avoided all added sugars. For the next three years I didn't have a single dessert that wasn't fruit or even eat sauce with added sugar.

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At another point in high school I gathered up some of the money from my part time job teaching ski and snowboard lessons to buy a small device from my local health food store to attach to my little flip-cellphone that supposedly blocked some of the harmful radiation. I knew almost nothing about electromagnetic frequencies, my purchase was completely unprompted, and some of my friends poked fun at me for believing there could be anything wrong with cellphone signals, but something about it resonated with me. 

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I can see now that I've always believed health is very important, that our bodies are by nature created very well, and that the keys to health are found in what's natural, not what's fake- even if I couldn't define those beliefs and was somewhat misguided putting them into practice.  

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I also had an interest in someday working in the medical field but never found something that interested me enough to pursue. For a while I wanted to be a dentist, then an orthodontist, then a physical therapist, but none seemed like the right fit when it came to making plans after high school. However, the military interested me and seemed like a smart choice for college so I accepted an appointment to the US Air Force Academy in Colorado for college. 

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My commitment to eating a no-sugar diet was thrown off as soon as soon as I arrived at the Academy for Basic Training since we had very little choice of what to eat, but I started growing a lot in my faith at this time.

 

Not long before, during my senior year of high school, I had made a commitment to follow Christ at a small Bible study led by one of my PE teachers. For some reason I had started to feel a leading to attend church and read the Bible even though I hadn't much before. So I agreed to go to this Bible study with a friend. At that study one night I suddenly had a very clear understanding that God is calling us to devote our entire selves to Him, not just pick and choose how much of our lives to give to church, and I decided I wanted to do that. Shortly afterwards, at another Bible study, I learned for the first time that the reason Christ voluntarily died on the cross was to reconcile us to God and allow us to be with Him in heaven. 

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So at the Air Force Academy I quickly got involved in some Bible studies and found a mentor which were big parts of my early spiritual growth. At this time I also started getting exposed to some ideas which would further shape the underlying beliefs I already had about health.

 

My parents called and told me one day that they had decided to follow a new "paleo" diet, which basically meant no grains, and they wanted me to try it too. My first reaction was to think How can you eat no grains? People need grains! But I quickly recognized the counter-intuitive wisdom in it and was delighted to realize that not only had that food pyramid been partly wrong- it had been all wrong! I was currently running on the Air Force Academy's track and cross-country team but I found that avoiding grains, even while training and competing, only made me feel better and eliminated some  asthma-like symptoms I had developed when I came to Colorado. 

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Later than year my parents told me something even crazier. My dad who is still an active runner had stopped wearing real running shoes in favor of a new thing called minimalist running shoes. Again my first thought was How can you run without cushioning and support for your feet? Won't you get injured like crazy? This is all I've ever been taught! But this was quickly replaced realizing that our body's innate ability to handle shock and movement made much more sense. God created our bodies well and intentionally, so why shouldn't we have built in mechanisms that are better than anything we can recreate in a shoe?

 

In fact, my dad who had been running less and less for years because of knee problems which most would have blamed on old age, was now pain free and running more than he had in years. To this day, at over age 60, he'll still challenge my family to 18+ mile long runs. On the other hand, I had spent my whole running-life up to this point almost constantly injured. I suffered painful knees throughout middle school and spent part of every single high school track and cross-country season out for injuries. I thought this was an inevitable part of the game, but as soon as I got rid of my conventional running shoes in favor of going as close to barefoot as possible, my injuries disappeared. Almost a decade later I haven't had a single injury related to my (lack of) running shoes. In that time I've transitioned to running marathons and at one point, when good minimalist running shoes were still hard to find, I ran a 50-mile ultra-marathon wearing water shoes I bought at Wal Mart. No injuries. 

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At the Academy I still oscillated between what I wanted to do long-term. I started off as a computer science major, then switched to behavioral science- one of the Air Force Academy's only pre-med tracks- with a plan to pursue Physical Therapy, but that also didn't end up seeming like the right fit and I switched back to a technical major. I graduated with a degree in Operations Research, also known as Industrial Engineering, which I also received my master's degree in shortly afterwards.  

 

I was also under a lot of stress at the Academy to the point where it took me hours to fall asleep every night and then the chronic sleep deprivation compounded the stress. I didn't recognize the role this would play in my health until after I graduated when I started to deal with the effects of it. But this was also the experience that would drive me to realize my passion for natural and alternative health. Like many advocates in this field, I developed this passion from my own healing experience. 

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After I graduated college I started working as an Operations Research Analyst for the Air Force. Only a few months into my new job I suddenly started getting tired all the time and nauseous after eating anything; I had stomach pain from eating, often got lightheaded and dizzy, my heart raced frequently and I was short of breath. 

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However, unlike a lot of people who deal with chronic conditions, I'm very blessed that mine never got to the point where they were very serious. I this to the great help and advice I got from my family and to the intuition I had that God had created my body well and it had the ability to heal itself. 

 

So instead of just taking Aspirin and Tums to cover up the symptoms while assuming that things just go wrong in our bodies, I started seeking help from the conventional practitioners I had access to through the military medical system.

 

But it quickly became clear to me that the treatments they recommended were also only band-aids. I had started doing some of my own research and knew my symptoms sounded like Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), adrenal fatigue, hypoglycemia, and hypothyroidism. But the doctors offered me anti-depressants when I had no symptoms of depression because my symptoms sounded similar to those of anxiety, told me I might just have to carry sugar pills in my purse for cases of low blood sugar, laughed at me when I asked about "adrenal fatigue", and told me I couldn't have IBS because my symptoms didn't match the exact textbook definition, so there was nothing they could do. I couldn't believe that when it came to chronic conditions, these doctors didn't seem interested in identifying or treating any root causes and only seemed to operate by their somewhat arbitrarily named descriptions of symptoms. 

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So I took my healing into my own hands and started the extensive research that has now become my passion and the impetus for this blog. 

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There's a lot of confusing, contradictory, and changing information available about health and I spent several month and thousands of dollars wading through this information and trying things that didn't work. I was so desperate for answers that I cried when I first read a description of hypothyroidism that seemed to perfectly fit my symptoms. But this didn't get me very far because it still wasn't the real root cause. My thyroid was not simply defective. Making sense of all the recommendations for treating hypothyroidism required me to figure out what was causing the under-active thyroid. 

 

As I researched and tested I found that the answers I was led to over and over again followed several similar truths: that the human body is rarely defective, it can heal, everything in the body is connected, the closer to how God created something (the more natural it is) the better it is for our health, and we must seek long-term rather than short term solutions. 

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Being able to identify these truths and put into words what had always made intuitive sense to me made it much quicker for me to find useful information. Eventually I was able to identify real root causes and address them with a temporary autoimmune-paleo diet, natural supplements, and intentional rest.

 

As I researched more I found the ketogenic diet and quickly became convinced that it was the single most effective thing I had come across for helping people recover from chronic conditions of all kinds. As I dove into the world of keto, I then found the carnivore way of eating and saw that it seemed to take all the benefits of keto to another level. Now, I enjoy great energy and none of my previous symptoms by following a keto-carnivore way of eating and overall health focused lifestyle. Additionally, this way of eating reversed an autoimmune low blood platelet condition that I've always tested positive for. ​​

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Today I'm stationed with the Air Force in Arizona, training for marathons, and always learning more about natural and alternative health. I read blogs and books, listen to podcasts and webinars, research constantly, and am studying to become a certified Nutritional Therapy Practitioner. 

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