Ep. 1 Carli's Health Story

Tune in to hear Carli's extended health journey through digestive issues, weight loss resistance, fatigue, PCOS and more and find out what led her to true healing and ultimately why get became a holistic health practitioner.

Carli IG: @wellnessbycarli
Carli Website:  https://www.wellnessbycarli.com/

Carli's Info:

Website: www.wellnessbycarli.com

IG: @wellnessbycarli

Transcript

Carli (00:02.958)
Hello, everyone. I am so excited to be starting this podcast. This is something I've talked about for a really long time. And just between growing a business and growing a family, it just kept taking a backseat. So today we are finally starting. Thank you for being here. You know, I know there's so many fascinating...

Thank you for being here.

Carli (00:43.662)
You know, there's so many fascinating things about wellness and healing. And I have so many just deep, insightful, expansive conversations with friends, with clients in a session. Maybe it's in a mentorship. And over the years of my own healing journey and my own business journey, I have met.

so many people and have had so many insights that I wish I could have collected it all and shared it. And that's basically where this podcast is coming from. I wanted to create a living library, a space of resources and these expansive conversations.

Carli (01:36.142)
So all the people and ideas and concepts and resource and tools, so all of the people and ideas, so all of the people and ideas and resources and tools that I have gathered and tried and put in my resource library for personal use and for clinical use, I just want to share it with as many people as possible.

So there's a lot of magic here and that's really what I want to share.

Carli (02:18.35)
So we will talk about things that help your physical health, things that I have learned and I use in clinic, like nutritional education, food sourcing, balancing blood sugar, wellness foundations, systemic detox, all this functional wellness stuff. But we're also going to get weird. I want to talk about the supernatural world, spirituality, energetics.

The conversations are just gonna be a reflection of what I love talking about. And ultimately, again, it's to help others. And I want to spread information that helps people heal. That's the goal. So I hope listening to this brings you.

Carli (03:12.558)
Shortcuts, insights, and really just anything that's helpful. So just wanted to set that intention because that is my goal here. For today's first podcast.

Carli (03:29.294)
I really want to just take some time and share my own personal story. I got into functional wellness because of my own health issues. It was almost one of those looking back very obvious things that doors were just shut in my face in my career until I got on my right path of wellness and helping others and then doors just started opening. So I wanna share.

my health story, but it's also going to fishtail into my, basically my business career story a little bit because they're very intertwined. I think you'll find a lot of people in the functional, holistic, natural worlds of healing have their own personal story because we, most of us grew up following conventional medicine, right? I went to the doctor, I took antibiotics, which there's nothing wrong with that, but I took a lot of them.

Um, my mom and dad weren't really well educated on holistic healing because we just didn't know about it. And so when I tried to go to conventional medicine to help me, there was nothing but frustrations and no answers. So it led me to functional wellness. And I think that's a lot of functional practitioners. Like I said, I think that's how they find their career path is because of their own.

success when looking for alternatives.

Carli (05:01.454)
So when I take a step back and I look at my health journey, it really started when I was born. My mom told me I was born with a version of a herpes virus and I had blister outbreak as an infant. I had UTIs. I had fungus on my feet. So that's three pretty intense things for a baby to be dealing with. And when I look back now with the lens I have,

I see microbiome imbalances, I see viral support needed, some antibacterial support needed, and these really start my journey. They start as young as an infant. So, you know, again, it can go back even further. I haven't talked to my mom about this, but the health of the mom when the baby's in utero...

But the health of the mom when the baby is in utero, her mental state, her stress levels, they will affect the baby's health. So I don't know what was going on. I'm not saying anything was going on with my mom possibly. I remember she told me that my brother was colicky and screaming 23 hours a day. And then she got pregnant with me before my brother was even what, six months old.

So I think there is probably some stress happening. But anyway, so I've got this stuff happening as an infant. And then I must have had chronic sore throats growing up because when I was seven, I got my adenoids out. But the first physical imbalance that I can remember from my memory, not just stuff my parents have told me, was that I had a lot of digestive discomfort. I remember getting stomach aches when we would go out to restaurants and kind of just being bowed over in pain.

and

Carli (07:04.846)
And looking back, that could have been something as simple as, you know, bacterial imbalances and maybe yeast, or it could have been wheat intolerance. But I just remember a lot of discomfort. And then fast forward to eighth or ninth grade. Again, this is when I'm a little bit more consciously aware of what's going on. I was the last to get my period in my group of friends.

So I remember, I think I was 17, I was a senior, I was embarrassed by it. I had no idea what was going on, so I kind of just hit it and ignored it. I remember also being a little bit uncomfortable in my body, meaning I just was a little too aware that I felt like I needed to lose five pounds. And this is in high school when I just don't believe girls should be worrying about weight.

but I'm sure it's very common. But I was really the whole point of me sharing this is that I was a three season athlete and eating salads at lunch while other people were sitting there eating Dunkaroos. So something just wasn't adding up. I just was a little uncomfortable in my body. I always felt a little puffy. I had really slow digestion. So chronic constipation. So again, not addressing any of these things, just kind of dealing with them.

And then the first time I was probably let down by the medical system was when I finally saw a doctor about not having a period and birth control was the only antidote that gave me. So I'm extremely sensitive to medications. And when I took birth control, I was, I just was physiologically depressed. I remember in high school, crying in the bathroom one morning and my friend was like, what's wrong? Are you okay?

And I just remember thinking, nothing's wrong. I have no idea why I'm so sad. And again, if I would have known better, it was these synthetic hormones that were just throwing me into such emotional turmoil and such imbalance.

Carli (09:36.078)
So that was, you know, a general.

Carli (09:42.446)
So that's a general recap of the major kind of health events growing up. I also had my wisdom teeth out, which if you know anything about dental work and the meridians associated with dental work, that can also cause its own problems. But we'll save that conversation for another day. Digestively, I kept suffering. So eventually, my mom went to a gastroenterologist and took me.

And I remember she always loves to tell the story because, I mean, truly it's upsetting. She started the conversation with, do you think my daughter could have any food intolerances like dairy or wheat because we had been starting to do our own research? And the doctor basically laughed at her and said, absolutely not. Food has nothing to do with your digestion, which is just the most incredibly blind statement.

So with this doctor, they wound up wanting to do some tests. So they gave me an egg sandwich on wheat bread, and they put an isotope on it so they could basically monitor the transit time through my system. Which first of all, if you're having digestive issues, wheat and egg are two of the most commonly inflammatory problematic foods. So that alone is...

short -sighted that they are giving these two very commonly allergenic foods.

so that they're giving these two common allergens as foods to monitor your digestion. So anyway, the results from this test came back that I had delayed gastric emptying and gastroparesis. So they said, okay, basically you have slow digestion. That's idiopathic, meaning we have no idea why, but take this syrup and have a great life. And the syrup that they gave me, I don't recall what it was called, but I remember I was doing an internship that summer and I remember almost,

Carli (11:46.254)
falling asleep coming home at 3 o 'clock driving. And so it just made me so tired and sleepy. And that was dangerous in itself. And it was a band -aid. It did not help my digestion at all. And it was just a dead end. So needless to say, I continued to have digestive stuff and just tried to read and.

Carli (12:27.15)
So I just tried to read and research on my own in my own time, kind of where that was coming from. So again, three season athlete going to college. I went to college to play lacrosse.

Carli (12:49.166)
So this takes me to college and I went to Yale University to play lacrosse. So this is a division one sport. I should be at the height of my athletic ability, the best shape of my life. And to be honest, it was probably one of those rock bottom times in terms of my physical health. Going to college, I gained so much weight. I would say about 25 pounds.

And this was, yes, it had a little bit to do with food and alcohol for sure, but I was also working out on a collegiate level. The math just didn't make sense. I was exhausted. I had so much digestive discomfort and my cycles were continuing to be irregular. So it was pretty, I was embarrassed. I was uncomfortable and I had no answers. I remember meeting with the Yale nutritionist.

thinking this was going to be a top resourced person. And she's just walking me through the cafeteria showing me to eat yogurt and fruit and healthy things. And I was just looking at this lady like, you have no idea. Like, I know how to eat healthy. This is not the answer I was looking for. So eventually, a teammate of mine shared that she saw this doctor in Connecticut who helped her with a parasite. So I find this so awesome because.

If you follow the wellness industry at all on Instagram or any social media, parasites are kind of hot right now, right? We've discovered that they're a very common root cause. So many of us, if not all of us, have parasites. There's a doctor that says, if you have a pulse, you have a parasite. So they're everywhere. But this was back in 2005. And no one was talking about parasites. So she got diagnosed with a parasite. And she said, he helped me so much, you should go see this doctor.

So the doctor, I can remember his name, Dr. Zabrecki in Greenwich, Connecticut. I would train from New Haven, Connecticut to Greenwich by myself, really in desperation for some answers. At this point, I have been struggling with my health for a very long time for the better part of my life, mostly digestive and hormonal. So this meeting with this doctor changed my life.

Carli (15:11.182)
The tests that I remember him running were food intolerances. I think it was IgG panel. So not IgE. It was more food intolerance. We ran a stool assessment. We looked at my hormones. We looked at my cortisol levels. I got diagnosed with Candida, which is yeast. I had nine food intolerances, including I can remember most of them because this is the first time that I adhered to a restrictive kind of elimination diet. I was avoiding lettuce.

black pepper, watermelon, wheat, dairy, salmon. That's all I can remember. But there were at least 11 of them. And he put me on a detox powder, some supplements, and we did an elimination diet. And when I tell you within three months, I was literally a new person. I dropped all the weight. I was actually thinner than I was in high school at this point.

I had so much energy that I would wake up and I would just want to go running. I have never been a runner. Even though I've been an athlete, running and training was always a little bit of a struggle for me. I'm just naturally slow. My skills lucked up for my, my skills made up for my lack of speed, but I had so much energy. I was going on five mile runs. Like this was a new human. I felt so good. So you can imagine after.

going to doctors and being just let down and just given medications and no answers, I felt like a superhuman. And I just wanted to shout this stuff from the rooftops. So I had a successful senior year. I felt great. I looked great. I had energy. I was performing better on the field. And really from there, you could say I was largely healed.

But when I look back now, I have still struggled with a bunch of things since then. And I think so much of it had to do really with stress. Because when I graduated college, when you leave college and you have to go grab a job and you're still kind of young and you have no idea what you want to do, it's the time of your life. But it's also very stressful. So my friends were going off to Wall Street. And I was like, I'll just take whatever job I can get.

Carli (17:30.83)
I worked in advertising and finally I realized like, I want to be in fashion. I'm very into aesthetics. If you know anything about human design, my strongest sense is outer vision. So beautiful things make me really happy. Organization, even though I'm not inherently naturally organized, I'm not like a Capricorn, I'm a Gemini, I'm an air sign, but having neatness and beautiful things makes me really happy. Anyway, I've always been into fashion, always been into just shopping to be honest.

So I moved from New York City, I left all my friends, and I went to the executive development training program at Neiman Marcus in Dallas. I did not want to leave New York. You would think that you could find fashion training in New York City, but really this was kind of the crème de la crème of if you're going to do fashion, you need to do this because you can become an executive and not just work in a retail store. So I went to this executive development program to become an assistant buyer, eventually wanted to be a buyer.

And I will tell you, there were some really fun things. The discount was glorious, but that industry is not what it seems. It's very devil wears Prada. I had a boss that, well, let's just say was not kind. I was so stressful. It's the only time in my life that I've had migraines from pure...

acute anxiety, make yourself sick to your stomach kind of stress. So let's just fast forward those years. It was stressful. I was away from my family. I had some family that was sick, and I was away from them, and that was upsetting. I was away from my friends. I was miserable in my job. And so eventually, after a hellish three years, I moved back to New York, and I got a job at a smaller retail brand as a buyer.

And let's just suffice to say that another horrible, horrible job experience with psychotic bosses, emotional abuse, absolutely just the worst kind of environment you can imagine, I started to realize this is not what I'm supposed to be doing. When I was reading books in my free time, they were always about health and wellness. And I was the one scouring those.

Carli (19:58.03)
You know those wellness shops, they probably still have them in New York where it's just aisles of natural supplements and bins of things like nuts and seeds and goji berries and energy balls. And they'll have a hot food bar and it would be all whole food ingredients, no wheat. I mean, this was again, how many years ago and those were my happy place. I would just scour the, the aisle. I would just walk up and down the aisles.

studying the herbs because these are the herbs that were healing me. So I was so curious how to use them all and what they all did and what would help me. And so I eventually decided I wanted to go back to school for health and wellness.

At this point, I did not even know what the term functional nutrition meant. I was just trying to find my place. And so I found the IIN, Institute of, what is it? Institute of Something Nutrition, which today is still a fantastic program, but you come out of it a coach, right? I knew I wanted to be more of a coach, more than a coach. I wanted a license. So the only thing I found was,

a dietetics program where I could become a registered dietitian. I thought that's what I wanted to do. So I took my pre -med, prerequisite classes in New York. I remember I would walk and take a microbiology test. I'd be studying at night. And at the time I was dating someone long distance in Houston. So I wound up going back to Texas to go back to school. I got my dietetics license at the University of Houston.

which was a great program, got a great medical rotation in. While I was taking classes, I had a guest lecturer lecture one of my classes all about functional nutrition. And that was one of those moments where your whole body tingles. And it was, you could call it an intuitive hit, a knowing. I was like, oh my gosh, this is it. She was talking about herbs that can heal the body.

Carli (22:05.774)
just natural biochemical pathways and how things work. And I was like, OK, we found it. So I wound up interning for this person while I finished my dietetics license, took my RD exam. And before I even took my RD exam, I was seeing clients. And so I just fishtailed right into being a practitioner, learning via mentorship primarily. And then I would.

study, I would sit in sessions and see clinical consultations happening. I would go to webinars. I would take weekend conferences. I have been learning, learning, learning for years and helped open one of the first functional medicine practices in Houston. It was hugely successful. And during this time, so this is kind of how my work life kind of braids in with my wellness story.

During this time, I was much healthier than I had been in the past. However, the stress of all this moving and going back to school and breakups and all this stuff, I had a lot of stress going on that I just wasn't really dealing with. And I wound up still having a lot of hormonal symptoms. I was diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome. At some point when I was going back to school, I had

mononucleosis, Epstein -Barr, which is a very exhausting, horrible virus that will flare and that can really bring you down. I had blood sugar issues. I had SIBO, so small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. So this was all happening. I was trying to perform at such a high level and multitask, and I was still struggling with some health stuff. But I had access to a practitioner that I could text all the time.

I could run as many tests as I wanted because these test companies knew I was a practitioner and they were giving them to me for free. I could get supplements at very cheap prices. So my body was teaching me how to deal with all these things and I was learning while I was helping others. So it was very, very interesting time. And at some point, the practice I was working at closed down, went completely virtual, the owner moved and there was an opportunity for me to...

Carli (24:30.062)
start my own company. At this point, I had already met my husband and we were engaged to be married. And we wound up all in one year, I started a business, got married, moved into our first house and had our first child, a little boy. And so I know my timelines are all getting crazy, but I just want to paint the picture that, you know, this is when I started Wellness by Carly. It was 2017.

And after my first child, I couldn't really ignore my health stuff anymore. It all kind of came crashing down about a year later. 2018, I was really struggling with energy levels. I was struggling with, at some point, we had mold exposure in our house. Weight loss resistance from the baby, brain fog was out of control. And so.

Really, I guess what I'm trying to say is I've walked through so many paths and the way that I've had the most success is by following my own intuition, not just following a typical protocol or just taking a test and then taking a supplement. I had to work on the emotions. I had to get spiritual guidance. So many factors and I will say I'm turning

this summer and I am the most comfortable, the most healthy version of myself since probably that senior year in college Carly that had so much energy. What I think took me full circle was a ketogenic approach, which we will definitely get into in this podcast. Ketosis helped me get back to my high school weight.

Refind my energy so I can keep up with my kids. I now have two kids. Balance my blood sugar. Learn how to just handle my body's fluctuations. So that has been an absolute, I don't like the word magic bullet, but it really has been for me. I call ketosis the Swiss army knife of metabolic approaches because it helps deal with so many things. It helps your cells clean themselves.

Carli (26:53.358)
It helps your body heal itself. You make more mitochondria, so you have more energy for life and also for your healing capabilities. So I am sure I will have multiple episodes here on ketosis. But that's where I am today. Again, I'm in Houston. I am happily married with two babies. And my health is thriving. I have a functional wellness business. I am.

completely virtual, so I see clients in a bunch of different ways. I do have 90 minute intro sessions for new clients, but the bread and butter of what I do is called the Realign program. And that's when I take people through an entire kind of transformation journey that includes a systemic detox. We address mold, metals, environmental chemicals, gut health, hormone health. We run all the tests up front.

and we use supplementation, lifestyle, habits, foundational wellness along the way. That's like my favorite way to work with people. I understand that that's very high level and not everyone wants to do that. So I do take clients individually as well in kind of four, six or nine month packages for the most part. And I provide a lot of accountability. So in those healing containers, you're gonna be able to message me. We usually meet twice a month.

That's the way you get the best results that I often see. But some people are more independent and want to work more, I would say, à la carte. And that's an option too. I don't take a lot of à la carte clients because I really reserve my time now for my package clients where I can spend way more hours coordinating care. I talk to doctors. I review labs. I do research. And I pour myself into those people. But that's...

My favorite way to work with people because we get really, really close and we go really deep on a lot of awesome conversations.

Carli (29:20.398)
So I hope that all makes sense. And that's just kind of where I am today. Thank you for letting me share this and kind of just start this podcast off with a space of sharing where I've been and where I am and what I'm passionate about. I hope you feel like you know me a little bit better. And although this has been great and I love sharing my story, I am just so excited for the conversations that are going to be held in this space. So do me a huge favor.

take one minute out of your day and subscribe to this podcast. It would be so incredible if you could leave a comment or even a review because this is your way of supporting me and allowing this information to get to more people. I am doing this for free, which I'm happy to do. This is really, really fun for me, but I would love to be able to help more people and you taking the time to, like I said, just leave a comment, subscribe, rate it.

really helps me and my small bills. It really helps me and my small business more than you realize. So thank you for your presence and your energy today and I will see you all next time on The Wellness Frequency.

So thank you for your presence and your energy today, and I'll see you all next time.