Kelly Hoffman successfully cured herself of irritable bowel syndrome and fibromyalgia using only natural methods including detox and cleansing. She has studied holistic health for the past 14 years and practices as a natural health consultant. I recently interviewed her about her eBook The Secrets to Curing Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Update June 2015: Unfortunately Kelly’s book is no longer available but another book that can help you is The IBS Miracle
Q1. Kelly, you have written a very informative eBook about how to cure IBS & Fibromyalgia naturally. You say you were lucky that you learned early that drugs cannot heal the body. How did you learn this?
A. When I was just out of high school, I had surgery on my left foot for what several doctors told me was a growth on one of my nerves along the ball of my foot. With the consent of my parents, I had surgery to remove the supposed growth. We were told it was a successful surgery, but they never really gave me a lot of details. I was still young, so I didn’t put much thought into it.
Interestingly though, the problem I had with pain in my foot did not go away after the surgery. Then later, I was told by a foot specialist that I needed expensive adjustments for my shoes. I didn’t want to do the plan that he said I needed, so I just lived with discomfort. Eventually, the problem I was having with my foot became less and less bothersome. Every so often, it will still hint to me that something is off balance there, but now I understand that it is generally associated with stress or with how I’m carrying my body. This experience was my first insight that doctors were just guessing and experimenting with me.
Throughout my whole childhood, I had different health issues that doctors just wanted to do surgery on or they would give me prescriptions that did little good. As a person who has always wanted to understand the core of things, I wasn’t satisfied when doctors couldn’t or wouldn’t educate me about what was going on with my body. So, about my early 20’s I started realizing, doctors don’t generally address health from a “healing” stand point, and it appeared to me that many of them were just guessing and suggesting drugs or surgery as an attempt to address the symptoms and never getting to the core of the health issue.
Over the years, I’ve seen friends and family on the mainstream medical merry-go-round and roller-coaster, except unlike these amusement park rides, their rides have not been fun. Back and forth to doctors they’ve gone around and around, up and down. Many of them are in worse health from the medications and surgeries than before they started.
Q 2. Could you give us a bit of background about yourself and what made you write this eBook?
A. There were signs all throughout my childhood that my health was a little off balance but my parents were just told that my illnesses were normal for children.When is any illness normal? As a kid, I had bouts of croup (an inflammatory respiratory illness with hoarse coughing), which even landed me in an oxygen tent in the hospital when my sister was being born.
Earaches and tonsillitis were fairly common for me. I had surgery when I was about 12 to have my tonsils removed. These were all signs that my body was giving, but my parents like most people trusted the doctors and didn’t question any further why I was having these problems. It wasn’t until I began doing my own proactive research into how to help myself that I started to understand these childhood illnesses and what caused them.
In my early 20’s, I started having digestion issues, and it was this health problem that finally drove me away from the doctors and on a quest to find my own answers. At the time, no one was really even acknowledging that irritable bowel was a health problem. I didn’t know anyone that had it, and I’d never heard of it. The doctors I went to didn’t even give it a label but just tried to give me prescriptions for antibiotics and antacids.
My irritable bowel symptoms became so severe that it made it hard for me to go to work, to eat out and to do too many things away from home. Once I became proactive and decided to take matters into my own hands, answers started coming to me, first from a relative and then through my own research.
I conquered irritable bowel and became empowered by what I had learned. I wrote the eBook because I knew what it was like to not find real answers, and I knew there must be others out there who could benefit from what I learned. I wanted to make all the suffering I had endured worthwhile and end it in a positive light.
Q 3. Can you explain how IBS and Fibromyalgia are linked and how your natural cure might help both conditions?
A. One of the foundations of our health is the digestive system. When our digestive system is out of balance, our whole body is affected. It might seem initially that just one part of our body is out of whack, but in truth, our whole system works together so no part is separate.
Many health problems stem from an imbalance in the digestive system. Here lies the connection. However, with that said, our bodies are also affected by the environment and by our mental and emotional health. These things cannot be ignored either. In my eBook, I teach people the foundations of health. I don’t want people to walk away thinking that health is just one magic pill, because it’s not. Our health and happiness needs to be addressed from a holistic perspective, which is addressing our whole person in mind, body and soul.
Q 4. You explain the four root causes of disease. Can you briefly outline them here?
A. Understanding the four root causes of disease will help people understand how their bodies function and what influences play a role in their health. These four root causes are trauma, toxicity, deficiency and emotional/mental upset. If you understand that ill-health stems from these four causes, then you can learn to understand and listen to your body.
Q 5. You talk a lot about how you changed your diet. How difficult was that for you?
A. Let’s just say that pain and discomfort are great motivators. Once I made up my mind and understood what was causing me grief, many of the diet changes I made were easy. At the time when I was really experiencing negative irritable bowel symptoms, I couldn’t cheat with too many things without painful consequences.
Now that I’m stronger and healthier, I can cheat with things that aren’t so healthy and not experience bad symptoms. I’m actually very grateful and happy that I was motivated to change my diet. I’ve learned so much, and the quality of food that I eat now is so much better than the garbage I use to eat. Sometimes I’ll eat something that’s a part of the old diet and wonder why I even liked it. I recognize the difference in the quality and nutritional value of food. I don’t even consider some of the old things that I use to eat food anymore.
I did struggle with cutting back and giving up some food items, but once I understood why I was doing it and made the mental and emotional decision to do so, I was fine. Sometimes it’s an “on the wagon of the wagon” type of process. We’re human and sometimes we make things hard on ourselves.
Ultimately, it’s about finding balance in your life. Sometimes you have to go in the opposite direction of where you’ve been for a while. It might seem extreme, but you’ve allowed yourself to get out of balance and a phase of correction and rebalance is necessary. For me, the lifestyle changes are no longer extreme. I look back on what I was doing to myself and my health in the past as extreme. Amazing what a different perspective can do for your life.
Q 6. You mention cleansing. How big a part do you think this played in your recovery?
When I did my first real cleansing and noticed physical pains going away, I knew there was big value in it. It amazed me. And I didn’t do any extreme methods, and I got real benefits. Cleansing your body does not have to be extreme or difficult. If it is, then maybe it’s not the right process for you.
There are many ways to detox your body. The number one way is to stop ingesting so many toxins. When my body gets achy, I know I’m eating too much of the wrong thing.
Q 7. You talk about activating our self-healing ability through affirmation and visualization. Do you have any particular methods for this?
I just believe that one’s faith and belief in the positive has a lot to do with a person’s health and happiness. Trust me when I tell you that my health journey has brought be to a stronger faith. I was lacking in this area of my life when I was younger. I did not realize that natural health would awaken me to this part of my life.
It’s not so much about the methods or the practices one uses to tap into the spiritual parts of themselves, it’s more a matter of recognizing the need to do this. Learn to tap into your inner self. Learn to listen to your body. Pay attention to how you feel and what your body is telling you. Sometimes this means we have to slow down so we can pay attention to ourselves. It can be a challenge for some of us, but I’ve found that when I don’t, I can get overwhelmed and out of alignment with what really matters.
When we set out to conquer something in our lives or to move ahead in a positive direction, I believe our conviction and our mental attitude toward what we are about to do is very important. If you’re not really clear within yourself why you are doing something, then maybe you’re not ready to do it.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing it just means you may not be ready. Sometimes we don’t always have the mental understanding initially, but if you really truly listen to your inner gut instinct and your heart, the understanding will come later.
I give a few tips in the eBook of things I’ve used to assist my mental and spiritual balance, but I’ll let readers discover those gems on their own. ;0)
Thanks Sandy and thanks to those who took the time to listen!
Update June 2015: Unfortunately Kelly’s book is no longer available but if you are looking for a cure for IBS then this ebook will help:
The IBS Miracle
