If you are like me, you are experiencing a health challenge and struggling to find answers.
Everywhere you turn they say, "He's fine!" "There is nothing to worry about...We think...."
But deep down in your Mama heart, you know that is not the case. You know there is something amiss, but you just don't know what it is.
So you become a Mama on a mission. You are going to find answers come hell or high water. You want to get to the root of the issue instead of just managing the symptoms.
I still remember the day the Pediatrician looked at me and told me I needed to change my mindset. I needed to change from "the seizures keep happening!" to "we are a family who experiences seizures. How do we manage them?"
At first I thought she was right. My son's seizures caused me a lot of stress and I felt pressured into "calming down." I felt like those around me thought I was making a bigger deal out of something the doctors told me was "no big deal."
But to me and my son, these seizures were a big deal! The sound of him gasping for air, the helpless feelings I felt holding him, wondering if he was going to die in my arms....was...Categorically...A BIG DEAL TO ME!
Same goes for my daughter. Her eczema keeping her up all hours of the day. Her crying and screaming from never finding relief.
Again I was met with, "Give her steroids and rub this cream on her. Not a big deal. It's the weather that's causing her eczema. Nothing you can do about it."
So I became a Mom on a mission. I had a limited knowledge of how nutrition played a part. But I had no idea where this journey would take me.
I enrolled that Fall in Saybrook University's Functional and Integrative Nutrition Master's Program and got to work studying and learning as much as I could.
Every professor I met, I would ask them the same questions I asked those doctors about my son's seizures.
One cold, rainy night in Juneau Alaska I met a professor that would radically change the course of our lives.
What he shared with me over the ensuing months has blown my mind, and connected so many of the dots that I've been collecting over the years.
You see the primary driver of disease today-be it my son's seizures, my daughter's eczema, the common cold, you name it-is not what you might think.
The primary driver of disease is the interaction between your genes, your daily living, and the environment. An area at the heart of a discipline called Functional Nutrition.
According to the Institute for Functional Medicine, disease is a phenomenon that is food and lifestyle driven/environment and genetics influenced.
Through Functional Nutrition (also known as Functional Medicine or Lifestyle Medicine) I found the answers to my son's seizures, my daughter's eczema, my struggles to loose weight, and so much more.
This is the medical model of the future. While the acute-care model has been effective at treating infectious disease and trauma, Functional Nutrition gets at the heart of chronic illness and disease.
It addresses the complex causes of disease rooted in lifestyle choices, environmental exposures, and genetic influences.
Did you know you can alter your gene expression by making changes to your environment, lifestyle, diet, activity pattern, stress, and mind-body connection?
Pretty rad, right?
By the choices you make for yourself and your family you can literally push yourself and your loved ones toward or away from disease by turning on and off certain genes.
One key area that has brought us the most healing is called Nutrigenomics. Where we examined our genome based on the genes most impacted by our lifestyle choices.
From here we can make personalized choices about our individual lifestyles to move ourselves and our kids towards wellness.
This took all the guessing out of the equation, and provided us with concreate solutions moving forward.
We not only found answers to my son's seizures, we found hope. We found solutions. We found actionable ways we can protect his precious brain health. We even found unexpected ways to help correct behavioral issues we were experience, all through eating according to our genome.
There is not a day that goes by that I'm not looking at things from a genomic standpoint.
It like we are hacking our genomes to live healthier, more vibrant, longer lives.
Would you like to hear more about our journey? Ways you too can find the answers that have been alluding you this far? Get personalized recommendations?
As I finish up my last year of school, I will be offering more services related to Nutrigenomics.
Until then I'll be sharing what I've discovered along our journey and how it just might help you get some clarity around what you are going through.
Stay tuned for a lot of, "Ah-ha!" moments. :)
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