Gabriela AFMC Certification Case

 

 

Congratulations to Gabriela, an AFMC-certified Health Coach with a practice focused on women struggling to juggle the many demands of career and family.

We are highlighting Gabriela’s success with a 46-year-old working mom of three, wrestling with chronic IBS and a paralyzing fear of food. Even something as simple as drinking water triggered debilitating symptoms. Years of stress had left her in a sympathetic dominant nervous system state, emotionally and physically drained. “Ten years ago, I was tired,” she confided to Gabriela. “Five years ago, I was exhausted. Today, I no longer feel anything.”

Does this sound familiar? For many practitioners, it’s a story we hear all too often.

Yes, you could just “treat the IBS”. But the logical outcome would simply be recurrence. A key principle of functional medicine is that downstream symptoms are manifestations of unique upstream root causes. Identify those root causes accurately in a case, and a customized clinical roadmap that can promote sustainable regression will reveal itself.  

Watch as Tracy Harrison interviews Gabriela to explore her approach, one that ultimately led to a savvy and successful intervention. 

Instead of just treating the IBS as an isolated issue, Gabriela guided her client through a holistic exploration of gut health, stress management, and nutritional imbalances. She identified several key dynamics that other providers either never asked about or considered irrelevant. A chronic sympathetic nervous system state turned out to be one of the key functional imbalances in the case.

When describing her focus on shifting from a mostly sympathetic to a more frequent parasympathetic state, Gabriela reflects: 

“When we started together, her diet was extremely limited and her bloating was quite severe. She looked about five months pregnant at her worst. So we had to start low and slow …. She was going from meeting to meeting to meeting, from trip to trip to trip, not stopping. We started with stress education, eating hygiene, meditation, breathing breaks throughout the day, and capping off her day with some gratitude practice. This sounded like nothing to her because obviously she’s so driven, but she was desperate. She did confess to me afterwards that she only tried all these things because she was desperate.” 

Three months into her journey, the transformation was undeniable. The client’s total symptom checklist score dropped from 90 to 32. Her bloating, once severe, reduced by 80%, and she could tolerate more foods. In particular, her confidence began to return. Most importantly, she was learning to trust her body and prioritize self-care, a significant shift for someone so accustomed to relentless busyness.

Gabriela worked together with her client over time to build a personalized roadmap for a sustainable return to health. The results were life-changing: not only did the client’s symptoms resolve, but she also began to rediscover her energy, joy, and connection to life.

The demonstrates the power of both the science and the art of a functional medicine clinical approach, well applied!