Patterns in Hindsight Part 2

Root of the Root — Part 4

The Accidental System That Healed Everything

If you're just finding this series, welcome. Parts 1–3 walked through the chain reaction that is my life. This is part 4 - where true healling began, and part 4 explains why everything worked. If you’ve been following through the years, fast forward to 2019.

Part 1 - The Root of the Root I
Part 2 - Root of the Root II
Part 3 - Root of the Root III
Part 4 - You are here!

Investing in myself…on accident

In 2019, at 43 years old, my husband talked me into signing up for an online bootcamp. Weight lifting and keto, together, in a structured program. I had never done anything remotely like it — though I had thought about going keto for a while. I'd read about it. I was curious. But I hadn't pulled the trigger.

I thought we were both all in…He didn’t sign up.

I’d spent $385. That was so much money to spend on myself at once for a dream I’d been failing at for YEARS felt selfish. It also felt like too much money to walk away from. So, I dove in — a little irritated, a little nervous, and completely alone in it.

That $385 may be the best investment I have ever spent.

What I Was Watching — and What It Was Doing to Me

At this same time, something else was shifting. Every morning when I lifted, I listened to Atomic Habits by James Clear. (I have since listened to it five or six times and read it once — and I will tell you right now, a full book review is coming because it deserves its own conversation.)

But in those early morning sessions, one of his core ideas started landing in a way that changed how I saw everything: your environment shapes your behavior more than your willpower ever will. Triggers lead to habits. The setup of your life — what you see, what you hear, what you sit down next to — quietly runs the show.

I started paying attention to what I was consuming — not just food, but everything. The shows I watched. The podcasts I listened to. The books I read. The people I spent time with.

I started watching television differently. Instead of just sitting down to unwind, I started noticing what I was watching and how it made me feel. And I became aware that there were certain habits that carried a glass of wine alongside them. Specific shows were triggering me to want to drink.

The shows were the trigger. Over time I said goodbye, and I cut them out of my life.

Not the wine first — the trigger first. James Clear would call that an environment design choice. I just called it finally connecting the dots. And it worked.

That shift in thinking — learning to look at my inputs and ask what they were producing in me — opened something. Friends. Food. Alcohol. TV. Podcasts. Novels. I started examining all of it with curiosity instead of assumption. What is this adding to my life? What is it quietly taking?

That was the first crack in the door. And what walked through next surprised me.

The Housewives Epiphany

I know. Bear with me.

It was 2019. I was watching the Real Housewives of Atlanta, which was exactly the kind of show I had started examining. And there was a moment — Kim's husband, a professional football player, had a chiropractor come to his home after every single practice and every single game. It was just part of his routine. Non-negotiable recovery. Keeping his body ready to perform and ready to heal.

I was sitting there watching this and something clicked. I’d been stuck in a pattern of two weeks of good exercise habits, two weeks of sickness…or something along those lines - FOR YEARS. The weight lifting gig was changing that…and then this

I can't have a chiropractor come to my home. But I can go to a chiropractor.

I accidentally (not really) found the best and most affordable chiropractor in Jacksonville, Florida. I started seeing him weekly — right as I was beginning to lift weights in earnest. Looking back, this is another one of the smartest investments I have ever made in my health. This did something I’ll explain below. It was integral to healing.

The Bootcamp Begins — and So Does Everything Else

When I committed to the program, I honed my wine intake down to two glasses per week. I learned to meal plan and prep. I learned to eat the same boring food over and over. I learned about electrolytes. I love to learn, so this was great for me.

Three months into the program, my energy was better but still very stretched in the afternoon. i was surrounded by like minded people in the bootcamp online - we met in a Facebook group. And then…I (accidentally) found a gut health system when seeking an energy drink.

The gut health system was a game changer because it helped me deal with lifelong constipation, weight that wouldn’t move, serious brain fog that I thought was ‘mom brain’, fatigue, bloating, did I mention stagnant weight? This system changed that.

My gut healed in a way I had never experienced before — and I still use it today. It's the foundation of the free nutrition protocol I share through my newsletter, and it's available to anyone who signs up. I will share what it did and why it worked when we get to the breakdown section below.

By month eleven, I was still going strong. Compounding habits hit and 63 pounds began to wash away. Over 47 inches lost all over.

Adding the gut health to the primed system that my body became was awesome. During this time my thryoid also normalized after a serious Graves Disease flare in 2013, and then Hashimoto’s diagnosis in 2017. (The thyroid flared again, but that’s a different story)

One year into this new routine, I was hitting the gym 3 times a week, sometimes 4. I was seeing the chiropracter and his accupunturist on alternating weeks for the first 3 months, then it moved into bi-weekly visits.

My body was responding in ways I hadn't expected, but had always hoped for. However, I had no idea about the synergy happening on the inside. I simply knew I was losing weight and I had energyl

And then… I Started Meditating.

Month fourteen-ish. March 2020. The world changed.

My old self — the version of me that had spent decades in a body under chronic stress, with a nervous system that had never fully settled — would have fallen apart. And honestly, anxiety did show up. It showed up hard.

I took the opportunity to start meditating.

I started with five minutes, then 10. I created a space to sit and be still in my closet. Eventually I worked up to thirty to forty-five minutes a day, Monday through Friday. And then I decided to go all in: I meditated every single day for 100 consecutive days- even on a road trip from Florida to AZ.

Meditation changed something fundamental in me. Not just my mood. Something structural. Something in the way my nervous system responded to the world, and I had no idea.

By late 2022, I was down over 70 pounds. I had gone from a size 14 to a size 4. And for the first time in my adult life, I felt well. Not just thinner. Not just less tired. Actually, genuinely well. I couldn’t remember feeling this good before.

So How Did This Happen? Let's Walk Through It.

Here's the part I find most astonishing: I did not design this system. I stumbled into it, layer by layer, over about four years. But when I started studying the science — trying to understand why it worked so well — I realized that each thing I added was addressing a layer of dysfunction I’d been carrying since childhood.

This wasn't luck. This was biology responding to the right conditions.

The weightlifting was doing more than building muscle. Resistance training increases insulin sensitivity — which means your cells start responding to blood sugar properly again. It reduces inflammatory markers. It supports mitochondrial function, which is a fancy way of saying it helps your cells produce energy more efficiently. For a body that had been metabolically burdened for decades, lifting heavy things consistently was essentially hitting a reset button on my metabolism.

Muscle also matters hormonally. Skeletal muscle is metabolically active tissue — it helps regulate estrogen metabolism and supports the clearance of excess hormones. Given everything I shared in Part 3 about my estrogen burden, this wasn't a small thing.

The keto diet dramatically reduced my blood sugar swings and dropped my insulin levels. This matters because chronically elevated insulin promotes fat storage, drives inflammation, and feeds the kind of hormonal environment that Candida and estrogen dominance thrive in. Removing sugar and processed carbohydrates was like pulling fuel away from a fire that had been burning inside me for years. The dense vegetable intake meant I was flooding my body with fiber, antioxidants, and the micronutrients my methylation cycle had been starved of.

The gut health system addressed what nothing else had touched directly — the actual terrain of my gut. It supported the elimination of Candida overgrowth, helped restore the mucosal lining, and began rebuilding a microbiome that had been disrupted since I was a teenager. When your gut lining heals, absorption improves. When absorption improves, every other system in your body gets better raw materials to work with. The lifelong constipation resolved. Many food sensitivities quieted. The bloating that I had accepted as normal - disappeared.

The chiropractic and acupuncture were doing something I didn't fully appreciate until later: they were supporting my nervous system's ability to regulate. A body under chronic stress holds that stress in its structure — in the spine, in the fascia, in the places tension lives. Regular adjustment and acupuncture were helping my body release what it had been gripping for years. They also supported lymphatic flow and reduced systemic inflammation in ways that complimented everything else I was doing.

The meditation was the final piece. Chronic stress keeps your body in a state called sympathetic dominance. Fight or flight. When you live there long enough, it becomes your baseline, and your body pays a steep price: elevated cortisol, disrupted sleep, impaired digestion, suppressed immune function, and a nervous system that can't distinguish between a real threat and an ordinary Tuesday.

Meditation — especially practiced consistently over time — shifts your baseline toward parasympathetic regulation. Rest and restore. When your nervous system is no longer in constant emergency mode, your body can finally do what it was designed to do: heal (and burn calories).

The Synergy

None of these things alone would have done what all of them together did. This concept is integral.

Lifting without healing the gut would have helped — but not like 70+ lbs down . Healing the gut without calming the nervous system would have helped — but not to the tune of VIBRANT health I experienced and have maintained. Keto without the muscle — meditation without the nutrition — any one piece without the others — would have been a fraction of the result in my body.

The synergy was everything. And I found it by accident.

What I know now is that healing from a lifetime of layered dysfunction requires a layered response. Not a pill. Not a protocol. A system — built one honest step at a time, in a body that is finally getting what it needs.

Your Turn

I'm not telling you my story so you can copy it exactly. I'm telling you so you can see that healing is possible — even when the pattern has been building for decades. (And maybe you see you in what I've been through. Shortcuts are everything!) Root causes are at the heart of the matter, and so is how you care for you

If any of this resonates with you — the unexplained symptoms, the weight that won't move, the sense that your body is working against you — I want to offer a great starting point.

My newsletter is where I share the free plate-building guide and the gut health nutrition protocol that started all of this for me. It's practical. It's free. And it's the closest thing I have to handing you the map I wish someone had handed me.

[Sign up here and get access to the free nutrition protocol and gut health system information.]

The Part I Almost Didn't Share

I've told you about the bootcamp. The weights. The keto. The chiropractor and the acupuncture. The gut health system. The meditation. Atomic Habits in my earbuds every morning while I lifted.

And all of that is true. All of it mattered.

But none of it would have happened without something I haven't told you yet. Something I almost left out — not because it isn't real, but because it is the most real thing I have ever experienced, and words feel small next to it.

A force was working in my life.

I invited Him in. I asked to understand and know Him. I asked — specifically, intentionally — for eyes to see what I needed to see in order to heal. I began seeking higher living in the world, and somewhere in that seeking, I was transformed to seek higher living in the Spirit.

Every open door. Every right person. Every moment of clarity at the right time — the bootcamp I almost didn't sign up for, the chiropractor I happened to find, the book in my ears at exactly the right season of my life — I believe none of it was accidental. Not really.

The system looked accidental from the outside. From the inside, it felt like being guided.

I talk about this more openly with my friend Paula on the podcast — if this resonates with you and you want to go deeper, I'd love for you to meet us there. You can find us here, along with new episodes of Do You Have The Guts regularly.

And for the practical starting place — the nutrition protocol, the gut health system information, the plate-building guide — that's all waiting for you in the newsletter. It's free. It's the place I put everything I wish someone had handed me.

[Sign up here.]

Thank you for reading this whole series. Every word of it has been written for the woman who feels like her body is a mystery she will never solve. I was her. And I want her to know —

The healing was always possible. You just needed the right conditions. And maybe, the right eyes to see them.