What Was Already Written in My Genes
The Root of The Root — Part 3
If you’re new here, this is a 4 part series, and you’ve landed in part 3. Part 1 covered the newly discovered and very beginning of my health journey. From trauma in a young life to gut health beginning to deregulate, the hiccup in my health journey began young. Part one dives into how our formative years truly build the systems within our bodies.
Part 2 covered the first distress signal. My skin began showing me that something deeper was happening, even when no one had an ability to connect dots.
Part 3 is the science that has created understanding in hindsight. This is where I began to see that my health journey isn’t random. Part 3 actually skips forward to present day in March 2026. In the finale, part 4, we’ll go back a few years to age 43—when healing truly began....and the healing pathways will definitely surprise you.
Click here to read Part 1.
Click here to read Part 2.
Birth Control and Hormones: How Long-Term Use May Affect the Body Over Time
My journey continued into young adulthood as many do. Birth control didn't end with Accutane. It became a fixture of my life from my mid-teens through age 37 — eventually in higher doses in my 20s and 30s as my symptoms quietly escalated. I used birth control to manage my PMS symptoms, and control my body. It helped me feel more calm and much less angry.
What I didn't know then, and what took me decades to understand, is that the synthetic estrogen I was taking every single day was doing far more than managing my monthly cycle and PMS symptoms.
In researching synthetic estrogen, I learned that it was very likely feeding a fungal environment that had already been primed by four years of low grade antibiotics and two rounds of Accutane. Based on studies I have read, I believe it was actively triggering Candida to shift from its passive yeast form into its invasive hyphal form.
My belief stems from also studying myself and the patterns and upsets my body has experienced through age 50. I have had a battle with weight and candida since my teens and early 20s evidenced by annual incremental weight gain that added up to 70+ pounds, and way too many yeast infections, for example. So as I've begun to understand the science, many of these studies, AND my body, make perfect sense.
The pill was not the villain. It was doing what it was designed to do. But in my body — with my history, my genetics, my already-compromised gut — it was the third layer of a cascade that nobody ever connected. I go more in depth about the effects of oral contraceptives in another article coming soon.
And…if I’m honest, I ignored anything that suggested oral contraceptives might not be as harmless as I was told. I didn’t want to hear it—and I know I’m not alone in that.
MTHFR: The Gene I Didn’t Know I Had—and How It Affects Detox, Hormones, and Health
To understand why all of this hit me harder than it might have hit someone else, you have to understand something about how my body was built. I learned this after the birth of my son at age 39 from a genetics test with a functional medicine doctor. The birth sent my body into a spiral, and we discovered I had Graves Disease and several ‘mutations,’ or variations of the MTHFR gene. Variations in the MTHFR gene are more common than most people realize—affecting up to 30–40% of the population in some form. (CDC; NIH)
MTHFR stands for methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase (I can’t say it either) — an enzyme your body uses to convert folate into its active, usable form. (PMC) Folate is also known as folic acid, its synthetic form. That active folate drives a process called methylation, which is essentially your body's master biochemical switch system.
Methylation controls DNA repair, neurotransmitter production, hormone metabolism, immune regulation, and — critically — detoxification. (Allergy Research Group) When methylation runs efficiently, your body processes and clears toxins, old hormones, environmental chemicals, and cellular waste. When it doesn't, things accumulate.
I carry 3 MTHFR variants. This means my MTHFR enzyme runs at reduced capacity — and has my entire life. Heterozygotes, someone who carries two different versions of a gene—one from each parent, carrying both the C677T and A1298C variants have been shown to have only 50–60% of normal enzyme activity. (PubMed) My genetic testing in 2013 and later testing in 2024 confirmed I carry both variants.
I was born with a detox system running at half speed, and I didn't know it.
When Symptoms Start to Form a Pattern: Looking Back at My Health Timeline
Here is where my history starts to look less like bad luck and more like a predictable pattern. Now I've spent years observing my health on my own, with a health coach, and with three different functional medicine MD's throughout my 30's and 40's. We've dug deep to understand how I could heal from so many issues. Fatigue, drastic mood swings, depression, anxious thinking, and more have been central to my life for years.
At age 10, I had a very serious reaction to penicillin. Incredible hives and itching that stayed with me for years.
At 31, I went into anaphylactic shock from MRI contrast dye. My throat closed, face swelled, and it was an extremely scary incident.
Enlightened by science and hindsight, these do not seem like random occurrences now.
Research suggests MTHFR variants impair the body's ability to break down histamine — the chemical at the center of allergic and anaphylactic responses. (Methyl-Life) When methylation is compromised, the enzyme responsible for clearing histamine from the body, called HNMT, can't do its job efficiently. Histamine accumulates. The body becomes hypersensitive. Reactions that might be mild in someone else become severe in someone whose clearance pathways are already running behind. (Dr. Hagmeyer)
But it goes further than allergies, and I got to experience the difficulties associated with MTHFR variants very recently, but with new understanding.
MTHFR impairs glutathione production — the body's master antioxidant and primary detoxifier. (Methyl-Life) Glutathione is what your liver uses to neutralize and eliminate toxins, heavy metals, mold mycotoxins, and drug residues.
When I was later exposed to black mold in adulthood, I was doing so with a detox system that had been compromised since birth, further depleted by years of oral contraceptives, and already burdened by Candida overgrowth, but also a body with incredibly sustained healing.
The mold landed on a healthy body with a restored gut, excellently functioning metabolic health, and solid muscle mass. And what a war it raged from the inside. I'll cover that more in a future article.
If you’ve ever felt like your body reacts more intensely than it should—or like your symptoms don’t quite add up—you’re not alone in that experience.
The Estrogen Connection: How Hormones Seem to Interact with Histamine and Inflammation
And then there is the estrogen connection — which is where MTHFR becomes deeply personal.
A 2024 Methyl Detox Profile from Cell Science Systems — ordered through my functional medicine physician — revealed variants in both MTHFR and COMT, two enzymes that work in sequence to process and clear estrogen from the body. When MTHFR is compromised, it starves COMT of the raw materials it needs. And when both variants are present, the bottleneck compounds. Estrogen clearance slows. Metabolites accumulate.
What happens next is a loop that research increasingly supports. Accumulated estrogen activates mast cells — which express estrogen receptors and respond to estradiol by releasing histamine and other inflammatory mediators. Evidence also suggests that histamine, in turn, stimulates further estrogen production, tightening the cycle. Estrogen can drive histamine—and emerging research suggests histamine may, in turn, influence estrogen.
In a body already carrying two decades' worth of synthetic estrogen from a high-dose oral contraceptive, that loop had nowhere to go but inward.
When this kind of cycle is at play, it can show up as a pattern rather than one clear issue—things like skin flare-ups, itching or hives, weight gain, hormonal swings, anxiety, poor sleep, headaches, and increased sensitivity to foods or environments. Symptoms often feel cyclical, inconsistent, or hard to pin down.
Sound familiar? So many of us have what feels like unexplainable weight gain, itching, fatigue, headaches and more with no way to change the cycle.
How Oral Contraceptives Can Deplete Key Nutrients Over Time
The pill was doing something else at the same time. Multiple peer-reviewed studies — including published research in Nutrition Reviews and American Journal of Clinical Nutrition — have documented that oral contraceptives deplete the very B vitamins the methylation cycle depends on: B6, B12, and folate.
B6 depletion is among the most consistently replicated findings, with measurable disruption appearing within the first month of use.
Folate and B12 levels also trend lower in oral contraceptive users, though the degree varies by formulation and individual. For most women, this is a manageable inconvenience. For a body with MTHFR variants already reducing the conversion of folate into its active, usable form, it is a compounding deficit — accumulating quietly, year after year, gradually raising homocysteine levels and undermining every downstream process that depends on those nutrients: neurotransmitter production, DNA repair, hormone detoxification, immune regulation.
The system doesn't fail all at once. It just gets a little slower, a little more burdened, with each passing year. Any effort I made to lose weight and feel better diminished over time too - because nothing worked.
What does a decade or two of oral contraceptive use look like on the outside of a body?
In the body, this can show up more subtly over time—things like low or inconsistent energy, brain fog, mood shifts, trouble handling stress, and a general sense that your body isn’t recovering or functioning the way it used to. Some may notice increased sensitivity, slower healing, or symptoms that seem to build gradually rather than appear all at once. It doesn’t feel like a sudden breakdown, but more like a quiet decline in efficiency—where the body feels a little more taxed, a little less resilient, with each passing year. We often call it 'getting older'.
The Cellulite I Couldn’t Explain: How Hormones Can Shape Body Composition
From my teenage years into adult life I have had cellulite that doesn't make sense to me. I was very active - even into my 20's. But no matter how much I moved or dieted, cellulite didn't change for me.
The moment it finally clicked came in my 40s, when I was deep in the frustration of trying to understand my hormones. I was angry — genuinely angry — that I couldn't feel consistently well, couldn't feel capable and clear. I started reading everything I could find about hormones, and I stumbled across something that stopped me.
High estrogen doesn't just affect mood and cycles. It directly shapes connective tissue architecture.
High estrogen promotes fat deposition specifically in the thigh and gluteal regions, and it alters the fibrous bands beneath the skin — the connective tissue septae — in ways that create the characteristic dimpled appearance we call cellulite.
This isn't a body composition failure. It is a structural hormonal imprint. (Science of structural estrogen effects on connective tissue)
At the same time I was reading about hormones and high estrogen, I was noticing something else. After the birth of my son, my skin changed. My hair changed — from oily and dense to normal texture, and less volume. My body shifted from what I now recognize as constitutionally high estrogen to something more middle of the road.
And yet the cellulite remained. Even after losing 70+ pounds. Even with consistent weight training, and YEARS of cardio. Dimples still show in my legs and glutes, stubbornly present in a way that no amount of muscle building has fully resolved.
That's because building muscle doesn't undo the connective tissue architecture that decades of high-dose synthetic estrogen already created. Neither does diet alone. I wasn't failing. I was living in the physically structural memory of a hormonal environment I'd been in since age 14.
Understanding that changed something. Not the cellulite — but my relationship to my body. For the first time, I stopped reading it as evidence of failure. My body didn’t ‘do’ this to me… I had participated in patterns I never understood. And in seeing that clearly, compassion for myself and a new connection to my body began to seep in.
Understanding the Pattern: When Everything Started to Make Sense
I now understood the map. I could see where the dysfunction had begun — in grief, in a gut reshaped by years of antibiotics and Accutane, in synthetic estrogen flooding a body I believe already prone to fungal overgrowth, in a detox system running at half capacity since birth, and in black mold that found a healed system with incredible resilience, but dysfunction.
Knowing all of this did not fix me - I have only uncovered these explanations with research and perseverance because it's important to me. Ultimately, I have healed! And I needed to know how and why. Now that I do, sharing is the next step. I hope this can shed light for you if you struggle with any of these issues and I want you to know that healing IS possible.
In Part 4, I'll tell you what happened at 43 — when healing REALLY began. I created a synergy…on accident. Each practice incorporated addressed a layer of dysfunction I didn’t even know existed.
My hope is that my healing can help you shift your mindset to one that will overcome.
The healing was coming. It just needed the right conditions in which to work.
As I mentioned, the system was accidental, and I've been pursuing why it worked for over 7 years now. I cannot wait to share part 4!
Thank you for reading to the end!
PS - I’d love to hang out in your inbox. Please join the list so we can keep in touch, and my goal is to help you find motivation and consistincy when they are lacking!
References
PubMed Central — Estrogen promotes Candida virulence and innate immune evasion; high-estrogen oral contraceptives documented risk factor for candidiasis: Cell Reports, PMC (2022)
The Candida Diet — Oral contraceptives deplete B vitamins and magnesium; combined with estrogen dominance impairs homocysteine regulation: The Candida Diet
PMC — MTHFR enzyme converts folate to its active form; variants reduce enzyme activity and disrupt the folate cycle leading to hyperhomocysteinemia: MTHFR Gene Polymorphisms: Wide-Ranging Clinical Implications, PMC (2025)
Allergy Research Group — MTHFR variants impair methylation and glutathione production; estrogen requires methylation for efficient breakdown and elimination: Detox Pathways and MTHFR, Allergy Research Group
PubMed — Heterozygotes carrying both C677T and A1298C variants have approximately 50–60% of normal MTHFR enzyme activity: A second genetic polymorphism in MTHFR associated with decreased enzyme activity, PubMed (1998)
Methyl-Life — MTHFR variants impair histamine clearance via HNMT enzyme disruption; impaired methylation leads to histamine accumulation and hypersensitivity reactions: MTHFR and Histamine Levels, Methyl-Life
Dr. Hagmeyer — Impaired MTHFR enzyme leads to elevated homocysteine and reduced capacity to detoxify, exacerbating histamine-related symptoms and gastrointestinal dysfunction: MTHFR and Histamine Intolerance, Dr. Hagmeyer
Methyl-Life — MTHFR impairs glutathione production; glutathione is the body's master antioxidant and primary liver detoxifier: Glutathione and MTHFR, Methyl-Life
Joanne Kennedy Naturopathy — Inadequate estrogen detoxification due to impaired MTHFR/COMT causes estrogen buildup that stimulates mast cells to release histamine, creating an estrogen-histamine feedback loop: MTHFR and Histamine Intolerance, Joanne Kennedy Naturopathy
PubMed — Oral contraceptives deplete folate, B2, B6, B12, magnesium, selenium, and zinc; estrogen lowers vitamins required for homocysteine remethylation: European Review for Medical and Pharmacological Sciences, PubMed (2013)
