She's Got Guts: Your Personalized Guide to Self Healing

By Laura Sprinkle

She’s Got Guts will propel you to become the master of your own healing through easy to understand explanations of major health issues, over 100 practical healing tips, and a complete guide to creating your personalized healing action plan!

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483546407

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Introduction

Read this first: How to use this book

Since most people don’t have time to read an in-depth, lengthy book on digestive health and healing, I’ve synthesized the information that I believe can best assist your digestive healing journey. If you ever want to dig deeper or have specific questions, please email me anytime: [e-mail]. Also check out www.laurasprinkle.com for more articles and resources.

Here’s an overview of the three main sections:

The first section of this book is what I like to call science-y articles - a literary term - that lay out why digestive health is important and what is causing our current health pickle. If it’s too much to take in all at once, there are summary boxes at the end of each section. You can always come back to individual sections as needed, and you can also use it as a reference for lifelong gut health.

The second section is all about healing. It is a collection of my best tips, pointers, and helpful goodies, organized under various topics. If you are looking for things to help you board the health train right away, head on over! You don’t have to try them all, and in fact a lot of them are contradictory, but trying a few at a time can give you a good idea of what works for you.

The third section will help you take all of this information and make it super actionable. It details out a plan that you can use to create your specific wellness path - your personalized healing action plan! It’s full of worksheets and exercises so that all of the good stuff doesn’t just sit in your noggin’. Health information is great, but it can be useless until you implement it, so make sure to utilize this section.

While you’re reading and working in these sections, remember that in addition to my own experiences, my knowledge is merely the fusion of all the factoids I have absorbed (get it? digestion joke…) from others over the years. So please check out the resource area at the end for more information and even more actionable delights.

As you will shortly gather, I believe we are all on our own paths, which means that not everything in this book will jam with everyone. Pick and choose what resonates with you and what you are excited to try out. Decide what you would like to get from this experience and then make it your own. That goes for this book, and for this life. Enjoy!

Who cares about digestive health?

If you, like me, have had digestive health problems, then you clearly know how miserable it can be. However, did you know that gut health is also a huge factor in many other illnesses and symptoms? That’s right, and it even affects organs seemingly unrelated, like the brain, the vagina, and the lungs.

By eating food, we get the nutrients we need to do our daily thang. But if something is off in our gut, it can affect the reproductive system, the nervous system, or any other area where the vitamins, minerals, and macronutrients are off-kilter. The gut is the source of many physical issues, which makes it the logical place to start in healing any health problem.

Looking beyond physical health, take a moment and think about where the gut is located: your core. Not only is it your physical center, but it’s also your spiritual and emotional core. It’s the area associated with the third chakra (also known as the solar plexus, or manipura), which makes it the epicenter of our personal power and self-awareness. Our self-respect, leadership, and ability to own our own power come directly from our core and our gut. Emotions and intuition, as well as our gut feelings about people and situations, are all related to how centered we are.

Once you are reconnected with your center, anything becomes possible and everything becomes easier to accomplish.

My Story

  In 2013, after a decade of dealing with my own severe digestive issues – including their emotional causes and the repercussions they had on every aspect of my life – I found some real answers to my problems. With lots of trial and error, I formulated my own plan for healing. I was so inspired by what I’d discovered and put into practice that I wanted to share it with others.

I began working with women to help them recognize that feeling crappy is not their true nature and is not normal. Navigating life’s ups and downs is hard enough without us suppressing our physical pain with injections, patches and pills. It’s possible to have a great career, fantastic relationships with friends, family, and your significant other, incorporate movement into your life, eat delicious food that is good for you, and feel a strong connection to the divine (whatever that word means to you, no judgment and no preaching). I can attest to that now, but it wasn’t always this way for me.

Although my digestive health problems physically started in college, they stemmed from earlier emotional issues. I was raised to be independent and to never rely on a man for money or anything else; this message was reinforced after my parents divorced. From elementary school to college, I pushed myself to achieve and succeed, and I did, in the form of good grades, medals and awards. I disdained girls who seemed obsessed with boys, while secretly pining for love myself. I wondered how other girls seemed to have it together each day at school when I felt so uncomfortable in my own skin. At age sixteen, I began having horrible period symptoms and was put on birth control pills to control my own body. I pushed male attention away, even going so far as to set up my friends with anyone I thought was cute. I want to make something of myself, and boys only break girls’ hearts and get in the way, I thought.

When I got to college, however, I began to date in an even more extreme way than the girls who I had pretended to disdain. Things got serious super-fast with my boyfriends - and then crashed and burned. The crashing usually lasted longer than the relationship itself, and the burning longer still.

At this point, physical manifestations began to rear their ugly heads. It was somewhat ironic because when I couldn’t deal with facing high school, my go-to fake illness had been a stomach ache. Now, I really was in pain: upset stomach, diarrhea, constipation, acid reflux, indigestion, headaches, fatigue, yeast infections, urinary tract infections, bacterial vaginosis… you name it, I had it. And let me tell you, it was a BLAST.

My lifelong dream had been to study abroad in college, so I spent four months of my junior year in Bolivia, followed by six months in Chile and traveling around South America. While this experience was fantastically life-changing, my digestive issues put a damper on it. I would run around foreign cities in search of a bathroom to avoid shitting myself. Pretty bad, right? But you know what the WORST thing about all of these symptoms was? Not the cramp in my romantic style (as guys were surprisingly understanding), or missing out, or even the physical pain and discomfort (though that was a bitch). It was something I didn’t even realize at the time.

The most awful thing was this: almost all of my peers had similar issues and it was considered normal. Can you imagine? We actually thought it was normal for the average healthy woman in her early twenties to have aches and pains, frustrating symptoms and raging hormones. We tried to force our bodies into submission. Damn bodies, why won’t you listen?! I tried medications, I tried doctors, I tried it all. Some things worked for a time, others did not. Maybe it’s age, I thought. Let me repeat: I WAS IN MY EARLY TWENTIES.

After college I moved to Bolivia and my symptoms got more extreme. I outwardly blamed them on the country (yep, I did), but deep inside I knew that something else was missing, that there was a piece I just wasn’t quite getting. Whilst still attempting to control my body via diet and nutrition, I finally had the epiphany: this is far from normal. Once I had that shift in consciousness, my healing journey began.

Soon after, I stumbled upon the book Integrative Nutrition by Joshua Rosenthal. The idea that different foods were good for different people blew my mind, as did Joshua’s concept of primary food. Primary food, he says, is actually your relationships with family, friends, and coworkers, your connection to nature and whatever your version of spirituality is, your chosen career path, and your physical activity. All of these things, combined with delicious whole foods, are what make a healthy person. I was so intrigued that I immediately signed up for the year-long course in health and nutrition at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition®. The experience was nothing short of life-changing.

Since graduating from that program in July 2013, my condition has improved significantly. I still have digestive health issues on rare occasions, and I still have days now and then where I feel awful, or think I am not good enough or cool enough or pretty enough or fill-in-the-blank enough. However, I have also gotten to know my body, my true home, so much better, including what works for her and what does not. And I’ve made the fundamental connection between body, mind and spirit – how each one affects the other.

Do you know what’s even better? I discovered that it’s our true nature