This Is Normal, Stop Asking.

You don't need more advice. You need someone to actually listen

Over the last ten years, I’ve worked with hundreds of clients, and there is no shortage of dismissal answers doctors give women about their symptoms.

Just in the last few months, I had a client come to me who wanted her progesterone and estrogen tested on two separate days, because that gives you a more accurate reading. Her doctor told her that as a healthy 30 year old, she didn’t need her hormones checked. She had to remind him that having a migraine every single day is not healthy.

I had another client, a mom of three in her late thirties, struggling with weight gain, constipation, fatigue, and bloating. Her doctor told her that’s just what being a mom is like. She has three kids, so this is her life now. For the constipation, he suggested Metamucil. She tried it. It didn’t help.

I don’t want to say these two stories are one and the same, but in different words, the same thing remained true: this is normal, stop asking.

But their symptoms aren’t normal. They’re common. That’s not the same thing.

And this is where the gaslighting begins. Women get told, over and over, that how they’re feeling is just something they need to deal with. Or, in other words: this is normal, stop asking.

Five, ten, fifteen minutes

Think about how long you’re actually in the room with your doctor. Five minutes. Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen if you’re lucky. That’s barely enough time to cover your top three complaints, let alone actually dig into any of them.

Here's something I really want you to remember: your symptoms aren't the problem. They're the messenger. They're pointing you toward what you need to uncover. But we've been trained to be almost fearful of our own symptoms, because the only response most of us have ever gotten is a prescription aimed at the symptom itself. And this usually starts at a young age. Birth control for irregular or heavy cycles. An antidepressant for fatigue or low mood. Metamucil for constipation. Antacids or a PPI for acid reflux. A GLP-1 for weight gain. An antihistamine for random hives or reactions. The list goes on, and I'm sure you get the point.

And honestly, most of the time that’s not even the doctor’s fault. That’s just what standard care looks like when a visit is that short. You come in with constipation, you leave with a fiber supplement. You come with acid reflux and you are most likly leaving with a prescription for acid reflux. Nobody’s digging into what’s driving the symptom, because there isn’t time to.

But the symptom itself was never what needed treating. What matters is what's driving it.

By the time a woman gets to me, she's usually not asking what's wrong with me anymore. She's stopped expecting anyone to answer that. What she's actually asking is simpler and harder: can you actually help me. Because so far, nobody has.

It's not stress. Or it's not only stress.

The most common answer I hear from clients, across the board, is stress. That’s the catch-all. This is what their doctors are telling them. It’s stress. Try to relax and stress less. Because that’s exactly the type of prescription you need. (Read sarcastically.)

When your labs come back “normal” and your doctor doesn’t have time to dig further, “it’s just stress” or “it’s just aging” or “it’s just being a mom” is often the fastest thing to say. I would like to believe it’s not meant to dismiss you, even though it absolutely feels and sounds like it does. It’s what happens when a fifteen minute appointment meets a problem that needed forty five minutes, and a lot more history and context than there was time for.

But stress isn’t nothing. Here’s what’s actually happening. When you’re stressed, your adrenal glands release more cortisol, and cortisol demands more energy production from your body. That energy production requires the minerals magnesium and potassium as cofactors. Magnesium is involved in over five hundred different reactions in the body with energy production being one of the biggest. Potassium handles nerve transmission and muscle contraction, and works alongside sodium to regulate energy at the cellular level.

So during stress, your body burns through magnesium and potassium faster, because they’re both tied up in producing the energy that stress is demanding. And here’s the kicker: you don’t just need these minerals during stress. You need them after, to actually calm your nervous system back down.

That’s why bloating, constipation, and fatigue are so tied to this. When you’re stressed for long enough, low magnesium changes how your gut moves and how calm your nervous system can get. So “it’s just stress” and “your minerals are depleted” aren’t two different explanations. They’re the same thing, described by two different people looking at two different parts of it.

It all comes back to minerals

If you’re dealing with what I specialize in, bloating, constipation, and fatigue, the next most common answer is an elimination diet. Plus Cut dairy. Cut gluten. Try low FODMAP and see what happens.

So you do it. Faithfully, for months. And maybe you feel ten percent better, which is its own kind of confusing. You don’t feel bad enough to prove something’s wrong. You don’t feel good enough to know you found the fix. So instead of clarity, you end up more confused, and usually more desperate than when you started. And on top of that you start believing food is the issue, so you become more restrictive with your eating, which actually makes your symptoms worse long term.

For the women I work with who are in their thirties and forties, there’s another layer to this. You look fine on paper, so your doctor doesn’t run extensive bloodwork. Your TSH comes back “normal.” Your hormones come back “normal.” Your ferritin is in range. But in range, and “normal,” isn’t the same as optimal. That gap, between “normal” and actually well, is where so many women get stuck. And nobody’s checking for it, because “normal” is where most doctors stop looking.

Sometimes what looks like just constipation, just exhaustion, or just stress is actually pointing at something that needs a different kind of screening altogether.

Take SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. The typical protocol is an elimination diet, usually low FODMAP, cutting out foods one by one. And temporarily, that can quiet symptoms for a little while. But it’s not addressing why the SIBO happened in the first place.

SIBO isn’t a root cause. If you actually want to feel better long term, the question isn’t just how to manage SIBO, it’s why it happened at all. The typical root causes include impaired motility, meaning your migrating motor complex isn’t clearing things the way it should, poor digestion, ileocecal valve dysfunction, adhesions or scar tissue, and certain medications. When we only focus on the symptom, this is the part that gets missed every single time.

It’s the same story with Hashimoto’s or subclinical thyroid dysfunction. Your TSH can come back fine, well within range, but TSH alone often misses early thyroid dysfunction. Constipation, fatigue, and bloating are classic thyroid symptoms, and they get chalked up to stress or diet instead, because the one number that got tested looked normal.

I see this constantly with my clients. I’ll send someone for a full panel, T3, T4, and TPO antibodies, not just TSH, and it turns out the constipation, the fatigue, the bloating she’d been managing for years was thyroid dysfunction the whole time. In other cases, it’s Hashimoto’s specifically.

So can I actually help?

If you’re asking whether I can actually help, here’s my honest answer.

I’m on your team. Understanding what you actually need, and what will genuinely serve you in your health journey, is the biggest part of how I practice. Most doctors are trained to diagnose and treat disease. Very few are trained in how to create health. Those aren’t the same skill.

Here’s the thing about how we think about food and health in general. Humans love absolutes. We want everything sorted into good or bad, yes or no, black or white. But it doesn’t work that way. It’s all contextual. Your history, your lifestyle, your sleep, what you eat, your actual symptoms, that’s all part of who you are, and it matters more than what any single test says on its own. Tests are useful. They help us understand what’s driving the symptoms. But a test result only means something once it’s interpreted in the context of you.

So I don’t start with a food you should cut. I start by understanding what your body is trying to tell you, and what will actually serve you.

You don’t need more information. You don’t need more advice.

What you need is for someone to actually listen, and help you put the pieces together.

That’s the whole reason the Inner Circle exists. It’s not a place where you have to prove something is wrong before I’ll take you seriously. You tell me what’s going on, and we start from the assumption that you’re right about your own body.

If that's what you've been looking for, come join us.