My Health Journey

My name is Amanda, and I would love share my journey into this magical world where food is medicine. While I am coming to you from a place of balance, consistent growth, happiness, and a purposeful life. I wasn't always in such good spirits or health.

Growing up, my life began with silly seemingly preventable health problems. I spent the first two Christmases of my life in the hospital with pneumonia. Finally, by the time my third Christmas rolled around, I had associated the holidays so strongly with hospital visits that being taken to see Santa I was convinced he was there to take me back to the hospital as opposed to spread Christmas cheer. As I continued the process of growing up, I seemed to get every cold that went around. In addition, I experienced bouts of scarlet fever, recurring strep throat, and tonsillitis, for which I was prescribed endless streams of antibiotics like many others in the medical system. While these medications helped me get past the sickness in the moment, they caused a plethora of other issues in my body including a great deal of imbalance in my gut.
While friends got to play outside after meals, I got used to running inside for painful bathroom breaks. I never complained, I thought it was completely normal…until my adult IBS was diagnosed. Knowing now that everything starts in the gut, I can look back and pinpoint the numerous reasons I could be dealing with such issues as an adult. This was only the beginning.

Later, I was diagnosed with asthma triggered by stress, with the imbalance in my body, it was no wonder that I had crippling anxiety, social and otherwise. This led me to believe I was unlike others and it made making friends a seemingly impossible challenge. The summer when everything finally changed was when I started dating a guy from the island. He had a brand-new sparkly green Wakesetter boat. The days spent on the couch and the lake were some of the best of my life. I finally felt free and welcomed by a group of good friends. I saw that for the first time I was accepted for who I was, and I felt secure in my own skin. The sunshine made me feel alive! Then it happened... one patch of scaly, rough psoriasis appeared. I didn’t know what it was, but later found out it was guttate psoriasis. That was quickly followed by more patches until it took over my entire body. My skin was red and scaly: I was humiliated, very confused, and upset.

I didn’t understand why this was happening to me. I tried covering it up with my Sally Hansen Airbrush Legs make-up, to no avail. It just made matters worse. I stopped going out of the house and soon fell out with my group of friends entirely. I was too ashamed to enjoy the summer. This continued for the following four summers while I researched and tried everything under the sun to make it stop and just feel normal and hopefully pretty again. Then, I got mad. I started asking important questions like: Why did every doctor have a different diagnosis? Why were they just guessing? Am I a freak? Is there something truly wrong with me? What is the real root cause of this? If I can’t depend on doctors, who can I count on? Myself? All these questions circled in my head, and I was determined to find answers not just for myself but to help others who felt the way I did. Surely, there must be others out there like me… right?

This led me down path after path of holistic advice. In the age of information, self-diagnosis became ever easier to research. I tried this and that, always coming back to the same conclusion, “everything starts in the gut”. This is what I kept learning over and over again, no matter how many paths I went down to learn about health-related material. Everything always came back to the fact that everything starts in the gut.

Could I cleanse myself with herbs and a change in lifestyle so that I could feel like a “normal member of society”? That was the question I started to ask myself, and I knew there was only one way to find out…dedication. It turned out that my body was being taken over by a parasite called Candida (A parasite that feeds of yeast).

If you Google it, you would be absolutely amazed by how incredibly normal it is amongst society. You would also be amazed to find out how many things that we ingest are yeast-forming in the body. It's astounding how common parasites are living in our intestines, and unfortunately most of us have them. That, for me, was not okay, not okay at all. This started me on a strict cleanse journey towards the path that was once beaten but now overgrown, a path that our ancestors laid out for us so that we would be able to receive from the earth something capable of curing everything that ails us.

Did you know? That the Egyptians studied herbs and used them in medicinal functions as far back as 3500 BC. The Chinese began the organized study of herbs in 2500 BC, and written records in China have survived enumerating the use of herbs that date back to 100 BC. Native American, Alaskan Native, and Native Hawaiian healers have a long history of using indigenous or native plants for a wide variety of medicinal purposes. So why have we dropped the reins to rely on a medical system that mainly prescribes band-aids instead of cures? It is time for this to change. We have gone too far in taking what was once natural and effective and turning it into something with way more side effects than any sick person deserves when all they really want is to get better.

Today, I am overjoyed to report that I am living a much better life and am truly happy thanks to holistic remedies and the changes in my lifestyle. I have never looked or felt better, and I can't speak of this without tears of gratitude involuntarily welling in my eyes. My anxiety has vanished, my skin is soft and glowing in a way that I have always longed for, and my life finally makes sense. I feel a great sense of purpose in sharing the things I learned throughout my health journey with you. I can almost feel our ancestors smiling down on me, with a gaze that says, “Finally, child, you see the ways we always meant for you and for all. Now, go share it with the world.”


I wish you all love, health, peace, & happiness,

Amanda