MEET SIERRA

I started experiencing health issues at a very young age; I think I was actually born with a lot of toxicity in my body. It started with severe constipation that eventually affected my mental health. At about 7 or 8 years old, I developed OCD and anxiety (there is a direct link between childhood constipation and OCD). When I was 10 years old, I received a vaccine that caused me to develop a gluten intolerance, which further disrupted my gut health. I kept eating gluten because at that time, my symptoms were pretty minimal and I didn’t understand the damage that was being caused. By the time I was 15, I had developed severe anxiety and panic attacks, which quite literally happened overnight. I could no longer function, I was not sleeping and doing normal day to day things became a challenge. This lasted nearly a year until I did research on anxiety, which eventually led me to learning about how the gut impacts the brain. With zero help from my doctor, I decided I wasn’t going to live like this and worked on healing myself.

I noticed major improvements as I changed certain eating and lifestyle habits, but nothing ever brought me to full healing. In my early 20’s, I was exposed to a lot of mold without realizing and after having COVID in 2022, I developed PPPD. The virus wasn’t the cause, but it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. PPPD is neural circuit dizziness, which is a functional issue, nothing is actually wrong with the brain. This can happen with nervous system dysregulation, but also, mold exposure.

My symptoms were so debilitating, I could barely walk from my room to the kitchen and I wasn’t able to sleep at night. This is when I sought help from a gonstead chiropractor. I worked with him for maybe 4 months and ultimately just got worse and worse, so I stopped and never went back. Over the next 2 and a half years I worked with a clinical nutritionist who caused me to develop full blown PCOS, a naturopathic doctor who put me through an intense detox that caused a hiatal hernia, a functional nutritionist who kept telling me I needed to get on a pharmaceutical, a functional medicine consultant who told me to “hang in there” when I told him I was reacting so badly to his supplement protocol that I wasn’t even sleeping and one more functional nutritionist who’s solution to my entire body swelling, due to lymphatic congestion from detox overload, was yet another supplement.

This is when I realized functional medicine doesn’t actually heal the body. Supplements are bandaids and without the proper lifestyle, the underlying issues that caused illness or symptoms still remain. Forcing detox depletes the body of what it needs to heal - voltage. This is where circadian rhythm enters.

You are not required to reach outside of yourself to heal. We’ve been mislead to believe we are lacking, but the body knows how to heal better than we do.

CREDENTIALS:

Institute of Transformational Nutrition - Certified Nutrition Coach (CNC)

Institute of Bioindividual Nutrition

Better Belly Functional Medicine Training

Institute of Restorative Health - Mastering the Art and Science of Gastrointestinal Healing (Level 1)

The Practitioner Blueprint

Herbal Academy

NASM Certified Personal Trainer