Growing up, I was always athletic. I also really cared about all things wellness and paid attention to what I ate. You know, stuff you have time for before “real life” hits?

After college, where I got degrees in business and in nutrition,  I worked a couple of jobs that were really intense, inclusive of 80 hour work weeks, and no time to even consider my own human needs.

These jobs included lots of traveling, which meant I was nowhere near a kitchen and couldn’t even remember what a healthy energy level felt like, or the inside of a yoga studio…

I started to lose myself, there just wasn’t time for all the things I was passionate about like cooking, working out, and eating healthy. In fact, there was hardly time for me to catch a deep breath.

As a result, I was in and out of the hospital. It turned out that all my problems were related to stress, not moving my body, and not eating well. As I now well know, and teach, if you don’t listen to your body: it will use physical symptoms to YELL (not tell) you to WAKE UP.

Hospitalization the umpteenth time was enough for me to quit the 80-hour-traveling-job, and begin to breathe my way back to normal. I started finding myself again, and it felt incredible. I was cooking again, which I love to do, and working from home. It was such a nice equilibrium inducer.

Then, when I felt the pressure to rejoin ‘normal’ society and thought I was strong enough, I got a second even more stressful corporate job, and again, the stress led to being hospitalized. Of course, it didn’t happen all at once. I thought my time away had helped me created lasting habits so that this time, the job wouldn’t break me.

Unfortunately, my body did not agree with my mind.

In this second round of corporate jobs, I dropped a lot of weight in an unhealthy way and developed really bad cystic acne. My body wasn’t absorbing nutrients and everything I ate was going right through me. I experienced the lowest days of my life and felt more frustrated than ever.

When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t even recognize myself, so I began to avoid eye contact. I couldn’t look at all the pimples on my face. I didn’t go out in public and stayed in the house unless absolutely necessary to depart.

When I did leave, it was to try to clear my face, I spent a lot of time making the rounds in San Diego, going to doctors, aestheticians, and dermatologists. Everyone wanted to put me on birth control, antibiotics, or Accutane. I had a bad experience with birth control. I was on it for 8 years and it took almost 2 years to get my body cycling again. And, of course, I didn’t want to antibiotics for no real reason other than, “let’s just see if this works!” 

During my doctor rounds, I found my now-partner Danielle who owns San Diego Acne Clinic.

Danielle has a bio-chem background and has studied with top dermatologists and aestheticians in California. Her methods are science-backed but with natural modalities mixed in. She’s amazing. During my first appointment, she requested I bring in every product I was using and supplements I was taking and we sat together for over an hour-and-a-half going through everything together.

Danielle improved my life in more ways than one, especially because, I failed to mention, I was EIGHT months away from several huge, PUBLIC events in my life… and my skin had reached its eruption point.

Until I found her, I had no clue I was ingesting almost 11 acne triggers (and stress triggers) every day.

Danielle and I naturally developed into friends over my appointment visits and we soon realized that our skill sets complemented each other. She had been developing a brand called CLEARstem and would often send me home with things to test out. I had a business and marketing background, so we decided to become partners. Within a few months, we launched CLEARstem for people like me, who had tried everything, and wanted a natural lifeline out of acne stress.

This meant a new friend, a window out of my hospital-inducing corporate career, and a new passion, to boot. I was happy and optimistic for the first time, in a long time and I felt much more confident about heading back out into public again, and I was ready to make a difference too.

I’m so grateful for the signals my body gave me, including acne, that led me to my current life. Meeting Danielle, and creating CLEARstem has given me a platform to share little tips on social media about how I’m getting movement into my day, how I’m finding time to spend with my family and friends and how I’m eating well on busy work days without spending hours in the kitchen.

It’s my mission to inspire and encourage every woman I can to realize they can find time to be happy, to be supportive of others, and be the best version of themselves. And as always, to listen to the signals their body is begging them to hear. Our bodies are our friends and they just want us to be happy. It’s up to us to listen, adjust, and prosper.