January 11, 2025 • 57 mins
Mold illness, mold toxicity, chronic illness, lipedema, hypermobility, Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, MCAS Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, POTS, Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome, etc!
From mysterious health symptoms to weight gain, and recovering from being a workaholic, Becca Golden shares her healing journey over the past few years.
From battling work-induced stress and hormonal imbalances to overcoming conditions like Lipedema, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, MCAS, and mold exposure, Becca recounts her struggles and triumphs. She discusses her shift from treating her body as 'broken' to seeing symptoms as valuable messages, the transformational mindset shift, and the various therapies and practices that have helped her reclaim her life.
Becca's story is one of resilience, deep introspection, and relentless pursuit of health, offering inspiration and hope to anyone facing similar battles.
Don’t forget to like, follow, and share this with someone who might need a little hope today.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to Golden Girl, a space where we dive deep into health, healing, connection, and
(00:06):
community.
I'm your host, Becca Golden, and this podcast is all about sharing and documenting my journey.
Each episode, we'll discuss topics like health and wellness, what I'm learning in therapy,
work-life balance, relationships, community, and all the ways I strive for more aliveness
and presence every day.
Let's dive in.
(00:26):
Hi everyone.
Welcome back to another episode of Golden Girl.
This is going to be a big episode today because today I'm going to be telling my entire story
of my health and healing journey over the last couple of years that I've been through and
we're going to cover a lot.
(00:47):
There was a lot that happened, but before I tell the story, I want to say a few things
about the story and what you're going to hear.
In this story, there are a lot of things that happened to me.
There are a lot of things that happened to my body and to my health and things that a
(01:07):
lot of people really would not wish for.
And for the first half of my health and healing story, as I watched my health kind of fall
apart, I treated my body like it was defective.
And for so much of these things that were happening to my health and my body, every
(01:28):
time I got a new symptom, I was so mad.
But this entire health journey has been the greatest gift.
This whole experience that I've gone through has saved my life.
Every single symptom, every single health condition that I have now, every single thing that I've
(01:49):
gone through with this health and healing journey that I've really only just begun,
has saved my life.
And that is because if none of this happened, I would have continued down a trajectory that
was so harmful to me that I really wouldn't have been living a life at all.
The way that I was treating myself and the priorities that I had were so harmful to me
(02:13):
that even without health problems, it was no way to live.
And my health spiraling out of control forced me to take a look at my life and reprioritize.
So as I'm about to tell a long, long tale about all the things that have happened to
my body and all the things that happened with my health and how I really was in such a dark
(02:36):
place, I just feel so lucky.
Because it's given me a second chance at being alive.
And regardless of how you interpret what I'll share with you, I am so grateful to be alive
today.
And every single day I wake up and I do not take anything for granted, I wake up and I
(02:59):
am so grateful to be able to get out of bed on my own, to be able to go outside and breathe
fresh air without being afraid of what it'll do to me.
I'm grateful to sleep every night and be able to move my body without pain for the most
part.
So this is all really amazing.
And so when I tell this story of everything that's happened to me, I want everyone to
(03:22):
know that I feel like the luckiest person on the planet.
I really do.
To be alive and to be in this body that I have and to be so resilient and to have never
given up on myself.
So now to set the stage.
My health story has three distinct chapters.
Chapter one is kind of like the lead up to the real stuff.
(03:46):
Chapter two is when my healing era really begins, but I'm going about it all wrong.
And then I have a huge shift in my mindset.
That mindset shift really kicks off chapter three of the journey, which is when I start
to actually find answers and make really good progress on everything.
So with that, I guess we can begin.
(04:09):
Chapter one, this is the ignoring chapter, the chapter of me ignoring all of my symptoms.
And this is all relevant.
Okay, so I'm going to start a little further back, but we'll jump ahead quickly.
So to begin the story, I am just going to say a few words about college.
When I was in college, school was really hard for me.
(04:29):
As a teenager, I was so messy and forgetful and scattered and frazzled.
That was kind of like the narrative that my parents gave me growing up is like, you're
such a mess and you're so forgetful and how are you going to be able to keep a job?
How are you going to do this and that?
And so I had this narrative in my head of like, I am not capable of keeping a job.
(04:50):
And I didn't agree with it, but I felt the need to constantly prove that that was wrong.
And so throughout a lot of my college career, I was failing to prove that that was not the
case.
I was struggling in my classes.
I had multiple jobs and I was struggling to manage all of them.
And there was just like way too much on my plate.
And I never felt like I had a good grasp on anything.
(05:12):
I was always drowning in work and stress and everything.
But I was determined to prove that I could keep a job.
When I was graduating, I was applying to tons of jobs.
I kept applying and applying, going to interview after interview after interview.
And I finally got one job offer, the only job offer that I got.
(05:35):
I took it and I held on for dear life.
So I started working in this corporate job and I worked my ass off.
And for the first time in my life, that started to be rewarded.
In college, I would work my ass off and it didn't make a difference.
I was still really struggling.
But in this job, I was putting in a lot of effort and it was paying off.
(06:00):
And that felt so good for the first time in my life.
The work that I put in and the effort that I put in was actually paying off.
So I poured everything that I could into work and I was really good at it.
And then I was getting recognized at my job and I was offered promotions and I was offered
(06:21):
more opportunities and more work to do.
And over time, it was really starting to take a toll on me.
So fast forward seven years and I am a full blown workaholic.
Work is everything to me.
Here is where the story really begins.
In January of 2022, things are getting pretty bad.
(06:45):
I was working like 15 hour days every single day waking up immediately jumping on a zoom
call and it was just back to back to back call after call after call.
So this is like 15 hours straight without a bathroom break, without a lunch break, without
any chance to go through my email and respond to all the things that people need for me.
(07:08):
Like I'm multitasking on every call.
I'm responding to texts while I'm like trying to be smiley and presentable on video and
typing to do list items and like taking notes while my phone is getting text messages.
My Slack is blowing up.
My email is blowing up.
Like there was so much happening and for 15 hours, that's a long time.
(07:31):
That means like I would start at 7am and I would be on calls until 10pm.
It was such a fast paced environment and it was draining me really fast.
It was around this time that I realized this is not good for me and I need a break.
And I talked to my management about it and I remember telling them I'm hanging on by
(07:53):
a thread here.
I was trying to wrap up these three really big projects at work though at the time and
so my management was like, okay, yeah, we hear you.
We know you need a break.
As soon as you're through with those projects, take a break and I was like, okay, okay, I
can do it.
I can manage to be okay until these projects are done.
(08:13):
So I pushed through for three more months and during that time, I was a shell of a human
being.
During that time, I was crying every single night.
I completely lost all sense of self and I was so isolated.
I wasn't sleeping at all.
I was not okay.
(08:34):
And then I finally wrap up these three projects at work.
So it's time for me to take the break and I felt broken.
I felt like nothing.
I couldn't open my laptop.
I couldn't answer the phone.
I couldn't answer text messages.
I was avoiding going to bed.
I would like just be stuck on my couch at night.
(08:55):
My body would refuse to go upstairs to get ready for bed.
I felt like somebody had taken me and like frozen me into a giant ice cube and I couldn't
move.
I was in what I now know is considered a trauma-freeze response.
But I didn't know that at the time.
So I kept pushing through and then I started having all these hormone problems.
(09:19):
Even though I was on birth control, I started having a lot more breakouts and a lot of rashes
and a lot more PMS.
Even though I was on birth control, I was having like crazy PMS.
So my body was having all sorts of symptoms and I gained like 20 pounds out of nowhere.
I wasn't fitting into any of my clothes and it didn't make sense.
(09:40):
I was like, why did I gain all this weight out of nowhere?
So I started on a quest to lose the weight and it was not budging.
I was exercising every day for the first time and going on walks and eating really clean
and the weight was not budging.
Eventually the frozen state turned into more like depression and I continued to have a
(10:06):
lot of weird health symptoms and depression.
My type of depression that I had at this time was lack of affect.
So nothing mattered.
I didn't care about anything.
I was never really upset or sad.
I was never happy.
I was just checked out.
Like I was on autopilot, I would wake up, go through the motions and nothing mattered.
(10:30):
Like nothing.
So that was not a fun time for me and I was like, you know what?
I bet my birth control is causing all this.
My birth control is making me gain weight and my birth control is making me depressed.
So of course I'll just stop taking my birth control and then all my problems will go away.
At this point in my life, the reason that I was on birth control was because I had endometriosis
(10:54):
and PMDD before I went on birth control.
Endometriosis is a really painful condition where your tissue starts to grow outside your
uterus and it's not supposed to do that.
So that is something that I had before going on birth control.
And then I also had something called PMDD, which is like a really extreme version of
(11:15):
PMS, but it really for me messed with my head.
Like I would go through these periods of deep despair, deep, deep despair when I had PMDD.
In addition to PMDD and endometriosis coming back, I was also really afraid that if I just
abruptly got off of the birth control that I would develop PCOS, Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome,
(11:38):
because it's very common for women who go off of their birth control all of a sudden
cold turkey to develop that, especially if it runs in your family and it does run in
my family.
So I was like not really excited to go off of my birth control, but if it was causing
me all this weight gain and depression, then I felt like I had no choice.
It was at this time that I made a commitment to myself.
(12:01):
I decided I had to go off my birth control regardless of what happens to me.
So this kind of wraps up chapter one with me deciding that going off my birth control
was going to be the answer to all my problems.
I'm going to get off the birth control, I'll drop the weight, I'll look like myself again,
(12:21):
I'll feel like myself again because I won't be depressed anymore, and I'll stop having
all these hormone problems and life will be good.
Now we begin chapter two.
I started working with this naturopath on getting my body prepared to get off of the
birth control.
At this point we're nearing the end of 2022.
(12:43):
I'm not drinking coffee.
I'm really rarely drinking alcohol.
We're starting to dabble with the healing era a little bit with cycle sinking and getting
more in tune with my body and thinking like okay I'm going to be in touch with my feminine
energy and listen to my body and the cycles.
(13:05):
I started learning about the different phases of the menstrual cycle.
I am doing a lot of infrared sauna.
It's helping me with my depression, it's helping me with seasonal allergies, and I'm taking
all these supplements, then all these things that my naturopath had given me and I'm so
committed to the journey of preparing my body to stop the birth control.
(13:27):
Then in May of 2023 I officially stopped taking it and it was such a great day.
I woke up and the world was colorful again and everything was beautiful and I felt alive
again, I felt like myself again.
It was such an amazing shift.
However, I continued to have a lot of other symptoms.
(13:52):
My cycles were around like 45 days long which is not considered normal.
It's not supposed to be 45 days.
The wake-ain never went away sadly for me at the time.
Instead, I noticed that the texture of my legs, the cellulite on my legs multiplied and it
(14:13):
was like the craziest texture of cellulite that I'd ever seen because I could see lumps
in my legs.
It looked like there was potato noki under my skin.
I've always had some cellulite on my legs, that's normal.
This was a different level of cellulite that I was not familiar with.
(14:34):
I started to lift weights.
I had heard that lifting weights was the best way to get rid of cellulite.
It was good for your hormones, all sorts of things.
I hired a trainer and I started lifting weights three days a week really consistently.
Over time, I continued to start feeling worse and I was like, I don't know what's wrong
with me.
I wasn't losing weight.
(14:55):
I was actually gaining weight.
I was starting to have a lot of problems with water retention.
My legs had so much water retention.
It would just be like leg and then foot.
There was no ankle whatsoever.
I was just having the craziest swelling and my legs were so heavy and I was really starting
to lose energy.
(15:16):
I wasn't losing the weight.
The cellulite was getting worse.
I was getting bigger.
My face was getting puffier.
I was becoming more and more tired and I was really desperate for answers at this point.
I had heard that sometimes your body can hold on to extra weight if you have trauma and I
(15:37):
was like, oh, that must be it.
My work has traumatized me.
Of course, I'm traumatized by my job.
It wasn't the birth control causing the weight gain.
It was trauma.
I started going to trauma therapy at this time.
Officially, my healing era has begun.
I'm in weightlifting.
I'm in trauma therapy.
I'm focusing all of my time and energy on myself and getting better.
(16:01):
I'm focusing on my hormones, focusing on my circadian health, getting plenty of sleep,
getting plenty of sunshine and healing myself from the inside out and I feel like absolute
shit.
I am so depleted at this point.
I was drinking six packets of element a day and that was not even enough.
(16:22):
It was helping me, but I was feeling so exhausted all the time.
Every time I reached like ovulation time of my cycle, I actually felt sick.
I realized I would have flu symptoms and I would also feel really irritable and anxious
and like PMSC, mid-cycle.
My body is still holding on to this extra weight is puffier and more inflamed than ever
(16:45):
before.
I felt like it looked like someone just pumped my body like full of air, like inflated me
and I still wasn't fitting in any of my clothes.
I was pissed and I was like, I don't understand what else to do here.
And then my focus got kind of diverted away from the weight gain because then I started
to feel really fatigued.
When I say fatigued, I mean like I didn't have the energy to go to my mailbox that's
(17:11):
at the top of my driveway and get my mail and I didn't have the energy to like answer
the phone.
I had the bare minimum amount of energy and during this time, I'm still showing up to
my workouts with my trainer and I would show up and basically attempt to work out and end
up stretching on the mat for half the time.
And that would be all of my energy for the day.
(17:33):
And then I would get home.
I wouldn't have energy to cook for myself.
I was just like so tired and I was so isolated.
Like I had no energy to talk to anybody.
So I would get home and just like lay on the couch and cry all day because I had no energy
to do anything.
And I'm like searching online, like on Reddit for answers at this point.
(17:54):
Like I'm searching everywhere because I'm like, I feel like I'm dying.
Like I literally felt like I was dying.
And then, and then I started losing my memory.
Then I started not being able to speak in coherent sentences very well.
And I couldn't think of words when I would begin to speak expecting words to come out.
They wouldn't.
And so that was really scary for me.
I was like starting to get very worried about what was happening with my health.
(18:19):
So I am talking to my naturopath about this and we decided to do a Dutch test.
So a Dutch test is a test that looks at your hormone levels.
There's a few different types of tests that they do, but the one that I wanted to do would
essentially track the levels of all of my sex hormones throughout the course of a menstrual
cycle so that I could see what exactly was happening.
(18:40):
I was like, okay, I just want to know what's going on.
And then once I do this Dutch test, I'll have the answers.
So the Dutch test was the new thing that I was like, as soon as I understand all my hormone
levels, it's going to explain everything.
So by the time I got the results back, I was like not even really focused on the weight
loss.
(19:01):
I was just focused on having a quality of life again, having my fatigue improve and understanding
what was happening to my body.
I was so desperate to understand what was going on.
So I get the Dutch test results back and all of my hormone levels are completely depleted.
(19:22):
Like my hormones were gone.
And on this test, it has categories of like, okay, if you're in this age range, this is
kind of the level you should expect.
Most of my hormones were in the age range of someone who is 90 years old.
And like you're supposed to have a cortisol spike in the morning.
Part of this test, we did a cortisol awakening response test, which measures your cortisol
(19:46):
throughout the day.
So you're supposed to have a big spike of cortisol in the morning and then throughout
the rest of the day, it slowly falls.
And that's what kind of gives you your energy during the day.
And then that's why you kind of wind down throughout the evening.
I didn't have a cortisol spike.
I didn't have any cortisol whatsoever.
I had no pregnant alone.
So I couldn't make DHEA.
(20:07):
I had nothing.
And that was so validating, but it was so scary to see how messed up my results were on that
test was honestly terrifying.
And so I was really relying on my naturopath to help me through it.
And unfortunately, I did not feel like she helped me at all.
So she pretty much looked at all the levels of things that were low and then recommended
(20:32):
that I take supplements of natural forms of those things.
So an example is I did not have any DHEA whatsoever.
And so she recommended that I start taking DHEA.
But I asked, like, why aren't I making DHEA?
Because above DHEA, what you need to make DHEA is pregnant alone.
So I was like, well, why wouldn't I take pregnant alone?
(20:56):
Because then wouldn't that allow me to make DHEA?
And she was like, oh yeah, you could do that instead.
But I was like, but wait, why don't I have pregnant alone?
Like, there were so many questions, I just didn't understand.
So she was giving me all of these natural supplements that she recommended that I take
to replenish the levels of the hormones that I was missing.
But she could not tell me why I was missing those hormones in the first place.
(21:19):
And that was what I found very troubling because I'm not treating symptoms throughout my whole
health journey.
I want to understand what's going on.
And she could not explain to me why I was so depleted in these hormones.
And that was really concerning to me.
So I did not take any of her advice.
I didn't take any of these hormones because I didn't want to mess with that.
(21:41):
Like, to me, the way that I was thinking at the time is like, my body was working fine.
And then something happened and everything got thrown off.
And if that wasn't my birth control and it wasn't work trauma, I mean, it might have
been a little.
But like, there's something else that I'm not getting here that that's not part of
the story yet that I haven't uncovered.
(22:04):
And I need to know because otherwise I'm just going to be taking supplements as a bandaid
forever.
Like, I need to understand why I'm missing these hormones because then there's a problem
that I haven't uncovered yet.
I was so frustrated.
I was so exhausted.
Like I had no energy.
I had no DHA.
(22:25):
I had no cortisol.
I had nothing left.
So I was like, I, but I have to, my life depends on this.
I have to figure out what's wrong with me because no one else is going to.
If I don't figure this out, who will?
Nobody.
This is up to me.
I have to be the one to solve this.
I went to my primary care doctor and went to my gynecologist.
(22:47):
I told my doctors like, I'm so fatigued.
I'm not feeling okay.
Like there's something wrong.
I'm losing my memory.
I can't speak well and they were like, yeah, well, you know, you're getting older.
I'm like, no, you don't understand.
Like this happened overnight.
Like this is happening all of a sudden.
I feel like I'm aging so rapidly.
(23:07):
I feel like I'm aging 10 years every day.
Like I'm, I feel like I'm dying and they did the blood work.
They're like, everything's normal.
There wasn't anything that they could do to help me and they didn't give me any answers.
So I was like, oh my God, I am never going to find answers.
I really thought I was dying.
(23:27):
I was so scared.
So at this point, I had nothing left to give and everything that I found said that I had
adrenal fatigue, which basically says that you're doomed forever.
You're never going to have energy back and everything's just always going to be hard
for you.
And I knew that was not the case for me.
I'm like, no, I don't have this.
Like this is, there's no way.
(23:48):
I, I have something else is happening.
Like I just knew, but in therapy, we had to start working on acceptance and coming to
terms with my situation.
And my therapist recommended that I begin the grieving process of the life that I thought
I would have.
So I did, I began to try to push myself to reach a level of acceptance with where I was
(24:14):
at and come to terms with the fact that I'm never going to have energy to do things that
I want to do.
But like it was hard to accept that.
Like every time I would get to therapy and have to force myself to grieve and come to
terms with where my health was at, I refused to do it.
(24:36):
I just wouldn't because I knew deep down that this was not my reality forever.
I knew it.
I didn't just believe that there was a better future for me.
I knew it.
So my therapist helped me reach this point where I was able to start grieving and start
reaching a level of acceptance.
(24:57):
But I told her that I'm not going to give up fighting for the life that I know I can
have.
I said, I am not going to give up.
And I refuse to make peace with the fact that this is it for me.
There's no way.
I still don't have any answers for why this is going on.
(25:17):
Like nobody's really explaining this to me.
And until I have answers, like I refuse to give up on myself.
So I'm going to continue fighting.
And so around this time, I'm like starting to realize that what I'm going through is
like a serious thing.
This is not just like a weight loss journey anymore.
I'm like thinking this is like a, like I think I'm dying and I don't want to die.
(25:39):
So I need to figure out how to not die and like, I feel like I can fix this.
Like there's got to be, if I can just find somebody who knows what's wrong with me, then
I won't have to die.
But I really felt like I was dying in the meantime.
So I started recording a lot of video diaries.
I would just like turn on my phone and record a video and talk to my phone.
And one day I woke up and I was doing a video diary and I'm exasperated.
(26:06):
I'm feeling my lowest point and I'm basically venting to the camera and I'm just like, this
is messed up and this is messed up.
And like my body's not letting go of weight and I'm exhausted and I can't remember my
words and my face is sweating a lot and my legs are swelling a lot and my ankles are
swelling and like this is wrong and this is wrong, this is wrong.
(26:26):
And I say, and my nervous system is up.
And then I say, well, that's not true.
My nervous system is not up.
It's actually working perfectly because my nervous system's purpose is to alert my body
when it's in danger and it is doing that.
And then I was like, oh, wait a second, it's working perfectly.
(26:49):
My nervous system is working perfectly because my nervous system is alerting me that my body
is in danger and that there's something wrong and it's perfectly working by bringing to
my attention that something needs to be addressed.
Oh my God, it's working perfectly.
And then I was like, oh my God, everything in my body is working perfectly.
(27:13):
All of my symptoms are symptoms of a problem and because my body's working perfectly, it
is showing me these symptoms so that I address them and so that I figure out what the problem
is.
I was like, oh my God, this whole time I've been thinking about this whole thing completely
wrong.
This whole time I've been blaming my body for being broken for having all these symptoms
(27:39):
when in reality, the symptoms are a sign that my body is actually functioning perfectly
because a perfectly functioning body would show you symptoms to alert you of a problem.
So I had this complete mindset shift and totally flipped everything upside down.
(28:01):
And so from then on out, I made a commitment to myself to listen to my body and receive
all of my symptoms as messages from my body because your body can't speak, well your body
can speak, but your body's processes cannot speak to you through any other way except
(28:23):
symptoms.
How else can your nervous system alert you of a problem except by being dysregulated?
That's the whole point of your body's symptoms is to tell you that something's wrong and
needs your attention, but that doesn't mean your body's broken and it doesn't mean that
you are broken.
(28:43):
It means that you're working perfectly and that your body is functioning perfectly.
And then during that video diary, I also decided that the only way I was going to get better
is if I surrender to the process.
So I was at my wit's end, I had reached the end of my rope and I was like, I have nothing
(29:03):
left to give.
And up until now, I've been fighting and fighting and fighting and maybe instead of fighting,
I'm supposed to just surrender and listen.
And from then on out, that was the turning point of everything.
(29:25):
That is when everything changed.
In my health, in my healing, in my life, that morning is when my life changed.
We are now in the second half of my healing story.
And this is where it gets really fun.
Chapter one was denial, being in denial, being a workaholic, and I was just completely ignoring
(29:50):
everything that my body was trying to tell me.
Chapter two is like fighting and pushing.
I was just like determined to fix everything.
I was determined to fix the weight loss.
I was determined to fix my hormones.
I was just like pushing and pushing and pushing.
Chapter three is the best.
Chapter three is when we surrender and we listen.
(30:12):
So chapter three begins.
In chapter three, I finally get acquainted with my functional medicine practitioner,
Telysa.
Telysa is a functional medicine practitioner and I decided to start working with her because
she was the first practitioner who actually had an explanation for my Dutch test.
(30:33):
So she looked at the Dutch test and she was like, yeah, if you don't have any minerals,
then you're not going to have what you need to make hormones because your body needs minerals
to make everything.
Like minerals are the foundation, like the building blocks for every single process in
your body.
She looked at my health history and all the symptoms I was having and she's like, yeah,
(30:55):
if you're depleted from your minerals, it's going to result in a whole host of things.
So the first thing we should do is a heritage of mineral analysis.
The concept behind a heritage of mineral analysis is that your body needs minerals as the foundation
for everything in your body.
And you can get blood work done like I did, but the blood work is just showing the mineral
(31:15):
levels in your blood.
It doesn't actually show you the mineral levels in your tissue.
You have muscle tissue, connective tissue, there's all sorts of tissues in your body.
So your body might have the minerals, but if your minerals aren't getting into the tissues
of your body, then what good are they?
Like they're not actually being utilized in your body.
So a heritage of mineral analysis, I'll call it an HTMA is basically analyzing the mineral
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levels that are in your tissue.
And the hair is like a good representation of the rest of the tissue in your body.
So I get the HTMA results back and I am depleted in every single category across the board,
like so, so depleted.
My results showed a huge loss pattern of all these minerals.
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So it made total sense why I had no hormone levels because I had no minerals.
When I say minerals, I'm talking sodium, magnesium, potassium, like those are minerals that like
electrolytes are minerals.
And so we get these results.
And of course my question is, but why?
(32:23):
Like why are my minerals so depleted?
Why is this happening?
Like it's great that now I know why my hormones are depleted.
It's because my minerals are depleted, but why are my minerals depleted?
Like what is going on?
And so Talisa looked at this and she's like, based on your results, this really looks like
the loss pattern of someone who has experienced a mold exposure.
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And I was like, Oh, you know what?
I have had a mold exposure that did happen.
That was like, and I thought back and I was like, wait, I've actually had two mold exposures
and they never had any impact on me.
I didn't think because they were a while ago.
I was like, well, the first one was probably like 2007.
And then the next one was probably like 2021, which was around like six months or so before
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I started having all these symptoms.
And I was like, Oh my God, it's a mold exposure that explains everything.
So she explains that in order for you to detox mold, your body has to be in a resilient place.
Like you can't be detoxing mold if you're already super depleted.
So the first step for us was let's rebuild your minerals, remineralize your body to get
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your body back to a place that's a little bit more resilient.
And then we can start working on slowly detoxing the mold from your body.
So it's really cool because this company that she works with, they put together like a custom
blend powder.
And so they mailed me a canister of powder that had my name on it.
It was like a very custom blend specifically for me.
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And it was based on my exact results.
And I would just put a scoop of powder in this cup of water every day.
And I was giving my body exactly what it needed for me.
It was all the things that were depleted.
I was replenishing them and all the things that were like in the wrong ranges.
It was the perfect custom blend for exactly what my body needed.
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After like two weeks of taking those minerals, my energy was starting to come back.
I had just been in this darkness of grieving the life that I thought I would have.
And then all of a sudden I was giving my energy back.
And I was so surprised.
I was like, okay, well, this is just one day, like this is a one off.
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I'm not really better.
It was really too good to be true.
And I was like, I can't, there's no way that I just am suddenly better.
That's crazy.
And so it didn't feel real to me.
So every day I woke up and if I had energy, I was just so grateful.
And after being on the minerals, I continued to do infrared sauna.
I started to take a binder, which basically attracts toxins in your body to it and then
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allows you to excrete it.
And that's really important to take while you're remineralizing because as you replenish
your body with the right minerals, your body can start letting go of other things that
it was like holding onto in its place.
So I was starting to do minerals.
I'm on this binder and I'm starting to feel better and better.
So I started to get my life back.
And now that I have more energy, I'm like wanting to go on more walks, wanting to put
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more effort into my workouts so that I can really take care of my body and get it in
a strong place.
And around this time, I discover that I have lipidema.
And I didn't realize that before, but it turns out the cellulite that I noticed after I stopped
my birth control, the like really, really lumpy, crazy cellulite, it turns out that's
lipidema.
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And that was the first time I had ever heard of lipidema.
I don't remember how I figured it out, but I probably saw something on the internet.
So lipidema is a fat tissue disorder in regular fat in your body.
I picture it like ricotta cheese.
And then lipidema fat is like cheese curts.
So when I was seeing like gnocchi under my skin, and I was like, that's weird that there's
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like all these like lumps.
It's because that's the lipidema fat.
So it's really fibrotic tissue.
And they say that your body doesn't have the ability to like metabolize it.
So that was around the time that I started wearing some medical grade compression and
cutting out seed oils from my diet.
Just trying to really reduce inflammation because inflammation makes lipidema progress
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and it's a progressive disease.
So I didn't want it to progress.
So I was just like taking these measures to try to prevent it from progressing.
So I'm taking the minerals.
I'm addressing my lipidema.
I am still really enjoying the like spiritual journey of unpacking my trauma and digging
deep into my inner world.
(36:57):
And then I reached this point where I felt like all of this was this huge, beautiful
process that allowed me to just wake up from this life that I was living of being a workaholic.
And now all of a sudden it's like, I get to be alive again.
I get to actually live my life again.
I get to be in my thirties and feel like I'm in my thirties.
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Like this is the biggest gift that anybody could have.
People suffer from chronic illness.
Like people don't recover the way that I recovered.
And I felt like I was dying and all of a sudden I'm not.
That's a crazy thing to go through into process.
Now I feel like this pressure to like quit my job and travel the world and all this stuff.
But my body was not in a place to be traveling still.
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When I say I got my energy back, I mean, I could get the mail.
I could fill up my car with gas.
Like I could go to my workout and then cook for myself afterwards.
Like I wasn't running on less than empty all the time.
But I still wasn't out running marathons or anything.
Like I was still barely functioning.
But compared to where I was, it felt like I was invincible.
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So I was like all in on the healing.
I'm like, I'm going to heal every last little cell in my body.
Because at this point I'm like, I'm never taking my health for granted again.
I'm going to treat my body like it is the most important thing in my entire life because
it is because if you don't have your health, literally nothing matters.
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I had learned that and now I'm given a second chance at life and I'm never going to prioritize
anything over my health.
With this newfound energy, I wanted to make sure that I felt connected to human beings
again because for so much of my healing process, I was completely alone.
I was so isolated.
I didn't have energy to reach out to anybody.
(38:48):
And now that I was starting to have more energy again, I really wanted to connect with others.
And I was just like craving this connection with people.
So I started to go to like sound baths and yoga classes and things where I would just
be around people who were prioritizing their health in a community space.
(39:08):
And then I started getting involved in a sisterhood circle, a women's circle.
I was doing all sorts of things to really heal deeply all the trauma, my relationship
with my body, my relationship with the world, my relationship with my life.
(39:29):
Now that I had energy back, I refused to live a day where I didn't deeply appreciate all
of the gifts of being alive.
And honestly, I was living a lot of this part of my life as if it were temporary because
I was not convinced that I was going to stay better forever.
I was really afraid that this energy was like a freak accident or something like this energy
(39:52):
was accidental and it was not going to stick around forever.
Now that I'm like pretty stable on the minerals, I am starting to learn more about lipidema
and realizing that so much of the disease is caused by inflammation.
I'm really working to eliminate every single bit of inflammation in my body.
And that means eliminating all the inflammatory triggers around me and inside of me.
(40:16):
So I do another round of tests and these tests are going to be to check for mold that is
in my body, mycotoxins that are in my body, which basically is mold and also check my
gut.
I did a GI map to check my gut to see if there's any sources of inflammation in there or if
I have parasites or an infection or anything like that.
(40:37):
Because at this point I'm eating really healthy and I'm still like there's something going
on.
So we were theorizing that I might not be absorbing the nutrients from my food and keep
in mind I still have not let go of this weight gain.
Even though the weight gain was no longer my concern, it was not my priority.
I had made peace with where my body was at, but it is a symptom.
(40:59):
So there is still some piece of the puzzle that we're missing.
So we did another round of tests and this was the mycotoxin test for mold and the GI
map to look at my gut.
And we also did an organic acid test.
So we get the test results back and it turns out I do have high levels of mold in my body
and I had pretty big inflammatory markers in my gut and I had markers of leaky gut.
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The other thing that we talked about was that based on my mold levels, it may not necessarily
just be a previous mold exposure that's causing my health problems.
This could actually be an ongoing mold exposure.
Something in my house.
So we started to work through this next phase of the protocol and this included a lot of
(41:45):
different supplements for my gut and testing my house for mold.
And this is just to reduce as much inflammation in my body as possible.
I did have a mold inspection in my house and it turns out I do have mold in my house and
I'm going to have to remediate and it's going to be a lot of money and it's a whole thing.
(42:06):
And this brought us to our next phase of healing, which is addressing the mycotoxins, trying
to detox those and then working on my gut.
So then all my new gut supplements arrive and I'm like, I'm ready to keep healing.
I'm ready to get rid of more inflammation.
Let's get rid of more inflammation.
(42:27):
So I start doing my new gut supplements and then all of a sudden something's very wrong
and I'm not okay.
And all of a sudden I'm like having a panic attack on the floor and I'm crying and I'm
like, whoa, I don't have a history of anxiety and I start breaking out in hives, having
panic attacks.
I can't fall asleep at night.
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I'm having crazy anxiety and then I have my first PMDD episode that I've had in years.
I was feeling deep despair.
I felt this darkness come over me, but it didn't really occur to me like why?
I figured like, okay, this is part of the course.
I listened to my body.
I just am listening to these symptoms like I'm listening, but like there was something
(43:11):
really wrong.
So I stopped taking the gut supplements and I just like gave my body some time to recover.
I was like back in a problem solving mode.
Like, okay, I need to understand what went wrong.
I basically had an episode of PMDD, but I knew I didn't have PMDD anymore.
I was like, that those days are behind me.
Like I don't have endometriosis anymore.
I don't have PMDD anymore.
(43:33):
So why did I have this crazy experience just now?
And then it vanished as soon as I got my period.
So I started doing some digging and I figured out that I had that experience because of
something that I have that's called MCAS.
MCAS stands for Massed Cell Activation Syndrome.
And I talk about this a little bit in a previous episode, but essentially MCAS is very tied
(43:59):
to your nervous system.
It has to do with massed cells in your body.
So you have massed cells all over your body and they release histamine when they observe
a threat in the world around you.
If you have seasonal allergies, that's because your body is sensing some kind of threat in
the allergens in the air and then your body releases histamine to alert you that you're
(44:21):
allergic to something.
So it's a very helpful system.
But in people who have MCAS, their mass cells start releasing histamine at times where there
is not a threat to your body.
So that's why if your body feels like it's in a state of fight or flight, your mass cells
are going to be like, oh my God, there's a threat.
So we're just going to release histamine all the time.
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So to get your body back into a state of safety can really help calm the mass cells in your
body.
What I did not know is that around the time of ovulation, when your estrogen is just naturally
higher, your histamine is going to be naturally higher and for somebody who has MCAS, having
(45:02):
a probiotic or like any kind of new gut supplement that my body wasn't used to, it sent off a
huge cascade of symptoms because it sent out like a series of alerts to my body that something
was wrong.
And I was already in this place of high histamine, higher estrogen, a little bit of dysregulation.
And so that one gut supplement basically threw everything off the rails.
(45:28):
And I was like, but it's okay, you know, I'll get better, I'll recover.
This is how healing works.
Like I'm going to go through it and then I'll get better.
And then I was like, not really getting better from it.
I had less energy.
I felt less resilient.
After that time, like I was just so dysregulated all because of taking that one probiotic.
And I'm trying to figure out how can I bring my body back into a place of safety?
(45:51):
Like why is my body still feeling like it's in danger?
So then I'm doing research on like all the ways that I can help my body feel a sense
of safety.
And I discovered that a lot of the people who have MCAS also have something called hypermobility.
And that's something that I have.
I was born with this.
I have hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome.
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And this is something that I have had my whole life.
I am extra bendy.
I'm very flexible.
And it's always been something that I've just known about myself, but I didn't really know
why.
And I didn't think about the fact that it's a connective tissue disorder and all of the
organs and all of your bodily processes, every single thing that's happening in your body
(46:35):
at any given point relies on functional connective tissue.
And so if you have a connective tissue disorder, then it makes sense that you would have this
like cascade of symptoms.
But I went most of my life without having these symptoms.
So I was like, all right, well, I don't really understand.
But because I have hypermobility, I also just like hold my body in weird ways.
(46:55):
So I like maybe use the wrong muscles to breathe and I might use the wrong muscles to walk.
And apparently that puts extra stress on your nervous system.
When you're not holding up your body the right way, when your muscles are using the wrong
muscle groups for things, if I'm using like my neck muscles to breathe instead of my diaphragm,
(47:17):
your body perceives that as danger.
That's like a threat to your body.
And then that puts extra stress on your nervous system.
And I didn't know that.
So immediately I'm like, I'm probably putting so much stress on my nervous system by just
existing every day.
Like, of course, my nervous system is always going to be fragile.
And so I signed up for physical therapy to help me learn how to move my body in the appropriate
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ways and how to use the right muscle groups to support all of my functions every day so
that I'm using my diaphragm to breathe.
And I'm using all of the right things the way I'm supposed to.
And that takes that pressure off of my nervous system so that I don't have this huge burden
that I'm dealing with every day.
(48:04):
So I'm going through physical therapy to teach my body how to operate in ways that are not
going to cause extra stress on my nervous system.
And that's just in an attempt to help me be able to tolerate more of these healing protocols
so that I'm not triggering mast cells in my body.
And this all goes back to mast cell activation syndrome.
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So because I took this gut supplement at the wrong time of my cycle when histamine was
already high, my mast cells in my body detected it as a huge threat.
And because my hypermobile body is already putting a level of burden on my nervous system
because of the way that I breathe and move throughout the day, my mast cells were already
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on high alert.
And so it makes perfect sense why having hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome would lead to mast cell
activation syndrome because maybe your mast cells are always on high alert from just the
way that you carry yourself through life every day because of being hypermobile.
And so that part, I'm like, okay, that makes perfect sense.
(49:13):
And then I heard about this thing called POTS, Postero-Tachycardia syndrome.
And I experienced a lot of those symptoms too.
Like I faint a lot and I like lose my vision a lot.
So I have POTS.
I have hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.
I have MCAS and I have nervous system dysregulation.
I also have lipidema.
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And it turns out that's connected to all this stuff.
A lot of the people who have hypermobility and MCAS and POTS also have lipidema.
And I'm like, yeah, but I didn't actually get POTS symptoms until recently.
And I didn't actually have MCAS problems until recently.
And I didn't really have lipidema problems until recently.
(49:54):
But that's when all this started to come together for me.
How do all these things fit together?
What is the connection here?
Then I thought about it and I'm like, okay, hypermobility is a connective tissue disorder
and Skype could understand the MCAS thing.
So then with POTS, POTS has to do with like blood getting to the right parts of your body.
So like if you stand up too fast, it's cause like the blood didn't get to your head fast
(50:18):
enough.
Your blood vessels couldn't like pump everything as quickly as it's supposed to or maybe it
doesn't know to do that.
So that has to do with blood vessels.
And blood vessels are coated in connective tissue.
So that makes sense.
And then I was like, oh, lipidema is also related to connective tissue because what happens
with lipidema is like you have leaky connective tissue and then that allows for fat cells
(50:40):
to get into your interstitial tissue and then form clusters there where your body can't
access them.
So it's like, oh, well that's also related to a disorder of connective tissue.
So I'm like, oh my God, all this is making so much sense.
If you have hypermobility, it's a connective tissue disorder.
And that means that your connective tissue is going to have an inefficiency somewhere.
(51:04):
What I'm learning is that if you have hypermobility, this connective tissue disorder, and you experience
either a mold exposure or a traumatic event or a highly stressful time of your life or
even like a COVID infection, it could trigger in your body this cascade of symptoms that
might seem like they are never ending and very confusing.
(51:28):
The symptoms actually fall into these categories, which are all related to your connective tissue.
There are so many people out there who have heller stand lows.
They have POTS, they have MCAS, they have lipidema.
And those conditions are preventing them from being able to live a life.
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They're really, really hard for some people.
And for me, maybe I just am really lucky that I have a really light version of all these
things.
But what I now believe is that if you have hypermobility, being exposed to toxic mold
or going through a particularly stressful or traumatic event of your life or even having
(52:10):
a COVID infection is more likely to trigger in you this collection of syndromes and diseases
than it would the average person.
And that's because this collection of things, MCAS, POTS, lipidema, it's all related to
your connective tissue and your nervous system.
It all makes sense to me now.
(52:31):
So when I was so desperate for answers before and I just felt like my body was falling apart
and it was doing all these confusing things that I didn't understand, I decided to just
trust the process and surrender to the process.
And in this whole healing journey, I've actually discovered a lot of answers and so many explanations
for what was happening to me.
(52:53):
And I'm so hopeful for everything that I can do for myself moving forward.
I have learned so much about my body and all of the ways that I can support it.
This whole thing started with my work stress in January of 2022 and my years of being a
(53:14):
workaholic before that.
Now it is almost January 2025.
And in just three years, I feel like I've lived multiple lifetimes.
I have searched so deeply within myself.
I have experienced such highs and lows and periods of despair and helplessness.
(53:41):
And where I'm at now is in a period of hope and joy.
And I feel truly like I am the luckiest person in the world because of all of this that's
happened.
I have completely changed everything about the way that I live my life.
So I don't drink anymore and I have an early bedtime every night.
(54:05):
And when I first started lifting weights, I thought that it would just be another time
where I tried to be consistent with exercise and like all the other times that I wouldn't
stick with it.
But by the end of the year, I'm going to be at 150 sessions with my trainer.
Like I have completely changed my life.
I am so different.
(54:28):
I look at the old version of me, the version of me who is working 15 hour days, 18 hour
days, who is so disconnected from her body and the world around her.
And I'm now just so grateful for this whole thing.
I'm grateful for how sensitive my body is.
(54:49):
I'm grateful for my hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.
And I feel incredibly lucky that my experience with all these conditions is not debilitating.
I take like 100 supplements a day still.
I'm detoxing from the mold still.
I'm going to have to go through this mold remediation.
It's going to cost a fortune.
And I have a much more sensitive nervous system now than I ever used to.
(55:14):
But every day when I wake up now, I'm like treasuring every little thing about being
alive because I went so long feeling like I would never have that opportunity again.
Now I take in every inch of beauty around me and I take in every feeling, all the good
(55:34):
ones, all the bad ones.
I cry all the time and I feel so deeply.
I am just so grateful for everything and that I believed in myself along the way.
Oh, and the other thing is that I finally started letting go of the weight.
My body is finally starting to let go of the 20 pounds all of a sudden.
(55:56):
And that's just kind of a beautiful thing because I just started the podcast and I
took a lot of courage for me because it felt really vulnerable to start this and to put
my story out there.
It felt really scary to share this with everyone, but it's almost like in doing so, my body
was finally like, okay, now she gets it.
Now we can let go of the weight.
(56:17):
She's finally understanding what all of this is for and it was to share this story with
everybody so that I can help everyone know that if you're going through something similar,
that you're not alone.
You are not alone and it can get better because I am living proof of it.
I am living proof that even when you think you are dying and when nobody has any answers
(56:41):
for you, don't give up on yourself ever.
Do not ever give up on yourself because you are always worth it and not everybody's
this lucky.
I feel so incredibly lucky.
But because I am this lucky and because I was given this second chance, I am not taking
it for granted and I'm going to tell everybody about it and I'm going to tell everybody about
(57:04):
everything that I've learned because I've learned a whole lot and I want to talk about
all of it and it just depends on what we should talk about first.
So if you made it this far, thank you so much for listening.
Now you know the full story of my whole health and healing journey.
Thank you for listening and I'll see you next time.
Welcome to Golden Girl, a space where we dive deep into health, healing, connection, and
(00:06):
community.
I'm your host, Becca Golden, and this podcast is all about sharing and documenting my journey.
Each episode, we'll discuss topics like health and wellness, what I'm learning in therapy,
work-life balance, relationships, community, and all the ways I strive for more aliveness
and presence every day.
Let's dive in.
(00:26):
Hi everyone.
Welcome back to another episode of Golden Girl.
This is going to be a big episode today because today I'm going to be telling my entire story
of my health and healing journey over the last couple of years that I've been through and
we're going to cover a lot.
(00:47):
There was a lot that happened, but before I tell the story, I want to say a few things
about the story and what you're going to hear.
In this story, there are a lot of things that happened to me.
There are a lot of things that happened to my body and to my health and things that a
(01:07):
lot of people really would not wish for.
And for the first half of my health and healing story, as I watched my health kind of fall
apart, I treated my body like it was defective.
And for so much of these things that were happening to my health and my body, every
(01:28):
time I got a new symptom, I was so mad.
But this entire health journey has been the greatest gift.
This whole experience that I've gone through has saved my life.
Every single symptom, every single health condition that I have now, every single thing that I've
(01:49):
gone through with this health and healing journey that I've really only just begun,
has saved my life.
And that is because if none of this happened, I would have continued down a trajectory that
was so harmful to me that I really wouldn't have been living a life at all.
The way that I was treating myself and the priorities that I had were so harmful to me
(02:13):
that even without health problems, it was no way to live.
And my health spiraling out of control forced me to take a look at my life and reprioritize.
So as I'm about to tell a long, long tale about all the things that have happened to
my body and all the things that happened with my health and how I really was in such a dark
(02:36):
place, I just feel so lucky.
Because it's given me a second chance at being alive.
And regardless of how you interpret what I'll share with you, I am so grateful to be alive
today.
And every single day I wake up and I do not take anything for granted, I wake up and I
(02:59):
am so grateful to be able to get out of bed on my own, to be able to go outside and breathe
fresh air without being afraid of what it'll do to me.
I'm grateful to sleep every night and be able to move my body without pain for the most
part.
So this is all really amazing.
And so when I tell this story of everything that's happened to me, I want everyone to
(03:22):
know that I feel like the luckiest person on the planet.
I really do.
To be alive and to be in this body that I have and to be so resilient and to have never
given up on myself.
So now to set the stage.
My health story has three distinct chapters.
Chapter one is kind of like the lead up to the real stuff.
(03:46):
Chapter two is when my healing era really begins, but I'm going about it all wrong.
And then I have a huge shift in my mindset.
That mindset shift really kicks off chapter three of the journey, which is when I start
to actually find answers and make really good progress on everything.
So with that, I guess we can begin.
(04:09):
Chapter one, this is the ignoring chapter, the chapter of me ignoring all of my symptoms.
And this is all relevant.
Okay, so I'm going to start a little further back, but we'll jump ahead quickly.
So to begin the story, I am just going to say a few words about college.
When I was in college, school was really hard for me.
(04:29):
As a teenager, I was so messy and forgetful and scattered and frazzled.
That was kind of like the narrative that my parents gave me growing up is like, you're
such a mess and you're so forgetful and how are you going to be able to keep a job?
How are you going to do this and that?
And so I had this narrative in my head of like, I am not capable of keeping a job.
(04:50):
And I didn't agree with it, but I felt the need to constantly prove that that was wrong.
And so throughout a lot of my college career, I was failing to prove that that was not the
case.
I was struggling in my classes.
I had multiple jobs and I was struggling to manage all of them.
And there was just like way too much on my plate.
And I never felt like I had a good grasp on anything.
(05:12):
I was always drowning in work and stress and everything.
But I was determined to prove that I could keep a job.
When I was graduating, I was applying to tons of jobs.
I kept applying and applying, going to interview after interview after interview.
And I finally got one job offer, the only job offer that I got.
(05:35):
I took it and I held on for dear life.
So I started working in this corporate job and I worked my ass off.
And for the first time in my life, that started to be rewarded.
In college, I would work my ass off and it didn't make a difference.
I was still really struggling.
But in this job, I was putting in a lot of effort and it was paying off.
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And that felt so good for the first time in my life.
The work that I put in and the effort that I put in was actually paying off.
So I poured everything that I could into work and I was really good at it.
And then I was getting recognized at my job and I was offered promotions and I was offered
(06:21):
more opportunities and more work to do.
And over time, it was really starting to take a toll on me.
So fast forward seven years and I am a full blown workaholic.
Work is everything to me.
Here is where the story really begins.
In January of 2022, things are getting pretty bad.
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I was working like 15 hour days every single day waking up immediately jumping on a zoom
call and it was just back to back to back call after call after call.
So this is like 15 hours straight without a bathroom break, without a lunch break, without
any chance to go through my email and respond to all the things that people need for me.
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Like I'm multitasking on every call.
I'm responding to texts while I'm like trying to be smiley and presentable on video and
typing to do list items and like taking notes while my phone is getting text messages.
My Slack is blowing up.
My email is blowing up.
Like there was so much happening and for 15 hours, that's a long time.
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That means like I would start at 7am and I would be on calls until 10pm.
It was such a fast paced environment and it was draining me really fast.
It was around this time that I realized this is not good for me and I need a break.
And I talked to my management about it and I remember telling them I'm hanging on by
(07:53):
a thread here.
I was trying to wrap up these three really big projects at work though at the time and
so my management was like, okay, yeah, we hear you.
We know you need a break.
As soon as you're through with those projects, take a break and I was like, okay, okay, I
can do it.
I can manage to be okay until these projects are done.
(08:13):
So I pushed through for three more months and during that time, I was a shell of a human
being.
During that time, I was crying every single night.
I completely lost all sense of self and I was so isolated.
I wasn't sleeping at all.
I was not okay.
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And then I finally wrap up these three projects at work.
So it's time for me to take the break and I felt broken.
I felt like nothing.
I couldn't open my laptop.
I couldn't answer the phone.
I couldn't answer text messages.
I was avoiding going to bed.
I would like just be stuck on my couch at night.
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My body would refuse to go upstairs to get ready for bed.
I felt like somebody had taken me and like frozen me into a giant ice cube and I couldn't
move.
I was in what I now know is considered a trauma-freeze response.
But I didn't know that at the time.
So I kept pushing through and then I started having all these hormone problems.
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Even though I was on birth control, I started having a lot more breakouts and a lot of rashes
and a lot more PMS.
Even though I was on birth control, I was having like crazy PMS.
So my body was having all sorts of symptoms and I gained like 20 pounds out of nowhere.
I wasn't fitting into any of my clothes and it didn't make sense.
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I was like, why did I gain all this weight out of nowhere?
So I started on a quest to lose the weight and it was not budging.
I was exercising every day for the first time and going on walks and eating really clean
and the weight was not budging.
Eventually the frozen state turned into more like depression and I continued to have a
(10:06):
lot of weird health symptoms and depression.
My type of depression that I had at this time was lack of affect.
So nothing mattered.
I didn't care about anything.
I was never really upset or sad.
I was never happy.
I was just checked out.
Like I was on autopilot, I would wake up, go through the motions and nothing mattered.
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Like nothing.
So that was not a fun time for me and I was like, you know what?
I bet my birth control is causing all this.
My birth control is making me gain weight and my birth control is making me depressed.
So of course I'll just stop taking my birth control and then all my problems will go away.
At this point in my life, the reason that I was on birth control was because I had endometriosis
(10:54):
and PMDD before I went on birth control.
Endometriosis is a really painful condition where your tissue starts to grow outside your
uterus and it's not supposed to do that.
So that is something that I had before going on birth control.
And then I also had something called PMDD, which is like a really extreme version of
(11:15):
PMS, but it really for me messed with my head.
Like I would go through these periods of deep despair, deep, deep despair when I had PMDD.
In addition to PMDD and endometriosis coming back, I was also really afraid that if I just
abruptly got off of the birth control that I would develop PCOS, Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome,
(11:38):
because it's very common for women who go off of their birth control all of a sudden
cold turkey to develop that, especially if it runs in your family and it does run in
my family.
So I was like not really excited to go off of my birth control, but if it was causing
me all this weight gain and depression, then I felt like I had no choice.
It was at this time that I made a commitment to myself.
(12:01):
I decided I had to go off my birth control regardless of what happens to me.
So this kind of wraps up chapter one with me deciding that going off my birth control
was going to be the answer to all my problems.
I'm going to get off the birth control, I'll drop the weight, I'll look like myself again,
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I'll feel like myself again because I won't be depressed anymore, and I'll stop having
all these hormone problems and life will be good.
Now we begin chapter two.
I started working with this naturopath on getting my body prepared to get off of the
birth control.
At this point we're nearing the end of 2022.
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I'm not drinking coffee.
I'm really rarely drinking alcohol.
We're starting to dabble with the healing era a little bit with cycle sinking and getting
more in tune with my body and thinking like okay I'm going to be in touch with my feminine
energy and listen to my body and the cycles.
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I started learning about the different phases of the menstrual cycle.
I am doing a lot of infrared sauna.
It's helping me with my depression, it's helping me with seasonal allergies, and I'm taking
all these supplements, then all these things that my naturopath had given me and I'm so
committed to the journey of preparing my body to stop the birth control.
(13:27):
Then in May of 2023 I officially stopped taking it and it was such a great day.
I woke up and the world was colorful again and everything was beautiful and I felt alive
again, I felt like myself again.
It was such an amazing shift.
However, I continued to have a lot of other symptoms.
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My cycles were around like 45 days long which is not considered normal.
It's not supposed to be 45 days.
The wake-ain never went away sadly for me at the time.
Instead, I noticed that the texture of my legs, the cellulite on my legs multiplied and it
(14:13):
was like the craziest texture of cellulite that I'd ever seen because I could see lumps
in my legs.
It looked like there was potato noki under my skin.
I've always had some cellulite on my legs, that's normal.
This was a different level of cellulite that I was not familiar with.
(14:34):
I started to lift weights.
I had heard that lifting weights was the best way to get rid of cellulite.
It was good for your hormones, all sorts of things.
I hired a trainer and I started lifting weights three days a week really consistently.
Over time, I continued to start feeling worse and I was like, I don't know what's wrong
with me.
I wasn't losing weight.
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I was actually gaining weight.
I was starting to have a lot of problems with water retention.
My legs had so much water retention.
It would just be like leg and then foot.
There was no ankle whatsoever.
I was just having the craziest swelling and my legs were so heavy and I was really starting
to lose energy.
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I wasn't losing the weight.
The cellulite was getting worse.
I was getting bigger.
My face was getting puffier.
I was becoming more and more tired and I was really desperate for answers at this point.
I had heard that sometimes your body can hold on to extra weight if you have trauma and I
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was like, oh, that must be it.
My work has traumatized me.
Of course, I'm traumatized by my job.
It wasn't the birth control causing the weight gain.
It was trauma.
I started going to trauma therapy at this time.
Officially, my healing era has begun.
I'm in weightlifting.
I'm in trauma therapy.
I'm focusing all of my time and energy on myself and getting better.
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I'm focusing on my hormones, focusing on my circadian health, getting plenty of sleep,
getting plenty of sunshine and healing myself from the inside out and I feel like absolute
shit.
I am so depleted at this point.
I was drinking six packets of element a day and that was not even enough.
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It was helping me, but I was feeling so exhausted all the time.
Every time I reached like ovulation time of my cycle, I actually felt sick.
I realized I would have flu symptoms and I would also feel really irritable and anxious
and like PMSC, mid-cycle.
My body is still holding on to this extra weight is puffier and more inflamed than ever
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before.
I felt like it looked like someone just pumped my body like full of air, like inflated me
and I still wasn't fitting in any of my clothes.
I was pissed and I was like, I don't understand what else to do here.
And then my focus got kind of diverted away from the weight gain because then I started
to feel really fatigued.
When I say fatigued, I mean like I didn't have the energy to go to my mailbox that's
(17:11):
at the top of my driveway and get my mail and I didn't have the energy to like answer
the phone.
I had the bare minimum amount of energy and during this time, I'm still showing up to
my workouts with my trainer and I would show up and basically attempt to work out and end
up stretching on the mat for half the time.
And that would be all of my energy for the day.
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And then I would get home.
I wouldn't have energy to cook for myself.
I was just like so tired and I was so isolated.
Like I had no energy to talk to anybody.
So I would get home and just like lay on the couch and cry all day because I had no energy
to do anything.
And I'm like searching online, like on Reddit for answers at this point.
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Like I'm searching everywhere because I'm like, I feel like I'm dying.
Like I literally felt like I was dying.
And then, and then I started losing my memory.
Then I started not being able to speak in coherent sentences very well.
And I couldn't think of words when I would begin to speak expecting words to come out.
They wouldn't.
And so that was really scary for me.
I was like starting to get very worried about what was happening with my health.
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So I am talking to my naturopath about this and we decided to do a Dutch test.
So a Dutch test is a test that looks at your hormone levels.
There's a few different types of tests that they do, but the one that I wanted to do would
essentially track the levels of all of my sex hormones throughout the course of a menstrual
cycle so that I could see what exactly was happening.
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I was like, okay, I just want to know what's going on.
And then once I do this Dutch test, I'll have the answers.
So the Dutch test was the new thing that I was like, as soon as I understand all my hormone
levels, it's going to explain everything.
So by the time I got the results back, I was like not even really focused on the weight
loss.
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I was just focused on having a quality of life again, having my fatigue improve and understanding
what was happening to my body.
I was so desperate to understand what was going on.
So I get the Dutch test results back and all of my hormone levels are completely depleted.
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Like my hormones were gone.
And on this test, it has categories of like, okay, if you're in this age range, this is
kind of the level you should expect.
Most of my hormones were in the age range of someone who is 90 years old.
And like you're supposed to have a cortisol spike in the morning.
Part of this test, we did a cortisol awakening response test, which measures your cortisol
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throughout the day.
So you're supposed to have a big spike of cortisol in the morning and then throughout
the rest of the day, it slowly falls.
And that's what kind of gives you your energy during the day.
And then that's why you kind of wind down throughout the evening.
I didn't have a cortisol spike.
I didn't have any cortisol whatsoever.
I had no pregnant alone.
So I couldn't make DHEA.
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I had nothing.
And that was so validating, but it was so scary to see how messed up my results were on that
test was honestly terrifying.
And so I was really relying on my naturopath to help me through it.
And unfortunately, I did not feel like she helped me at all.
So she pretty much looked at all the levels of things that were low and then recommended
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that I take supplements of natural forms of those things.
So an example is I did not have any DHEA whatsoever.
And so she recommended that I start taking DHEA.
But I asked, like, why aren't I making DHEA?
Because above DHEA, what you need to make DHEA is pregnant alone.
So I was like, well, why wouldn't I take pregnant alone?
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Because then wouldn't that allow me to make DHEA?
And she was like, oh yeah, you could do that instead.
But I was like, but wait, why don't I have pregnant alone?
Like, there were so many questions, I just didn't understand.
So she was giving me all of these natural supplements that she recommended that I take
to replenish the levels of the hormones that I was missing.
But she could not tell me why I was missing those hormones in the first place.
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And that was what I found very troubling because I'm not treating symptoms throughout my whole
health journey.
I want to understand what's going on.
And she could not explain to me why I was so depleted in these hormones.
And that was really concerning to me.
So I did not take any of her advice.
I didn't take any of these hormones because I didn't want to mess with that.
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Like, to me, the way that I was thinking at the time is like, my body was working fine.
And then something happened and everything got thrown off.
And if that wasn't my birth control and it wasn't work trauma, I mean, it might have
been a little.
But like, there's something else that I'm not getting here that that's not part of
the story yet that I haven't uncovered.
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And I need to know because otherwise I'm just going to be taking supplements as a bandaid
forever.
Like, I need to understand why I'm missing these hormones because then there's a problem
that I haven't uncovered yet.
I was so frustrated.
I was so exhausted.
Like I had no energy.
I had no DHA.
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I had no cortisol.
I had nothing left.
So I was like, I, but I have to, my life depends on this.
I have to figure out what's wrong with me because no one else is going to.
If I don't figure this out, who will?
Nobody.
This is up to me.
I have to be the one to solve this.
I went to my primary care doctor and went to my gynecologist.
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I told my doctors like, I'm so fatigued.
I'm not feeling okay.
Like there's something wrong.
I'm losing my memory.
I can't speak well and they were like, yeah, well, you know, you're getting older.
I'm like, no, you don't understand.
Like this happened overnight.
Like this is happening all of a sudden.
I feel like I'm aging so rapidly.
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I feel like I'm aging 10 years every day.
Like I'm, I feel like I'm dying and they did the blood work.
They're like, everything's normal.
There wasn't anything that they could do to help me and they didn't give me any answers.
So I was like, oh my God, I am never going to find answers.
I really thought I was dying.
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I was so scared.
So at this point, I had nothing left to give and everything that I found said that I had
adrenal fatigue, which basically says that you're doomed forever.
You're never going to have energy back and everything's just always going to be hard
for you.
And I knew that was not the case for me.
I'm like, no, I don't have this.
Like this is, there's no way.
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I, I have something else is happening.
Like I just knew, but in therapy, we had to start working on acceptance and coming to
terms with my situation.
And my therapist recommended that I begin the grieving process of the life that I thought
I would have.
So I did, I began to try to push myself to reach a level of acceptance with where I was
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at and come to terms with the fact that I'm never going to have energy to do things that
I want to do.
But like it was hard to accept that.
Like every time I would get to therapy and have to force myself to grieve and come to
terms with where my health was at, I refused to do it.
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I just wouldn't because I knew deep down that this was not my reality forever.
I knew it.
I didn't just believe that there was a better future for me.
I knew it.
So my therapist helped me reach this point where I was able to start grieving and start
reaching a level of acceptance.
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But I told her that I'm not going to give up fighting for the life that I know I can
have.
I said, I am not going to give up.
And I refuse to make peace with the fact that this is it for me.
There's no way.
I still don't have any answers for why this is going on.
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Like nobody's really explaining this to me.
And until I have answers, like I refuse to give up on myself.
So I'm going to continue fighting.
And so around this time, I'm like starting to realize that what I'm going through is
like a serious thing.
This is not just like a weight loss journey anymore.
I'm like thinking this is like a, like I think I'm dying and I don't want to die.
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So I need to figure out how to not die and like, I feel like I can fix this.
Like there's got to be, if I can just find somebody who knows what's wrong with me, then
I won't have to die.
But I really felt like I was dying in the meantime.
So I started recording a lot of video diaries.
I would just like turn on my phone and record a video and talk to my phone.
And one day I woke up and I was doing a video diary and I'm exasperated.
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I'm feeling my lowest point and I'm basically venting to the camera and I'm just like, this
is messed up and this is messed up.
And like my body's not letting go of weight and I'm exhausted and I can't remember my
words and my face is sweating a lot and my legs are swelling a lot and my ankles are
swelling and like this is wrong and this is wrong, this is wrong.
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And I say, and my nervous system is up.
And then I say, well, that's not true.
My nervous system is not up.
It's actually working perfectly because my nervous system's purpose is to alert my body
when it's in danger and it is doing that.
And then I was like, oh, wait a second, it's working perfectly.
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My nervous system is working perfectly because my nervous system is alerting me that my body
is in danger and that there's something wrong and it's perfectly working by bringing to
my attention that something needs to be addressed.
Oh my God, it's working perfectly.
And then I was like, oh my God, everything in my body is working perfectly.
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All of my symptoms are symptoms of a problem and because my body's working perfectly, it
is showing me these symptoms so that I address them and so that I figure out what the problem
is.
I was like, oh my God, this whole time I've been thinking about this whole thing completely
wrong.
This whole time I've been blaming my body for being broken for having all these symptoms
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when in reality, the symptoms are a sign that my body is actually functioning perfectly
because a perfectly functioning body would show you symptoms to alert you of a problem.
So I had this complete mindset shift and totally flipped everything upside down.
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And so from then on out, I made a commitment to myself to listen to my body and receive
all of my symptoms as messages from my body because your body can't speak, well your body
can speak, but your body's processes cannot speak to you through any other way except
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symptoms.
How else can your nervous system alert you of a problem except by being dysregulated?
That's the whole point of your body's symptoms is to tell you that something's wrong and
needs your attention, but that doesn't mean your body's broken and it doesn't mean that
you are broken.
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It means that you're working perfectly and that your body is functioning perfectly.
And then during that video diary, I also decided that the only way I was going to get better
is if I surrender to the process.
So I was at my wit's end, I had reached the end of my rope and I was like, I have nothing
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left to give.
And up until now, I've been fighting and fighting and fighting and maybe instead of fighting,
I'm supposed to just surrender and listen.
And from then on out, that was the turning point of everything.
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That is when everything changed.
In my health, in my healing, in my life, that morning is when my life changed.
We are now in the second half of my healing story.
And this is where it gets really fun.
Chapter one was denial, being in denial, being a workaholic, and I was just completely ignoring
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everything that my body was trying to tell me.
Chapter two is like fighting and pushing.
I was just like determined to fix everything.
I was determined to fix the weight loss.
I was determined to fix my hormones.
I was just like pushing and pushing and pushing.
Chapter three is the best.
Chapter three is when we surrender and we listen.
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So chapter three begins.
In chapter three, I finally get acquainted with my functional medicine practitioner,
Telysa.
Telysa is a functional medicine practitioner and I decided to start working with her because
she was the first practitioner who actually had an explanation for my Dutch test.
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So she looked at the Dutch test and she was like, yeah, if you don't have any minerals,
then you're not going to have what you need to make hormones because your body needs minerals
to make everything.
Like minerals are the foundation, like the building blocks for every single process in
your body.
She looked at my health history and all the symptoms I was having and she's like, yeah,
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if you're depleted from your minerals, it's going to result in a whole host of things.
So the first thing we should do is a heritage of mineral analysis.
The concept behind a heritage of mineral analysis is that your body needs minerals as the foundation
for everything in your body.
And you can get blood work done like I did, but the blood work is just showing the mineral
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levels in your blood.
It doesn't actually show you the mineral levels in your tissue.
You have muscle tissue, connective tissue, there's all sorts of tissues in your body.
So your body might have the minerals, but if your minerals aren't getting into the tissues
of your body, then what good are they?
Like they're not actually being utilized in your body.
So a heritage of mineral analysis, I'll call it an HTMA is basically analyzing the mineral
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levels that are in your tissue.
And the hair is like a good representation of the rest of the tissue in your body.
So I get the HTMA results back and I am depleted in every single category across the board,
like so, so depleted.
My results showed a huge loss pattern of all these minerals.
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So it made total sense why I had no hormone levels because I had no minerals.
When I say minerals, I'm talking sodium, magnesium, potassium, like those are minerals that like
electrolytes are minerals.
And so we get these results.
And of course my question is, but why?
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Like why are my minerals so depleted?
Why is this happening?
Like it's great that now I know why my hormones are depleted.
It's because my minerals are depleted, but why are my minerals depleted?
Like what is going on?
And so Talisa looked at this and she's like, based on your results, this really looks like
the loss pattern of someone who has experienced a mold exposure.
(32:47):
And I was like, Oh, you know what?
I have had a mold exposure that did happen.
That was like, and I thought back and I was like, wait, I've actually had two mold exposures
and they never had any impact on me.
I didn't think because they were a while ago.
I was like, well, the first one was probably like 2007.
And then the next one was probably like 2021, which was around like six months or so before
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I started having all these symptoms.
And I was like, Oh my God, it's a mold exposure that explains everything.
So she explains that in order for you to detox mold, your body has to be in a resilient place.
Like you can't be detoxing mold if you're already super depleted.
So the first step for us was let's rebuild your minerals, remineralize your body to get
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your body back to a place that's a little bit more resilient.
And then we can start working on slowly detoxing the mold from your body.
So it's really cool because this company that she works with, they put together like a custom
blend powder.
And so they mailed me a canister of powder that had my name on it.
It was like a very custom blend specifically for me.
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And it was based on my exact results.
And I would just put a scoop of powder in this cup of water every day.
And I was giving my body exactly what it needed for me.
It was all the things that were depleted.
I was replenishing them and all the things that were like in the wrong ranges.
It was the perfect custom blend for exactly what my body needed.
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After like two weeks of taking those minerals, my energy was starting to come back.
I had just been in this darkness of grieving the life that I thought I would have.
And then all of a sudden I was giving my energy back.
And I was so surprised.
I was like, okay, well, this is just one day, like this is a one off.
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I'm not really better.
It was really too good to be true.
And I was like, I can't, there's no way that I just am suddenly better.
That's crazy.
And so it didn't feel real to me.
So every day I woke up and if I had energy, I was just so grateful.
And after being on the minerals, I continued to do infrared sauna.
I started to take a binder, which basically attracts toxins in your body to it and then
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allows you to excrete it.
And that's really important to take while you're remineralizing because as you replenish
your body with the right minerals, your body can start letting go of other things that
it was like holding onto in its place.
So I was starting to do minerals.
I'm on this binder and I'm starting to feel better and better.
So I started to get my life back.
And now that I have more energy, I'm like wanting to go on more walks, wanting to put
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more effort into my workouts so that I can really take care of my body and get it in
a strong place.
And around this time, I discover that I have lipidema.
And I didn't realize that before, but it turns out the cellulite that I noticed after I stopped
my birth control, the like really, really lumpy, crazy cellulite, it turns out that's
lipidema.
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And that was the first time I had ever heard of lipidema.
I don't remember how I figured it out, but I probably saw something on the internet.
So lipidema is a fat tissue disorder in regular fat in your body.
I picture it like ricotta cheese.
And then lipidema fat is like cheese curts.
So when I was seeing like gnocchi under my skin, and I was like, that's weird that there's
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like all these like lumps.
It's because that's the lipidema fat.
So it's really fibrotic tissue.
And they say that your body doesn't have the ability to like metabolize it.
So that was around the time that I started wearing some medical grade compression and
cutting out seed oils from my diet.
Just trying to really reduce inflammation because inflammation makes lipidema progress
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and it's a progressive disease.
So I didn't want it to progress.
So I was just like taking these measures to try to prevent it from progressing.
So I'm taking the minerals.
I'm addressing my lipidema.
I am still really enjoying the like spiritual journey of unpacking my trauma and digging
deep into my inner world.
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And then I reached this point where I felt like all of this was this huge, beautiful
process that allowed me to just wake up from this life that I was living of being a workaholic.
And now all of a sudden it's like, I get to be alive again.
I get to actually live my life again.
I get to be in my thirties and feel like I'm in my thirties.
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Like this is the biggest gift that anybody could have.
People suffer from chronic illness.
Like people don't recover the way that I recovered.
And I felt like I was dying and all of a sudden I'm not.
That's a crazy thing to go through into process.
Now I feel like this pressure to like quit my job and travel the world and all this stuff.
But my body was not in a place to be traveling still.
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When I say I got my energy back, I mean, I could get the mail.
I could fill up my car with gas.
Like I could go to my workout and then cook for myself afterwards.
Like I wasn't running on less than empty all the time.
But I still wasn't out running marathons or anything.
Like I was still barely functioning.
But compared to where I was, it felt like I was invincible.
(38:04):
So I was like all in on the healing.
I'm like, I'm going to heal every last little cell in my body.
Because at this point I'm like, I'm never taking my health for granted again.
I'm going to treat my body like it is the most important thing in my entire life because
it is because if you don't have your health, literally nothing matters.
(38:26):
I had learned that and now I'm given a second chance at life and I'm never going to prioritize
anything over my health.
With this newfound energy, I wanted to make sure that I felt connected to human beings
again because for so much of my healing process, I was completely alone.
I was so isolated.
I didn't have energy to reach out to anybody.
(38:48):
And now that I was starting to have more energy again, I really wanted to connect with others.
And I was just like craving this connection with people.
So I started to go to like sound baths and yoga classes and things where I would just
be around people who were prioritizing their health in a community space.
(39:08):
And then I started getting involved in a sisterhood circle, a women's circle.
I was doing all sorts of things to really heal deeply all the trauma, my relationship
with my body, my relationship with the world, my relationship with my life.
(39:29):
Now that I had energy back, I refused to live a day where I didn't deeply appreciate all
of the gifts of being alive.
And honestly, I was living a lot of this part of my life as if it were temporary because
I was not convinced that I was going to stay better forever.
I was really afraid that this energy was like a freak accident or something like this energy
(39:52):
was accidental and it was not going to stick around forever.
Now that I'm like pretty stable on the minerals, I am starting to learn more about lipidema
and realizing that so much of the disease is caused by inflammation.
I'm really working to eliminate every single bit of inflammation in my body.
And that means eliminating all the inflammatory triggers around me and inside of me.
(40:16):
So I do another round of tests and these tests are going to be to check for mold that is
in my body, mycotoxins that are in my body, which basically is mold and also check my
gut.
I did a GI map to check my gut to see if there's any sources of inflammation in there or if
I have parasites or an infection or anything like that.
(40:37):
Because at this point I'm eating really healthy and I'm still like there's something going
on.
So we were theorizing that I might not be absorbing the nutrients from my food and keep
in mind I still have not let go of this weight gain.
Even though the weight gain was no longer my concern, it was not my priority.
I had made peace with where my body was at, but it is a symptom.
(40:59):
So there is still some piece of the puzzle that we're missing.
So we did another round of tests and this was the mycotoxin test for mold and the GI
map to look at my gut.
And we also did an organic acid test.
So we get the test results back and it turns out I do have high levels of mold in my body
and I had pretty big inflammatory markers in my gut and I had markers of leaky gut.
(41:23):
The other thing that we talked about was that based on my mold levels, it may not necessarily
just be a previous mold exposure that's causing my health problems.
This could actually be an ongoing mold exposure.
Something in my house.
So we started to work through this next phase of the protocol and this included a lot of
(41:45):
different supplements for my gut and testing my house for mold.
And this is just to reduce as much inflammation in my body as possible.
I did have a mold inspection in my house and it turns out I do have mold in my house and
I'm going to have to remediate and it's going to be a lot of money and it's a whole thing.
(42:06):
And this brought us to our next phase of healing, which is addressing the mycotoxins, trying
to detox those and then working on my gut.
So then all my new gut supplements arrive and I'm like, I'm ready to keep healing.
I'm ready to get rid of more inflammation.
Let's get rid of more inflammation.
(42:27):
So I start doing my new gut supplements and then all of a sudden something's very wrong
and I'm not okay.
And all of a sudden I'm like having a panic attack on the floor and I'm crying and I'm
like, whoa, I don't have a history of anxiety and I start breaking out in hives, having
panic attacks.
I can't fall asleep at night.
(42:48):
I'm having crazy anxiety and then I have my first PMDD episode that I've had in years.
I was feeling deep despair.
I felt this darkness come over me, but it didn't really occur to me like why?
I figured like, okay, this is part of the course.
I listened to my body.
I just am listening to these symptoms like I'm listening, but like there was something
(43:11):
really wrong.
So I stopped taking the gut supplements and I just like gave my body some time to recover.
I was like back in a problem solving mode.
Like, okay, I need to understand what went wrong.
I basically had an episode of PMDD, but I knew I didn't have PMDD anymore.
I was like, that those days are behind me.
Like I don't have endometriosis anymore.
I don't have PMDD anymore.
(43:33):
So why did I have this crazy experience just now?
And then it vanished as soon as I got my period.
So I started doing some digging and I figured out that I had that experience because of
something that I have that's called MCAS.
MCAS stands for Massed Cell Activation Syndrome.
And I talk about this a little bit in a previous episode, but essentially MCAS is very tied
(43:59):
to your nervous system.
It has to do with massed cells in your body.
So you have massed cells all over your body and they release histamine when they observe
a threat in the world around you.
If you have seasonal allergies, that's because your body is sensing some kind of threat in
the allergens in the air and then your body releases histamine to alert you that you're
(44:21):
allergic to something.
So it's a very helpful system.
But in people who have MCAS, their mass cells start releasing histamine at times where there
is not a threat to your body.
So that's why if your body feels like it's in a state of fight or flight, your mass cells
are going to be like, oh my God, there's a threat.
So we're just going to release histamine all the time.
(44:42):
So to get your body back into a state of safety can really help calm the mass cells in your
body.
What I did not know is that around the time of ovulation, when your estrogen is just naturally
higher, your histamine is going to be naturally higher and for somebody who has MCAS, having
(45:02):
a probiotic or like any kind of new gut supplement that my body wasn't used to, it sent off a
huge cascade of symptoms because it sent out like a series of alerts to my body that something
was wrong.
And I was already in this place of high histamine, higher estrogen, a little bit of dysregulation.
And so that one gut supplement basically threw everything off the rails.
(45:28):
And I was like, but it's okay, you know, I'll get better, I'll recover.
This is how healing works.
Like I'm going to go through it and then I'll get better.
And then I was like, not really getting better from it.
I had less energy.
I felt less resilient.
After that time, like I was just so dysregulated all because of taking that one probiotic.
And I'm trying to figure out how can I bring my body back into a place of safety?
(45:51):
Like why is my body still feeling like it's in danger?
So then I'm doing research on like all the ways that I can help my body feel a sense
of safety.
And I discovered that a lot of the people who have MCAS also have something called hypermobility.
And that's something that I have.
I was born with this.
I have hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome.
(46:13):
And this is something that I have had my whole life.
I am extra bendy.
I'm very flexible.
And it's always been something that I've just known about myself, but I didn't really know
why.
And I didn't think about the fact that it's a connective tissue disorder and all of the
organs and all of your bodily processes, every single thing that's happening in your body
(46:35):
at any given point relies on functional connective tissue.
And so if you have a connective tissue disorder, then it makes sense that you would have this
like cascade of symptoms.
But I went most of my life without having these symptoms.
So I was like, all right, well, I don't really understand.
But because I have hypermobility, I also just like hold my body in weird ways.
(46:55):
So I like maybe use the wrong muscles to breathe and I might use the wrong muscles to walk.
And apparently that puts extra stress on your nervous system.
When you're not holding up your body the right way, when your muscles are using the wrong
muscle groups for things, if I'm using like my neck muscles to breathe instead of my diaphragm,
(47:17):
your body perceives that as danger.
That's like a threat to your body.
And then that puts extra stress on your nervous system.
And I didn't know that.
So immediately I'm like, I'm probably putting so much stress on my nervous system by just
existing every day.
Like, of course, my nervous system is always going to be fragile.
And so I signed up for physical therapy to help me learn how to move my body in the appropriate
(47:44):
ways and how to use the right muscle groups to support all of my functions every day so
that I'm using my diaphragm to breathe.
And I'm using all of the right things the way I'm supposed to.
And that takes that pressure off of my nervous system so that I don't have this huge burden
that I'm dealing with every day.
(48:04):
So I'm going through physical therapy to teach my body how to operate in ways that are not
going to cause extra stress on my nervous system.
And that's just in an attempt to help me be able to tolerate more of these healing protocols
so that I'm not triggering mast cells in my body.
And this all goes back to mast cell activation syndrome.
(48:27):
So because I took this gut supplement at the wrong time of my cycle when histamine was
already high, my mast cells in my body detected it as a huge threat.
And because my hypermobile body is already putting a level of burden on my nervous system
because of the way that I breathe and move throughout the day, my mast cells were already
(48:51):
on high alert.
And so it makes perfect sense why having hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome would lead to mast cell
activation syndrome because maybe your mast cells are always on high alert from just the
way that you carry yourself through life every day because of being hypermobile.
And so that part, I'm like, okay, that makes perfect sense.
(49:13):
And then I heard about this thing called POTS, Postero-Tachycardia syndrome.
And I experienced a lot of those symptoms too.
Like I faint a lot and I like lose my vision a lot.
So I have POTS.
I have hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.
I have MCAS and I have nervous system dysregulation.
I also have lipidema.
(49:34):
And it turns out that's connected to all this stuff.
A lot of the people who have hypermobility and MCAS and POTS also have lipidema.
And I'm like, yeah, but I didn't actually get POTS symptoms until recently.
And I didn't actually have MCAS problems until recently.
And I didn't really have lipidema problems until recently.
(49:54):
But that's when all this started to come together for me.
How do all these things fit together?
What is the connection here?
Then I thought about it and I'm like, okay, hypermobility is a connective tissue disorder
and Skype could understand the MCAS thing.
So then with POTS, POTS has to do with like blood getting to the right parts of your body.
So like if you stand up too fast, it's cause like the blood didn't get to your head fast
(50:18):
enough.
Your blood vessels couldn't like pump everything as quickly as it's supposed to or maybe it
doesn't know to do that.
So that has to do with blood vessels.
And blood vessels are coated in connective tissue.
So that makes sense.
And then I was like, oh, lipidema is also related to connective tissue because what happens
with lipidema is like you have leaky connective tissue and then that allows for fat cells
(50:40):
to get into your interstitial tissue and then form clusters there where your body can't
access them.
So it's like, oh, well that's also related to a disorder of connective tissue.
So I'm like, oh my God, all this is making so much sense.
If you have hypermobility, it's a connective tissue disorder.
And that means that your connective tissue is going to have an inefficiency somewhere.
(51:04):
What I'm learning is that if you have hypermobility, this connective tissue disorder, and you experience
either a mold exposure or a traumatic event or a highly stressful time of your life or
even like a COVID infection, it could trigger in your body this cascade of symptoms that
might seem like they are never ending and very confusing.
(51:28):
The symptoms actually fall into these categories, which are all related to your connective tissue.
There are so many people out there who have heller stand lows.
They have POTS, they have MCAS, they have lipidema.
And those conditions are preventing them from being able to live a life.
(51:48):
They're really, really hard for some people.
And for me, maybe I just am really lucky that I have a really light version of all these
things.
But what I now believe is that if you have hypermobility, being exposed to toxic mold
or going through a particularly stressful or traumatic event of your life or even having
(52:10):
a COVID infection is more likely to trigger in you this collection of syndromes and diseases
than it would the average person.
And that's because this collection of things, MCAS, POTS, lipidema, it's all related to
your connective tissue and your nervous system.
It all makes sense to me now.
(52:31):
So when I was so desperate for answers before and I just felt like my body was falling apart
and it was doing all these confusing things that I didn't understand, I decided to just
trust the process and surrender to the process.
And in this whole healing journey, I've actually discovered a lot of answers and so many explanations
for what was happening to me.
(52:53):
And I'm so hopeful for everything that I can do for myself moving forward.
I have learned so much about my body and all of the ways that I can support it.
This whole thing started with my work stress in January of 2022 and my years of being a
(53:14):
workaholic before that.
Now it is almost January 2025.
And in just three years, I feel like I've lived multiple lifetimes.
I have searched so deeply within myself.
I have experienced such highs and lows and periods of despair and helplessness.
(53:41):
And where I'm at now is in a period of hope and joy.
And I feel truly like I am the luckiest person in the world because of all of this that's
happened.
I have completely changed everything about the way that I live my life.
So I don't drink anymore and I have an early bedtime every night.
(54:05):
And when I first started lifting weights, I thought that it would just be another time
where I tried to be consistent with exercise and like all the other times that I wouldn't
stick with it.
But by the end of the year, I'm going to be at 150 sessions with my trainer.
Like I have completely changed my life.
I am so different.
(54:28):
I look at the old version of me, the version of me who is working 15 hour days, 18 hour
days, who is so disconnected from her body and the world around her.
And I'm now just so grateful for this whole thing.
I'm grateful for how sensitive my body is.
(54:49):
I'm grateful for my hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.
And I feel incredibly lucky that my experience with all these conditions is not debilitating.
I take like 100 supplements a day still.
I'm detoxing from the mold still.
I'm going to have to go through this mold remediation.
It's going to cost a fortune.
And I have a much more sensitive nervous system now than I ever used to.
(55:14):
But every day when I wake up now, I'm like treasuring every little thing about being
alive because I went so long feeling like I would never have that opportunity again.
Now I take in every inch of beauty around me and I take in every feeling, all the good
(55:34):
ones, all the bad ones.
I cry all the time and I feel so deeply.
I am just so grateful for everything and that I believed in myself along the way.
Oh, and the other thing is that I finally started letting go of the weight.
My body is finally starting to let go of the 20 pounds all of a sudden.
(55:56):
And that's just kind of a beautiful thing because I just started the podcast and I
took a lot of courage for me because it felt really vulnerable to start this and to put
my story out there.
It felt really scary to share this with everyone, but it's almost like in doing so, my body
was finally like, okay, now she gets it.
Now we can let go of the weight.
(56:17):
She's finally understanding what all of this is for and it was to share this story with
everybody so that I can help everyone know that if you're going through something similar,
that you're not alone.
You are not alone and it can get better because I am living proof of it.
I am living proof that even when you think you are dying and when nobody has any answers
(56:41):
for you, don't give up on yourself ever.
Do not ever give up on yourself because you are always worth it and not everybody's
this lucky.
I feel so incredibly lucky.
But because I am this lucky and because I was given this second chance, I am not taking
it for granted and I'm going to tell everybody about it and I'm going to tell everybody about
(57:04):
everything that I've learned because I've learned a whole lot and I want to talk about
all of it and it just depends on what we should talk about first.
So if you made it this far, thank you so much for listening.
Now you know the full story of my whole health and healing journey.
Thank you for listening and I'll see you next time.
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