I didn't find
this work.
I survived
my way to it.

BEFORE

I was a collegiate athlete who burned out the second the final whistle blew. By the time I hit my late thirties, I had quietly replaced every healthy habit I'd built in sport with the coping mechanisms of someone who had stopped listening to her body entirely. Most nights I was enjoying a glass or two of wine. Most lunches were fast food, something convenient, or nothing at all. Most mornings started with caffeine and a handful of sugar. I kept moving because stopping felt uncomfortable.

I was also, though I wouldn't have used the word then, a chronic people pleaser. I said yes to everything and everyone. Setting boundaries wasn't the problem. Holding them was. I was more concerned with being liked than with being well. And I wore my exhaustion like a badge of honor because that's what I had been taught ambition looked like.

MY STORY

The raw and real version

"I was surviving on caffeine, convenience, and other people's expectations — and calling it a full life."

THE DIAGNOSIS

In early 2024, my body sent me a bill I couldn't ignore. I started having severe digestive symptoms. I’m talking about constant bathroom trips, blood, and such severe pain that I couldn't explain. I lost 25 pounds in two months. I was so scared to eat at work that I often didn't. I had accidents in the office I was too ashamed to talk about. My ankles and knees were so swollen because I was so severely anemic that I could barely walk.

Ulcerative colitis carries a particular kind of shame. Nobody wants to hear about bowel disease or poop. It makes people uncomfortable. So you suffer quietly, smile at your desk, and pray the meeting ends before your body forces you to leave it.

When the diagnosis finally came, it was almost a relief. There was a name for it. There was a reason. And now there was a choice.

"I understood why people don't fight back. It is easier to sit in your circumstances than to change them. But I knew what my alternative looked like. And it was literal hell."

THE TURNING POINT

I chose to fight. Not because I was particularly brave but because I didn't have another option I was willing to accept.

I completely overhauled my nutrition. I cut out alcohol, caffeine, processed food, and processed meat. I went back to basics — whole, real foods, the kind my ancestors could have eaten. I learned everything I could about inflammation, about the gut-brain connection, about what my specific body needed to heal. I didn't need a diet. I needed to learn how to eat like a human again.

I did the mindset work too. I sat with feelings I had been drinking and people-pleasing my way around for twenty years. I journaled. I walked without my phone. I explored breathwork and meditation. I started to respect the silence that not always moving introduced. I allowed myself, for the first time in a long time, to actually dream about a different life.

Mid-recovery, I enrolled at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Not because I had it figured out but because I needed to understand what had happened to my body, and I had a growing sense that other women needed someone who had actually been through it to help them before they got there.

I went from severe ulcerative colitis to clinical remission in 6 months, and endoscopic remission in one year.

WHAT I KNOW NOW

I realize now that while I may not have caused my disease, I had absolutely contributed to its conditions. Years of ignoring my body's signals. Years of outsourcing my self-worth to other people's approval. Years of choosing convenience over nourishment because I thought taking care of myself was somehow selfish.

The emotional weight I was carrying had become physical weight. My nervous system had been in survival mode for so long it no longer had what it needed to repair. No supplement was going to fix that. No protocol was going to touch it. What I needed was permission. Permission to stop performing, stop pleasing, and start choosing myself.

That is the work I now do with other women. And it is the only work I have ever done that feels like the reason I am here.