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This post is an installment in our 52 Health Hinges series. Remember, “Small hinges swing big doors.”

Most who start a nutrition practice have a story of their own that inspired their career. Same is true for me.

As with many things in life, everything makes sense through the rear view mirror. As I was experiencing many symptoms, they first seemed compartmentalized and annoying, and over time graduated to overwhelming, confusing, and impactful. 

Today I’ll tell you a little about the road I traveled to arrive here.

I started feeling symptoms in my early 20s.

The first biggie was what I called dizziness. Randomly, throughout the day, I would just feel off. Couldn’t think. Dizzy. Not to the extent that I felt like I was going to fall over, but a feeling like you might have after you ride a rollercoaster. Shaky.

The only thing that would make it go away was to take a nap. My doctors ordered scans to check for a brain tumor, and sent me for extensive testing for inner ear imbalances. Thankfully, both were negative, but the problem wasn’t resolved.

Having ruled out a major problem, my doctors shrugged and sent me on my way. None of them asked me about my diet.

Over the next 15 years, I had various other symptoms pop up:

• Debilitating menstrual cramps
• Insomnia
• Acne
• Depression and anxiety
• Diarrhea
• Constipation
• Sudden onset of seasonal allergies
• Urinary tract infections
• Yeast infections
• Weight gain, and weight loss resistance
• Hair growth (where I didn’t want it); hair loss (where I DID want it)

Some symptoms got a Band-Aid treatment; most I just “powered through.”

I certainly never considered that the root cause of any of these was my diet or lifestyle…I chalked it up to genetics, getting older, or just being “normal,” and went on with my life.

Then some bigger things happened that I couldn’t ignore. I woke up one morning with a rash. It turned out to be shingles, most common in people over 50. I was in my early 30s.

I admitted that I was stressed, but I didn’t feel like my stress was significantly more than others’ stress levels. THEY weren’t getting shingles, so what was I whining about? Toughen up, woman!

So in typical high-achiever fashion, I powered through shingles. Over a 3-5 year period, I had another 3-4 bouts of shingles. My mom told me that she’d had shingles multiple times and that my uncle and aunt have had shingles multiple times, so I again chalked this up to unlucky genetics.

So while I didn’t ignore my shingles, I didn’t react to it with any urgency.

Finally, the biggest blow happened when I was trying to get pregnant. I became consumed with my FSH, estrogen, progesterone, basal body temperature, charting…still nothing.

At some point, I started to panic…but STILL didn’t consider that my diet or lifestyle had anything to do with it. And frankly, neither did my doctors. They couldn’t find any reason why I wasn’t getting pregnant, so labeled me with a most unhelpful (and cop-out) diagnosis of “unexplained infertility.” (You can read about our Holistic Fertility Enhancement program here.)

Do you have symptoms you’ve accepted as normal? What if these symptoms are not normal and you could do something about it?

Your assignment for the week is to think about your symptoms and document them. When did each start? What was happening in your life when you started to notice the symptoms?

As I see the refection of my 15-year journey in the rearview mirror, I now know that I spent a lot of time masking and controlling the symptoms in a nasty game of whack-a-mole, but whack away as I did, I never addressed the root cause.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never won a game of whack-a-mole. So let’s change the game.

I promise – this story does have a happy ending. Next week, I’ll tell you what I found when I changed my game and dug for my root cause.