Tell me if this story sounds familiar.
You aren’t feeling well. You are suddenly battling unexplainable weight gain. Your energy is low. Your skin is having frequent breakouts. You feel constantly lethargic and fatigued. It’s a battle just to make it through the afternoon without falling asleep.
You schedule a check-up with your doctor to see what’s going on. Your doctor runs a basic blood work panel to take a look under the hood and see what’s happening. It’s not cheap but you’re desperate to find out what’s going on.
A few weeks later you get a call from a staff member at your doctor’s office. You hear something like “Results came back normal” or “We couldn’t find anything”.
No face-to-face visit. No ability to ask questions. No conversation.
You should feel relieved. I’m okay. But instead, you find yourself frustrated and disappointed.
Maybe you continue to search for answers and try to solve your health problems by what you find through google, YouTube, and the health and wellness section of the bookstore. You try to self-diagnose and find a solution. You live playing a constant guessing game without finding real solid answers and solutions.
Or maybe you embrace a painful acceptance that this is just the way life is. You begin to accept that you will simply have to live with these symptoms and conditions the rest of your life. You begin to question yourself and think that it is all in your head. You begin to believe that the energetic, motivated version of yourself is a thing of the past. You begin to accept pain and discomfort as normal.
If this is your story, here’s what I want to tell you.
You aren’t crazy.
If you are feeling exhausted and fatigued all the time, it’s not normal and it doesn’t have to be this way. (Read my top ways to increase energy naturally here)
If you are battling severe skin problems and can’t find a cure, it’s not normal and it doesn’t have to be this way.
If you have a chronic autoimmune disorder and think that you are just going to have to suffer for the rest of your life without relief, there are solutions for effective symptom management and strategies for remission.
I am respectful of traditional medical practices and am not here to start a revolution or demonize the existing infrastructure.
But I want to flip the script a little bit.
I want to empower you with the tools needed to be the detective for your own body. I want you to know how your body works and give you a framework for understanding it. When you understand your body, you can work with it instead of against it.
But here’s the thing: You can’t effectively fix a problem that you don’t understand.
This is your body, and you should have a damn clue about what is going on in it. It’s a shame that far too many people are kept in the dark about what is happening inside their own bodies. Too many people are struggling just to get someone to understand the problem they are dealing with and then forced to blindly trust the solution they are presented with.
Unfortunately, no doctor or specialist is going to care more about your health and ability to live a comfortable, healthy life than you do. No one is going to care about your skin and nails more than you do. No one is going to care about whether or not you have enough energy to run and play with your kids more than you do. No one is going to care about your discomforts or potty problems or struggle to fit your favorite pair of jeans than you do.
Oftentimes, conventional medicine places a high emphasis on managing, masking, and subduing symptoms. This leads to more of an emphasis on superficial fixes rather than digging deep to find the root of the problem. And it’s understandable. The business of managing and masking symptoms is far more efficient in the short term than spending the time to understand the cause of the problems. It’s also lucrative. Pills, prescriptions, and procedures are much more profitable than natural, preventative measures.
Functional medicine on the other hand, is investigative by nature. It seeks to get to the root of the problem. Rather than seeing symptoms as something to be masked or managed, it sees them as clues that are valuable in helping you track down the source of the problem so you can fix it once and for all. This is an important mindset shift for us as we continue to talk about you and your health. I want you to become a detective that pieces together the messages and clues that your body is giving you and traces it back to the source.
Uncomfortable symptoms are your body’s way of talking to you and letting you know when something is wrong. Oftentimes we become so obsessed with getting those unwanted cries for help to shut up and go away that we forget to listen to what they are trying to say to us. The functional medicine mindset invites you to see value in the signals and signs your body is trying to give you and take the time to listen and address the underlying problems rather than slapping quick fixes.
This leads to long term results and true, sustainable change.
If you are ready to take control and sit in the driver’s seat of your own health and get some answers about what’s going on, I’d be honored to guide you through that process. We’ll set up a free consultation, implement strategic testing, and design a wellness plan for you based upon the results. The GI-Map test is one the tests that I find particularly useful as well as the Viome test in some cases.
I preach it night and day, but I’ll say it again: Test Don’t Guess.
It’s time to sit in the driver’s seat of your health again.
