THERE'S NO STOPPING US NOW

Determined not to let their health problems dictate their lives, these women pivoted their way to a brighter future

- FIONA KINLOCH, KIM WILLIS

‘I feel fitter and more energised’

Sally Wade, 42, lives in Canterbury with her husband Adam, 42, and their two children, Dexter, nine, and Jasmine, five.

Packing up the range of healthy and delicious snacks into a box and sealing it shut, I added it to the pile of orders all ready to be shipped. For the past three years, I’ve been running my own healthy snack-box subscription service, and after being riddled with health issues, nobody was more amazed than me that I’d not only managed to turn my life around and feel fitter and more energised, but I’d also turned my passion into a successful venture.

EXTREME TIREDNESS

For as long as I can remember, I’d suffered with constant fatigue. At work in my role in admin, I started noticing that my speech slurred while talking to colleagues and I was crippled by constant brain fog, which significantly affected my ability to work effectively. Then, when my son Dexter was born in 2011, I was more tired than ever and had a real case of ‘baby brain’. I often went to bed at the same time as him, in addition to napping during the day, but even nine hours of sleep wasn’t enough to fight the extreme tiredness I felt on a daily basis.

Previous trips to the doctor’s had turned up diagnoses of IBS, then chronic fatigue syndrome. But when my eczema flared up in 2014, I was sure there was more to it.

I turned online for answers and quickly found that my diet was the most likely culprit for all the issues I’d been having. A trip to the nutritionist revealed I had a gut imbalance, with high levels of bad bacteria and low levels of good bacteria. I was advised to eat fermented foods, such as sauerkraut and kimchi, to help restore the balance.