“All disease begins in the gut.” This quote from Hippocrates - the father of medicine - has proven to hold a lot of truth over 2,000 years later. Is your gut dragging down your immunity? Read on to learn how you can tell, and what you can do about it!
Blood Tests for Immune Health
Case Study: A Functional Approach to Hormones and Gut
How Functional Health Coaching Treats Mood, Gut and Hormones in an Integrated Way
The Symptoms
When Emily joined our coaching program, she was struggling with depression, anxiety, fatigue, and brain fog. She said that she did not have the energy to improve her diet or exercise regimen to support her health. She feared that trying to make major changes could have the potential to elicit panic attacks that would prevent her from moving forward.
Photo by Jason Briscoe
Emily felt “tired almost all of the time.” Up until a few years before joining our functional coaching program, she had lived an active life. She had spent years gaining her education and working as a public health professional. And, at 38-years-old, she found herself barely making it through the day.
Emily had resorted to some of the most common coping mechanisms available: coffee in the morning to give her enough energy to get going, and alcohol at night to help her sleep.
Emily had resorted to some of the most common coping mechanisms available: coffee in the morning to give her enough energy to get going, and alcohol at night to help her sleep.
She suffered from symptoms of gas, bloating and indigestion. Her symptoms eased when she was strict about her diet but returned whenever she wavered slightly.
The First Steps
The first thing we advised Emily to do was to take the huge step of removing coffee and alcohol from her diet. Within a matter of a couple of weeks, she was amazed at how much better she felt, just from those small changes. While this is not always as impactful for everybody as it was for Emily, it does show that sometimes a couple of small tweaks can have big effects.
The Labs
As Emily made those early changes to diet, we ran a handful of functional labs, including:
DUTCH Complete hormone panel
Comprehensive thyroid panel
GI-Map stool pathogen test
Micronutrient (vitamin and mineral) test.
The Test Results
The test results showed that Emily was quite deficient in the stress hormone cortisol. Cortisol is the primary stress hormone but it is also responsible for providing a sense of energy and plays an important role in regulating the circadian rhythms controlling sleep/wake cycles.
Emily was also very low in all of her female sex hormones (the estrogens and progesterone) and she was also very low in melatonin, a hormone that helps promote restful sleep.
Emily's thyroid appeared to be slightly sluggish and she was deficient in seven different important micronutrients.
Her stool test detected two different parasites, an overgrowth of two different opportunistic yeast species, suppressed immune response in the small intestines, and a very strong sensitivity to gluten-containing foods.
Part of the Hormone Report
Stool Test Results
The Protocol
Emily remained free from coffee and alcohol and began to adopt a gluten-free diet.
She started doing moderate exercise, managing her stress levels, eradicating gut pathogens through an herbal protocol, and supporting her healthy hormone balance through diet, herbs, and lifestyle changes.
She introduced some herbal tinctures such as black cohosh, red clover, vitex, and motherwort to support her female hormone levels. She used a product called Adrenotone from Designs for Health to support the adrenal glands and the balance of stress hormone production through the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis.
Emily supported her micronutrient balance through the introduction of a complete mineral support formula and used the Designs for Health GI Microb-X product as one of the antimicrobial blends for eradicating infectious microorganisms. She also introduced Megaspore probiotic to rebuild beneficial gut flora and to support the immune system.
For dietary support, Emily began seed cycling and introduced more healthy fats into her diet. She also incorporated detoxification strategies such as dry brushing and rebounding into her daily routine to help her move toxins out of the body in a natural way.
The Transformation
Photo by Patrick Hendry
As Emily gained energy, she was able to reintegrate exercise into her life and she enjoys mountain biking and outdoor sports of many kinds.
After six months on the coaching program, Emily reported feeling better than she had in years despite experiencing some extreme stress, including the sudden death of her partner’s mother.
Over the course of her six months on the program, Emily gained enough energy and mental clarity to make big decisions about her life, including the purchase of a new home and a desire to have a baby.
Emily is now thriving, pregnant, happy in her life, and excited about her future.
Are You Ready for Your Transformation?
Work With Us!
We would be honored to work with you as a private client. We provide testing and coaching options to women in most every state and country. Come check out our coaching options to see if it’s a fit.
Bridgit Danner, LAc, FDNP, is trained in functional health coaching and has worked with thousands of women over her career since 2004. She is the founder of Women’s Wellness Collaborative llc and HormoneDetoxShop.com.
Ease Anxiety and Support Immunity in a Disaster with Mira Dessy
Mira Dessy is the Ingredient Guru and a Houston area resident whose home was flooded in Hurricane Harvey. She is a practicing holistic nutritionist and meditation expert.
She’ll share both how she remediated her home and some of the emotional and physical health challenges she handled with nutrition, supplements and mindfulness.
We cover:
The DIY actions she is taking to restore her home
How a community can come together in a crisis
The symptoms she’s noticing right after the hurricane
The emotional toll of losing your possessions and your home
How even junky food, given with love, can be nourishing!
How to kick a sugar habit if you’ve relied on it through a disaster
The supplements Mira uses to stay healthy
How quick and simple meditations can help for sleep and stress
Resources
Download notes from this interview HERE.
Get Mira Dessy's free ebook: Eating Out Healthy
Moisture Meter - to make sure all surfaces are dry enough before beginning the rebuilding process.
To learn more about Mira Dessy, visit her website here and follow her on social media:
You can listen to this and all other episodes on the podcast or watch directly on our YouTube channel here.
Please enjoy these articles from our friends Trudy Scott from Every Woman Over 29 and Jodi Cohen of Vibrant Blue Oils:
Nutrition Solutions for Psychological Stress After a Natural Disaster
3 Steps to Combating Mold with Essential Oils
Essential Oils to Modulate the Toxic Effects of Mold
Tomorrow we’ll have our final day of Mold Week with Ryan James, teaching you how to get the most out of an insurance claim. Home remediation can be quite costly; let Ryan keep you from getting the short end of the stick from your insurance company.
Audio-Only Version
If you are on-the-go or have a poor internet connection, it will be more reliable to play the following audio-only version.
Free Guide: Healing from Toxic Mold
You want help for your mold symptoms ASAP! Cut to the chase with this straight-forward guide, outlining my favorite supplements for detoxing mold. As a person who has been healing from mold toxicity, I can personally say these supplements support my daily self-care effectively.
Let me help you start healing!
Bridgit Danner, LAc, FDNP
Founder of Hormone Detox Shop
Be Aware of Waterborne Pathogens with Dr. Darin Ingels
Welcome to Day 2 of Mold Week. Dr. Darin Ingels is a naturopathic physician but was a clinical microbiologist and immunologist before going back to medical school. So he has a pretty broad background in infectious diseases and microbiology. He understands both the causation side and the healing side of mold illness.
In this interview, we focus on:
Which bacteria and parasites may be present in flood waters
How to dress to protect yourself while remediating a water-damaged home
What you’ll need to throw away when and if it’s been touched by water
Simple supplements that protect your immune system
Why you need to be careful with drinking & bathing water after a flood
How insects descend on an area, after a flood, and what to do
You can listen to this and all other episodes on the podcast or watch directly on our YouTube channel here.
You can also subscribe and listen on our podcast.
Download notes from this interview HERE.
To learn more about Dr. Ingels, visit his website here and follow him on social media:
Audio-Only Version
If you are on the go or have a poor internet connection, it will be more reliable to play the following audio-only version.
Free Guide: Healing from Toxic Mold
You want help for your mold symptoms ASAP! Cut to the chase with this straight-forward guide, outlining my favorite supplements for detoxing mold. As a person who has been healing from mold toxicity, I can personally say these supplements support my daily self-care effectively.
Let me help you start healing!
Bridgit Danner, LAc, FDNP
Founder of Hormone Detox Shop
Your Hormones And Your Immune System With Justin Marchegiani
Dr. Justin Marchegiani is a functional medicine practitioner with a private practice in Houston, Texas. He has extensive training in kinesiology, functional medicine, chiropractic medicine, nutrition, chronic infections and blood chemistry.
Today’s episode is about estrogen dominance and we will be talking about the immune system and hormones. We talk about how estrogen dominance can cause immune dysregulations, the branches of the immune system and how they work, what foods/nutrients support them and treating the immune system.
We also talk about:
- Why the immune system matters and the difference between women and men's systems.
- Exposure to chemicals
- Causes of estrogen dominance
- Symptoms of estrogen dominance including PMS, cramping, breast tenderness, moodiness, back pain, excessive menstruation and migraines
- The reason why so many women have increased frequency of autoimmune conditions
- The working of TH1 & TH2
- How to boost/regulate the immune system and herbs to take to boost TH1 and TH2
- Inflammation and other hormones that affect the immune system
To learn more about hormone balance, visit Justin's website here. You can also follow him on Facebook and on his YouTube account.
Thanks for listening!
Bridgit Danner, Founder of Women’s Wellness Collaborative
Learn About Colostrum
One of the wonderful things about my job is that I get to continually learn more. Two supplements I've recently studied I wanted to share with you.
They are IGG Colostrum powder and its cousin, Immunolox, by Nutrasumma.
Colostrum is the 'first milking' of mammals, but it's not exactly milk. It's a fatty,