What Your Body Actually Needs This Spring

What Your Body Actually Needs This Spring

This post is a companion to the latest ReWild Wellness podcast episode. If you'd like to listen, find it wherever you tune in:

🎧 iTunes | Spotify | YouTube

This morning I harvested a colander of spinach, sorrel, chives, cilantro, and parsley from the garden, made a salmon parchment packet with roasted sweet potatoes, and ate it outside in the sun. Slowly.

That's what spring is giving me right now. And honestly, after the winter we just came out of, I'll take every bit of it.

What I've Been Observing

Most people who find their way to my work are not doing nothing. They're consuming information, trying things, rotating supplements, adjusting their diets. They are genuinely trying.

And still — the results don't hold. Symptoms cycle back. Something works for a few weeks and then stops. They feel stuck in a way they can't explain, because from the outside they look like someone who should be getting better.

Here's what I keep coming back to: it's not that they're doing nothing. It's that their body can't hold what they're doing.

That's a different problem. And it requires a different approach.

What Spring Is Actually Revealing

Spring doesn't drain you. It reveals what you actually have.

More light means more biological demand. The body is signaled to activate — cortisol rises naturally, the mitochondria are asked to output more, the immune system shifts gears. All of that activation requires fuel. It requires reserve.

If the reserves aren't there — minerals low, gut compromised, nervous system running hot — that activation doesn't feel like energy. It feels like overwhelm. Spring didn't create the deficit. It just made it visible.

The Antibiotic Piece Nobody Talks About Enough

So many of the people who come to me have been through a long stretch of chronic stress — a demanding job, a hard relationship, caregiving, too much demand with not enough recovery. And then something tips them over. Often it's a tooth infection. A bad virus. A round of antibiotics.

What shocks most people is realizing what got them there. They forget how much one round of antibiotics can wipe out your gut bacteria and leave you unbuffered and susceptible — rearranging your microbiome in a way that makes you reactive and uncomfortable. As if the chronic life stress wasn't already depleting you — the antibiotics can push you over the edge. Way more than most people realize.

A year later they're asking why they feel so terrible. And nobody ever connected the dots.

The Foundations Gap

Here's something I see constantly: people think they're doing the fundamentals — and to some degree, they are — but they can't always see what's actually missing. And just as importantly, what their current capacity is to actually integrate what they're trying to do.

A lot of people can't handle a full gut protocol yet. Not because they're not ready to heal — but because their system can't hold it yet. The foundations have to come first. Not as a consolation prize, but because they're what prepare the body to actually benefit from the deeper work.

And those foundations? Most people have real gaps in them — even the ones doing a lot.

What Spring Reminds Us to Do

Spring brings the bitter plants back. And bitters are one of the most foundational — and most overlooked — things you can add to your daily life.

We were literally designed with bitter receptors all throughout our bodies, starting on the tongue. Bitter plants and foods initiate the cephalic phase of digestion — the brain-initiated first phase that begins before food even reaches your stomach. It signals your body to produce digestive enzymes, stomach acid, and bile. It wakes the whole system up.

Many of my clients notice real changes once they get consistent with bitters — less gas, less bloating, greater ease between meals — even when other things in their gut picture are complicated.

I think of bitters as a staple. Not a supplement. As foundational as protein or fat in the diet. And spring is the perfect reminder to come back to them.

👉 My favorite bitters — linked here

Digestion Starts in the Brain

Here's the part I want you to actually sit with.

The cephalic phase only works when you're present. When you're calm enough for your nervous system to shift into rest and digest mode. When you eat rushed, distracted, stressed, or standing at the counter — that phase is largely bypassed. Your body hasn't prepared. Digestive capacity is already compromised before you take a single bite.

This is the vagus nerve at work. Chronic stress, shallow breathing, a nervous system stuck in activation — all of it impairs vagal tone. Impaired vagal tone means impaired digestion. Every meal.

So the simplest thing I can offer you right now is this: before you eat, pause. Sit down. Take three slow breaths. Look at your food. Smell it. Give your brain thirty seconds to register that a meal is coming.

That's physiology. And it's free.

What Actually Works

Pick one or two foundational things. Not ten.

Bitters before meals. A mineral-rich herbal infusion daily — nettles are perfect right now if you have access to them. A short walk after eating. A consistent sleep and wake time. The cephalic phase pause before every meal.

Do them consistently. Not perfectly — consistently. Give your body the chance to respond before you add something else or change the plan.

At some point you have to stop searching and actually start implementing. Let a few foundational things become part of you before layering anything else on top.

The seed is in the ground. Stop digging it up to check if it's growing.

If You're Ready for the Deeper Work

I work with people who've been dealing with symptoms for a long time. Usually they've tried a lot and nothing has really held. What we do is look at what's actually going on — minerals, gut ecology, nervous system state — and build things back in the right sequence at the pace your body can actually integrate.

Slower than you're probably used to. More intentional. And it sticks.

If that's what you're looking for, you can learn more about Minerals & Microbes >HERE