I didn't start out wanting to be a practitioner. I started out wanting to be heard.

BeforeThe body I knew

I have been an athlete my entire life. I was fit through college. I cheered for an arena football team. I trained like a bodybuilder. I got into Ironman trainings and triathlons. I ran 5Ks and half marathons. I did Spartan races and mud runs. My body was the one thing I could always count on.

Then I hit my late thirties.

The crashEighty pounds in a season

In a short period of time, I gained over 80 pounds. I had crushing anxiety. My energy was gone. I was exhausted in a way no amount of sleep could fix. And I was still working out four to five days a week. Home gym, Peloton bike, Peloton tread classes, every workout I'd built my identity around.

None of it touched what was happening to me.

The dismissal"Your labs are normal."

I went to the doctor. He pulled my bloodwork, looked at it for a few minutes, and told me everything was normal. That this was just my age. That I should take three anxiety pills a day. He sent me home with a heart monitor.

And then I felt like he had taken my power away. Because if a doctor with my labs in his hand says nothing is wrong, what am I supposed to do with that?

"I tried everything. Beachbody. Peloton. Shakeology. 21-day fixes. 21-day cleanses. Vegetarian. Keto. Elimination diets. Low-carb. Low-fat. Every supplement that promised fat loss. Every trendy diet I could find. Nothing worked."

The spiralWhat you can't see in the mirror

I started drowning myself in alcohol so I could deal with what I saw in the mirror. My confidence, something I'd had my whole life, collapsed. I stopped wanting intimacy with my husband because I didn't like the way I looked. The body I'd lived in for forty years had become a stranger.

The second blowBrian

Then my husband Brian had a severe stroke from the COVID vaccine. He couldn't walk. He couldn't talk. He couldn't feed himself. He couldn't see for a period of time. He had nearly every marker of a major stroke short of paralysis and death. To this day, he doesn't have full feeling on the left side of his body.

After his therapies ended, we started having little spats. The first time, in our entire life together, that we'd ever fought. We'd never had that before. The cracks were everywhere.

· · ·

The turning point"I'm not doing this anymore."

We were celebrating my 43rd birthday at one of my favorite beaches in the world, the beaches I grew up on. I had bought myself a massive cover-up to hide my body. I'd never done that. And something in me said You are worth more than this. You deserve more than this.

I walked up to our hotel room and I told Brian:

"When I get home, I'm getting sober and going to compete in a bodybuilding show in 2 years. No matter what it takes, I'm going to get healthy again."

The pathHealing me first

I learned about gut health. I learned about hormone balancing. I put myself back through school and earned my Functional Medicine Nutrition Practitioner certification. I did a deep dive into labs and lab reviews and how they correlate to symptoms.

And then I went back. I pulled the same bloodwork that doctor had run, the one who told me everything was normal, and I read it through my new training.

"Everything was already there. Every signal. Every red flag. He just didn't see it. Because he didn't see me."

If he'd just listened when I said "this is not normal for me," if he'd just heard me, he probably could have healed me. But he didn't. So I did it myself. And then I learned more, and I healed Brian too.

NowWhat we do here

We got healthy again. When western medicine left us with medications and emptiness, we got healthy, got off medications, and got into the best shape of our lives.

Every client who comes to me for healing gets the one thing I never got from my own doctor: they get heard.

That's the foundation of The Vitals Lab. It's not a marketing line. It's a moral mission. Because labs mean nothing if you don't know the person they're attached to.