Read the Transcript:

Hello there and welcome back to The Live FAB Life Podcast. I'm your host, Naomi Nakamura.

In the last episode, I shared my approach to marrying Functional Nutrition and Human Design to heal your health and in that episode, I used the example of work-related stress.

Today, I'm continuing that conversation, in the context of my own health and sharing an update on how things are going. You can find the backstory of my current health challenges in Episode 211, where I shared how I was addressing skin issues with my approach to Functional Nutrition with Human Design.

There was a lot of interest in that because it’s been one of the most popular episodes thus far this year. And so, today I want to, one, provide you an update because I’ve received a lot of questions asking how things are going. I didn’t realize how many of you also struggle with eczema or other types of skin issues, so, as I said, there's a lot of interest in the topic.

Before I go on, I’m experimenting with different parts of my Human Design, one of which is taking you along the journey and sharing my experiences so that you can see if it might be something that you might be interested in for yourself. That's the thing with Human Design – it’s an experiment.

I’m not sure which episode it was, but I recently shared how I have a hard time sharing my journey as it's happening. Part of it is a struggle with perfection, with not feeling ready enough and not knowing enough and so this is my experiment to work through that and align to my design.

Speaking about my experiences is of the active gates in my Throat center, and how I’m meant to express the energy of that center.

I view this level of detail in my Human Design as taking a functional approach to health. Diving into the individual gates is like peeling things back and seeing what’s under the layers.

The top layer is Types, Strategies, and Authorities. But what determines Types, Strategies, and Authorities? Your defined and undefined centers. And what determines which centers are defined and undefined? Well, the gates and this is where I'm spending a lot of my time now in my Human Design experiment.

With there being 64 Gates, it’s a lot to take in and not something that you just go through in a month or two. These are lifelong journeys. I’m also really, really trying to follow my intuition, my Splenic Authority, noting when I get instinctual hits. And that's partly how this episode came about. It wasn’t the episode I originally planned for this week, but I felt prompted to share my journey in its present moment, so I'm following Gate 35 and speaking about my experiences.

I brought back Functional Nutrition Assessments to my service offerings, so I thought I’d share what it is, the process and output of it, in the context of my current health struggles.

I shared the backstory of what’s going on in Episode 211, if you didn't listen to it, long story short, I started having some skin issues, specifically on my armpits last summer and I initially thought it was heat rash. I was born and raised in hot and humid Hawaii, weather that I don’t enjoy, but I’d never had heat rashes or anything like it before.

Finally, in early September, I realized that it might be more than a heat rash. So, I went to see my primary care physician who said that it was a fungal infection and prescribed anti-fungal meds which cleared up the affected area, but newly affected areas kept appearing. So, she prescribed another round of anti-fungal meds and the same thing happened. So, she referred me to a dermatologist.

The first (of two) dermatologists that I saw, and by this point it was a month after I first saw my primary care doctor, prescribed a topical medication. Again, it cleared up the affected areas, but new areas kept appearing, to which she said, “Well let's give it another couple of weeks” By now, it’s November and yet another month had gone by. As you can imagine I was getting frustrated. The medications proved that they cleared up the skin, but it didn’t answer why new, at this point I was calling it lesions, kept appearing.

So, I didn't follow back up with her even though the problem continued and progressively got worse. At the end of December, a friend of mine said, “I'm starting to get concerned about this for you.” That was when I decided that couldn’t keep ignoring it.

For a hot minute. I thought it might be bug bites. I took Coco Pop, my dog to the vet to check for fleas, which she didn't have. I had pest control come out to check my home for bed bugs. Not only were there bedbugs, but there were also no bugs at all. But I still got rid of rugs and deep cleaned my house, but my skin just wasn’t getting better.

I decided it was time to see the dermatologist again except the dermatologist that I originally saw was on maternity leave. So, I saw a backup dermatologist who was completely unhelpful. It was the worst doctor’s visit I’ve ever had. It was so one of those terrible experiences that makes you understand why people don't like to go to the doctor. It was utterly frustrating and demoralizing. During the visit, the doctor could tell I was getting upset and she called it out. I was like, “Well if they’re gonna call it out, I’m gonna be honest about what I’m feeling – in a respectful way, of course. And I reminded them that it was now January, so my insurance deductible reset, and that useless doctor's visit was going to cost me $280 – for a useless 10-minute visit. I mean, I had to ask them if they even wanted to examine my skin! That's how bad it was! They ended up prescribing another topical prescription and said there was really nothing they could do and suggested that I live somewhere else for a few weeks to see if it was environmental which is so unrealistic, especially during a pandemic. Anyways, the lesions continued to appear, and the new medication didn’t help.

It finally got so bad to what I now understand was that I was experiencing a flare. This was in early to mid-March. It was a severe, bad, uncomfortable, and painful flare.

I messaged the first dermatologist that I saw who was now back from maternity leave and asked if there was anything else she could prescribe. She didn’t know that I was still struggling with this and asked me to come in and see her that same week, which is amazing because it's like a three-month wait to get a dermatology appointment.

When I went in, she did a skin biopsy. I had never ever had stitches before and even though it was only two or three stitches, I was nervous about it. Thankfully, it was pain-free, but while we waited for the biopsy results, my flare got worse.

I was prescribed prednisone just for the week while we waited for the results, just to give me some relief until we understood what was going on. I took it for four days and it did nothing to help me at all; it just gave me insomnia. Others who I talked to who had taken Prednisone before said that they saw immediate results. But for me - nothing. That's how much of a chaotic state my immune system was in.

It got to a point where I got really scared about how bad my skin was getting so, I messaged the doctor. It happened to be her day off, but she asked me to send her some photos. I did and she called me on her personal cell phone right away – that’s how bad it was. By chance, the biopsy results had come back right then, a few days early, and within a day or two, she had me in her office to start my treatment plan.

The biopsy indicated that I had nummular eczema, which is a form of eczema where you have lesions that group together and form round circles that look like coins. I don't speak Latin, but I guess nummular means “coin” Latin, hence, nummular eczema. The umbrella term for it is “atopic dermatitis.”

I started phototherapy three times a week, which I’m still doing. It’s been so helpful but what helps the most is that I see the dermatology nurses three times a week and have the opportunity to ask them questions and get their advice while going through this treatment.

In addition to phototherapy, I'm also taking a specialty medication called Dupixent. You’ve probably seen a commercial for it. It’s injectable that blocks certain cytokines that are causing confusion in the immune system. The expectation was that it could take one to two months before it kicked in, but the pharmacist at the specialty pharmacy that sent it to me said it was more realistic to expect three to six months before seeing the full effect.

So, I’m now doing both treatments of phototherapy and Dupixent. I started them at the end of March and at the time of this recording, on the last day of May, I’d say that my skin is 90% better.

When I had my first dose of Dupixent, we had a hard time finding a clear area to inject it – that’s how bad my skin was. The only places that didn’t appear were thankfully on my face and feet. It was even on my scalp.

I still have mini-flares every now and thing in specific spots, but I understand that my immune system is adjusting and healing – it’s a process.

Since January, I’ve been tracking, keeping very detailed notes of everything going on - what I ate, how I slept, anything to collect clues as to what might be going on and why.

This is the approach of Functional Nutrition - to collect data so we can put our detective caps on and look for clues to put the puzzle together of what's going on.

Before I move on with how to do that, one last update is that I had noticed that when it's windy outside the symptoms, the itching and redness, started to flare up, and it gets windy where I live. So, one of the nurses that I see during my photo therapy treatments recommended taking Allegra. If it helped alleviate the symptoms, then I should consider also seeing an allergist for allergy testing. So, I did, and Allegra did help minimize symptoms, and last week I saw an allergist. It took a month to get in to see them.

It was one of the best doctors’ appointments I’ve ever had – and that includes appointments with functional medicine and integrative medicine doctors and naturopaths.

The allergist spent a full hour with me, mostly having a conversation to understand my health history and my current situation, gathering information that might shed light on clues for things that hadn’t been considered before.

So, all that being said, let's get how I’ve been taking a functional approach to my current health condition.

The approach I’ve taken, as I do with all my clients, is to start with a Functional Nutrition Assessment, which is what I've recently added back to my service offerings.

You might be asking, well, what’s a Functional Nutrition Assessment? It starts with completing an extensive questionnaire to collect data on health history. Some of the questions might be obvious, some may be questions you might not have considered when compiling your health history.

We collect this data and put the puzzle pieces together to get a bird’s eye view - get a big picture of what's going on - to see how things are interconnected.

So then, what do you do with the data that’s collected?

I've compiled my health history years ago and added to it each time something new happens and have shared it with my doctors and others on my healthcare team, and they've been appreciative of that level of detail.

So, as my skin condition became more serious, went back and took a look at my health history and noticed a couple of things in regard to it.

First, I remembered that my grandmother had skin issues. I lived with my grandma for a portion of my childhood, and I remember putting anti-itch creams on her back for the skin issues that she had. Also, knowing what I know now, I’m also convinced that she had undiagnosed and untreated thyroid issues as do I, but I’m being treated for my thyroid dysfunction.

Another observation is that my mother has an autoimmune condition. While she doesn’t have typical skin issues, the autoimmune condition is that she has a robs of moisture from her body which makes her skin very dry.

When I researched nummular eczema, I read that dry skin is a big factor in it. While I grew up in Hawaii, where it’s so very humid, I still always had dry skin. I remember, as a kid, my mom would always tell me to put lotion on my legs because my skin was so dry. But with the heat and humidity, I hated the feeling of lotion touching any part of my skin. I never got into the habit of using lotion until the past few years. And even then, my skin has always trended on the dry side dry legs, dry heels, and dry elbows.

Now, having atopic dermatitis/eczema, I'm making the connection that my grandma did have skin issues, my mother has an autoimmune condition that robs the body of moisture resulting in dry skin, and I'm convinced that they both have had untreated thyroid issues. I’m not saying these are direct connections to my situation, but it’s certainly something to take note of as I update my health history.

Also, autoimmune conditions run in my family with several family members having different ones. And there’s several people who also suffer from eczema, but, as far as I know, have not had it to the degree that my flare was. Again, things to take note of and document in my health history.

In addition to health history, the assessment also asks questions about your current lifestyle factors - How are you sleeping? How are you moving your body? What is your energy level like? What are you eating? How are you eating? These are all inputs that play a role in your daily health.

The third part that the assessment addresses potential environmental factors - Where do you live in the world? What’s the climate like? What personal care products to use? What products do you use in your home? What are the things in your environment that might be influencing your health? situation?

And then there's also the element of your social circles and community - How are your current relationships? Do you feel supported in these relationships?

Because as I talked about in the last episode, all these things are interconnected. We can’t think of health as mental health that’s separate from physical health. It's all health. It’s all related. So, we have to look at all these areas - we can't silo them, and I know that you know if you're here listening to this episode, you already know this - I'm not telling you anything you don't already know.

So that’s s a simple summary of the Functional Nutrition Assessment, but once you collect this data and document your health history, what do you do with it?

The next step in the process is to compile a functional timeline. I take the data that’s been collected and plot a timeline. For example, when a client is struggling with digestive issues, nothing that they traveled to Asia a couple of years prior is something to take note of and include in their functional timeline.

Then, we put together a matrix to create a visual representation of the data and timelines.

To clarify, I didn’t create these tools – the assessment, timeline, and matrix. These are tools are from my functional nutrition training at the Functional Nutrition Alliance that they provide to their students to use in our client work.

And then the output of all of that – the assessment, timeline, and matrix are an action plan with recommendations of things you can do in the immediate and consider doing in the long term.

So, with all of this is the hope that you might see different, expanded perspectives, and maybe illuminate some things you might have overlooked or some points you may not have connected together. Because remember, as I shared in the last episode, Functional Nutrition is a methodology of how to look at your health both from the big picture perspective and also as a puzzle to solve as you fit the pieces together.

You can also share these tools – your health history, timeline, and matrix with your doctor and other members of your healthcare team - your acupuncturist, chiropractor, or whoever is part of the team that takes care of you. And hopefully, they’re caring enough to take the team to look through it and consider the information you’ve taken the time to put together. Because we all know, most doctors just aren’t allotted the time to go this in-depth with you and collect possible contributing factors to whatever it is you’re struggling with.

I first shared my information with my integrative doctor in, was it 2017-ish. They’d never seen data pulled together in these formats and were appreciative of it, gained insight from it, and added it to my medical records.

During my recent visit with the allergist, I shared earlier, we went through my health history, and they noted that I was being treated for thyroid dysfunction which is an indication of hormonal imbalances. They asked me for more information about why I’ve been taking progesterone. It was because of poor sleep that was so debilitating the thought process was that if were to supplement my progesterone production on certain days of my cycle, perhaps it would optimize my hormonal balances and help me sleep.

The reason they zeroed in on this was that there’s such a thing as progesterone-induced eczema. I’d never heard of it, so he pulled up some information on it and we read through it together. This is what partnership with a health care provider should look like and by the way, he's not a functional medicine doctor, integrative medicine doctor, or a naturopath. They’re an allergist, who did all the things and treated me in a way I ever hope for from a practitioner.

So, they pulled up information on progesterone-induced eczema and we read through it together. While we don’t know if it’s a contributing factor to my condition, we talked about ways to experiment to find out if it is. And in a lot of cases, experimentation is the only way to decipher these things.

This is why it takes so long to figure out what’s going on for people with chronic illnesses and chronic symptoms. This is why it takes a long time to identify root causes. It takes a long time because there's so many, often complicated, things going on. There's different inputs that lab work and supplements can’t shed light on.

So, in my case, we decided that I'm going to stop taking the progesterone for three months and see what happens. This times perfectly with my next appointment with my integrative doctor who prescribed the progesterone for me. We're going to if it has any impact on my skin condition, as well as my sleep.

In the meantime, I’m doing patch testing to test for contact dermatitis meaning is there anything that I'm putting on my body that could also be a contributing factor? I scheduled patch testing back in March and the first availability for it is the first week of June. That's another reason why some of these things take so long to tease out.

I experienced something similar back when I was struggling with chronic digestive issues and SIBO.

You try something and then wait a little bit and see what happens, and then decide the next course of action. It’s trial and error. All these things take time to figure out and the whole process can be stressful, which just adds to the stress you’re already feeling.

And this is where Human Design comes in. In the last episode, I talked about the different kinds of stress we experience and how that makes stress the root cause of much of what suffer from.

In my situation, skin issues are a result of dysfunction in the immune system – it’s not functioning in the way that it’s meant to. In Human Design, the immune system is an embodiment of the Spleen Center. The Spleen Center is about fear, survival instincts, and health. It also happens to be my authority – Splenic Authority. In peeling back the layers, I had to admit that I’ve been struggling with a lot of fears. Pandemic-related fears, but also fears within me.

At the height of my flare, as I shared in Episodes 214 and 215, I was struggling with expressing myself – my voice. I knew my voice and my message, but I wasn't feeling confident about how to express it. I was having self-doubts. In Human Design the Throat center is about communication, messaging, tone – how we express ourselves and while it’s a defined center in my design, I felt lost and was out of alignment with it.

Having a podcast, and social media are places in which I express myself, but it’s also how I tap into my creativity which was also feeling stifled and out of alignment. The Sacral center is the center of creativity, along with lifeforce energy, and I was feeling the stress from misalignment. At times, I was in angst about it, and it kept me up at night which resulted in poor sleep.

Add that on top of the many nights that my skin condition symptoms were so bad that I had to sleep with ice packs on my body. My skin felt like it was on fire and my high tread-count sheets hurt against my skin. Another layer of stress.

The Root Center is embodied by the adrenals which manage stress in our bodies.

Part of my feeling lost with my voice was not feeling that I was worthy of sharing what it is I share with you and that’s what the Heart center, undefined for me, is about - worth and ego.

I felt so many mixed emotions, the Solar Plexus center is the center of emotions.

At the beginning of the year, I started doing some shadow work, and personal growth work and I remember feeling angst because I didn't know what I wanted out of life – where I wanted life to take me, and in addition to being the center of identity and love, the G-Center is also about direction.

I was doing so much overthinking it felt debilitating and the surest signal that you’re not in alignment is overthinking.

So, in looking at my physical health, I always look at my mental and emotional health too because it's all so closely intertwined and Human Design is the framework that helps me put it all together, giving me context to help me understand me.

This past weekend, I spent time studying my incarnation cross. Side note, I haven't done an episode on the incarnation cross yet, but I do have one planned, but in studying at the gates in my incarnation cross, along with other gates in my design, looking at the shadow of those gates, the themes that stand out to me are pride and doubt - hesitating to take the stand when not everyone may be supportive, making assumptions about things that haven’t happened yet, the fear of imposing my will on others.

Talk about having the truth slammed in your face because admittedly if I’m being honest and transparent, these are contributing factors to feeling stifled in my voice and creativity.

It’s very clear to me that when I work through the shadows of pride and doubt, I’ll flourish in ways that I want to flourish. In my physical body, as well as mentally and emotionally too.

So, what am I doing now? I'm looking at each energy center and continuing with the individual gates of my incarnation cross, which by the way is your life's theme. So, as I’ve been asking myself, “What direction do I want my life to go in? I’ve been looking at my incarnation cross, which by the way, doesn’t tell you what to do, it illuminates what your life themes are, according to your Human Design, and it’s up to you to decide what to do with that.

So, as I look at the gates of my incarnation cross, I’m looking at what the gifts are, shadow, and then what alignment looks for each of those gates.

This is currently where I am in my Human Design experiment, as I work on healing my skin and seeing where they intersect or layer on each other. That’s how these things come together.

So, in my work, this is what I offer my clients – the Functional Nutrition Assessment, for those who are dealing with some chronic health issues that they are just really confused about. And they really want to see the bigger picture but maybe they just aren't able to yet, and then the beginner level Human Design Readings, as well as a more advanced reading – for those who want more introspection and bring those things together.

Then, in one-on-one coaching, we dive into deeper parts of your design, peeling back the layers, looking at the energies of your different centers, the different gates that are active, and seeing what’s illuminated, what are the gifts and shadows of those gates and centers, and how they could support healing in your physical health.

And that my friends, is in a nutshell, is how I help clients and the kind of work that I do, and it’s the process that I'm taking myself through right now.

At the start of this episode, I shared how sharing this journey as its happening in real-time versus after the fact, is part of the shadow work that I’m doing and now that we’re closing out the episode, it feels good to have shared all of this with you because normally I would have waited until after the fact to share it.

But as I said, chronic issues, whether they be of a physical nature or otherwise, take a long time to tease out, so if I were to wait to share, it might never be shared.

To me its no wonder that I felt stifled in my voice, creativity, emotions, direction – all of it.

Working through all of this feels good. It’s not easy at all, but it's empowering, it feels free and it feels worth it. It has me feeling so much more comfortable in my skin - pun intended, kind of.

So, there you have it - an update on my health because many of you have asked, and a complete look at the direction of my coaching work - the direction that I want to see it go in. This is how I want to help people. This is deep – it’s intricate stuff.

But this is the stuff that I'm here for as a 1-line, a researcher who likes to go deep into things, and as a 3rd-line who is all about experimentation, learning from past experiences, and putting pieces together.

This work is aligned with my design and the more I study and get into the nuances, and the deep parts of it, it all just resonates so much. In hindsight, I repeatedly see the times I’ve been misaligned with my design – the times I adjusted myself to someone’s mold, and tried to fit myself as a square peg into a round hole. These things didn’t fit, but the more that I align myself with my Human Design it fits so well. As always, thank you for being here – for listening and sharing your time, energy, and attention with me, and hopefully, perhaps something I’ve shared here might be something that you consider in your own journey too.

It feels so good to bring you behind the scenes on my journey in real-time, and I'm excited to share more. I'll see you right back here again next time. Bye.