaving, we start to experience all sorts of symptoms. Constipation, diarrhea, acne, brain fog, seizures, anxiety, eczema, joint pain, chronic sinusitis, allergic and autoimmune reactions, and more.

Thinking back to my acne in middle school, my body was experiencing a buildup of toxins. When our liver (our primary detox organ) is overworked or not functioning as effectively as it should, our bodies will detox more in other ways, such as through the skin (leading to lovely symptoms like acne and eczema).

When I mention *toxins,* I’m talking about A LOT of different things. Toxins can include: what you put on your skin, what is in your food, what pathogens & toxins are in your gut (such as parasites, h. pylori, mold, pathogenic bacteria), heavy metals, foods our bodies are sensitive to, and more. We are more prone to experiencing a buildup of toxins when our guts and livers aren’t digesting / absorbing food properly, prohibiting the growth of pathogens, and detoxing effectively.

Let’s talk more about one toxin category in particular — food sensitivities!

I used to be skeptical of food sensitivity tests, and I didn’t really even know what a food sensitivity was. Sometimes I would hear of a friend or client who would do a food sensitivity test and now apparently they can’t eat 10 billion “healthy” foods forevermore. Especially coming from my eating disorder background, this seemed like it had the potential to be overly obsessive and extreme. (Which I do think can be the case when one doesn’t have a solid foundation of a healthy relationship with food). (I also do think a lot of the food sensitivity tests out there are not helpful / very accurate). 

In recent years, testing for food sensitivities has gotten increasingly advanced. What I love about the testing that we did through Vibrant Wellness is that you can differentiate between your temporary and permanent food sensitivities. Yes, many food sensitivities are temporary (due to leaky gut) and you should be able to eat all or most of those foods again once you heal your leaky gut!

Leaky gut develops when the lining of our small intestines is increasingly damaged (such as through mentioned-above toxins like parasites, toxins in products we eat or put on our skin, and eating foods we are permanently sensitive to), which allows for larger food particles to enter the bloodstream (which is not ideal — we want small, digested particles being appropriately absorbed). The body then has an increased inflammatory reaction to these seemingly “foreign entities,” and a (temporary) food sensitivity is developed.

Food sensitivities are different from food allergies, in that the symptoms can occur up to several days later, making them much harder to “obviously” detect (without testing). While eating a food you are sensitive to isn’t generally a “rush to the ER acute emergency,” they DO contribute to a host of chronic, debilitating health symptoms and diseases. (The inflammatory pathway is also different — food allergies are IgE-mediated, and food sensitivities are IgA or IgG-mediated. For the purposes of completeness, food intolerances do not involve the immune system, and are usually due to the lack of certain enzymes needed for digestion, such as in the case of lactose intolerance (where someone is lacking enough of the enzyme lactase needed to break down lactose).)

Temporary food sensitivities are meant to be taken out of the diet for usually only 6-12 months while working specifically to heal your leaky gut. You then should be able to eat these foods again once your leaky gut is healed. Yay! If you don’t work (using a comprehensive, valid strategy!) to heal your leaky gut, and only take out the foods that are bothering you because of your leaky gut, you will likely accumulate more and more temporary food sensitivities (because your leaky gut isn’t being healed), thus limiting what you can eat even further. AND, worsening the problem of a poor gut, because your gut likes variety! I strongly recommend doing testing (like through Vibrant Wellness) so you know exactly what your sensitivities are, instead of guessing and checking.

We always want to TEST, and not guess!

I generally don’t recommend avoiding foods long-term unless you have valid data confirming they are an inherent problem for you. I also think it’s important to have healed from any disordered eating before incorporating nutrition science in this way.

(I also don’t recommend testing for your temporary food sensitivities unless you are ready to go with working with a practitioner like Allison to heal your leaky gut, otherwise you will drive yourself crazy avoiding these foods without actually healing, and our guts are always changing so you would have to retest anyway once you started working with someone, thereby wasting hundreds of dollars because while testing can be 100% worth it, it isn’t cheap.)

In contrast, permanent food sensitivities are inflammatory reactions to the specific peptides (small amino acid chains) found in specific foods. This is shown through what’s called a “food zoomer test” (here we are “zooming in” on the specific peptides, in contrast to a generic food sensitivity test that looks at temporary, “can-be-healed” reactions to whole foods). These are not due to leaky gut and are therefore not meant to be eaten regardless of you healing your leaky gut. (The theories I have as to how these develop are beyond the scope of this post!) The testing that we did through Vibrant Wellness showed if we had any permanent inflammatory reactions to the each of the main specific peptides found in wheat, dairy, lectins, corn, and other grains.

I would have to look into this, but I believe I have read that around 30% of the population has a significant food sensitivity to something like corn, grains, or dairy.

(Note: the testing uses raw, organic peptides, so it doesn’t matter if you are eating an organic or non-organic version of the food — you will still react the same, as the genetic structure of the peptides is the same). An example screenshot from part of my own personal wheat zoomer test is below so you can see what it looks like.

As it turns out, I am extremely (permanently) sensitive to all grains, including wheat, as well as to dairy and soy. I also have some foods I am removing only temporarily until my leaky gut is healed.

As you can imagine, finding this out a little over a month ago was a LOT to sit with at first. I wasn’t surprised about the strong sensitivities to wheat, corn, and oats, because I had already removed those from my diet a year ago due to this exact suspicion, and aspects of my digestion and mental health immediately improved, and my acne basically totally went away. (Goodbye, overnight oats). But I had still been eating tons of rice and quinoa, thinking this was fine for my body. (Grain sensitivity, I’m realizing, is quite common when it comes to autoimmunity and other neurological disorders).

Some sadness and loss came up with thinking about so many of my favorite recipes, restaurant dishes, and holiday foods. Not to mention the now-complicated dynamics of eating with others and at social events. Great! Thoughts about being judged as the “eating disorder dietitian who clearly still has an eating disorder” have been in my head, as food sensitivities are still something that most people don’t know much about, including why it’s important to completely avoid strong food sensitivities (as much as we can personally control that) for autoimmune disease remission and prevention in particular.

At the same time, I also felt a lot of relief and hope for healing… throughout my life, I had been unknowingly inflicting so much damage on my gut by consuming these foods that my body was reacting to in such strong ways. When I think back to a typical day of eats when I was growing up, every meal and snack would have included wheat and/or other grains! (Not at all blaming anyone to be clear, as food sensitivities weren’t talked about as much as they are today, and testing as accurate and comprehensive as this didn’t even exist. Not to mention it was the 90s and early 2000s, and even the wonderful food pyramid was all about the grains!)

Since removing all grains (and dairy + soy) for the past month, I’ve noticed a dramatic reduction in the amount of anxiety, obsessive thinking, and general feelings of brain inflammation that used to be pretty much all day everyday for me. The way I sometimes describe it to Alec is that my brain feels very “inhospitable” to me — a very unwelcoming place for my mind to exist, if that makes any sense. Like trying to churn a rigid gear, like a head that is full of tension. There have been more and more days and stretches of time where my brain is feeling much more “hospitable” and “flexible” — more calm, present, and less inflamed! That has been the most obvious and immediate shift. I am all about therapy, but we can’t out-therapy an inflamed gut that is driving an inflamed brain! 100% worth the food changes, given this shift alone!

I’m still feeling some anxiety over how others might perceive my medically-necessary food restrictions (a good opportunity to practice not caring what other people think!), but am feeling some more excitement when it comes to cooking in my own kitchen, getting creative with lots of grain and dairy-free recipes.

I’ve discovered amazing grain-free baking recipes by Sweet Laurel, am using lots of my favorite Roasted Root recipes (and other blogs such as this and this), and am growing in my familiarity using a variety of grain-free flours. While I’m having to start from scratch with finding some new recipes for certain things, my goal over time is to have a recipe repertoire of genuinely delicious grain/soy/dairy-free recipes that I can use to nourish myself and others. My passion for connecting with others around amazing food WILL continue, albeit in a slightly different fashion!

My philosophy when it comes to how I personally engage with food and counsel clients remains the same. Truly healthy eating is rooted in ENJOYMENT and SATISFACTION, even if you have to cut out certain foods for medical reasons. And it’s only when we have a healthy relationship with food as a solid foundation that we can incorporate nutrition science in life-giving, and truly healthy ways.

As a dietitian, I find that my profession tends to be really black and white when it comes to all this. Either you’re an eating disorder dietitian who focuses solely on helping people improve their relationships with food and if someone is trying to be physically healthy and care about nutrition and resolve genuine gut issues they are seen as “operating out of their eating disorder,” OR sometimes dietitians can be so fixated on nutrition and gut health that the relationship with food and enjoyment aspect of eating is missed, perpetuating disordered eating beliefs and behaviors. (And worsening health, as “when the JOY goes out of eating, NUTRITION SUFFERS!” – Ellyn Satter)

As my career continues to progress, I’m hoping to continue to take a more nuanced approach than either of the above alternatives. I will continue to prioritize working with clients to help heal eating disorders and disordered eating. THIS is our foundation for a lifetime of genuinely healthy eating. At the same time, through personal experience and what I’ve observed in working with clients, disordered eating renders havoc on our physical health, and functional nutrition protocols (including testing for and eliminating permanent food sensitivities) can be a key component of experiencing optimal physical health — and mental and emotional health, too! It’s ALL connected. A healthy gut = a healthy brain = a greater likelihood for avoiding disordered eating obsessions in the future.

Even before working with Allison, one of my goals has been to become an FDN-P myself. This will allow me to provide clients with a path to journey toward FULL AND LASTING HEALING — including both healing our relationship with food and resolving gut, mineral, hormonal, and autoimmune imbalances. (“Phase 2 Recovery” is how I think of it).

I’m passionate about health in all senses of the word — physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual — and believe they are all connected. It’s when we take a multifaceted approach to healing, addressing a number of root and interconnected factors, that we are able to live the fullest, most vibrant life we can!

If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments below or to message me directly. And if you’d like more support in your own LASTING HEALING, I invite you to consider reaching out to work together one-on-one! Building relationships with clients and journeying alongside them as they experience life-changing, life-lasting healing and freedom is by far the best part of my job. 🙂