#1: Who am I? My Gut Healing and Diet Journey

Hey!

I understand what it's like to "try it all" and feel stuck, desperate and confused when nothing works. I get it because I've been there...

I was a young girl that was so passionate about health, yet went through a horrible gut journey and struggled to find answers, and it really seemed unfair to me at the time.

Now I look back and it's a blessing because if I didn't go through this journey, I wouldn't be where I am today, teaching other women around the world how to heal their gut concerns.

The issues I struggled with 9 years ago that doctors couldn’t diagnose!

I wanted to get into who I am, what my story is and why I specialise in weight loss because a lot of people might look at me and think, “oh, she's got it easy, why are you a weight loss nutritionist”? “Why does she specialise in that? As if she knows how it feels”. That couldn't be further from the truth.

I also have to try hard every day.

The way I eat for my weight maintenance is actually how I teach others about weight loss because I believe that the way that you lose weight should be the way that you maintain it.

After all, it isn't easy for most women. We do have to try, especially if we want to have a bit more food and drinks on the weekend.

Of course, there are some lucky women out there that can stay slim and that are naturally slim. But for me, it's not that way, I promise.

So, it's not just my weight journey that I have been through….

I'm going to go back to the beginning.

One of the biggest things that I overcame was a gut healing journey. If we rewind 8 years when I was about 17, I was a healthy young girl and I grew up in a healthy household. I was fit and I was exercising quite a lot but then randomly I started to get these stomachaches, I could manage them at first when they were only coming around once a week. Then when I hit 19, things started to get really, really bad for me. I was getting stomach aches daily, I was so bloated, there was so much gas in there and unfortunately for me, I also suffered from chronic constipation.

When I was 20 and 21 things only got worse and worse. It wasn't making sense to me because I was eating well, I was moving my body and drinking lots of water. I was doing my own research because I was obsessed with health, I was always picking up the health magazines when most people would pick up the gossip ones. I was a human biology nerd at school, it was my favourite subject, I even got a prize for it which I'll always drop in and claim in conversations. I really am fascinated by the human body and how it works, which lead me to feel so frustrated when I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with mine!

Why get multiple opinions, listen to your gut and never give up?

My mum was taking me to see specialists in Perth, where I live in Australia. I saw a gastroenterologist and different GP's and they all said that there was nothing wrong with me, I just needed to eat more fiber.

When you pay that much money to see a specialist and they tell you that everything is fine and you walk out knowing that everything isn't fine. It's really heartbreaking and it was taking a huge toll on my quality of life.

One doctor gave me magnesium that had to be made up at a compounding chemist, it was so horrible, I had to take five capsules every 15 minutes. They made me feel so bloated, gave me the runs and made me feel nauseous. That's what I was told I needed to do, give yourself a clean-out once a week!

If I wasn't hungry for more answers and if I didn't do more research myself, maybe I would have stuck with that same mindset and believed him because he was a specialist at the end of the day. This gives me a huge amount of passion for really inspiring you guys because I really want you to know that not one single person will have the answer to your problem.

Sometimes it does take listening to your gut, knowing that you deserve more and searching for more answers because I promise there are answers out there to everything that you're going through. You just have to really do your research and listen to the right people and then end up working with someone that can diagnose you.

After even flying to Sydney, to the center of digestive disease which was another six or seven hundred dollars to see a specialist over. I was told that I had a type of bacteria and to go in this antibiotic without any testing!! I went on this antibiotic called vancomycin, which is such a strong antibiotic. I wish I knew back then, but it’s so strong that my good bacteria were actually completely stripped out. I didn't know much about gut bacteria back then because the science looking into gut health wasn't that strong yet.

By this time I had really bad energy levels and was developing anxiety and because of these issues I couldn't work through. I was also fluctuating with my weight a lot. That really upset me because I was counting my calories to a T and I felt starving. This lead me to restricting myself throughout the day then I would eat more weekends and ending up feeling so crap on Monday. There were days that I felt puffy in the face, felt heavier than I should and my energy was so low.

I had a whole host of other symptoms that went along with my bloating and chronic constipation concerns, which helped me. It sparked me on my journey through research. I asked myself what's causing this weight gain? How to lose weight is all connected to all of these different things.

It wasn't until I bumped into a woman who was an integrative doctor and we got chatting about my gut health. I'm so blessed that she walked into the little shop that I was working. I was at a little gift shop around the corner while I was studying for my degree, and she was mortified. She said to me, why are you on that antibiotic? That is completely ruining your gut even more, you have to come to see me and we need to do some tests.

My unexpected diagnosis and how it transformed my life:

I was researching like a maniac whilst I was studying for my Bachelor of Science nutrition degree, which was very heavily science-based. I was learning a lot and it was really interesting to put things together, but I still didn't have any answers for myself and I felt stuck, frustrated and just so lost until I went to see Ruth.

Ruth Cullity was my amazing integrative doctor. She was a beautiful woman who listened to me and did the right tests. I call her the gut expert because she helped me figure it out. We did a food sensitivity test and it came back that I was highly sensitive to all grains, soy, wheat, gluten, dairy and eggs.

I didn't think that those foods were unhealthy because they're healthy foods, but my gut didn't like them. When I figured that out and then cut those foods out of my diet, oh my gosh, it was game-changing. I stopped bloating as much and I knew if I kept this up, my gut would slowly heal.

That was one piece to my puzzle. The second piece to my puzzle was that I got diagnosed with a slow thyroid. I can't explain the feeling when she told me that I've got a slow thyroid and I had all of these food sensitivities. I also had to go on lots of different supplements to correct the balance of my gut bacteria.

I felt so overwhelmed thinking, how is so much wrong with me when I have done everything right? However, the other half of me just felt this overwhelming feeling of relief, I was finally given answers to all of my years of struggle.

When I walked out of that appointment, I had the biggest feeling of empowerment. I also walked out thinking, Bec you have a duty now.

You have a purpose, you have to help other women like you transform their gut health and weight loss journey so that they don't have to go through what I went through!

The approach I follow consistently keeps me bloat and hunger-free:

When I was in my final year of my Bachelor of Science Nutrition degree, it was all starting to make sense. I was also training with some Brazilian trainers in Perth, they were heavily into a lower carb diets so I tried to follow a low carb diet for a while and I felt incredible! The reason I originally did it is that it fitted in well with my food sensitivities.

I found it so easy to follow because it was a lot of vegetables, really good quality meats, nuts and healthy fats. When I started doing that, my gut started improving and I wasn't hungry and I can't explain how game-changing that was for me.

I had gone from following a diet that was low in fat because I thought it's high in calories and starving every day with low energy. To transitioning to a lower carb, higher fat diet. I was actually able to maintain my weight far more easily and even better I was getting to the weekend and I wouldn't feel that need to rebel and overeat.

Figuring this out, changing my diet and also excluding my food sensitivities whilst on the right supplementation, I slowly started to feel better and better and better. I became so obsessed with this lifestyle that I learned for myself that I had to get it out there to other women. Learn all about this approach here

Where my passion stemmed from and how it grew my business to where it is today?

Within this time I finished my nutrition degree. I had learned nothing about business, it was just the science, the food and the facts but I just knew I needed to start a business. I wanted to consult women one on one and I'm so glad that I did that! I have loved every single minute of the last five years, the reward that I get from helping women overcome these issues that they have been struggling with for years and years, is honestly the best feeling I can describe!

I wake up with purpose every single day. I LOVE inspiring women with this lifestyle that cured me of my gut issues and my weight fluctuations.

For the first two years of my business, I consulted women one on one and I was making personalized meal plans for health-conscious women that things weren't making sense for. These meal plans were extremely personalized, I would spend a whole hour with them chatting, really listening to them, because I was so put off by all the doctors and professionals that I could tell weren't listening to me.

Slowly, one by one lives were changing and they were messaging me, saying Bec, I can't believe it, I've lost this amount of weight and I haven't been hungry and my bloating is gone. I went from seeing maybe one client a week for my first year and then in my second year, things just hit the fan and it became full time. It had got to the point where I'd made so many meal plans and had worked with just over 400 women.

Once I had worked with hundreds of women, I started to see even more that they all had very similar concerns and a similar approach worked for all of them. This is when I could finally make my first meal plan that I was hoping to sell to lots of different women, because my goal, mission and purpose have always been to help as many women in the world as I can.

This is when I made my first e-book so that I could merge the foods and themes that seemed to work for so many of these women to create my signature plan, the 3 Week Body Reset. Thousands of women around the world have now been transformed from this plan. It is helping women slim down without the hunger and lose their bloating concerns and want to keep it up as a lifestyle.

It's super exciting to know that my journey and my passion for nutrition research and knowledge about the body led to now me helping thousands of thousands of women around the world.

A year and a half ago I got to another point when I realised these women are loving the plan. I would then take consults when they had finished the 3 Week Body Reset to help them further. This is because obviously, three weeks isn't enough to make serious long term change for most women. After a while I couldn't fit as many in as I wanted and just wasn't making sense. That’s when I decided to start the Health with Bec Tribe, which is the membership of women I help to this day.

The women in the Tribe are so incredible. They are following a low carb lifestyle so that they stop the yoyo dieting, never feel hungry and can work it in with their lives!

So many women's lives are changing and I love teaching them. I can't even explain to you how beautiful, kind and supportive they are. Every time I talk about them, I get a tear in my eye because I don't know how I have attracted such an incredible community of women.