Our Story in a Timeline-Part 1

December 2013:

Justin & I had been dating for a year & a half when we decided to plan an epic 17-day holiday roadtrip using all of our vacation time from our jobs at The Boeing Company. We went down the coast of Highway 101 from Washington to California and back up to Washington again where we lived. We tent camped along the entire coast and made some of the best memories!

When we returned home from that trip my body exploded with inflammation, seemingly out of nowhere. I had a history of skin issues from my childhood; mostly eczema & scalp psoriasis that I would manage with topical steroids & medicated shampoos. But this inflammation was different, it consumed my whole body. I immediately went to our local walk-in clinic & was prescribed immunosuppressant drugs, the typical protocol when your immune system is out of whack. What I didn't know then is that these drugs, as well as the steroids & medicated shampoos of my past, were only addressing the symptoms of a very internally dysregulated body. Because of the drugs they prescribed I had to go to the clinic every week to get a blood test to make sure my white blood cell count wasn't elevated. If it was that meant my body was trying to fight an infection, which it could not do since I was taking the immunosuppressants. The drugs were making me sick to my stomach every time I ingested them & they didn't just make everything all better. All of this raised red flags, I knew I couldn't continue weekly blood test or feeling nauseous every day so I started searching the world wide web to find some answers. I stumbled upon the Paleo diet & a blogger named Liz Wolfe. At the time she had published a skincare guide talking about common skin issues & how what we put into our bodies plays a huge role in our overall health & wellness. Justin & I read her book, Eat the yolks, and it opened our eyes to our broken conventional food system & how simply changing the sourcing of our food could help change our health from the inside out. 

I had one more visit with the local walk-in dermatologist & told him about my findings on the Paleo diet & moving away from eating processed foods as a way to help my psoriasis. His response? "Sure! If you go on a diet & lose some weight it could get better, but in the meantime, we can stop the pills & move to long-term injections since this will never go away." I walked out of the office that day & never went back.