On more than one occasion I had so much stomach pain I had to lay down on the floor under my desk at work. Terrible pain in my gut. Maybe I was just backed up. Maybe I ate something bad. But it happened enough that I knew if I laid down for fifteen or twenty minutes it would subside or disappear completely.
My body was literally screaming to me. And my response? “This too shall pass.” (No pun intended.) I normalized feeling terrible. Every time I turned around there seemed to be a new something happening. Acid reflux. Nausea after I ate fried food. Sugar cravings. I was not sick enough, or regularly enough, to stay home, but I also was not healthy enough to actually feel good, so I settled somewhere in the middle and started calling it normal.
I would love to be able to say I was the exception. The anomaly. But I do not think that is true. Although not everyone feels this way all day or even every day, I think more people than not know exactly what I am talking about. Most people I know are functioning at a pretty high level, but I am pretty sure they are not actually well either.
I do not say this from a place of judgment. I say it because I lived there for years.
Each time there was a flare up, a new symptom, or in my case another trip to the emergency room, I got more used to the idea that this was just going to be the new normal for me. Aim for better health. Eat better. Get more exercise. Take the right supplements. And wait.
Wait for the shoe to drop. Wait for the next crisis. And it inevitably came. At the same time, I never questioned what was becoming my new normal and always had a new and different reason to explain why it was happening. Diverticulitis. Stress. Being overweight. Being a smoker. Not drinking enough water.
I justified it. I ignored the messages my body was screaming to me and called them something else. Then I just kept moving.
That may be the strangest part of all of this. The body can adapt to almost anything, including dysfunction, and human beings are remarkably good at adjusting to conditions that are slowly wearing them down.
We adjust around symptoms instead of addressing them. We explain them away and tell ourselves we are getting older or that everyone feels this way. We joke about needing coffee to survive and wine to relax, as though feeling depleted all the time is simply part of being an adult. Eventually the exhaustion and bloating become so familiar that they fade into the background, not because they disappeared, but because we stopped expecting to feel any different.
At some point, many of us stopped expecting to feel good at all and became grateful for the stretches of time that we did. And why? Because we accepted the lie that there was nothing we could do about it.
We have to work. We have to eat. We have families, responsibilities, bills, stress, obligations, and schedules that rarely slow down. And honestly, I think many people are exhausted from hearing over and over again that modern life is destroying their health while feeling completely overwhelmed by the idea of changing it. So we do nothing. And it drones on.
It was only after a second hospitalization that I finally said enough is enough. Another enormous medical bill. Another discharge with no real game plan. Another moment where I realized I could not keep pretending this rotation of life and hospitals and doctors and emergency rooms was normal. That is when I really dug in. For me, but also for you.
And what I found through hours and hours of research was that it was not just my gut screaming. It was my family, my neighbors, my friends, my coworkers. Everywhere I looked people were exhausted, inflamed, bloated, anxious, depleted, foggy, uncomfortable, and trying to function through it.
That is what led me to the microbiome, fermentation, and the relationship between gut health and the body’s ability to recover.
Any real wellness plan has to include the gut, which I still think many people underestimate. So much of the body traces back to the condition of the gut itself. Energy. Mood. Digestion. Inflammation. Cravings. Skin. Immunity. Mental clarity. When the gut is under strain long enough, eventually the rest of the body feels it too.
I stopped looking at health as punishment, restriction, or endless self optimization and started looking at it more simply. The body responds to the conditions we create for it over time. That search is ultimately what led to Original Biome.
Do not misunderstand. I do not believe for a second that one simple product solves everything, because it does not. But I do believe the body responds to support, and I believe many of us have spent years asking our bodies to compensate for lifestyles that slowly wear them down. I believe all day long and twice on Sunday that we can move our “normal” needle back toward center on the health scale. I have a fresh baseline. And now, I can address changes or symptoms or conditions because I know I reset my foundation.
For me, my own product, Original Biome, became part of rebuilding that foundation instead of waiting for the next crisis and pretending it came out of nowhere.
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