What It’s Actually Like to Work With Me: Inside Minerals & Microbes

Most people come to my work, Minerals & Microbes, when they’ve reached some kind of impasse.

For some people, that comes after years of trying to figure out their health. They’ve changed their diet, run blood work and functional labs, tried different supplements and protocols, and worked with several kinds of practitioners.

For others, it hasn’t necessarily been years. They’ve simply reached the point where they can tell that what they’ve tried so far isn’t getting them where they want to go, or they haven’t found the right kind of support for what they’re dealing with.

And that doesn’t mean nothing has helped.

A dietary change may have improved digestion. A supplement may have made a noticeable difference in energy or sleep. A practitioner may have helped them understand something about their body that they didn’t know before. Sometimes people have made significant progress in one area while still struggling in others.

They may still be dealing with chronic health issues that don’t resolve cleanly, or find that the problems keep shifting. One symptom improves while another becomes more noticeable. A lab result gets targeted, but the way they actually feel doesn’t change very much. They pursue a suspected root cause or finally get a diagnosis, only to discover that having a name for one piece of the problem doesn’t necessarily tell them what to do with everything else.

A lot of the work they’ve done has been organized around one symptom, one lab marker, one diagnosis, or one suspected cause at a time.

So they may have accumulated a tremendous amount of information without ever getting a clear sense of how the pieces fit together, what matters most right now, or what would actually help them make more meaningful progress.

And often, the approaches themselves haven’t been particularly realistic to sustain. Complicated supplement schedules, restrictive diets, repeated protocols, expensive rounds of testing, or plans that require so much attention that taking care of their health starts to feel like another full-time job.

If you’re here, you can probably relate to some version of this.

I know this because I’ve watched people come into my work after cycling through many of the same loops the functional health world keeps people stuck in.

Some show up with 15+ bottles of supplements, taken with religious precision, hoping that if they just get the stack right, their body will finally organize.

Others arrive with a supplement graveyard in their cabinets and a nervous system that flinches at the thought of adding one more thing. They’ve been burned by the industry, overwhelmed by conflicting advice, and exhausted by how much effort it’s taken just to feel a little better.

Most people have been caught somewhere in between.

From there, the pattern often looks familiar.

People have tried protocols aimed at very specific problems: antimicrobials, parasite protocols, mold binders, detoxes, gut cleanses, nervous system programs, hormone support. Some of those approaches may have been appropriate. Some may even have helped.

The problem is that they’re often done one after another, each focused on the issue that seems most urgent at the time. When something new shows up, another intervention gets added without much opportunity to step back and ask how the pieces might be related, what the body is actually tolerating, or whether the overall approach is creating more stability.

Testing can become another version of the same thing.

Blood work. Hormone panels. Organic acids. Stool testing. Food sensitivity testing. Sometimes the information is genuinely useful. But it’s also easy to end up with a growing collection of abnormal markers and no clearer understanding of which ones actually matter most, how they relate to the way you feel, or what deserves attention first.

There’s always another test that could be run, another imbalance that could be targeted, another possible explanation to investigate.

Food often gets pulled into this too.

A lot of people arrive after cycling through different ways of eating: gluten-free, dairy-free, grain-free, low FODMAP, autoimmune protocols, carnivore, vegan, “clean,” anti-inflammatory.

Sometimes removing a food is absolutely useful. If something is making you feel terrible right now, I’m not interested in forcing you to eat it in the name of dietary diversity.

But I also don’t assume that “I don’t tolerate this well right now” automatically means “this food can never work for me again.”

That distinction matters.

Over time, temporary restriction can quietly become a smaller and smaller diet. Meals start requiring more calculation. Foods get divided into safe and unsafe categories. People can become incredibly knowledgeable about what they avoid without ever getting much closer to understanding why their tolerance changed in the first place.

My goal is not to make someone eat everything.

It’s to avoid confusing restriction with restoration.

When possible, I want the direction of the work to move toward greater nourishment, more flexibility, and a body that can handle a wider range of ordinary foods — not an ever-growing list of things someone has to avoid in order to function.

Then there’s the search for the right label.

SIBO. MCAS. Hypermobility. Histamine intolerance. Hormonal diagnoses. Nervous system dysregulation. Sometimes finally having a name for something is incredibly useful. A diagnosis can offer context, explain experiences that previously made no sense, and point toward important care.

But a label still describes only part of a person.

It doesn’t automatically explain why digestion, energy, sleep, muscle tension, inflammation, food tolerance, mood, and recovery may all be changing at the same time. And it doesn’t necessarily tell us which part of that picture deserves attention first.

Your gut, nervous system, immune system, hormones, connective tissue, metabolism, and mineral patterns are not operating independently of one another. They influence one another constantly.

That doesn’t mean every symptom comes from one root cause.

It means that when each issue is approached in isolation, important relationships can be missed.

This is one reason people can do a tremendous amount of work on their health and still feel as though the larger picture hasn’t come together.

That larger picture is where my work begins.

Pacing Matters

This work is not built around doing everything at once.

When someone has been dealing with chronic health issues for a while, it can be tempting to respond to every new symptom, lab marker, or theory with another intervention. But adding more does not necessarily create more progress, especially when digestion, sleep, energy, stress tolerance, or recovery are already inconsistent.

So part of the work is figuring out what your body seems able to work with now.

Sometimes that means adding support. Sometimes it means changing the order in which we do things. Sometimes it means backing off something that looked good on paper but clearly isn’t working well in practice. And sometimes the most useful thing we can do is hold steady long enough to see what actually changes.

I pay close attention to how your body responds because progress is not just about what we add. It is also about whether your system can tolerate, use, and adapt to what we are asking of it.

The goal is not to move slowly for the sake of moving slowly.

It is to work at a pace that gives us useful information and allows change to become more stable over time.

The First Phase: Understanding Your Landscape

When someone begins Minerals & Microbes, the first thing I want to understand is the landscape we are actually working with.

That includes your symptoms, health history, food and digestion, sleep, energy, movement, stressors, environment, current season of life, and what has happened when you have tried different things in the past.

Then we add objective data.

Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis, or HTMA, is usually one of our first lenses. I use it to look at mineral patterns and relationships, how those patterns have shifted over time when we have previous testing, and how they may fit with what you are experiencing in daily life.

I am not looking at a single mineral and deciding that it explains you.

I am interested in the pattern.

How do calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium, copper, zinc, phosphorus and the other minerals relate to one another? What stands out when we put those relationships beside your symptoms, diet, history, stress load, hydration, digestion, and current level of demand?

That gives us a starting point.

From there, we decide what actually deserves attention first rather than trying to correct every number on the page.

For one person, that may mean working on hydration, mineral intake and regular meals. For someone else, digestion or bowel motility may be the more obvious place to begin. Another person may need fewer moving parts because they are already doing too much.

There is no single “phase one” protocol because there is no single phase-one person.

Minerals still matter enormously in this work because they participate in energy production, fluid balance, nerve and muscle function, connective tissue, digestion, and many other basic physiological processes. But I don’t interpret them in isolation. I’m interested in the relationships between them, how those patterns fit with what you’re experiencing, and how they change over time.

Gut Ecology in Context

BiomeFX adds another layer to that picture.

Rather than using stool testing only to hunt for something to kill or eradicate, I use it to better understand the ecosystem that is already there.

We look at things such as microbial diversity, important species, functional potential, fermentation and metabolite patterns, digestive function, inflammatory activity, and other features that help us understand how the gut environment may be functioning.

But again, I do not treat the report as a list of problems that all need to be corrected at once.

If a species is low, the question is not automatically, What probiotic contains it?

If a fermentation marker is elevated, the answer is not automatically, Remove every food that feeds fermentation.

If something looks inflammatory, I want to know what else is happening around it: How is food moving through the gut? What is digestion like upstream? What are you actually eating? What can you tolerate? What happens to symptoms when we make a change?

That context matters because microbial ecosystems respond to the conditions around them.

So our work may include supporting bowel motility, changing the types or amounts of fermentable foods you are eating, widening nourishment gradually, supporting digestion, addressing obvious irritants, or simply giving a change more time before layering something else on top of it.

And we keep watching what happens.

If something improves digestion but wrecks sleep, that matters.

If a food that was difficult three months ago becomes easier, that matters.

If a supplement looks perfect for a lab result but consistently makes you feel worse, that matters too.

The testing helps us see more clearly. Your response helps us decide what to do with what we see.

This Is a Mentorship, Not a Hand-Off

I’m not here to hand you a protocol and disappear until our next appointment.

A large part of this work happens in what we learn between sessions.

That’s why weekly check-ins are built into Minerals & Microbes. They give us a chance to see what is actually happening once a recommendation meets your real life.

Is your digestion changing? Are you sleeping differently? Did something help at first and then stop helping? Are you tolerating a food better? Did a supplement that looked appropriate on paper make you feel worse? Has life become unusually demanding and changed what you have capacity for right now?

Those details help us decide whether to adjust something, add support, pull something back, or simply give your body more time with what we’re already doing.

Sometimes progress comes from making a change.

Sometimes it comes from not changing five things at once.

My role is to bring the testing, education, pattern recognition, and outside perspective while helping you become more fluent in what your own body is telling you.

You do not need to overhaul your diet or your entire life overnight. We work with what is realistic, pay attention to how you respond, and build from there.

We go as fast as the slowest part of you wants to go.

That doesn’t mean assuming your current capacity will always be your capacity. It means starting where you actually are instead of continually asking your body to function from somewhere it hasn’t reached yet.

Progress Has Its Own Timeline

There is no universal timeline for chronic health work.

Some things can change surprisingly quickly. Others take longer. And different parts of the same person can move at very different rates.

Digestion may become more predictable while sleep is still inconsistent. Energy may improve before food tolerance does. Someone may feel substantially better overall and then discover that a demanding week still exposes the edge of their current capacity.

That doesn’t automatically mean the work isn’t working.

It gives us more information about what has changed, what hasn’t, and what may need attention next.

This is one reason I’m careful about promising that a certain symptom should resolve within a certain number of weeks or that everyone should move through the same sequence.

I’ve never seen two BiomeFX results that look exactly alike, and I don’t see two people respond to the same starting point in exactly the same way either.

The goal of the first four months is not to “finish” your health.

It is to understand the terrain more clearly, begin working on the areas that seem most important, and see how your body responds when we change the conditions around it.

Some people make meaningful progress in that first round and feel ready to continue on their own for a while.

Others realize that the first four months have given us a much better map — and they want more time to keep working with what we’ve learned.

That’s why Minerals & Microbes now has both a four-month and an eight-month option, and why some clients choose to continue beyond their first round.

How Minerals & Microbes Is Structured

Minerals & Microbes is available as either a four-month or eight-month private 1:1 experience.

Both begin in the same place: understanding where you are now.

The 4-Month Option

The four-month experience includes HTMA, BiomeFX, four private sessions, weekly check-ins, and ongoing support between sessions.

Our first session gives us time to go through your health history alongside your HTMA and begin identifying the larger patterns that seem most relevant to what you’re experiencing.

BiomeFX gives us another layer of information about your gut ecology. We look at the results in the context of everything we already know rather than treating the stool test as a separate problem to solve.

From there, the remaining sessions become increasingly responsive to what is actually happening.

We may be working on digestion and motility, food tolerance, mineral support, sleep, recovery, movement, or something else that has become more important as the work unfolds. We revisit what has changed, what hasn’t, what you’re tolerating well, and where something may need to be adjusted.

The four-month option is a meaningful starting point. It gives us enough time to gather the initial testing, begin implementing what we learn, and observe how your body responds rather than making recommendations from a single snapshot.

The 8-Month Option

The eight-month experience includes BiomeFX, two HTMAs, eight private sessions, weekly check-ins, and ongoing support.

It gives us a longer runway from the beginning.

Rather than reaching the end of four months just as we are beginning to understand how your body is responding, we have more time to follow those changes, revisit mineral patterns with a second HTMA, refine what we’re doing, and continue working with whatever becomes clearer along the way.

That longitudinal piece is especially valuable to me.

A test tells us what was happening at one point in time. Repeating a test and putting it beside months of symptoms, responses, setbacks, improvements, and lived experience gives us a much richer picture.

And Sometimes the Work Continues

Some people complete one round of Minerals & Microbes and feel ready to take what they’ve learned and work with it on their own for a while.

Others choose to continue.

That might be because they’ve made progress but there is clearly more they want to work on, because we want to repeat testing and see how patterns have changed, or simply because they value having ongoing support while their health continues to evolve.

There isn’t a predetermined number of rounds everyone needs to complete.

The work evolves according to what we’re actually seeing rather than following a fixed timeline established before we’ve even met.

Who This Work Is For

Minerals & Microbes tends to be a good fit for people who are thoughtful about their health and want to understand what is happening rather than simply collect another protocol.

Many have already tried a lot. Others are earlier in the process but can tell that addressing one symptom at a time isn’t giving them the larger understanding they’re looking for.

You don’t need to know anything about HTMA or the microbiome before we begin. You don’t need to have the perfect diet, a low-stress life, or years of experience tracking your body.

What helps is a willingness to participate in the process.

That means paying attention to how things are changing, letting me know what you’re experiencing, being willing to adjust when something isn’t working, and sometimes giving something enough time before deciding we need another intervention.

I’ll make recommendations. I’ll tell you what I’m seeing and what I think deserves attention. I’ll help you decide what to prioritize and explain why.

But I’m not interested in creating a relationship where you become increasingly dependent on me to tell you what every sensation means or what you’re allowed to eat, take, or do.

Part of our work is helping you understand your own patterns well enough that you become more confident navigating your health over time, not less.

This also means I can’t promise that everything will unfold in a straight line.

Bodies change. Life changes. Something that worked beautifully for three months may need to be adjusted. One area may improve quickly while another takes longer. Sometimes a setback tells us something important that we couldn’t see when everything was going well.

That’s not a reason to avoid having a plan.

It’s the reason the plan needs to remain responsive to the person living inside it.

What I Ask From You

You don’t need to be perfectly regulated, endlessly patient, or able to reorganize your entire life around healing.

You do need to be willing to communicate honestly about what is happening, participate in the decisions we make together, and recognize that chronic health work rarely comes with absolute certainty.

If what you want is someone to hand you a rigid protocol, promise exactly how long everything will take, and tell you what to do without needing your input, I’m probably not the right practitioner for you.

If what you want is someone who will look carefully at the data, listen to what is happening in your actual life, help you connect the pieces, and stay engaged as the picture changes, that is much closer to the work I do.

How to Know If This Is the Right Time

You do not need to be at rock bottom to begin.

You also don’t need to have spent years trying every diet, supplement, practitioner, and protocol available. Sometimes people come to me after a long and complicated health history. Others simply recognize that what they’ve been doing isn’t getting them where they want to go.

What matters more is the kind of help you’re looking for now.

You may be ready for this work if you’re less interested in finding one more thing to try and more interested in understanding why the pieces of your health seem to keep interacting the way they do.

Maybe you want to know why digestion improves but energy still fluctuates, why certain foods suddenly become harder to tolerate, why stress seems to affect symptoms that don’t appear related to stress at all, or why something that helped six months ago doesn’t seem to be what you need anymore.

You may also be tired of making decisions from one isolated lab marker, diagnosis, symptom, or theory at a time.

You want someone to help you step back, look at the larger pattern, and decide what actually deserves your attention next.

You don’t need to be perfectly calm, perfectly consistent, or living a beautifully regulated life before we begin.

You do need to be willing to participate.

That means telling me what is actually happening, paying attention to how your body responds, asking questions when something doesn’t make sense, and being open to changing direction when the information we’re getting tells us something different than we expected.

Sometimes I’ll recommend that we add something.

Sometimes I’ll recommend that we stop something.

Sometimes I’ll tell you that I think we need to give what we’re already doing more time.

That responsiveness is part of the work.

If what you’ve been looking for is someone who can help you connect the dots, make sense of the information you already have, bring in better information where we need it, and stay involved as the picture changes, Minerals & Microbes may be a very good fit.

Ready to Work Together?

Minerals & Microbes is my private 1:1 work and is available in both 4-month and 8-month options.

Both include HTMA, BiomeFX microbiome testing, private sessions, weekly check-ins, and ongoing support. The 8-month option gives us a longer runway and includes a second HTMA so we can observe how your mineral patterns and overall health are changing over time.

I intentionally limit how many new clients I onboard each month.

The beginning of our work tends to be more hands-on as I get to know your history, review your testing, and help you get oriented to the process. Staggering new enrollments allows me to give that phase the attention it deserves while remaining closely involved with the clients I’m already supporting.

Availability changes from month to month. Current openings are always listed on the Minerals & Microbes enrollment page.

If you’ve already tried a lot but still feel stuck with chronic health issues that don’t seem to fit neatly into separate boxes, I’d love to help you make sense of the larger picture.