IBS. Autoimmune Disease. Anxiety. Insomnia. And I'll just go ahead and say it out loud, depression. A chronic, painful, 15 year cycle. 5 colonoscopies before the age of 30. $25K of my hard earned money trying to figure out why my body was so broken. All while continuing to grind at my high-profile NYC corporate jobs, because work comes first, right?
Forget work. Let's talk about dating.
It's hard enough. But dating in New York City? That's a whole different beast. Telling a cute stranger that I haven't had a bowel movement in over a week - and that I couldn't eat 90% of the menu at this expensive restaurant he brought me to - isn't quite the ice breaker.
So I ate it all. I hid it all. I faked my smile. I faked my health. Until I just couldn't anymore.
I felt so broken.
The truth is, it's the system that's broken. $1,000 to book a specialist. Six months for the appointment. Two hours in the waiting room. Ten minutes with the doctor. "It's the stress. Have you tried going gluten free? Get more steps in."
You leave, you book the next one, you hope the next test reveals something. It never does. Meanwhile the industry hands you tests, supplements, programs at absurd prices. And they can, because we are desperate enough to pay at the slightest hope of healing.
By my 30s I was unrecognizable. Infusion treatments between meetings. Steroids that wrecked me. Medications I couldn't pronounce. The isolation took over. I hated what I felt like, what I looked like: constantly bloated, nothing fit anymore. My job was suffering, relationships were suffering. I was losing control of everything. And the stress of it all just made it worse. The cycle ran.
My husband watched it all unfold, until he just couldn't anymore. He said: we're going to figure this out ourselves. So he started building. Every meal. Every bowel movement. Every medication. Every mood. Find the pattern. Predict the flare. Stop the flare.
"Predict the flare." Sounds like a dream. Except, it worked. It is the only thing that has ever worked.
My husband built this app to heal me.
Now we're building it to heal the world.