And then through these years of chronic stress and inflammation, my immune system became dangerously weak. I was prescribed antibiotics repeatedly — eight times in just a few years — and my body started not to respond to them well and I ended up getting such a severe case of pneumonia that I nearly died from it, and it took three separate rounds to finally recover.​

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After that, I committed — yet again — to rebuilding my health. I changed my diet, added new supplements that promised to support immunity, and doubled down on strengthening my body. I still had acne, painful periods, and chronic muscle aches — but I truly believed I was getting better. The next time I got sick, I was able to fight it off without antibiotics. And then for an entire year, I didn’t catch anything, and this gave me the confidence to travel again because I was convinced my immune system had finally bounced back.

But after an overseas flight — almost exactly two years after being hospitalized with pneumonia — I quickly developed yet another lung infection and ended up in the hospital again. This time, the antibiotics triggered such a severe candida overgrowth in my gut that I became resistant to antibiotics and antifungal treatment. So while in severe agony (whenever the pain medication I was given would wear off it felt like I was being stung by a swarm of hornets inside of me), I started frantically researching about what candida overgrowth was, and I learned I needed to starve the fungus out. As I was in a foreign country and did not have a way to get myself antifungal herbs, I decided to eat tons and tons of raw garlic (which made me feel soooo incredibly sick to my stomach) and I only ate zucchini, chicken, lentils, and plain yogurt for weeks. I cut out anything that could possibly turn into sugar in my body. Slowly, I got the candida into remission enough that I wasn’t in constant agony anymore.

But something still wasn’t right. My acne became worse than ever, I started having eczema, my hair started splitting more than ever, and many other symptoms kept flaring. So over the next year, I kept studying and experimenting, and then I finally uncovered the missing piece: I hadn’t fully eliminated the candida or truly healed my gut. I’d just suppressed it. To break free from the cycle, I had to learn how to support detox pathways, rebuild the gut lining, and remove the deeper root causes. 

That’s when everything began to shift. Because just taking healthy supplements wasn’t enough. If I wasn’t pairing them with each other correctly, strategically, I was actually doing more harm than good to my body.