Brain fog. Belly fat. Acne that won’t quit. Anxiety that feels like it lives in your chest. Periods that are way too heavy. Energy that crashes by 3 pm and doesn’t come back.
Sound familiar?
If you’ve taken any of that to your doctor and gotten a shrug, a prescription, or been told your labs are “normal,” you are not alone. And you are not crazy. What you might be dealing with inflammation. And the reason nobody is connecting those dots for you is that most conventional medicine wasn’t trained to.
I sat down with Leslie Jackson, a women’s-focused functional nutritionist, who has been living and breathing this work, first in her own body, then in the bodies of her clients. Here’s what I learned.
What inflammation actually is
In the simplest terms, inflammation is your immune system’s response to a threat. When your body senses danger from stress, from food, from toxins, from lack of sleep, it mounts a defense. The problem is that for most women today, that defense response never turns off.
Leslie broke it down like this: we are consuming 2,000% more sugar today than we were 100 years ago. We are chronically stressed. And the food we’re eating is calorically dense and nutrient-empty, which means our hunger hormone, ghrelin, keeps screaming for more food because our cells are not getting what they actually need to function.
Here’s the part that really got me. Our cells don’t run on calories. They run on vitamins, minerals, and nutrients. We have been so obsessed with calorie counting that we completely missed the point.
When our bodies are running on the wrong fuel, chronically stressed, and nutrient depleted, everything downstream suffers. Hormones. Gut health. Brain function. Immune system. Metabolism. It is all connected.
What Leslie’s own doctor told her
Leslie spent years feeling terrible. Brain fog. Depression. Anxiety. Cystic acne. Heavy periods. Bloating. She went to her doctor and within ten minutes had a prescription for Adderall and birth control. No investigation. No root cause conversation. Just two prescriptions and the door.
Two years later, her system had completely tanked. When she went back and said this isn’t working, her doctor threatened to drop her as a patient.
She left. Started researching on her own. And eventually found her way to functional nutrition, which gave her, in her words, her life back.
I love this story because it is not unusual. It is the story of almost every woman I talk to. And it is why I am going back to school to become a naturopathic doctor. Because we deserve providers who actually want to find the answer.
What to actually do about it
The first step Leslie recommends is blood work. Not a basic panel. A real, comprehensive look at your nutrient levels, thyroid, cortisol, insulin, and hormones.
She recommends two platforms specifically: Function Health and InsideTracker. Both are functional medicine rooted, both let you order your own labs without a doctor’s referral, and both give you results that show you where you land on a spectrum from “at risk” to “optimal”, not just whether you’re in the normal range.
That distinction matters. As Leslie put it, where Americans commonly land is not where we want to be. Normal and optimal are not the same thing.
I have used Function Health myself, and I love it. Full dashboard, biological age calculation, supplement and food recommendations. If you have an FSA or HSA account, they now accept those too, which makes it significantly more accessible.
If you do go to your primary care doctor, ask specifically for thyroid levels, insulin, cortisol, gut health markers, and your B vitamins. If they push back, find someone who won’t.
The cortisol piece nobody talks about
One thing Leslie said that I have not been able to stop thinking about: when we are stuck in chronic stress mode, what she calls the sympathetic nervous system, our body pulls resources away from digestion, immunity, and hormone regulation in order to keep us “safe.”
Which means that even if you are eating well, you may not be absorbing the nutrients you need because your body is too busy being in survival mode to properly digest them.
When you shift into the parasympathetic nervous system — rest, digest, feel safe — your body functions completely differently. It’s not just about what you eat. It’s about the state you’re in when you eat it.
Sleep, movement, community, connection. These are not nice-to-haves. They are medicine.
The thing Leslie said that I want every woman to hear
Every single challenge she described- the inflammation, the nutrient deficiencies, the cortisol overload, the hormonal chaos, is solvable. Reversible. Overcomeable.
You just have to know what to do. And usually you need someone in your corner who can help you figure it out.
That is why conversations like this one matter. That is why I do this podcast. That is why I wrote the book and why I am going back to school. Because the information exists. It is just not being handed to you.
Now it is.
Listen to the full episode with Leslie Jackson on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Find Leslie at @LeslieJacksonWellness on Instagram or visit her Radiant Health Collective community at $37/month.
Natalie Garay is an author, podcast host, and future naturopathic doctor focused on women’s health and brain health after 40. Her book WTF Happened to My Body? Fixing the Aftermath of Having Kids No Matter How Long Ago It Was is available now in paperback, Kindle, and on Audible.
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