The Next Piece of Information Will Be the One to Save Me

How optimizing my health ruined my health

My mom was your typical 80s/90s American woman- jumping from Weight Watchers to Jenny Craig and back again, always buying new workout VHSs, and stocking the pantry full of low fat and fat free “healthy” processed food.

She also worked nights (dealing black jack and roulette at Harrah’s Lake Tahoe), and was herself raised on processed food by a single working mother. Because of these things I grew up in a house with zero culinary culture, where I almost never witnessed food preparation, and where almost everything I ever ate was highly processed and lacking nourishment.

Cereal for breakfast, whatever horror was being served for hot lunch at school, Top Ramen after school, and for dinner either a processed low fat frozen meal or pizza or fast food (if my dad was up for an outing) or perhaps he’d fix the one dish he ever prepared for me and my sister- eggs scrambled in a bowl then topped with Velveeta cheese and microwaved.

My mom was also the most loving and wonderful person who ever lived, and I live my life and mother my daughters in honor of her memory. If she were here, she’d be walking this path of discovering nourishment with me, and every post is a communication to her just as much as it is to you.

My interest in health started young and was an unintended side effect of my mom’s own desire for health and the food fear instilled by the culture of her time. When I was 17- around the time I was first diagnosed hypothyroid- she brought home the book Total Health Makeover by actress Marilu Henner, and I (never one to let printed material sitting on the table go unread) devoured it.

I had been vegetarian since age 12 (not for my health or even for the animals, but because I hated the texture and taste of meat- I now see this as a symptom of nutrient deficiency, on top of and due to the lack of cooking in the home), but I became vegan after reading this book.

I loved the idea that I could achieve optimum health through lifestyle- mostly dietary- choices. That belief stayed with me for decades, and since then I’ve read countless books and blog posts, listened to endless podcasts, etc., constantly making small tweaks to what I ate to further “optimize” my health.

I remained vegan through my first pregnancy, birth, and postpartum at age 25. I nursed my daughter for 2.5 years. She was deliciously chubby and vibrant and beautiful, and I was an emaciated, anemic, undernourished mess.

Mother Nature in her fierce wisdom had ensured that my baby was as nourished as possible, and my already-low nutrient reserves were swiftly exhausted.

At this time I undertook an herbal apprenticeship with Kami McBride. At one of our first classes she pulled up a chair next to me on our lunch break, looked me in the eye and said “You’re vegan, aren’t you?” When I said yes she lovingly said “I can tell by looking at you” and went on to explain how I was under nourishing myself by eschewing animal products as a childbearing woman.

Her words poured into me like warm honey (which, not being a totally insane person, I was still consuming).

I had known that something was wrong, but had not guessed that my super healthy and morally superior vegan diet could be the problem. It was optimal!

But each word she spoke rang like truth throughout my being.

She asked me if I’d eat sardines if she went into the house and got me some, then and there, and I said yes.

And I did. And something inside of me woke up again.

This is when I first started to think about what nourishment really means (spoiler: still figuring that out, writing this Substack to help me figure that out).

Here I will check my tendency to ramble on for paragraphs and instead sloppily list out the things I cycled through during the following 15+ years that are relevant to my health now- separation, broke & hustling single motherhood, my mom’s sudden and devastating death, getting unexpectedly pregnant a couple weeks after her accident and having a second daughter with my now husband Owen (born ten years after the first), plowing through exhaustion during my second pregnancy to barely- both financially and time wise- buy us a small home, the explosive growth of our herbal business during my youngest’s first couple years of life, starting a podcast, and trying to address the baby weight and the exhaustion I was ignoring by turning once again to gurus and experts who promised to help me optimize my health- from years 2 to 5 of my second postpartum I rotated through paleo, keto, low carb, intermittent fasting, and long term fasting (a practice I had first dabbled in in my early 20s and did not use to restrict calories, but rather because I truly believed I was giving my body a break and a reset that would boost my wellbeing- I was optimizing!).

The piece of health information that was going to save me was always just around the corner (in the next book read or podcast episode listened to).

I was always just a few tweaks away from optimal health.

Except that, over time, the opposite happened.

By my early 40s this approach to health had backfired big time.

I had tried so hard to do everything right, truly wanting to nourish myself and support my health so that I could show up for my family and my business, and instead I had decimated my metabolism/body’s ability to make energy by limiting a rotating cast of foods, fasting and also unconsciously undereating, and living in a state of constant doing.

Stress, undernourishment, and lack of self attunement had depleted me at the cellular level.

Just before my 42nd birthday I collapsed in utter exhaustion and completely lost my vitality.

If you’re interested in understanding the mineral and metabolic roots of energy and fatigue please read this incredible booklet from the 80s- oh how I wish my mom had somehow stumbled upon it then and followed this advice instead!

I remember my teenage daughter (yes, the baby in that photo, who is now almost 18!) coming into my room as I lay crying on the floor two winters ago. “Are you okay Mom? What is going on lately? I’ve never seen you like this.”

For the first time in my life I answered “I am not okay”, but I had no idea why.

About a month later I hosted Niecia Nelson on episode 100 of the Medicine Stories podcast Returning the Mother to Herself: Our Nourishment Shapes How We Receive Life, and realized that I had deep repair work to do.

It took me 100 episodes, which had increasingly been focused on food and optimizing health, to realize that I had been going about it all wrong.

I began working with Niecia and started doing regular hair tissue mineral analysis (HTMA) and blood work labs (more on that below), and have been amazed by how they accurately reflect my felt sense of energy every single time. I also began an inner, psychological healing process to accompany the more scientific and behavior-changing approach.

I began caring more about nourishment than nutrients.

Decades of listening to everyone but myself had had profound consequences, and I had lost the plot.

I had, rather, lost myself.

Today I am constantly walking that fine line between learning from others about what ails me and what might help, and learning to discern and oftentimes tune out knowing that isn’t my own.

My approach to food these days is generally in line with the bioenergetic understanding of cellular health and energy, also called pro-metabolic.

This article is both an excellent introduction to this approach and a takedown of how it is commonly misunderstood and misapplied. My biggest takeaway from it, supported by my own experience and walking with many other women on this path, is that it all come down to bio-individuality.

I endeavor to support my cellular metabolism- the basis of health and wellbeing- by figuring out which foods work for me at this moment in time (noting the irony that had I not restricted so many foods over the year I would probably have less food reactivity now), making sure I’m consuming enough calories every day, and slowly working to heal my most problematic low energy symptoms (gall stones, frequent night waking, and weight gain still beleaguer me, while the utter exhaustion of the last couple years and constant pain I was in for 25 years have mostly resolved as I’ve remineralized my body).

I also had to radically change how I was spending my time in order to re-pattern my stress response. I restructured my life in order to heal, or rather to move toward healing.

I pushed through stress and my body’s signals to slow down for so many years (I always say that I was living on caffeine and cortisol) that my body finally forced me to stop. I spent late winter, spring, and early summer of 2023 in bed.

My husband- who already had a full plate- had to step up big time when it came to our children, household duties, and our business. The mom guilt consumed me (especially when I got my youngest daughter’s HTMA- hair tissue mineral analysis- results and saw the mineral inheritance I had passed down to her- but that’s for another post!).

I was in the darkest corner of a cave, barely any life emitting from me. I had no hope, no joy. Trusting that I could be well again was a stretch, but I’d seen other women do it. And I had my family, who love me and need me.

Every marker on my first thyroid labs showed an under-functioning thyroid, with very high levels of Reverse T3, which is what slows bears down and forces them into hibernation- in other words, nature’s way of telling a body to go into that cave and REST.

If someone had told me a few years ago to slow down or else pay the metabolic price, I would have brushed them off. “Okay buddy, how about you live my life for a week and then tell me it’s possible to slow down?” (Now when I look back at the first HTMA I ever did, about six months before my crash, I clearly see that I was in what is called the “alarm stage of stress”, where the body is trying desperately to keep producing energy despite plummeting mineral reserves).

This hypothyroid state has been reflected in numerous follow-up HTMA tests that I’ve taken over the last year. I am in a “four lows” pattern, with the four most important energy-producing minerals (calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium) well below the levels needed for healthy cellular functioning.

These electrolytic minerals are vital for both the thyroid and the adrenals- the body’s main energy producing organs- to function. This is why an HTMA can so accurately assess a person’s energy.

There is no end to the list of health problems that a low metabolic state can cause.

Likewise, a person with robust metabolic health is unlikely to experience many health problems.

And metabolic unwellness is rapidly increasing in the population as our soils and food become ever more depleted of nutrients, we are exposed to a tsunami of toxins that overburden our depleted bodies, chronic illness and autoimmune disorders skyrocket (even among children), and the stress of modern living continues to wreak havoc on our nervous systems.

This is why I am sharing my thoughts and my very personal, (tediously boring?) story here.

Because so many of us, mostly women, are experiencing something similar.

Because it’s so hard to find the balance between learning from genuine experts who can help us and falling under the sway of inept influencers who can harm us (I SEE YOU DAVE ASPREY).

And because this metabolic unraveling is happening to younger and younger people.

No matter what I do for my children- how I feed them or what values I instill- while they’re still at home, the culture is an overwhelming force.

And the culture is deeply unwell.

May this space create small ripples in the culture that just may, someday, help to change our species’ metabolic future for the better.

And if not that lofty goal, at least help more women and mothers feel less alone in their struggle to regain metabolic wellness in a world that seems intent on undermining it.

I am finding my way to wellness again, but I will never be who I was.

We don’t heal backward into who we were before we were ill, we heal forward into someone new. And I aim to heal not just for myself, but for my mother and my daughters as well.

I would love to hear from anyone who read this far-

*if you’re willing to be public with your thoughts, please comment on the post rather than reply to the email (ten minutes after publication I’ve gotten so many great email responses!)*

What was the food culture in your home growing up?

Did you absorb the food beliefs or behaviors of your caregivers?

What is your definition of nourishment?