My Journey Healing My Gut and Becoming A Writer and Health Coach – Heather Anne Wise

I grew up working in my mother and father’s small primary care practice, during an era prior to electronic medical records, automated billing and online scheduling. My parents often struggled to make ends meet after paying all the staff, rent, and other expenses.

Despite all the hardship of running their own small business, my parents persevered because they knew that what they were doing was helping people. Almost every day at least one patient would tell my mother or father how much it meant to them that my mother took the time to listen, offered natural alternatives to medications, and gave useful and practical diet advice. They were providing a needed service in a medical world that had largely lost its heart.

Gut Health And Sugar Cravings Are Related

During college, I started to experience my own strange symptoms rooted in imbalanced blood sugar, metabolic abnormalities, skin conditions, fatigue, and infections. Having grown up in a holistic medical office, I had the sense these weren’t just a passing phase. They were warning signs of chronic health problems down the road.

After graduating college I decided to dedicate a year to my own health and well-being. I was living in Eugene, Oregon at the time. I took a part-time job in a healthcare office and spent the rest of my time learning how to cook healthy foods (frequenting the farmers markets for local organic ingredients), baking without white flour, practicing yoga, and started meditating.

I also journaled regularly, as I had most of my life. I continued to do research on herbal remedies for many of my health problems and also sought to understand the root cause from a scientific and medical standpoint—because despite what the doctors said about all my seemingly unrelated symptoms, deep down I knew, they were all connected somehow. I guess you could say I had a “gut’ feeling that I couldn’t ignore.

Good Gut Flora Coexists with Bad Gut Flora Like Candida-Albicans

While continuing to research my symptoms I had stumbled upon a pile of research on the pathogenic microbe Candida-Albicans, which is an unhealthy microbe that can grow in our gut and cause some of my strange symptoms like fatigue, imbalanced blood sugar, and infections.

I didn’t know anything about the gut microbiome at the time but my curiosity grew. The available research was very limited at the time but eventually, I ended up completely changing my diet and managing my stress in a whole new way based on what I learned about the gut microbiome. Taking the time to journal or meditate also helped me shift from a mode of survival to a mode of proactive thought.

Rather than just responding to situations in my life as they would arise, and feeling like I didn’t have much control over them, I started to take an active stance in going after what I wanted in my life — which at the time was to have my whole health restored.

After that year hiatus, I felt healthier and had more energy than I had in a decade. Most of the anxiety and depression I had struggled with most of my life lifted for the first time. I hadn’t even known that I was anxious and depressed a lot of the time because I had no reference point to compare what I was supposed to feel like. I just assumed that was how everyone felt.

This, coupled by a few books I read at the time, including Depression-Free Naturally by Joan Mathews Larson, Ph.D, led to the powerful realization that there was a direct connection between our gut health and emotional well-being.

My success healing my own physical and mental conditions inspired me to go back to school so I could help others. After becoming certified in holistic health coaching and getting my masters in public health in Boston, I knew that I wanted to reach people on a larger scale. Yet, I still didn’t know how I would do that.

I was working as a holistic health coach but could only meet with people one-on-one. I decided to diversify my career and took a role in health communications at a small healthcare start-up, then the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, and finally Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. This allowed me to educate larger audiences with useful health information.

Yet, the information I was writing and speaking for these healthcare agencies wasn’t the message and information I felt would be most beneficial based on what I had learned about the gut microbiome during my own journey.

It was while working in health communications that I had the idea to write this book. The timing couldn’t have been worse, in some respects, because I soon got pregnant with our first child. My husband was in year three of a six-year graduate program at the time, so I was the primary bread-winner. It’s a miracle my book survived under the pressure to provide a stable income and benefits for our family, both during my pregnancy and after our daughter was born.

Yet, despite all the stress at the time, I couldn’t stop thinking about my book and had to make time to work on it. I took this as a sign that this book needed to make it out into the world. Now, four years later, and after a lot of stress and turmoil, it’s finally going to be released by Rowman and Littlefield publishers in September 2018! You can get this book A GUT FEELING here.

About the Book
A GUT FEELING: Conquer Your Sweet Tooth by tuning Into Your Microbiome

Dive into the world of microbes teeming within us in Heather Wise’s latest book, A Gut Feeling: Conquer Your Sweet Tooth by Tuning Into Your Microbiome.  A Gut Feeling relays her personal story and the story of many of her health coaching clients in overcoming chronic fatigue, excess belly weight, skin problems, and metabolic symptoms.

Wise takes you through her journey learning about a burgeoning field of science that shapes our mood, metabolism, food cravings, and even genes. Rooted in scientific evidence and providing a number of healthy sweet fixes high in prebiotics and probiotics that support the growth of healthy gut flora, this book is a practical guide to help heal our love/hate relationship with sugar and discovering how listening to your food cravings can give insight into the inner state of your microbiome.