Your Wellness

Hormonal balance is key here.

Many of us struggle with PCOS, endometriosis, PMS, perimenopausal symptoms, fibroids, irregular periods, painful periods, or lack of periods altogether! How can our beautiful brain, ovaries and uterus create this much havoc? Easily! Our hormones weave a very delicate and intricate web through our bodies, and just one tweak to the web (e.g. the Pill, weight gain or loss, illness, hormone excess or relative deficiency, sluggish liver, insulin resistance, uterine (mis)alignment, stress), can throw the whole thing out.

While hormonal balance is integral, it doesn’t always feel achievable! But it is. Really.

Kids are meant to get sick. Occasionally. It’s part of their job as they develop strong and resilient immune systems. But the occasional acute infection should not turn into weekly or monthly infections. Any battle with recurrent colds, flu, ear infections or gastro can be won. And chronic long term problems like asthma, eczema, attention difficulties, poor sleep or digestive issues can also be improved and managed.I love working with kids (and their mama’s!). Dietary and lifestyle changes are often required here. Child-specific (in dose and taste!) herbs or supplements may be prescribed.

We all experience some degree of stress. But for some of us, striving to feel balanced and calm is a bit like walking a high-wire tightrope – experiencing dizzying high’s and also moments of desperately hoping there’s a safety net somewhere below.Naturopathy can’t take the stress away, but it can support your body through the stress. A variety of herbs and nutrients can soothe your nervous system, to calm the mind and body, and start to restore balance. Regular stress management strategies, like exercise and meditation are important too, for longterm mental wellbeing. And did you know that 90% of our serotonin (the ‘Happy’ neurotransmitter) is actually in our gut. Proper diet and digestive function go a long way to supporting our stress levels too.

Well, I guess I do go on and on to my patients about their digestion. A seemingly never-ending list of questions about cravings, food, reflux, burping, bloating, wind and…there’s no getting around it…poo!Your digestion is the foundation of everything. The way you eat, digest, absorb and assimilate your nutrients, really can impact on each of your body systems. How can you feel energetic when your body isn’t absorbing iron? Or if you are constipated? How can we make healthy DNA for all our cells, or build muscle tissue, or make our happy neurotransmitters, if we aren’t digesting protein in our stomach? And it’s pretty hard to have harmonious hormones with a sluggish liver.

And more than that, digestive dysfunction feels just awful. It feels even worse to constantly rely on ant-acids or laxatives.

Herbs, supplements and probiotics can kickstart and normalise digestive function. Good eating habits will help maintain it.

Here’s the thing, some exposure to pesticides, heavy metals and industrial chemicals is unavoidable. Most of us experience multiple, low dose exposures, cumulatively. For example, a phthalate-laden skin cream or nail polish, triclosan soaked dishwash liquid, pesticides on the smoothie strawberries, BPA in the sandwich wrap, passive smoke at the bus stop, flame retardant on your new clothes, mercury-containing-tuna in your nori roll…all before lunch!‘No one is free of toxins. And that’s painful to know. But it’s remarkable what we can do, and change. It’s a forward-looking adventure.’ Dr Martha Herbert, The Autism Revolution: Whole Body Strategies for Making Life All It Can Be

I love a forward-looking adventure!

Consider a detox once or twice a year – say after Winter and after Christmas/New Year. After any period of over-indulgence. Before conception.

If you are experiencing sluggish digestion, fatigue, brain fog, hormonal imbalance, chemical sensitivity, fertility issues, skin problems, or poor immunity – you might benefit from a detox.

An individualised detoxification strategy can be put in place for you. Depending on how you present, this might be a two, four or six week project. This will involve guidance on your daily exposures to chemicals (and how to avoid them!), appropriate food suggestions, and nutrients and herbs to support the whole process.

How would it be to wake up feeling refreshed? Pretty fantastic. But for various reasons, a lot of us are tired. Bone tired.Our lifestyle has a big impact on energy production (or lack of). Overwork, poor sleeping habits, poor diet, high stress levels. Any of these can drain our energy resources.

Underlying physiological issues can also manifest as fatigue, for example a thyroid disorder, anaemia, blood sugar irregularities or depression.

Trying to understand your fatigue pattern can help get to the bottom of why you’re feeling tired, and how to turn that around. Working on sleep, exercise and diet, and utilising supportive herbal or nutritional therapies, can make a magical change to how you’re feeling.

For some of us, it just feels like one thing after another…cold, chest infection, cold, sinus infection, thrush, cold sore, UTI, gastro, cold (for the third time in 3 months…)The body can get rundown. Sometimes it’s never given the full opportunity to recover, and so recurrent infections start to set in. And then so too do the cold and flu tablets, the antibiotics, the thrush cream. Ahhhh!

You need to get better. Full stop. Herbal medicine, good food, sleep, and strain-specific probiotics can remind your immune system who the good-guys are (you), and who the bad-guys are (bacteria, virus, fungus).