Chapter 1: How I Healed My Gut – The Beginning

How Gut Health, Grit, and God Brought Me Back to Life

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July 29, 2025. Today is a big day.

It’s the day I finally sit down and start documenting my dramatic healing story.

In November of 2023, at the age of 50, I suddenly became sick with a cough that wouldn’t go away. That led to many other health issues including a diagnosis of “acid reflux” and LPR. I lost my voice. I couldn’t digest my food anymore. I lost my appetite. I could barely get any food down. I lost weight. I had no energy. I couldn’t sleep. And all my doctors could say is, “You have reflux. Take this pill. Your endoscopy is in 6 months.”

I didn’t have 6 months. 

I also didn’t think “I just had reflux.” That may have been the symptom, but it wasn’t the cause. And so I resolved to question the medical establishment. To look for an answer. To find the underlying cause. To listen to my body. To advocate for my own health, educate myself, believe in a cure, and blaze a trail to find it.

My healing journey took me 1 year and 7 months. But looking back, knowing what I know, it didn’t have to take that long. I could have healed in 7 months, had I known what to do right away.

And that’s partly why I want to share my story with other people (like me) who might be searching for hope.

I’ve thought about sharing my story for months, but there was always some thought holding me back… 

• I wasn’t “healed enough” yet to claim that it worked. (At what point do you get to claim you’re “over it”? Is 90% good enough?)
• Imposter syndrome. Who am I to think I could step into the space and “help someone”?! I didn’t feel like I had the authority. I’m no doctor – just a farm wife who had to find her own way through the world of modern medicine, with a very personal story of healing. Maybe it only worked for me.
• I was afraid that the healing was temporary. I didn’t want to say, “This worked!” and then have it come back, and be called a liar. 
• I was afraid no one would believe me, because the solution ended up being quite simple. In the end, it wasn’t “modern medicine” and drugs or expensive therapy that held the answer. It was “just my food.” And somehow that seemed to invalidate it.
• What if I give false hope to someone, they invest all this time trying out my suggestions, and my “advice” doesn’t work for them? When it comes to gut health, this isn’t a one-size-fits-all formula. Would they get any value from it?
• How do I start telling the story? There’s so much to say. It will take forever. Trying to synthesize the story into a digestible and helpful format seemed daunting.

Ultimately, I decided I just had to start. Instead of trying to write the grand opus all at once, and have everything follow the perfect sequence and tie it all together – I am just going to write one chapter at a time. I will aim to write one chapter per week, but I’m also not putting any pressure on myself. If I’m late or early – that’s okay. Some of them might be long; some might be short. This will unfold exactly as it’s supposed to. And one day, I will just know when I am “finished.”

For now… we begin simply.

First of all, I want to make sure that I state up front that I credit my healing to the Lord.

I want to be careful and make sure you don’t think I’m saying, “Oh well… it was supernatural, so it can’t happen to most people.” That’s NOT what I’m saying. This wasn’t an immediate healing. It was a process, and I believe God was instrumental in leading me to find that process. I believe this because it isn’t easy to find this process. I think most people in my situation give up or stop believing it’s possible way too soon, so they never make it there. For whatever reason, God prompted me to keep looking. 

Discovering this healing process took a lot of searching, persistence, trial and error, and grit on my part. But I also sought God’s help. I prayed a lot. I begged God to help me many times a day. I wept. Many times, I got down on my knees in my farm field and surrendered the outcome to Him. I journaled long gratitude lists every day as a practice. 

And God was with me. I felt him. It’s hard to describe. My inner dialogue pep-talks would suddenly cause this peace to envelope me — even as I still felt symptomatic. I would read scripture multiple times a day and kept being led to words about shielding, protection, rocks, the Lord of Heaven’s Armies, faithfulness, trust, perseverance, deliverance, presence, peace. This went on for months. I became yielded to the Lord. I leaned into Him hard-core. I even flew to Colorado to “place a stone on Mt. Muscoco” as a sign that God had declared my healing certain. I heard him whisper to me on my hike up the mountain that I could trust him. It was all going to work out.

Curiously, solutions began to suddenly “appear” out of nowhere – like breadcrumbs. I’ll share some of them with you in the weeks to come, but for now just know that this “bad circumstance” ended up leading to a powerful God experience for which I am eternally grateful. I have experienced my God as “the one who leaves breadcrumbs.” The question for me in the future remains: will I choose to notice them and keep following them?… 

As I began to see these breadcrumbs dropping, I realized that I was in the middle of a miracle-in-the-making. Then I got excited. That’s when things shifted and I started to believe I would eventually heal. That’s when I started to have hope. I became convinced that I just had to wait for the next breadcrumb, pick it up, and eventually I would get out of my predicament.

This battle would be won in breadcrumbs.

Trusting God for my healing was the scariest thing I’ve ever done, and also the most thrilling time in my spiritual walk to date. 

Now that I’m on the other side of healing, I give all the credit to my God – who revealed the path to me. It has been a beautiful “dance” with my Maker, like a work of art that we created together. It really does feel like it was happening “for me.” It was an “awakening.” 

I am so grateful for God’s intervention, that I feel moved to now tell my story publicly. I’m doing it because I want to help someone else. When I first got sick, and doctors didn’t seem to know how to help me, I was looking for a guide, a roadmap – anyone with similar symptoms. I wasn’t expecting that person to have ALL the answers. But maybe they could give me a piece of the solution. Maybe they could offer the next breadcrumb or movement in the right direction. Like a worm, I wanted to “wiggle my way into” my healing. But I needed somewhere to start looking. It was hard to find these answers. But God eventually helped me find them. Now I feel like my job is to make this easier for other people who are running a similar race, but who are still behind me. I want to put the dots together on the page and help you see how they connect.

I hope that my story will function in that capacity to a few people. I have asked the Lord to “send me the people who could be helped by my experience.” And this blog is my attempt to do that.

If you are physically sick, there may be something in my story for you. 

Briefly: my primary health symptoms were mostly digestion-related. Reflux, bloating, chest pain, difficulty breathing, constipation, gas pain in my intestines, elevated fasting insulin levels, burping, slow digestion (like 4-5 hours to digest food), low energy, hoarseness, globus in my throat, pain swallowing, bad breath, loss of voice, inflammation/puffiness, bloated belly (I looked pregnant after I ate!), scales on my tongue, rashes, hair falling out, sleeplessness, low appetite, constant mucous in my throat. But it actually first presented as a cough that wouldn’t go away. I also had elevated blood pressure (I even passed out on an airplane flight to Oregon, which is what sent me to the doctor), high-ish cholesterol, and a pretty low gallbladder ejection fraction (although still within acceptable levels). I also found out I had fibroids, which were bleeding every few weeks. Let’s also mention that I started periomenopause during this time, which may actually be the ultimate culprit!

All of these symptoms are now 95% resolved. (I do occasionally still experience delayed digestion depending on how much protein I eat).

And I did it by “healing my gut.” 

We’ll talk more about what that means in the weeks to come. It was done predominantly through a change in diet, a few well-placed supplements, and shortening my eating window every day. Today I want to suggest this provocative question: What if your symptoms are rooted in your gut?…

The literature I have read suggests over and over again that caring for the gut will unwind many of today’s chronic disease == things like diabetes, heart disease, Hashimotos, brain fog, depression/anxiety, Crohn’s disease, joint pain, weight gain that won’t go away, auto-immune disorders, and even Parkinson’s.

When I run into people now, and I hear them talk about their health symptoms, there’s a part of me that wants to say, “I wonder if you would heal if you focused on healing your gut instead?”

Dr. Gundry (the doctor that ultimately gave me my healing formula) would often repeat this maxim from Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine: “All disease begins in the gut.” If it seems too simplistic to be true, I remember feeling that way, too! But what if it’s as simple as healing your gut? I admit I could be wrong. I realize not every illness is caused by leaky gut. But I think a lot of them are. Would it be worth it to at least test it out? 

In the weeks to come I have so many things I am eager to share with you. Sometimes it will be very practical clinical advice that I discovered along the way. Sometimes it will be thoughts and feelings I encountered along the way, as my eyes were opened. This “mosaic” of experiences I document should be taken as a whole. I want to normalize them (in case you encounter them), speak hope into them, and show you there is a way out. This battle will largely be won in your mind. You have to believe this is possible. I think you have to want it, because the world will not make it easy to acquire. You’ll have to fight for it.

Here are just a few of the chapters I’m planning on addressing in weeks to come:

• Key Milestones in My Early Journey
• How Digestion is Supposed to Work
• What Is Leaky Gut (And Why Is It Wrecking Everything Else?)
• Stop Asking “What Should I Take?” and Start Asking “Why Is This Happening?
• Doctor Gundry’s Plant Paradox: The Gut-Healing Protocol That Finally Helped
• A Realistic Timeline for Healing Your Gut
• The Yes/No Food List: Your New Filter for Healing (What if Food IS the Medicine?!)
• The First Week Is Brutal (And That’s Not a Sign You’re Failing)
• Imagine Feeling 10% Better
• The Role of Gratitude and Tapping into the Abundance Around You
• Trying to Eat Differently When Everyone Else Isn’t
• Digestive Enzymes: A Short-Term Bandaid to Give You Relief
• Alkaline Water: Why I Started Then Stopped Drinking It
• What if…? Sometimes Healing Takes a Long Time
• Reading Food Labels Like a Gut Detective
• Both Can Be True: I Can Feel Discomfort AND Be Healing at the Same Time
• Processed Foods Culture – We Are at War, Friends.
• My Discovery of Lectins – What They Are and Where They Are in Our Food
• Are You on PPIs or Acid-Reducing Meds? Let’s Talk About That.
• Build Your Meal Plans – My Go-To LectinFree Cookbooks and Blogs
• 7 Surprising Foods That Might Be Wrecking Your Gut (Even the ‘Healthy’ Ones)
• Balancing the Gut Microbiome (and How Your Microbiome is Controlling Your Mind)
• What to Expect and Not Expect from Your Doctor – Assembling Your Medical Expert Advocates
• Requesting Your Own Medical Tests (Did you Know You Can?)
• Mindset Shift: This is Happening For You
• Fear. Normalizing It. Expecting It. Fighting It.
• Tracking What and When You Eat
• Here’s What Started Happening as I Healed (The Wins You Can Look Forward To)
• Yes, It Costs More to Eat This Way. But What Is Your Health Worth?
• The Supplements That Moved the Needle for Me (What I Took and Take Now)
• What I Eat in a Typical Day Now: My Core Recipes: The Ones I Use on Repeat
• How to Know If a Food Is a Trigger (And What to Do When It Is)
• WHEN I Eat. Why I Adopted an 8-Hour Eating Window and Is it Hard?
• The Loneliness of Eating Differently (and How to Stay Connected Anyway)
• Pantry 101: Clean Swaps I Had to Get in My Pantry
• Your Taste Buds Will Change (Because Your Gut Will Change)
• How to Get Your Family to Support You (and Join You!)
• Why You Can’t Stop Eating Junk (And Why It’s Not Your Fault): The Mitochondria Mistake That’s Sabotaging Your Energy and Cravings
• How to Travel While Healing Your Gut (Without Losing Your Mind)
• Why No One Believes You (And Why You Have to Keep Going Anyway)

Wow. That’s a lot, isn’t it. Maybe I won’t do ALL of them. (Wink)

And if there’s a question you want me to answer, please reach out to me at sharedlegacyfarms@gmail.com. Maybe I’ll answer it in the next blog.

If you’re ready…I’m ready.

May God bless this work. May God heal you. May God give you the confidence, the perseverance, the patience, the resolve to find your way. This is a LONG PLAY, my friend. But so worth it.

And in case no one else is saying it yet… I believe in you.

I’ll see you in the next blog.

Corinna

Want to read the next chapter?…

Chapter 2: This Wasn’t Just Acid Reflux — It Was a Gut Health Wake-Up Call