My Life Altering Journey to Healing Metabolism: Food As Medicine & Keto-Adaptation

As a facilitator of Fidalgo Island Health Center’s Metabolic Reset Program, I will be guiding participants along a path that uses food as medicine to heal and optimize the metabolism. While I am a licensed acupuncturist and holistic healthcare provider with a medicinal background to support the 7-week journey that participants will embark on in our program, I also want to share my personal experience with some of these life altering practices we will learn about and utilize.

Twenty years ago, I started my own journey learning about the power of using food to heal. At the time, I had suffered in silence with digestive issues since I was a teenager. When I finally sought out help, I was diagnosed with IBS and Crohn’s disease. However, none of the western medical interventions they recommended seemed to help. Feeling like I was at the end of my rope, I sought out alternative medicine. It wasn’t until an acupuncturist recommended trying an elimination diet that I learned gluten was the culprit of many of my symptoms. Within weeks of cutting gluten out of my diet, I regained a quality of life that I hadn’t experienced in years.

About a decade after going gluten-free, I was living in Hawaii and leading an extremely active and healthy lifestyle. However, I began to develop new symptoms. I felt tired and sluggish all the time. My joints were constantly achy and painful. No matter how active or restrictive I was with my eating habits, I still experienced fatigue and a sense that my metabolism was slowing down. At the encouragement of my doctor, I decided to go on a diet that limited me to under 1300 calories a day. I changed nothing else about my lifestyle. He told me that after one month of eating less, I would lose about eight pounds and most likely feel better. Instead, I gained five. The person who I was dating at the time made the exact same dietary changes in an effort to support me. Guess what? They lost eight pounds. It was then, that I realized that not all bodies are created equal. I had worked so hard to better my health with this dietary change, however, I felt worse instead of better. And on top of it, I was hungry all the time now.

I began talking to others about their relationship with food, body image and wellness. I felt frustrated about living in a culture that places so much importance on body size instead of on wellness. For example, I was moving my body all day, eating less than 1300 calories, and was a size 12. According to the Center for Disease Control’s Body Mass Index (BMI), I was considered on the border of obese. How could this be when I was so active and eating like a rabbit? Also, I was one of the most active people I knew. How could I be considered unhealthy? The more I talked about my experience, the more I discovered that there were other people who shared comparable experiences and felt similar to me. After doing some personal work that helped me to understand that bodies can be healthy at all sizes and that the expectations our culture places on body image are completely unrealistic, I decided I wanted to explore if there were other diets that put the focus on health rather than weight loss. I began doing my own research and discovered a way of eating I had never heard of previously. The idea wasn’t to eating less, but instead about eating less often. The only other change was to limit carbohydrate intake. Upon making these changes, I literally felt something inside of body shift. Day by day, I regained control over my health. I discovered that teaching my body different ways to convert food into energy helped to change the way I metabolize food. I began to have more energy, mind clarity, less pain and just felt SO MUCH BETTER.

Since discovering this new way of using food as medicine over ten years ago, I have spent quite a bit of time learning more about why intermittent fasting and diets that are low in carbohydrates can do wonders for our health. I even became a holistic healthcare provider myself, just so I can help people like you find a path of improved health and wellness. This is exactly what I will share with you in our 7-week Metabolic Reset Program. Please join me on our next program! We will learn more about how to achieve metabolic flexibility- the ability to shift your metabolism between sugar and fat burning- so that you can enjoy the wonderful benefits of utilizing food as medicine.