Navigating Chronic Illness: The Hey Hey Mae Origin Story

Hey, you're gonna be OK! 

Welcome to my podcast! I'm Elizabeth Mae, and my functional health practice helps people heal when they’ve exhausted traditional options. I will be sharing stories of people  who have healed themselves through addressing the root cause of chronic illness. With a focus on nutrition, supplementation, and lifestyle changes, this podcast will explore our core belief that everyone can heal when strategically supported. Today, we are sharing our story and more about what is to come this season. Stay tuned!

Instagram: @heyheyelizabethmae
Website: www.heyheymae.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hey, you're gonna be okay. I'm your host, Elizabeth May, and my functional health practice helps people heal when they've exhausted traditional options. When no one can figure your health challenges out, my team helps you resolve symptoms and restores your health. You're listening to my podcast where we'll hear stories of healing chronic illness from a root cause approach. Hey you guys! Origin stories are always some of my favorite to listen to. I love memoirs and biographies. So let's get digging into kind of like what are we doing here? What is this? Where did it come from? So I'm a nutritional therapist with a practice that focuses on healing those struggling with chronic illness. We work mostly with women and children, their families who have a host of symptoms, including chronic fatigue, neck pain, neurological symptoms, GI distress, autoimmune diagnoses, dizziness, bloating, constipation, diarrhea, all those fun things you don't really want to talk to anybody about, but daily plague you, um, chronic infections, Lyme disease, tons of different thyroid disorders, oddities, um, weight and hormonal issues. There's really not a whole lot that we can't help improve with diet nutrition supplementation. So I'm starting this podcast, Hey, You're Gonna Be Okay, where I want to share stories with you of clients and non-clients who have healed themselves and found health through root cause approach. You know, this is work that I came to in my own life, and it took one story and one person saying, you know what, I tried that and it was really helpful for me. Lucky for me, she was a doctor friend and she said, Hey, I am starting a practice and I'm bending this way, and I think it could really help you. But it took me hearing some of her story to trust a different process than what I was used to with our traditional medicine. So in this podcast, I just really want to share with you more and more client experiences. I do want to teach and help you to kind of understand your own body because I think there's so much power in understanding how our bodies work that removes a lot of anxiety, fear, and worry in a post-pandemic world. We did all learn a little bit more about how our bodies worked. But a lot of us learned how to pick up the anxiety, concern, and worry that comes with illness in the spotlight. And I think it's okay if we learn some more, we get educated, we find some knowledge and freedom to put some of that anxiety and worry down that we picked up during COVID. We all picked up lots of negative things. And it is time and it is okay for us to release those. So, you know, our practice at Hei Hei May is a group practice. I am one of our lead practitioners. We have other gals who are supporting clients every day, every week. And we really are here to target the root cause. We want to equip your body to heal, whether that's through lifestyle, supplementation, foods, special diets, exercise, meditation, immunotherapy, all sorts of different things. But we're really here to be your guide so that you can get that body equipped and ready to do what it was designed to do. Because as you know, when you get sick, your body actually resolves that eventually. It is really smart. And we're just here to help guide our bodies in this modern world through a healing journey. So we work with a lot of people who have seen countless practitioners. Maybe that's you. Maybe you feel unheard, maybe you feel confused and desperate for any kind of an answer, for not the runaround, for not another specialist, for not somebody else who's going to send you to somebody different. We get to the root cause with you. Let's get to the root cause. Like, why is this sickness here? Why does this symptom persist? When did it start? What happened around that time? We're like little detectives. We provide that one-on-one support and resources to help you identify that root cause of your chronic health symptoms. And we create a strategic plan with all the parts we set you up for true healing so that your body at the end of your process is stitched together and whole much better than your body became after all the sickness took place. We want you back to an original place of more wholeness and health. So, what do we believe it? Hey, hey, like what is this built on? You know, food is medicine, food first. So special diets are absolutely part of that. And you will hear people healing chronic illness, diets and nutrition are up and coming. Kind of, you know, we're we're curious about our doctors are even starting to recommend more than just go see the nutritionist. Sometimes they give us specific diets, and we're seeing that food is medicine, and food first is our approach because we all eat three times a day. You're already paying for food. Like, let's just make it count, okay? Second, every human is made to flourish. Modern living gets in the way. This kind of addresses the amount of toxins in our environment, the amount of chemical patents since the 50s is insane if you look up that information. Um, there are lots of things. We're inside all day. You know, people had mold in their homes back in the day, but were they inside all day in a closed quarters with it? Not quite as much as we are hauled up in our houses. Modern living, the pace of our lives, the stress, you know, folks didn't get in their car and pedal 30 minutes to an hour and a half to work every day, work all day, and then drive home and then still have family responsibilities, right? Traditionally, we were on a little, you know, on a homestead, on a on a smaller community scale. Our modern living really stresses our bodies, requires a lot of us. Your iPhone digging all the time, your emails coming in. There's so much stimulus. Every human is made and designed to flourish. Modern living gets in the way of that health. Third, anybody can heal when strategically supported. We believe this, like down to our core. Anybody can find healing with strategic support. Everyone can experience some measure of healing. Zero people have left our practice without some measure of healing and progress. But bioindividuality is key. Everybody needs something different. Not everybody is going to respond to the exact same thyroid treatment, even if their labs are the same, because you also have a liver, you have a spleen, you have a circulatory system, or all these things, right? All those things are going to be different in you versus the next guy with a thyroid problem. So bioindividuality is key. Everybody can heal when strategically supported. Supplements are for a time, for a purpose, always high quality and as food-based as possible. I think that kind of covers it. In our modern world, our food is depleted, nutrients are depleted. We do need supplementation. And sometimes we need supplements to be strategic for us. Our pathogen-based immune therapy is the most magical, wonderful thing, and it is a big key to reversing chronic infections. And those supplements are for a time. They are for a purpose, they are pathogen-specific, they are high quality, and they are as food-based as possible. Finally, we believe that your health changes every part of your life. When a mother is well, she can mother well. When a child is well, he can develop and learn well. When you are well, you can enjoy your life. You can contribute to the world. You can contribute to your family. You can be happy. So your health changes every part of your life. And that's why we do this work. So, you know, chronic illness is becoming more and more an issue in America. One in two children have a chronic illness. I'm sorry, what that always gives me pause because one in two children, if you think about your children, half of my son's class at school has a chronic illness. Whether that be eczema, whether it be allergies, whether it be severe cystic acne, whether it be an actual like type one diabetes diagnosis, maybe there's thyroid disorders, juvenile arthritis, pandas and pans, autism. All of these things are chronic illnesses. Now, people in our traditional medical setting are layered with a myriad of diagnoses, right? You go to your doctor, you got a little blood sugar issue, okay. Got a little blood sugar pre-diabetic. We're gonna send you to the endocrinologist. And your liver's kind of looking like fatty liver. So we're gonna go ahead and send you back to your PCP. She's gonna order like a gallbladder scan. We want to see how that's doing. And you just end up with layer after layer of issue, right? You got IBS on top of that, you've had strep issues, you get sick every twice a year with bronchitis, like layers and layers and layers of diagnoses. But what do all those diagnoses mean? In our present world, in our traditional system, they usually mean layers and layers of prescriptions that band-aid symptoms. What do I mean by that? If I give you a medication for your IBS so that you stop having diarrhea three, four, five times a day, sure, maybe the PEPTO helped stop your diarrhea. Did it remove the reason the diarrhea was there? No, it's just a band-aid. That reason is still there. I take the PEPTO away, you still have the diarrhea. You didn't actually have a PEPTO deficiency. That's not what happened, right? The Pepto came in and bridged a gap and stopped your diarrhea. No, it's a band-aid. It's still a band-aid. Same thing with lots of different medications for lots of different disorders. So, what we have is this system with lots of chronic illness. People are layered with lots of diagnoses. You're going to many different doctors, they don't communicate with one another. The solutions you're offered are multiple prescriptions. Prescriptions have side effects that can deteriorate the body, can contribute to dysfunction, and there's really no solving them into a root cause approach to healing. And this is something that I came across in my own life nine years ago, and it has changed everything for me. And watching our clients heal over the past five years has been nothing short of miraculous and amazing, and really not anything that we have done. Our clients have done the work, but we have just looked at their health in a different way. We are looking for what started all this? When did it start? What was the first thing? Was it thiabet first and then the thyroid stuff? Was it the blood sugar? We want to look at the whole body. And our practitioners look at all your body systems. We're working together. There is no trip to the specialist in that one, but really looking to rebuild all parts of that body. So my story really started after my second son's birth in late 2016. I had noted some random health concerns after my first son's birth. Nothing wild, just some chronic fatigue for a month or two that abated, which you got a new baby, you know, it could be that. Um, had some pretty significant hair loss that wouldn't stop after my first baby. But again, I don't know, maybe that's just your first baby. But in 2016, I was entering a traumatic divorce. My home life was unsafe and unkind. My health completely crumbled at the beginning of 2017. I had birth my boy in the summer of 2016, and that's when things really kind of kicked off and brought that deep decline in the winter of 2017. I was diagnosed with Hashimoto's thyroiditis. I had 800 plus TPO antibodies, if you're familiar with that. I had a stint jumping between graves and Hashis. I remember sitting in the bathroom floor with my newborn and my two-year-old, like feeling like I was gonna throw up, feeling like my stomach was gonna jump out of my body, my entire body is shaking, my body temperature dropping very low, me wearing like three layers of clothes and sweatpants to try and keep warm. And nothing was really helping. I also developed rheumatoid arthritis antibodies. I had relentless bronchitis episodes, multiples, six in one year. Um, nothing really would help. I would get done with one, it would turn into a chronic cough for three, four, five months, uh, weeks, not months, gracious, but basically back to back, I had a cough to where I couldn't talk to my kids. Like I was just coughing. I couldn't tolerate gluten. Um, any gluten made me extremely anxious. I would immediately have my GI tract just clear out. I had extreme dizziness and weakness. My Epstein bar titers were very, very high. They were to the highest marker, and then it says plus. It doesn't even go into specific numbers. So it was 600 plus, 400 plus. Um, but all that was offered to me really was a script for thyroid medication, and you should just go home and rest. And you're just postpartum. You have a two-year-old and a six-month-old, you're gonna be fine, but also you're gonna live with your Hashimoto's and functionally, I knew I was entering into world and continuing in a world where I was raising my boys um by myself and I was still nursing, and I knew that a medication and a you know, a death sentence kind of to no gluten, um, extreme dizziness and weakness every day. I had to move in with my parents. That wasn't something I could sustain and raise my children. So I also was still nursing, as I said, and I wanted to work in my issues by non-medical means. I didn't want to bring in medication that would change my ability to nurse my son. So I rested, I began to research and learn about all the pieces that contributed to Hashimoto's. I started to note what foods were affecting me. It became pretty clear that some foods really made me feel a lot better and others really made me feel a lot worse. And I edited my diet. I started getting better. I found I really had a knack and an interest in nutrition. It became fun. Um, and it was for a purpose. It was for me to get better, but I wanted to learn more. So I went back to school and it really was so I could learn more about healing myself. Um, I had been a wedding and high-end portrait photographer for 16 years at that point. And um, having children, I didn't want to spend my Saturdays at other people's weddings. I wanted to spend my Saturdays at their game. So it was just like a perfect season for me to learn more about this stuff. And I hadn't really planned on becoming a practitioner, but I really had a great knack for it. And I love putting together, you know, the puzzle of people's health history. I love listening and I loved putting my life experience of going through a traumatic divorce and having such hopeless options offered for my health issues laid before me. Like putting all that together for other people. I went through quite a journey. And so when I went back to school, you know, that morphed into one certification leading to the next and the next. I wanted to understand testing. Um, I really felt that that could be helpful to me. And I worked with a practitioner who is restorative wellness solutions trained, like I am and our team is now. And I really then learned how to look at lab work, um, some specialty lab work and some traditional like blood panels in a functional lens. So when we look at blood work, we're looking at early indicators of dysfunction. We can see not when your kidney is in kidney failure, but we can see when it's beginning to have um some kidney failure, and we can support that and reverse that. And so I used that information from learning labs, learning nutrition. I learned about my MTHFR genetic mutations. I daily increased my body's capacity to detox. I tried the autoimmune paleo diet for a season. I had zero sugar, zero zip, nada, no sugar. I would have it maybe uh an eighth of a cup of fruit every day at my worst. Um, at my worst, I say, because restrictive diets in the end don't win. They can be really helpful. And AMP was really helpful, but I could not sustain it. I then kind of settled it gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free, sugar-free, essentially a whole 30. And life kind of held steady for me as it was. And my dizziness episodes continued for years. Um, it was almost like not a full-blown dizziness, but like I feel almost, or I felt like the floor would kind of move. I had a vertigo episode for a week once, and it kind of always felt a little bit like that beginning. But my thyroid antibodies and medication needs to continue to drop, my rheumatoid arthritis antibodies disappeared completely. Um, there were more seasons of fatigue, but as long as I listened to my body and rested in response, if I tightened up my diet when that happened, if I supported my mitochondria good sunshine, um, things were mostly good in really stressful seasons as we worked through a lengthy divorce process. I would have severe neck pain. Um, but again, a chiropractor could help me with that. She often joked, like, hey, have you had this instance happen or is this stressor going on? Because it's the exact same place again. And for the most part, you know, managing that neck pain, body pain um that came, it was more in the form of weaknesses or myalgias. It was okay. My labs always look beautiful. Um, my practitioners would joke, my functional doctor would joke, these look really great. I mean, you continue to get better and you seem better. And I was, I was able to do so much more and I was able to take care of my kids. But this was my my intro to root cause healing. The approaches, the methods that we use throughout, but I still hadn't really understood fully that underneath of all of this, my Epstein bar was really wreaking havoc on my neck, on my liver, on my thyroid. Um, it was creating autoimmune activity. And as we moved into the COVID season and we continued to see clients, we kept seeing clients coming to us that had either been a little bit chronically ill before COVID and now we're full-blown, out of control, autoimmune cascade. They weren't always necessarily long COVID, though some were what we would call a long COVID presentation. They just had these long strings of illnesses. We had lots of clients experiencing mold illness because now everyone's working at home. Your environment had changed, and some people were exposed there, and then they would have a cascade. It just came coming up over and over and over for me that the immune system seemed to be involved in all of these occasions. It's like it couldn't go back to where it was before the person got sick most often in that season with COVID, which made me start to think about my health differently. I ate so much gluten. I baked two cakes a week in college to share with friends. I baked bread when I was early in my marriage for my friends, for my family. Um, I ate all the things. I loved eating out as a foodie. I loved cheese. I loved dairy. And none of that really ever bothered me. Um, I definitely had some like GI issues here or there as a kid and some um, you know, intermittent issues, but nothing like I had after I had my boy, my second son, and my health completely changed. And so COVID really brought about this awareness that the immune system seems to be active in this. And that is really the crux of how we approach client care and how we approach chronic illness is that that immune system has changed at some point. And now the body is not returning to its original balance of addressing pathogens, of addressing chronic illness, chronic infections, and keeping you well most of the time. So, experience became a best teacher. We kept seeing clients through COVID. I experienced COVID myself, and the light bulb finally turned on that really EVV was at the root of my health issues. And when I address that root cause, symptoms began to shed. So we will get into that more in later episodes. I really want to get into the nitty-gritty of what does it look like to follow a protocol? What does it look like to find your root cause and address it? What does it look like to have someone empathetically, compassionately lead you through a healing experience? If you think about that right now, in relation to what you've experienced so far in your health journey, the idea that someone would be compassionate to you, that they would be empathetic, that was the kind of care that I experienced in the functional world. Someone who said, you know what? It's not just your thyroid, it's not just these Epstein Bar antibodies. There's more to this puzzle. Let's work on your liver, let's work on your safety at home, let's work on your food freedom, your clean water. Let me help guide you through that. It was that process and that care that freed up my body to really find healing and return to a healthy place, that healthy place from before I got married, back when I could eat all the gluten and all the dairy, and I could stay up late and I could work really hard and bounce back. That is what we are after. And that is what finding the root cause does for clients. That's what finding where the immune system is involved in chronic illness does for clients. So we really want to partner with you guys and help you understand a whole system's approach to improving your health. It was really that one functional doctor who said to me, Hey, we're practicing like this in this different way. I think it would be beneficial to you. This is how it's changed my life that allowed me to really see and understand that this was somewhere where I would be cared for and this was somewhere that my health could. Change. So I look forward to talking with you guys. I look forward and so excited to interview clients and friends who have experienced functional healing so that we can all learn and understand more about looking to heal chronic health issues by addressing the root cause. Thanks for listening. I hope you're leaving encouraged, curious, and hopeful. If you learned something, I'd love for you to share this episode with a friend. Hey, we're all healing together. You can learn more about my practice, our team, and what it's like to work with us at heyheymey.com. I teach lots on Instagram and answer questions each Monday. My Instagram handle is at Hey Hey Elizabeth May. And my cookbook, Hey Hey Everyday, is available on heiheymei.com and Amazon. Happy healing.