Welcome & Intentions

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I'm Deidre Bloomquest, I'm a functional nutritional therapy practitioner and I want to help you understand how your body works so that you can navigate complex health conditions and take back your health. I'm passionate about serving women, no matter what stage of life you're in, so that you can take your health into your own hands, understand and address root causes for disfunction and holistically support every facet of your life.

Women are the gatekeepers to the health of the family.

And I want to help you understand health deeply to make the best decisions, not only for yourself but for your family. I'm a lifelong learner and I hope you'll join me in this journey to be always learning and always growing. Let's dive in!

Hello, hello! Welcome to the inaugural episode of Always Learning and Always Growing. I'm Deidre Bloomquest, I'll be your host and whether you're joining us.

In real-time or coming back to this at some time in the future, I'm so excited that you are here.

In this first episode, would like to not only share a little bit more about myself, but also. How my practice, always growing nutrition, came to be, and then my intentions for this podcast, so that you know where we're going with this and what you can expect more of in the future.

So since the majority of our community is on Instagram currently. I know there are so many of you who have reached out and said that you feel like you know me, we get on the phone and you know my voice and it is always so flattering and then in prepping for this podcast, I realize that as a business owner, I have been a very private person for a very long time and that really changed when I became a mother and it really completely opened me up in terms of what I wanted to share and how I wanted to show up in the world and be able to help others and, as you'll see, as we discuss, everything has really shifted for me since becoming a mother. Things have catapulted essentially, and I want to share that journey with you so that if at any point in time, that feels like it resonates with you, you know that you're not alone, but also so that you can see more about me, where I come from and how I got to be where we are now, and then we'll kind of wrap-up with why I wanted to start this podcast after years of it being requested, and finally having the capacity now to be able to spend some time doing this and create this resource for you, and what my intentions are going forward.

So a little bit about me, I'm a Colorado Native, I was born in 1990, so I'm a 90's kid through and through and whether you realize this or not, I am very much so and introvert. If you're into personality test, I am an INFJ I'm also an Eniagram eight and I'm risk taker, I'm very driven. I want to help others, but I am also somebody who really enjoys their, their privacy and their space, and being alone at home, much of a home body for sure, but I know how important it is to share my personal story and things that you might be able to relate. So I'll be a little bit vulnerable here and share some of that, and I'm always happy to have a discussion on anything that comes up as well. So growing up I ate pretty awful. I think this is true of most of us who grew up in the 90's that you know, I lived on a lot of process foods and a lot of sugar and certainly noticed, as became a young adult, how it was impacting my health. One of the things that I remember, particularly from being in high school, was that I had a lot of migraines and I missed a lot of school as a result. I had migraines so severely that many mornings I would need to call my mom to pick me up from school because I was not only having a migraine but was also nauseous and vomiting, and we at some point in time had visited our family practice, doctor or pediatrician, whatever it was at that point in time and came to the realization that I was eating too many process foods that were high in sodium. I was basically living off of things like hot dogs and olives, like conventional olives and Little Debies everything, a lot of sugar, and they were giving me migraines, and I think I was fortunate enough not to have any true food allergies. But what I was eating was certainly not nourishing me in the way that I think not only me but my entire family had hoped it would be, and so I pulled back on a lot of those things, and a lot of those things were very self driven. I'm sure I know that particularly in young adulthood I was a very picky eater, so I am in no way shape or form necessarily blaming my parents, I think a lot of times, and this is true of all parents. We're doing the best we can with the information that we have, and so there were a lot of things. I think that negatively impacted my health growing up from a food perspective, and I didn't really put that into perspective until I was a little bit older. So I actually have an entire blog on the website about how I started drinking soda when I was two years old and when self weaned when I was in college. I went through some pretty intense caffeine withdrawals and detail a lot of that there, as well as how I went about doing it, I'll make sure to put that blog in the show notes for you so that you can read that if that's of interest to you.

But I want to share that with you because I think a lot of times when we see practitioners, either out in the real world or on Instagram, it really feels like they are so healthy. They didn't have to work through any of this, especially if they aren't actively sharing their health story, which is a very common thing that comes up with practitioners. A lot of us get into the space because of our own health conditions. So you know, typically you'll see people who have hashimoto love working with clients who have hashimoto sort of thing, and my story is a little bit different in that I've been very fortunate to catch things early, I think, and be able to re navigate my health as a result.

So I want you understand that I didn't come from a healthy place as far as food and nutrition goes as a child, this isn't something that I have been fortunate enough to experience my whole life, and when I was in my early twenties, especially thinking about college, I had a really severe hypoglycemia. I was still making poor food choices and I made the conscious decision to change things slowly, and the first one of those things was quitting soda.

Because growing up we didn't really drink water in our house. It's funny, but my, my dad has always said: you know water will kill you, that stuff will kill you, he wasn't wrong when he was talking about tap water, which is pretty funny now. But we didn't drink water. We really drank soda. We drank lemonade with added sugar. You now we drank flavored beverages. There wasn't any water in our household when I was in those early twenties and was having really bad irritability and mood swings and blood sugar crashes when I went too long between meals. You know it took somebody else really shaking me and saying like something is wrong you shouldn't feel this way. For me too look into it deeper, and I started making better food choices, I started moving my body in different ways and it's changed the trajectory of my health as a whole. So I understand that it's a hard thing to do, especially when it's not the norm in your family. And I'm hoping that I am sharing a lot of this can help make it as easy as possible for you to do the same things if you would like to.

So that kind of brings me to going to college. I attended the University of Denver. I grew up in Greeley, Colorado, and then I moved South about an hour, if you're not from here, to go to the university, and when I was in high school I did the International Baccalaureate Program, which is essentially like AP on steroids, if you're not familiar. And I really wanted to be in the medicine field, those of you who are about the same age as me probably remember things like house and Gray's Anatomy, and all those things were very popular on TV at the time, and I really wanted to be a Medical Doctor. I was always fascinated with the human body and physiology, and I was also a really high achiever, I wanted to do the hardest thing possible. So instead of just doing the AP program, I did the IB program then when I went to University of Denver I really went to that school for the pre-med program because I wanted to stay somewhat local to be close to family, but I also wanted to branch out and do my own thing, and so, in being the high achiever that I was, I wanted to be a cardiologist.

I have no idea why I wanted to be a cardiologist.

It was the hardest thing I could think of, and so I decided that is what I wanted to do.

But as I was going through the first year of school at Denver, something just felt off. I felt like all of the information was really regurgitated, it wasn't very authentic to what I wanted to do. It felt like a lot of what I had done in high school was just being repeated and the other side of me is: I'm a very highly creative person, so there are very much so two sides of my brain that are competing interests.

I am a very clinical science-based really great at math person, and then.

I am also a very creative person and I like space and quiet and nature, and I think this was the first time in my life where I really felt those two things competing for my time and for my interests.

And so knowing that going into the pre-med field that school didn't feel right for me.

I felt like I needed to make a shift and at that point in time I didn't know about alternative medicine or health. I only knew that you know the route was premed: medical school, go to be a doctor or residency. All of that. So at that point in time I switched my major and I ended up majoring in journalism with a minor in women's studies, and so I did a lot of writing. I loved music throughout high school and college, and so I wanted to be a music writer, I essentially had the coolest job in the world.

Go to concerts, meet the band, write a review, talk about their music and their albums.

And it would get published. I've been published in a number of magazines, online platforms, blogs, newspapers, things like that and, of course, I wanted to work for something like Rolling Stone at some point in time.

Right, but when I got out of college there weren't a whole lot of job opportunities for someone like me, and the only things that were really finding that were available to me in the relative area was Real Estate writing. That's not what I wanted to do, and so I came to terms with the fact that I had to make a living as a young adult and had joined a temp agency to do just any job, to make money, which you'll probably notice as we go through this that I'm always willing to do. I'm not above doing that and anyway she perform, and so I started temping for receptionist or admin or data entry positions to make a living and I was connected with an oil and gas company.

For a temp receptionist position, I believe it was over the holidays at the time.

This must have been 2021 not 2021, 2013. When I accepted the position to permanently stay on as the receptionist for this oil and gas company, I decided that I wanted still honor myself and do something that I love to do, and prior to getting that job, I had started to dip my toe more into the wellness community as a whole and I started going to yoga, the big class that I was really going to was Core Power Sculpt yoga. If you've ever been, it will forever live is one of the hardest workouts you could possibly do and I was going a lot. I'm going to other yoga classes and are really dipping my toes into spirituality and yoga and mindfulness, but also moving my body, and so one of the things that I have come to really believe in is movement as meditation. More than anything, you won't find me being the person who, like, sits down and quiet and meditates, but I will certainly be somebody who moves my body, and that's my meditation. And so when I started my position at the oil and gas company, I decided that I was going to sign up to be a yoga instructor to just do something for me. So I signed up right away and started doing yoga, and one of mentours was a woman named Becca.

I could not do chaturanga to save my life. I couldn't do a push up. I was so weak and thin looking back at pictures of myself. I definitely an excessive amount of body weight for the amount of muscle that I had relatively to my body and I couldn't do push-ups and Becca said why don't she come to this class with me? So I went to class with her and it turned out to be a cross fit gym and I never really heard about crossfit in any fashion.

But I decided to go.

It took about a week and I was hooked. I drank the Kool-aid as they say. I did that for a few years and was working at my corporate job at the time and then I decided that I wanted to be a Crossfit trainer, so I went and got my level one certification to be able to train others and I was essentially teaching yoga and teaching crossfit in the evenings and on weekends, and I really never thought that it would be a career for me, but at the same time I knew the corporate world wasn't for me. It was really exhausting. There were so many mornings driving my 30 to 60 minute commute through Denver traffic that I don't remember because I was so tired and it wasn't because I was staying up late. It was just that the hours for my job were growing increasingly demanding. I would typically get in the office somewhere between six and seven and not leave until six or seven in the evening and then was working out five days a week minimum, working on eating healthy and all of these things, and so I realized that I was starting to feel really unhappy and unfulfilled in my in my job and really loved what I was doing outside of that. I had always really had aspirations of moving more into nutrition, because one of the things that I was seeing as an instructor in my capacity was that a lot of people were really interested in moving their bodies and movement, but they didn't know how to nourish their bodies outside of that one hour a day and knowing that there are another 23 hours in the day that people don't know how to take care of themselves. I really wanted to lean into that and overtime that grew to evolve to what it is now. So around 2013 I went in for a normal annual Pap smear and I got an abnormal result and they wanted to do the follow-up procedure, the name of which I always butcher horribly: Caloscopy I think.

And in waiting for that procedure to come, I was so terrified. You know, your, your doctor tells you nothing, you basically. I get told we're going to do this to see if you have cancer. Then you go to doctor Google and google not much help either. So I was terrified and at this point in time I had really kind of worked my way up into the oil and gas industry, so I started as a temp temporary receptionist.

Then in that same company, I really became close with and worked well with their vice-president and I became his Executive Assistant, and then, in realizing, through doing various tasks for him, that I am not terrible at math, ultimately moved into a position where I was a financial analyst, I moved around oil and gas companies to a different company at point, and I was in this really tough position where I was making a lot of money as a 23-year old. But I didn't feel good about.

And every time somebody wanted to talk to me about career progression, and where do you want to be in five years? I didn't have an answer for them because I couldn't see myself working in this job for another five years. I didn't really enjoy showing up to work every day the same way that I did when I first started, just because something was new.

So when I got this HPV diagnosis and I was waiting for the follow-up procedure, I really started thinking about, you know, the mortality of myself. What if I had cancer?

It shook me enough that I realized that I didn't want to go to work at a job that I hated another day for my life. ESpecially if I only had a set amount of time to spend and we all have a set amount of time, but I think thinking about that as being a shorter period of time Potentially really brought that into perspective for me.

And so ultimately ended up quitting my job the same day that I quit my job. I went and signed it for nutrition program and said I'm jumping all into this. So it was really around this time that I started looking into my health more.

When I was growing up, like most kids, I took a lot of antibiotics every time I was sick, whether it was bacterial or viral, whether it was tested for that, I was given an antibiotic and so you know, when I was really the end of my oil and gas career, I was getting things like UTI's and Strep Throat it like once a month and was getting to the point where I knew, in quitting my job, that I wasn't going to have insurance anymore, being a self-employed person, because I probably couldn't afford it, which is exactly what ended up happening, and so I needed to know other ways to start addressing my health without relying on medications to do so, also knowing that they weren't working long term, taking, you know, taking a antibiotic once a month or every once a quarter, even to support something that kept coming back.

Told me that it wasn't working, and so I started looking for different options.

So there was one day where I felt like I was getting a UTI and I left work. It was a 30 minute drive home, had only felt like some burning when I went to pee and then, by the time I got home, I went to the bathroom again and it was completely bloody. I started taking garlic for her for a few days, essentially, so I was taking garlic, chopping it and putting it into capsules and swallowing it whole. I think I read this somewhere on the internet on how to resolve this, naturally and started taking things like echinacea tea, and Vitamin-C and even though it was probably a really terrible Vitamin-C at that point in time within a number of days it went away, I didn't have to go take and then I had another thing happened shortly thereafter, where I got Step Throat and I had the white polyps on my throat in my tonsils and didn't want it to move into my ears to have an ear infection, because I knew how painful that had been from historical experience, but I also know I didn't want to take an antibiotic if I didn't have to, and so I started doing garlic and I got rid of Strep Throat.

And it was one of the first stepping stones for me to realize that the allopathic model of medicine wasn't serving me the way that I would hope it would, and it also helped me understand that I could do a lot of these things myself as long as I knew how to do them and it was still safe. It wasn't dangerous for me. I wasn't putting myself in any danger by doing these things, and so when I quit my job I didn't have insurance. It was so expensive and I was already in a position where I was living off of a very small amount of savings, selling anything in my home that I didn't need in order to pay my bills.

Because I didn't have things figured out yet and the only reason that I was remotely interested in maintaining insurance or working with a medical doctor is because I needed it for birth control. I had sort of taken birth control when I was 18 years old and I ended up taking it for over 10 years. I took it until I was married, which I'm sure we will talk about a whole lot more in another episode, because it's a long story in terms of how to get off birth control safely and why I waited.

But I found other ways to get access to those things without insurance, and I'm not necessarily advising that, but in a lot of ways it also helped me realize that I didn't need the conventional medicine model to help me navigate health and to overcome things that most of us come in contact with on a regular basis.

You know, being 23 years old and getting a cold every so often or Strep Throat, or a UTI here or there was not the like was not the. The other thing that I want to mention to with this is when, to this point, quitting my job, taking my health into my own hands, not having insurance and starting my own business.

I didn't have a whole lot of support. I can probably count on one finger how many people are in my life supported me during that time because it was scary. Like I said, I was making a lot of money. I literally threw it all away in this career that could have set me up for life. To pursue my own happiness and pursue being a how was really hard for a lot of years. We're kind of talk about what it all looked like, but I don't want to paint it as rainbows and butterflies. It was really hard.

Primarily from a financial perspective, but also then translates into an emotional perspective, and I've worked really hard to make things where they are now and done a lot of self learning in that time as well.

So when I quit my job, I signed up for IIN, which is the Institute of Integrated Nutrition, and they teach health coaching. I literally, at that time, handed my boss my resignation letter and then walked out to my car and signed up for class, called them, gave them my credit card information ready to go so that I could start class as soon as possible, and I dove right in. Shortly after that. I also signed up for Precision Nutrition they treat, teach essentially nutrition coaching more like macros meal balancing, things like that and, as I have mentioned around that time also. I also had my Level One for crossfit training, but also became a certified personal trainer, so I spent a lot of time in money investing in myself and investing in making myself a well-rounded health provider. At that point in time, really focused around fitness and somewhat, unfortunately, fitness was one of the only places where I was able to find steady work and steady income, and so I actually coached crossfit for six years, six or seven years Full-Time at a number of gyms in Colorado, when I quit my job I immediately had reached out to gym that I had followed for a long time and really wanted to attend and asked if they were looking for coaches, got hired to come coach there and that was the beginning of it. I was there for a number of years before I moved to another another gym and I've worked in a number of facilities over the years. Just based on coaching hours available, my availability and different things, that kind of came up. Coaching paid the bills essentially, but at the same time I also started Always Growing Nutrition I built my own website created all of my services, packages, and that was really what I was passionate about, was nutrition. I knew that people needed to be focusing on it, but it was so hard to get people to do it especially, or even in the fitness industry, because they were spending a lot of money. Especially at that point in time on memberships for fitness and going to the gym, and things like that. So really leaned into being crossed coach. I really enjoyed working with people, many of the clients that I worked with initially and even still to this day work with are people whom I have coached crass.

Which is so so amazing to see that transition overtime, and I worked my way up to being a-level three crossfit trainer and at that point in time there were about 600 people in the world who held that level of certification. So it was a pretty big deal and I really wanted to teach for Crossfit headquarters.

And there were a lot of people who were teaching for them at that point in time that were really encouraging me to pursue it because of my talents and drive and just having a natural gift for talking and presenting and teaching people how to move their bodies. But I knew that I really wanted to focus on nutrition and at that point I started proposing to gyms that I create nutrition programs for them, and so I led a number of nutrition programs at various gyms across the state, not only for gyms where I was working, but also teaching other gyms how to create nutrition programs for other facilities as well, where we were focusing on things like macros, food quality, meal, balancing, doing like whole 30, paleo, or, you name it really. Your basic nutrition information to help people move the needle away from the standard American diet was what we were doing.

And so, I was really enjoying what I was doing. I was building a really profitable and successful nutrition practice, but I was still coaching at that point in time and I was still, I would say, full-time coaching and doing, Always Growing on the side, and I had always considered going to the Nutritional Therapy Association. It was one of the first programs that I had looked at back when I had signed up for IIN on day one. But I never pursued it because I just wanted to be able to jump right into the field, and I wish I could have done it sooner.

So in 2019, I decided to sign up for the NTA. I was still really making ends meet barely, and I wasn't really able to pay for the training for the NTA and so my sweet sweet husband and I were together at that point in time and I really told him what it meant to me. That I really wanted to do it and he helped me finance it, which was incredibly humbling and also makes me really grateful, especially because of where things have come, since making that leap.

And so I started going to school there, and I remember when we would have our in person classes, I was in class, learning, with other practitioners, but at the same time I was also managing a thriving practice, as it was. Not terribly successful but very busy. I would be sending people contracts and updates and checking in with them. Whereas I was sitting next to a lot of people in class who had never worked with anybody yet at that point in time too, because of the type of practitioner that I was and was doing well for that type of practitioner, I started helping other people too, as far as practitioners go. So i was mentioning them, other health coaches and nutrition coaches, on how to build out their services, how to provide challenges to gyms, how to build a program in a gym facility as well, and realized that I really love helping from that perspective as well at that point in time.

So, while I was going through NTA I met Anna McKelvey, but her name wasn't McKelvey back then and she'll come back into the picture later. Many of you, if you are clients, work with her now, but I met her at that point in time, and we've worked together in some capacity since then.

So when I was going through that program, I realized that I wanted to have an office space. I wanted to have a brick-and-mortar space where I could see clients on a regular basis but at that point in time we had moved from Denver and were living in Colorado Springs, which is about an hour south, and I was certainly in no position to be spending money on a monthly lease for an office, but I decided to jump right in and, at the same time that I made this jump, I decided that it was time for me to jump in with both feet with my nutrition practice and quit coaching at the same time, so my office lease was set up to be maxed out at $1,000 per month. I had no idea how I was going to pay it, but I somehow did. I got in there on month one and worked really hard to do outreach and do free calls, which we still have in practice, to help people, give them some advice, make some suggestions and then talk to them about how we could work with them more long term, and at this point it was just me working and so I was traveling up to Denver, where my office was, because that's where most of my client base was at that time, from Colorado Springs for an hour, and I was seeing clients somewhere from 9 am to 7 pm three days a week, with an hour drive each way, and I was doing that two or three days a week, and then on the back-end of things, doing the backend business work. I was also working from home two or three days a week.

So I was very, very busy around the same time when I had graduated from the NTA I connected with one of my instructors, Thomas Gillford, he's still an instructor for the NTA.

And we started an organization called the Holistic Health Collective.

Where we mentored NTA grads on both clinical practice skills as well as business practice, and that's really where I started hone teaching best practices as far as business goes.

And being able to answer people's questions, how I've been able to set up my business and share the information that is often really missed in a lot of practitioner education courses.

So that was also happening on the side, and in the summer of 2020 I found out that I was pregnant with Jasper and it shook my whole world, like I think it does for a lot of women, that it was a little bit unexpected in terms of timing and my career was starting to ramp up, and it felt really scary in terms of how am I going to be the mother that I would like to be at the same time, really pursue these passions that I have worked years to make happen, and it's finally starting to have that snowball effect that everyone looks for, and we really had to look into how was I going to do something like even just take a maternity leave?

As a Business owner: how was I going to be a stay-at-home mom but also be fulfilled in this career, because I didn't want to give up my career, and so this is when I started really thinking about shifting the structure of Always Growing Nutrition to be more than just about me and me working with clients. So this is when I really started thinking about building a team of practitioners outside of me.

So that I could continue to help clients, I could still be involved.

I didn't need to be the only person client facing in a one on one capacity.

Then, during this time as well, while I was pregnant, I started going through Restorative Wellness Solutions, so I went through your level one program, which is now called their Art and Science of Gastrointestinal Healing. When I finished that program I knew I was pregnant. I was probably about six months pregnant and I remember my instructor, who I'm still in friends with, she had gone to mentioned to me: maybe don't do the next level yet. Since you are pregnant, it's pretty intense and, like the crazy lady, I am signed up anyway to do the next level, which is Optimizing Hormones, and I did most of that course work while I was pregnant, especially late in pregnancy, and took final with a one month-old baby on me the entire time as well. So I went to that program and it has completely catapulted how I function as a practitioner.

That program for those who don't know, really teaches us how to utilize, interpret and then create protocols based on functional testing. So things like stool testing, hormone testing, blood chemistry, mold toxicity, everything under the sun, literally any, any test you can think of, is basically what Restorative Wellness teaches.

And so I have since gone through all four of their levels, so I'm now a Master Restorative Wellness practitioner and since then I've also started teaching for Restorative Wellness, so currently I teach GI Healing, Optimizing Hormones and Blood Chemistry, and I really love their organization. They do a phenomenal job of teaching practitioners real skills to actually get clients results, and it's one of the programs that I recommend most for people who are interested in getting into this field.

So during that time of becoming an instructor, have really realized that while I love working with clients I also love the mentoring side of things. I love mentoring other people, and so one of the tings that I have been building towards is building a team of highly skilled practitioners to work alongside myself, as well as open up the space for me to enter other practitioners, because I believe that the more practitioners there are in the world, the better the world is going to be. I know a lot of practitioners really function within the space of scarcity, where there's not enough clients and the market is over saturated, and I don't feel that way.

I feel like there are so many people that need help, and the more people there are available, the more people we can help as as a community.

And so I have gone through a number of iterations in terms of hiring team members, some people have stayed around for a year or two years and then another opportunity or a better fit has become available. I have practitioners who have been with me for 2-3 years now as well, and it's now myself and a team of seven other women, and we essentially fall into two categories. We have our team who works primarily with adults; we have practitioners who work with primarily women, others that work with both men and women, and then we have our pediatric team as well as our parianatal team, and this group of women works with children.

Resolving health issues like constipation and diarrhea, eczema, focusing on more neurological health concerns like ADD, ADHD, Autism. So supporting women through pregnancy in the postpartum period, and being really respectful of the mother, child diad at the same time as well.

I can honestly say that, the Women on our team are some of the most brilliant in the industry. I've been very selective about who is included on our team, because clients feel a lot more like friends and sisters to me than they do people who are paying me money, and I want to make sure that they are in the best hands possible, and so part of what I do with our clients is I can't select their practitioner for them based on their personality, talking to them based on what their needs, are, their health concerns, to make sure that when they meet their practitioner through me it still feels like they're just talking to a friend or they're just talking to their sister on the phone every couple of weeks and they just happen to be talking about health issues. We just happen to be guiding them through their journey.

And it's something that I don't take lightly. So when I tell you guys that they are amazing, I truly truly mean it.

Many of them I have met in real life. Some of them I have met through teaching at Restorative Wellness, their co instructors there. Others are people whom I have met through Instagram, who started as followers and applied to work with us when the time came, and I'm so grateful for the space that they hold for our clients and then also allowing me to take a step back from my role as a practitioner, which is part of why I started this podcast. So while we as a team love working with clients and I love working with clients. I've made a big effort in the past year to remove myself from seeing clients in a one on one capacity and instead handing them over to my team to do the majority of one work now, I'm still heavily involved in the clinical side of our practice. I Screen all of our clients when you sign up to apply to work with us and you do an intro call. It's always with me, I oversee all of our client protocols when we're troubleshooting. We're doing this all as a team. We do weekly team meetings where we're just client protocols and troubleshooting and making sure that we're all on the same page. And the best part of this, from my perspective, is that not only are clients getting a team, but people who are working on their health case. So, rather than getting just me and my limited years of experience. You're also getting my entire teams experience and they have different backgrounds to bring to the table and different perspectives, which makes it a very unique experience. And you get so many different perspectives to help insure that we are giving you the best care possible. But as a practitioner, this is also A really great way to make community and not feel so alone this journey and second guess what you are doing.

Because, what you might not realize for those of us who are practitioners is that we don't know everything and we second guess ourselves. And when things go wrong, it's a really lonely journey. Its sometimes a heavy burden to carry, holding space for people, and so having a team of people to work alongside, has been truly game-changing in terms of not only expanding our reached to help more people, but also, in my health and happiness as a practitioner, to make this something that I can do long term.

And so one of the things that we have been seeing is that there is a need for me to fill a role outside of one on one clinical work, and so, while I want to use my experts to help as many people as possible, I know that by filling my calendar back to back on the days when I'm available with clients who only allows me to see one person at a time is really limiting. It means that I can. I can really do good work with those people and the one on one setting, but I can't help more people and I know that I have a limited number of time on this earth to help people, and I want to help as many people as possible, and so I've switched gears to move away from one on one model, to be able to teach other practitioners, teach bigger populations of people at the same time and make sure that there are as many people as possibl;e benefiting from what I have to offer. So that happens in a number of ways. I want to be able to serve this community as best possible. I want to serve and teach the next generation of practitioners. I want to mentor other people. I want to make sure there are many people providing this level of care that we provide and the results that we give clients as possible, and so some of that here, That is one of the things that I am working towards.

I also have worked really hard and the team has worked really hard to help me keep our rates as low as possible, but also pay the practitioners what they are worth for the sincere services they provide, while we are some of the most affordable practitioners in the space, you know, I know there's a lot of people who charge more on a monthly basis than we do. Close to double what we charge, if not more. We are still outside the budget for most people who need and deserve our help. And so one of my goals with this podcast is to create a free resource for anyone who wants to learn more. Do a deep dive into topics and get some education.

Help themselves walk-through this journey.

One of the things that we all always tell clients, even when we're working, you in a one on one setting is: we're not here to heal you, we're not here to fix you, we're not here fix this issue for you. You're going to do that, you're going to do all, but we're just here to guide you, and the same thing is going to happen with this podcast. I Know that there will always be time. I'm going to recommend testing and I'm going to recommend working with a practitioner to make sure that you are safe in this process, especially if you're thinking about doing detox protocols. But I also want to give you as much information on a wide range of topics as possible at no cost to you so that you can take this into your own hands .

Because I believe in a healthier tomorrow, not only for you but for generations to come.

We believe in healthy women. Healthy women make healthy families, healthy families, Healthy families make healthy children.

I am not someone who believes that information should be withheld. I want this podcast to help you take a peep behind the curtain. Information should be free and we have been a big proponent in teaching you the Nitty Gritty details to navigate your health and make appropriate changes for yourself.

I think in the holistic space there's kind of this concept of keeping when it comes to information. You know one of the one of the most popular pieces of business advice that not only I've heard in talking to mentees for business coaching, that I have heard people say: don't give people too much information, leave them wanting more, and I just don't agree with that. I want to tell you everything, because what I know is what you should know, and there's no reason for me to withhold information so long as you can put things in the place safely. The next reason, really brought this podcast to life, and one of my intentions is to educate through and through. I am an educator.

And for me, holistic health means the whole body, body, mind and spirit, and we want to help you not only understand but navigate each of these things, and so we're going to be talking about A lot of different areas that might be outside of nutrition might also be something that you need to hear. So, for instance Nervous system: this regulation is a huge topic that we talk about with clients, crucial to so much of what we do with our health, and not enough people are talking about it, so we're going to, we're going to dive into that and and why it means so much and how to do those things in your life. But in the process we're also going to be bringing on some of the best of the business. Some of those people are going to be my team members because they have a wide range perspective and they are brilliant in different areas that I want to give them the opportunity to teach you things in their own way, but I also want to bring people on in a wide range of modalities to help you understand everything, and put together health from a full perspective as well, so that you have as many resources and tools as possible to do this, and then one of my other intentions is to do what I'm currently calling case studies, but we might call this something else at some point in time. I have heard you loud and clear for those of you who are on Instagram and have been seeing us share case studies, test results that come up and symptoms that people are experiencing, kind of what we're doing and then the results that they're getting and so I'm going to, in some episodes, do some deep dives on those case studies, talk about what we're saying, what test results showed, and I'll of course, of course, be keeping all of their private information, you know private and not sharing that, but that way, if there's something that comes up that with you or somebody in your life, you can share that with them, and it might give them some ideas on how they can better navigate those issues as well.

The other thing I just want to share with our team: we are not functional doctors. We are never diagnosing anybody with anything. We're really here to teach you a functional approach to the way your body works, so that you can make changes in your lifestyle to support that.

We are a big proponent of the test don't guess ideology. So a lot of functional testing, blood chemistry, hormone panels, micro toxin testing and we are typically looking at things from a functional perspective rather than a conventional perspective. So the most common way that comes up is with something like blood chemistry. When we're looking at blood chemistry, which we will talk about a lot more in one of those case studies, is that we're looking at it from a functional perspective and functional ranges. These ranges are a lot more narrow than conventional ranges because conventional ranges take into account about 95% of cases and when you fall outside of those ranges it's used to diagnose for disease. We're not doing that. So we're actually looking at where things should be optimally and when things fall outside of those ranges, tells us more about the systems in the body that might be struggling to function optimally.

We are also a very big proponent of you are way more than your test results. This is something I tell every single client we want to talk about symptoms, and what you're feeling in your body on a day to day basis and your health history and a timeline of events with your health and how those correlate with what you see on functional testing, we're very big proponents of root cause health, so I don't we don't do band-aids we will never give you a band-aid solution if we talk about something to give you symptom relief, it is intended to be a short-term solution to give you some relief so that you can do the deeper work. But we believe in very personalized approaches for everybody, which means that you're not going to get a whole lot of one size fits all dogma here on This is good and this is bad, but it does mean that we're going to dive into what bio individually might make sense for you, so that you can determine that yourself, but also what's actually driving the symptoms that you're experiencing or your health concerns. What's the root cause of that? Because sometimes it's what you might think and sometimes it's not.

And so we want to make sure that you know how to navigate that as best as possible.

And lastly, as we dive into this, I want you to remember that my journey is not your own. Nobody else's journey is your own. Everybody is unique, so some journeys are fast, some journeys are slow, and to honor that within yourself and your body's own journey and your own your own spiritual, mental journey in this as well. So I hope this gives you some perspective on me, where I've come from, how we got to this point. Where Always Growing Nutrition is what itis, and I can't wait to dive into some more topics with you in-depth.

We're going to get into some of my favorite stories here very soon and I can't wait for you to meet all of the wonderful guests that I have in mind for you, see you soon.

Thanks for joining us today. If you're looking for help navigating digestive troubles, hormonal imbalances, reversing infertility, putting autoimmune conditions into remission or support navigating mold toxicity, we'd love to offer you a complimentary consultation to see how our team of practitioners can help. While we offer a wide range of functional tests, we know that you and your story are way more than a set of test results and we want to help you take back your health.

You can find more information about our team, our process, program pricing and testimonials and apply to work with us in the show notes. See you next time.