Told My Labs Were Normal While My Body Was Breaking Down: My Midlife Story

From the video captions, as spoken.

I want to share with you how I came to learn about this because I didn't sit down and learn about it in a classroom. As I said earlier, I have always loved health education. It's my master's degree. And I've spent decades since then in the world of health and wellness teaching about the mental, the emotional, the spiritual, and the relational layers of the body. Now, in my 40s and 50s, I spent years being told by very kind, very well-meaning insurance-covering doctors that I was fine while my body was breaking down. Okay? They looked at my labs.

They told me my labs were normal. But I kept getting sicker. So for 2 of those years, I could literally barely function. I had fatigue that absolutely no sleep could touch. My hair was coming out in the shower. And when your hair starts falling out, doesn't come out in a cute little haircut. I had weight gain that didn't make sense, giving there there was no change in what I what and how much I was eating, or how much I moved.

I had brain fog so thick that when I couldn't sleep at night, I was googling early dementia symptoms. I had joint pain. My body ached and I had bloating that would just not resolve after I ate. And underneath this, I felt this like a background prickliness, a tension in my body that just wouldn't lift. So I spent years going to doctors, getting basic labs run, nothing turning up. And I'm going to stand firm in my position that most doctors, whether they are naturopaths, alternative, traditional Chinese medicine doctors, your primary care physician. Most doctors are, they absolutely are doing their very best and they care about us and they mean well.

Okay? So I don't have a story that doctors are trying to get us on pharmaceuticals and they're, you know, they're not brilliant. They are. And at this point, not getting any answers and I'm just not feeling right or like myself, right? There are phrases that you may hear yourself sing or others like, I just don't feel like myself, or I just don't really care, right? Or your enthusiasm for your aliveness diminishing. So finally, I went to what's called a functional medicine practitioner.

They have the same amount of training as most medical doctors, and they operate a little bit differently. In many ways, they're a little bit ahead of the times, especially with labs and how they interpret lab data. Okay? So my first functional medicine practitioner immediately, we did some testing and she could tell me everything that was going on in my body. What? No, no, these are not complicated things, friends. And here's what was going on for me.

Autoimmune, Hashimoto's, thyroid impaired. Okay. I had SIBO, which is a small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. My sex hormones were like non-existent. I had adrenal fatigue, which means your cortisol levels, which is supposed to be a curve like this throughout the day from morning to bedtime, was like a piece of hard spaghetti flatlined.

I had low stomach acid, which almost nobody talks about and gets missed constantly for Women in Midlife, right? Oftentimes Women with like stomach discomfort and symptoms are put on a PPI, medication for too much acid, things like Nexium, Omeprazole. But so many of us in Midlife, actually what we need, we have too little acid and we need more. But this is not something that's a conventional doctor's area of strength. Now without enough stomach acid, which is a huge problem for a lot of Midlife Women. Protein doesn't get broken down, iron's not absorbed, and B12 doesn't get absorbed. So our minerals stay locked and unavailable.

So for me, I was eating genuinely nourishing food, but I became profoundly nutrient deficient because my body couldn't access what I was giving it. Now, all of this converged at once. This was a wrecking ball to my life. And it took me out basically on all 5 layers. Clearly, it took me out on the layer of my body. It took me out on the layer of my mind because I couldn't really trust my own memory. My emotions were impacted because I didn't recognize the Woman that I had become.

My relationships were impacted because I had nothing extra left to give those who loved me, and I felt my spiritual layer impacted because I teach spiritual practices for a living and I could barely stay present inside my own. Now, so what finally changed for me was finding the right educators and the right doctors. And what the functional medicine practitioner did for me that was different from conventional care was not only did they know what tests to order, they interpreted the results differently. They read optimal ranges from my lab data instead of normal ranges, and they understood that the state of your gut is the beginning and ending of everything else that Women feel physically in Midlife.

Now, nobody handed me a map like the map you're getting today and that you will get this week in all the materials. I had to dig hard through this with all my brain fog. I went and found the angels that could actually help me, and it took years for me to find them. So saving you years of suffering is the entire reason that I'm standing here with you today. Now, for me, with the right health, the right education, the right treatment, all of my hair grew back. Okay? My hair has literally never been healthier.

My gut healed. My thyroid antibodies came down and they plummeted all the way from the high 300s down into the low 50s and they're still dropping. And most importantly, I felt more alive at every single step. Now, I also replenished my missing sex hormones. Topical testosterone, very low doses, topical estrogen, and oral progesterone. So this protocol that I use was built customized for my body by my practitioners. So this is not a prescription. It's not a one size fits all. It's a one size fits one.

And by the end of this conversation, I will tell you exactly how to get your own sex hormones tested, what to do with that information. What I can tell you is that all of what I did was the difference between I know this sounds dramatic. It was the difference from feeling like I was walking dead to feeling vibrantly alive. Okay, and I'm not even through Menopause yet.

So I actually feel better now at 54 than I did at 35. And after the wrecking ball came through, I got a life that feels better than the one I had before all this started.