My Journey - Integrative Health Practitioner
A little bit about me… I grew up in London and from about 17 I loved to party! It wouldn’t be uncommon to drink 5 pints on a Tuesday night and eat McDonald s 4 times a week! Looking back I had very low self esteem and social anxiety and drinking alcohol was a way for me to run away from this.
My natural health journey started when I had acne and the conventional treatments weren’t working for me… a change in diet, cutting back on the alcohol and using a broccoli supplement and it cleared it up. This really opened my eyes to the power of natural therapies and diet.
Fast forward a couple of years I put a sewing needle through my finger and unbeknownst to me it was stuck in there... an operation and 5 rounds of antibiotics later, my gut was wrecked. I spent 2 years going to different practitioners with no clear answers. I was sick a lot and picked up the worst food poisoning in Vanuatu which went on for 8 days, yuk.
In 2016 I became pregnant and picked up a parasite (Blastocystis) when I was 6 months. Our beautiful baby boy was born by caesarean section (that’s a whole other blog post) and that’s where the fun began… he was a very demanding chap! He didn’t sleep well and was up 3-6 times a night for 18 months. I was in a very bad way by this point with chronic fatigue, brain fog, apathy, anxiety and digestive issues. I thought this was rock bottom but there was still more to come…
At 11 months old my son picked up a gastro bug which then developed into a huge rash all over his face, constant crying, very upset stomach and waking up for 2-3 hours at nighttime banging his head against his cot and us, it was terrifying. We spent our days going from appointment to appointment (kinesiologist, homeopath, naturopath, integrative medicine doctor, Chinese medicine doctor, immunologist) trying to figure out what was wrong.
It was so consuming and there was a constant commentary playing in my mind on how we could heal Arlo. I would spend hours researching different practitioners and methodologies and would get very overwhelmed and not know where to turn…. One night after another night of being up from 1-4am I text my mum asking her to come over from the UK to help as I was broken. Luckily, she did, which was a huge blessing. As soon as she arrived Arlo’s mood started to improve. Looking back i see it was because my energy had changed as I felt I could relax now my mum was here to look after us. Babies and children are so intuitive!
3 months later after working with a naturopath and kinesiologist, we started to see improvements. The rash on his face was so much better, he was much happier and stopped headbutting. He got better as the months went by, tolerating more foods, not getting sick as often, dark circles under his eyes going…. It was a long road and took us 4 years to get to the point where he was doing solid poops again. I did some serious happy dances when that happened!
All the while when Arlo was sick, I still had the parasite and was breastfeeding, at one point I was only eating about 10 foods as I didn’t know if what I was eating was affecting his tummy. I was seriously underweight and looked gaunt. Once we weaned at 17 months, I set to work on getting rid of the parasite. I read anything and everything on how to kill it, I was obsessed. 4 different treatments later and nothing had worked. I was so adamant that I wanted to treat it naturally but at this point I was considering antibiotics or flying to London for a FMT (Faecal Matter transplant).
As often happens, just as I was about to give up, I came across some new information. I was listening to the Melissa Ambrosini podcast and she was talking to Dr Stephen Cabral, an amazing naturopathic doctor in the US.
His approach and protocols just spoke to me. Within a week I had signed up to do his Integrative Health Practitioner course and had started his parasite protocol. After that I went on to do the Candida and Bacterial overgrowth protocol. All up it took me 4.5 months. The moment of truth was when I went to get re-tested for blasto, I almost fell off my chair when the doctor told me the test had come back ALL CLEAR!! It was the moment I had been dreaming of for 2.5 years, it was such an amazing feeling I cried with happiness.
I then committed the next year of my like training to be an Integrative Health Practitioner and helped many clients with their own gut issues.
Buuuuuuuut the journey didn’t end there, although I had eradicated the parasite I was not feeling 100% better. Still very tired and huge anxiety. Then covid hit and that took my stress levels to a whole different level. My family is from the UK and I wasn’t sure when I would see them again. During this time I started putting on a lot of weight… I went from being very skinny to 5kg’s over my ideal weight in a matter of 6 months. Lots of bloating, constipation which I have never had. So i knew something was up again!! This time i had SIBO.
SIBO is when bacteria from the large intestine gets into the sterile environment of the small intestine. This can be due to stress, antibiotics, the illeocecal valve (the gate between the large and small intestine) not working properly, surgery, slow digestion.
I tried various different protocols for this, the last one being 10 weeks on allicin and oregano and the bi-phasic diet. This was INTENSE! There was quite a bit of gut healing to be done afterwards. I went off to the UK where I grew up and I noticed my gut was 100 times better there.
This led me to the next phase of my healing journey…. Energy medicine!