Hi, my friends.
It’s taken me a minute to get this episode up — I actually recorded it 3 weeks ago, but then *Life* had it’s way with me. But here we are, almost a month later but right on track with my goal of being imperfect and showing up anyways :)
A little note about where we’re going from here:
When I launched this project, it was such a relief to know I wasn’t trying to teach, preach, or prove anything. I just wanted a space to show up and have real, honest conversations about my experiences and what I’ve learned along the way. I gotta say, I’ve been flustered by the response - I didn’t realize how much that energy would resonate with everyone! But after so many of you reached out after Episode 1 saying how refreshing it was to hear someone not striving for perfection, I’ve been feeling like I do actually *kind of* need to define what this podcast is about.
It might surprise you, given that I’m a nutritionist who mostly shares overflowing plates of seasonal vegetables and the finer points of intestinal permeability, but my relationship to health has always been about more than what you eat.
What I’ve come to realize is that everything I care most deeply for — everything I’ve lived and worked through — falls under three interwoven pillars of Health:
Body, Mind, and Spirit.
But for this second installment of the podcast, the body is where we’re going to start. Or more specifically, my body, and the experience of living in a very sensitive one that has required continual care, repair, and lessons that continue to humble me.
This tale has everything:
* Growing up on Hot Pockets and Marie Callender’s chicken pot pies
* Drinking Pepto Bismol daily throughout college
* Years of digestive distress, chronic illness, and autoimmune issues that forced me to reevaluate my whole life
* Tyrannical fashion stylists and debilitating travel-related infections
* Worsening my health problems with trendy plant based diets and agave smoothies
* Discovering functional medicine and ancestral nutrition and truly recovering my health by doing the opposite of what the wellness world was fixated on at the time
* Opening Honey Hi with zero experience and a dream to change the world — and proceeding to run myself into the ground again (Hey, I never said it was glamorous.)
What you hear here really lays the groundwork for how my philosophy around healing and wellness has evolved over the years.
In the second half of the episode, I open up about what I haven’t shared publicly yet: how pregnancy and postpartum exposed massive new layers of imbalance I didn’t see coming, and the identity crisis of being a health professional whose body just kept falling apart.
This episode is as much a story about food as it is about resilience, self-trust, and the humbling lifelong work of coming back to yourself.
For the next chapter, we’ll turn to the mind. This one’s a colorful tale, too — living with a debilitating anxiety disorder, OCD, ADHD, uncovering long-masked neurodivergence as an adult, and what it’s meant to move through the world as a highly sensitive person. It’s a story I haven’t told fully before, and I’m excited, hopeful (and nervous!) to open it up here with you all.
As always, thanks for listening,
xo
Kacie
*** At 1 hour and 15 minutes there’s a little addendum about how I nearly rerecorded this entire thing but decided to keep it; be sure not to miss it :)
At the bottom of each episode, I’ll try to always share a few resources that I’ve used over the years that might be able to help you in your own bodily exploration. For the body, here are some of my most trusted resources:
Function Lab Testing : Function Health is a membership service that tests 100+ biomarkers twice a year— from hormones and nutrients to toxins and inflammation — through a quick visit to Quest Diagnostics. Results are tracked in an online dashboard so you can spot changes, catch issues early, and make informed health decisions. The dashboard is so snazzy and contains a ton of resources to help you learn about each biomarker, and what lifestyle, food and supplement related changes you could make to improve them. I wish this had been around when I was younger - I’ll be a member for life.
Chris Kresser : My most trusted functional medicine practitioner. His website has a wealth of information about nearly every condition under the sun, including free E-Books that are well-researched and evidence based. His podcast is exceptional and just the right level of nerding out.
Adapt Naturals: The line of supplements created by Chris Kresser that I implicitly trust and use myself. These are some of the highest quality supplements you can find and I love that he builds most of the products with synergistically supportive nutrients to give maximum benefit. I was so happy when he came out with this line and I am a gung-ho supporter of them. Their Bio-Avail Organ complex is my favorite way to get your iron stores up and support healthy hormone production.
Genova GI Effects Test: A thorough at-home stool test that checks how well you're digesting fats, proteins and carbohydrates, whether there's inflammation or imbalances in your microbiome, and if there's any infection or leaky gut—kind of a gut-health deep dive. With scoring across digestion, inflammation, dysbiosis, metabolites, and infection, it’s designed to help clinicians pinpoint underlying issues and guide targeted support. You need to work with a functional medicine doctor to order this test.
DUTCH Plus + Urine & Saliva Hormone Test: Urine is a much more reliable marker than blood when it comes to hormones, and this test tracks at a specific time in your cycle, multiple times a day and even through the night to get a full picture of sex hormones and cortisol patterns.
Continuous Glucose Monitor: I love the Stelo monitor which you can order without a prescription. I pair it with the Nutrisense app for more advanced analysis of blood sugar trends. It also makes it easy to snap a photo of your meal and it will analyze both the nutrition and your body’s response to it. They also have nutritionists who are covered by insurance! So helpful to talk to them about your trends, questions, and what tweaks you can make to your diet and lifestyle to better balance your blood sugar.
Any other specific resources you’re looking for, just let me know and I can try to include them :)
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