About

I grew up with my share of Mc Donald’s, Sizzler’s and ice cream. But I was mostly well-fed a traditional Korean diet consisting of rice, fish, miso soups, kimchee and veggies. I loved lettuce wraps, spaghetti, and kimchee stew; I wasn’t very picky in general but didn’t like cheese (or what I knew as cheese – Kraft American Singles!) or mayo or alfredo sauce. Far from my colleagues with hippie upbringings and also far from those who grew up on canned corn and pizza, I rarely caught colds and only missed one day of school during K-12 from illness (a short lived stomach bug). (I got the chicken pox and a few bouts of the flu during my vacations! ha!)

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That was... until my senior year of high school. I started experiencing debilitating menstrual cramps – self diagnosed by month two because the doctor my mom (who obviously never had cramps) took me to told me I was constipated! During that “time of the month”, I would be in intense pain, freezing cold, rolling on the floor, unable to eat or sleep and spent the better part of those days in bed wrapped around a heating pad. Pain killers only dulled the pain and I needed so many that I rarely used them. I missed mid-terms in college and was lying on the grass, in tears, on my college graduation day. This went on for 9 years.

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During college, I developed stomach pains which were very frequent – which I now attribute to irregular meals, lack of stress and overwork – and when I had extreme cramps, the indigestion got worse. I only dared to eat a few meals of porridge because the more my digestion had to work, the worse my cramps were. Once I learned where my deficiencies were and how to heal my stomach, I was able to heal from these digestive pains.

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I tried visiting a few doctors in college and each one had one solution for my cramps: birth control pills. But my intuition told me it just wasn’t the answer. I felt that they had missed the point. I wasn’t trying to prevent birth. I wasn’t trying to mask my pain. I wanted to know why. I wanted to know what was wrong in my body. It wouldn’t be for another 15 years, with the birth of my first son that I found out that I had had severe endometriosis.

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By this time though, I had already rid of those dreaded cramps. As I made my way through nutrition school and my internship, I learned to heal my digestion, detox heavy metals and balance my thyroid. By doing so, my indigestion was resolved; my energy soared; and nails started growing thicker and faster among other improvements. However, though the cramps decreased in degree, they weren’t gone. I worked with many women and helped them rid menstrual symptoms, including cramps, but I would still always experience a big dip in energy and have some degree of pain during my cycle. I had forgotten about one the of the main roots of illness that I dig for in my clients’ history. Injuries. It was a collegue I met at a seminar who insisted that I must have an injury in my lower body. I could not put my finger on it and a week later, I remembered! I had suffered a pretty bad body-boarding injury where both of my legs got gouged by coral reef a few months before the cramps had started.  Since I cleared that injury, those cramps and all the associated symptoms have been gone!​

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