The results are in and it is just as I suspected- I'm a mess. I'm no doctor but I could just feel that I was all over the place, which is why I wanted to go to the naturopathic doc in the first place.

My follow up appointment is not for another three weeks, but fortunately, my sister-in-law is a nurse practitioner and can read lab results so last night I showed her what I've got and she analyzed the numbers.

First of all, my heart looks good, or all the numbers that would point to my heart being good- were well in the normal range.

TSH which is what they use to measure my thyroid function is high, which is somewhat surprising since I am pretty religious about taking my medication each day.

That probably has to get retested and my meds adjusted.

Uric acid and potassium are high too, which when I took it into my own hands and looked on Google, this meant that I was having kidney failure!

But, according to my SIL, I am not dying. I do need to make adjustments though and eat more...

I've always been a traditional medicine type of girl and thought anything else was kind of woo but recently I attended a local women's retreat and one of the speakers was a naturopathic doctor who introduced me to the functional medicine matrix. 

I immediately knew that this was something I wanted to explore more. If you're unfamiliar, the matrix is a tool to help clinicians examine the body systems, symptoms, and risk factors associated with their patient’s health conditions.

It takes into account mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects of health and lifestyle factors. Whereas traditional medicine aims to assess symptoms, seeking to name a diagnosis and prescribe medication, functional medicine is more focused on finding the root cause(s) of a health condition.

When I heard the doctor speak, I was drawn to her. Her mother stood in the back of the room, walking in and out while bouncing the doctor's baby on her hip while the woman up front shared with us her...

I had my second week of coaching this week and it only lasted half the time. I've been working my way through The Intuitive Eating Guide to Recovery and so I shared with Teri what I've been learning. 

This book makes sense, for real! It is exactly how I imagine that freedom from diets looks like, but more importantly what it will feel like. 

No calorie counting, no tracking, no pre-occupation with the nutritional level of foods. This is what I want. 

Every few months in my journal (not my food journal, but my "this is what's going on and what I need to work through" journal), I write out where I see my life going. I place myself ten years into the future and I write how old I'll be and how old my children will be. I then talk about how my life looks.

This is my vision, my dreams. My goals. This is where I see my future self. Someday I'll share it with you. But for now, I want you to know that it is freedom I desire. 

I sometimes feel that my desire to be thin or...