The road to getting my gut health on track has been a long one, not going to lie!

And the reality is I think it will be a lifelong commitment for me to maintain good gut integrity and to be honest, sometimes I fall off the wagon of doing the things I should, to support my gut, and then I have to get back on that wagon and correct it.

What initially started this journey for me was learning all that I had through running our business here at Additive-Free Lifestyle.

Over the years we have spoken to many gut health experts which got me thinking about my own gut health and gave me the insight to recognise that something wasn’t great with my own gut microbiome.

Yes, even me who lives additive-free and has a low-tox environment, and does all the things to support my body to stay healthy can still suffer from gut issues.

What symptoms did I have?

For a very long time I have had really bad stomach (and overall health) issues, including:

😣 Extreme bloating
😣 Fatigue
😣 Really sore stomach
😣 Intense bowel pain – in fact, I actually fainted twice on the toilet floor from extreme bowel pain.
😣 Just to name a few…

In the past I had gone to the GP to seek help for this and had just been told to get more fibre into me, drink Metamucil, drink more water, exercise, and at one point I even had a colonoscopy.  The colonoscopy showed some polyps, but nothing really serious.  I was pretty much told that this is my body and I just have to live with it and manage it with fibre drinks.

However, I knew there was something way more wrong than this… I cannot begin to fully articulate the intense pain and bloating I was experiencing. I wouldn’t want anyone near my stomach and would do all I could to avoid being touched there, even if getting a hug from my husband or kids, I would back away because it hurt so much.

Thankfully now there is a lot more focus on gut health than there ever was when I first started experiencing these symptoms 15 years ago.  Back then, it was deemed to be just a part of normal life and not seen as an issue that could be resolved.  I honestly don’t know how I got through those years of suffering, especially when now I know how to maintain my gut health.

If not for all the learning I have done through hosting this podcast show and speaking to experts, I would never have realised that it wasn’t normal to feel that way and that I could actually fix it.

It wasn’t until around 2019 that I properly looked into it more and made the decision to do something about it.  This was on the back of a manic 2019 for us not only in our professional lives but also incredible upheaval in our personal lives as well.

Let me just paint the picture for you…

At the very end of 2018, our mother was diagnosed with Leukaemia. She literally went from the specialist appointment straight to hospital for treatment as her cancer was so severe.  She ended up in hospital for quite a few months receiving intensive treatment.

Therefore, at the start of 2019, we had our mum undergoing treatment for Leukaemia. My kids were only in the early stages of primary school, I was dealing with the whole mum/life juggle – thankfully my husband Shane worked with Additive-Free Lifestyle at the time, so he was home and around more.

January 2019 saw horrific bushfires in Tassie and whilst we weren’t directly affected, the stress load was high, and we did all we could to help out displaced individuals who had lost everything.

In Feb we came 2nd place in the doTERRA Incentive Trip to Vietnam. We questioned whether to go or not because our Mum was so sick, but she insisted we go.  Although it was an amazing trip, our minds were constantly on our Mum back at home.

We were still running our online store at this time in a warehouse we had in Tassie, so running this as well as being in and out of hospital caring for Mum was a lot.

March was full on with work and to de-stress we went on a family cruise (which I had actually booked long before Mum got sick).  Going on a cruise was something I had always wanted to do.  But we quickly learned that we are not cruise people lol – we actually hated it.

In April we flew up to Byron Bay for another doTERRA trip.  This was also the same month where our mother was diagnosed as terminal and, we came close to losing her as her health took a turn for the worst.

On top of all this, and the craziness already experienced, we decided to write our first cookbook everyday additive-free (gosh knows what we were thinking! Lol). It’s fair to say we don’t do things in halves around here lol

In May we flew to Sydney and presented on stage at the annual doTERRA Convention in front of 4,500 people! There was so much to prepare for this event.  One of the best things about this month was that Mum had done a complete turnaround in her health and had actually been placed into remission. What a relief!

June was head down bum up writing our cookbook – we had NO IDEA how much was involved with this!

July saw us fly up to the Gold Coast for the doTERRA Leadership Conference where we attended and also presented.

September we flew to Melbourne where we presented at the AusMumpreneur Awards and won first place in the Making a Difference category.

In October we held our very first Wellness Event in Hobart which was a massive day-long event to organise and prepare for. It was awesome – people actually flew in from around the country to attend.

Also, in October we released pre-sale for our cookbook that we’d spent all year writing… all 160+ recipes of it! Again… we don’t do things in halves! Haha

We also presented at a Hobart doTERRA event in October as well (gosh I’m exhausted reliving this all again!).

In November we flew to Guatemala as we had been chosen to participate in a doTERRA Co-Impact Sourcing trip. We extended it with a little 3-day Mexico City holiday afterwards.  It was amazing but by the end of it we were so physically and emotionally spent from all that had gone on that year.

As you can see 2019 for us was MASSIVE! By the end I was overweight, bloated, exhausted, and just so done!

BUT… we kept on pushing because in December we had a little family holiday in Queensland at Christmas because my Father-In-Law was in the final stages of his life with bowel cancer.

We flew back in Jan 2020 and then a week later we flew to Melbourne to sign 1,000 copies of our cookbook, everyday additive which we had just launched.

But wait there’s more…. Yeah I know I sound like one of those Demtel ads 😂

In Feb, between Tracey and I we held 32 in-person workshops all around Australia!  There was so much travel!

So, by March… boy was I done and so so sick!

I decided I needed to focus on my gut health and thought I could do it alone. I started by walking every single day… rain, hail, or shine!  I ended up calling it my therapy time.  I preferred to go alone but if the kids did come along they were under strict instructions to behave with no arguments or distractions. It was my ‘me’ time.  I actually found this walking time a game-changer.  It wasn’t about the length of the walk, because sometimes I could only go for 15 minutes, but it was so good for my mental health.

I was also turning 40 at the end of that year and it was my kickstart to turn my health around and be the best version of me I could.

That was also the year that COVID hit, thankfully we didn’t really have lockdowns in Tassie (something we are very grateful for and a fact we are so sorry to the other states who suffered dramatically through it), but obviously, people were home a lot more because of it. It actually gave me the opportunity and permission to be more at home to unwind from what was an incredibly hectic 12 months.

From all this I started to get better… my bloating started to go down and I started feeling better overall.

This sustained me through most of 2020 and by my 40th in November I was feeling great. But as we can often do and I sure fell prey to this, because I was feeling great, in December I started to let my diet slip and enjoyed Christmas a bit too much with all the things and my health started to take a dive again.  I even developed eczema for the first time ever! I had never suffered with it before, but I now had it at the back of my knee. My nails became incredibly brittle and would split, whereas I used to have the strongest most beautiful nails. I was more tired than I had ever been. If it wasn’t for work and my family, I would have stayed in bed all day.

It was at this point that I decided to engage the help of a health practitioner and get the professional help I needed.

I knew that I wanted to go down the functional medicine route because I had already tried GP’s for help and got nowhere.  I even had Coeliac testing through the GP’s which came back negative.

I came across Alley from Learn to Nourish as she had spoken at our wellness event in Hobart. Alley is a Clinical and Holistic Nutritionist who specialises in hormones and her husband, Benedict who also works at Learn to Nourish, is a Clinical Nutritionist who specialises in gut health. So, I booked in to see Benedict.

And yes, it was an investment… side note: why do we always question investing in our health? Yes, we have budgets to stick to and only so much money to go around, but investing in our health is the cornerstone for us to sustain life. So, whilst I cringed at the money spent, I knew it had to be done, and looking back, investing in my health was the BEST DECISION I could have ever made!

So… if you relate to any of this and are sitting on the fence, give it a try to see a functional medicine practitioner.

My first consultation with Benedict was 1.5 hours, so a really long time… way longer than you would get with a GP! Prior to the appointment I had to fill out an extensive questionnaire which made the whole process so incredibly thorough.

Benedict needed a range of blood tests to get done, which in case you are unaware, you have to go to your GP to get the referral for.  But here’s the thing, the GP didn’t want to give me the referral for the long list of bloods I needed done.  She basically went through a bunch of them and said I didn’t need them.  However, I stood my ground and insisted that my Nutritionist needed these, so they get done. I also got a stool testing done and was put on a range of supplements too.

I won’t go into detail about the supplements I went on because everyone is different and what my Nutritionist prescribed for me may not be what he would prescribe for you.

Benedict also took me off fermented foods, gluten, dairy, and sugar.  It turns out that fermented foods and probiotics (like you find in yoghurts) were my gut’s worst enemy.  Here I was thinking I was living healthy by eating yoghurt once a day and drinking my homemade kombucha once a day and it was actually doing me harm.

For these reasons and so many more it’s so important to see your own practitioner and get your own testing done because as I said above, every single body is different.

What he did add in was bone broth daily, lots of fibre, organic meat, wild-caught fish, and spray-free fruit and veg. The stool test results showed that my e-coli was really low, it was 5 times lower than it should have been which accounted for my fatigue.

Another result was that my lactococcus was really high. Normally it should be under 5% but mine was 88.8% – 560 times higher than it should have been. This was a huge reason why my body was so bloated all the time, because it couldn’t digest food.  It was also the reason why fermented foods and probiotics were not good for me because when I consumed those products, I was feeding the lactococcus bacteria and doing my gut more damage.

Through all this testing he was able to work out that I had had gut health issues for 20 years since my early 20’s.  We pinpointed it to a time when I was partying a lot, not looking after myself and suffering with tonsilitis constantly which meant I was on antibiotics a lot.  I subsequently had my tonsils out when I was 24. Then when you layer on the years of gluten exposure, toxins my body was exposed to on a daily basis (because I sure wasn’t additive-free back then) since I killed my gut health at 24, it kept accumulating to the dire point I was at before seeking Benedict’s help.

Had I not ever done this testing, I wouldn’t have known any of this. I cannot advocate enough for how important it is to know where your body is at and learning the root cause, so you can heal it in the most effective way possible.

It’s worth noting that our gut health is directly linked to our brain health.

“The gut-brain axis (GBA) consists of bidirectional communication between the central and the enteric nervous system, linking emotional and cognitive centers of the brain with peripheral intestinal functions. Recent advances in research have described the importance of gut microbiota in influencing these interactions. This interaction between microbiota and GBA appears to be bidirectional, namely through signaling from gut-microbiota to brain and from brain to gut-microbiota by means of neural, endocrine, immune, and humoral links.”

Source: National Institutes of Health

Studies now also show the gut-brain connection leading to depression and the role stress and high cortisol takes on our gut health.  As you can see from our crazy 2019, our bodies were constantly in fight or flight high cortisol mode which would have had a detrimental effect on our gut health.

Even as we record this episode, stress is still a major factor in my life having moved from Tassie to Queensland recently.  Stress is not something we can avoid but it’s something we need to learn to manage. It would be no surprise to me that the level of stress I endured has been another contributing factor to my poor gut health.  Honestly, I think we need to do a whole podcast episode about stress and how to manage it, so stay tuned for that in the future.

Unfortunately, there’s no quick fix for poor gut health. It takes a long time and requires you to commit to fixing it and doing the hard yards. But when you come out the other side, you’ll wish you had done it sooner because you will feel so good.

I am getting myself back on track because it’s a daily journey, but the best thing I ever did was prioritise my own health and learn the tools to get it back on track.

We are in no way sponsored or affiliated with Benedict or Alley at Learn to Nourish, they are just brilliant practitioners who we would highly recommend to anyone.  And #dontstressit if you don’t live in Hobart, they offer Zoom sessions so they can see anyone around the country.

To check them out head to Learn to Nourish HERE.

For our nourishing bone broth recipe downloadable… enter your details below and it will be sent straight to your inbox.

If you have found some benefit from this podcast episode we would love it if you could give us a review in your preferred podcast app – as this will help get our podcast show out to as many people as possible and spread the word about living an additive-free lifestyle.

Jo (and Tracey) x