My Story

 

-Restoring HOPE to Hopeless Health Situations-

Hey there! Thanks for stopping by!

I wanted to share a bit about myself for those of you curious as to why I do what I do now. Those things are important to me. 🙂

First, I’m a wife + a mama. My husband and I reconnected after our first marriages failed and we were a big part of each others healing process. I’m so thankful for his support and love every single day. We have 3 tiny humans, Logan, Liam + Maddison. They are my biggest life achievements and I’m so thankful I can work from home with them and never miss a moment!

I’m an extremely stubborn human which has lead to my survival through some of life’s biggest trials. There’s nothing quite like almost dying that makes a person want to live. That’s where my passion to help others live their best life comes from…more on that in a minute. I smile a lot which gives me all the smile wrinkles. I’d say I’m more of an extrovert but I keep my close circle very small. Now, I know you clicked on the “my story” tab for a reason…you want the nitty gritty. You want the truth. You want to hear about my past, my struggles, my transformation, how I got to where I am now and if I’m a person you want to trust and learn from. Well…you asked for it…so here we go.

I grew up in a small town in northern California with an awesome family. Life consisted of going to a Christian school, church on Sundays, potlucks and playing in the creek. For the most part I was a pretty sheltered kid, which I can really appreciate now. Life was good. My family was full of love. I learned the importance of work ethic, team work and I watched my parents in love and loving doing life together. We were happy with our hand-me-downs and thrift store finds because we were rich in each other.

Everything changed on my 11^th birthday, June 18, 1998. I had softball practice an hour away that day, so to make it special, my dad took me on his motorcycle and planned a pizza date for us after practice. I was SO excited! The warm breeze felt amazing. My dad taught me the cool motorcycle wave you do to other motorcycle riders in passing. He sang Garth Brooks at the top of his lungs in his country twang. It was magical. On the way home however, we were hit head on by a drunk driver in an old Ford Truck. Our bodies were thrown 30-feet from the point of impact and we were immediately knocked unconscious. We were both medi-flighted to separate trauma centers with a fatal prognosis; neither of us expected to survive the night. I don’t remember much about that night, but my last memory was of me wrapping my arms around my dad’s waste and us exchanging “I love you’s”. What a gift that memory is. I still get emotional thinking about it because I am overwhelmed with gratitude for the love I had as a kid. I know not everyone is blessed with that.

The road ahead of us was rough. I was in a coma and on life support for one week with brain swelling, multiple fractures in my left femur, and a completely shattered shin from being crushed between the truck and our motorcycle. Miraculously, I was showing signs of improvement with each day. Slowly I came out of my coma and was eventually transferred home to a hospital bed. My dad also made it through the night, and while he was showing signs of improvement, his coma was lasting longer than mine did.

July 5, 1998. I’ll never forget the details of the day when my mom walked in my room to talk to me and my brother…followed by our pastor, aunts and uncles, and our cousins who were living with us at the time. Her eyes were bloodshot. She looked so sick. Her face wrinkled with worry lines, she held our hands and looked down trying to speak the words she wished with all her heart weren’t true. She looked into our innocent eyes…”Your daddy has gone to be with Jesus.” Tears filled the house. No one understood what happened. Guilt. Consumed me. My hero, my beast of a dad who towered over everyone at 6’7 was gone. His laughter and sarcasm would no longer be heard down the hallway. As you can imagine…my world was crushed. My heart was broken. I was so confused…why him and not me? We were in the same accident on MY birthday that he made special for me by taking me on his motorcycle. WHY…it was heavy. It was a question I’d never know the answer to. It’s a question all of us ask at one point or another in our lives that we never will understand. Because the creation will never comprehend the Creator. God’s ways are not our ways. He does not create pain and hardship, but I learned at a young age that He can and does work through them to bring about good. Romans 8:28. So, I decided to learn into Jesus and strive to live the fullness of life my dad never had the chance to live. Somehow as it does, time went on…and we tried to take steps forward with the beautiful memories we had of him.

It took one year of 7 intense surgeries, metal screws and plates, painful therapy and lots of prayer to get me on my feet and walking again. By God’s grace and miraculous healing, my injuries were healed, and body restored in the year following the accident. Throughout this year of healing, my passion for healthcare really grew. We found out from my dad’s autopsy that his death was due to a malpractice incident from one of the nurses who was caring for him. 100% preventable. While difficult to swallow, this fueled my fire to prevent another family from going through something like this. I myself had my own positive and negative experiences with home nurses, hospital doctors, and several specialists in my healing journey. I knew my calling was to prevent preventable suffering. My mission began. It was at this point in my life that I decided I was going into the medical field…yes, at 11 years old.

Fast forward to my freshman year of college. I made a comeback with softball and was playing my first year of college softball while starting nursing school at a 4 year college in San Diego. While all my advisors told me I couldn’t do both…as per true Jessica fashion, I said… “Watch me”, always with a smile of course.

Throughout college, I was always known as the more health conscious friend. I chose the whole wheat options over white flour, I ate chicken breast, turkey meat, fruit, cottage cheese…tried all the special diets to try and stay healthy…to get “skinny”. On the outside I was the smiley energetic young woman that seemed to have it all together and tons of friends.

Behind closed doors…I had several regular anxiety attacks where I thought I was dying. I struggled with chest pain, shortness of breath and numbness down my left arm frequently. Most nights I was kept awake with horrendous stomach pain and a bloated stomach that made me look 6 months pregnant. My hormones were a friggen’ MESS. My doctor told me at 19 years old that I had the estrogen levels of a 55 year old woman. My period stopped for 7 years total and no one could figure out why. The testing continued…”Jessica, we think you might have a brain tumor, you need a brain scan. Let’s send you for blood work…and more blood work…and more blood work…You need to see an endocrinologist and a gastroenterologist for further studies.”

Despite my protest, they insisted I go on birth control for my hormones. I told them I was a virgin and wasn’t going to have sex until I was married so I didn’t need birth control. They first laughed at me and said “oh ok…”, and then insisted that would solve my problems. Meanwhile…my symptoms got worse. I had chronic acid reflux. Everything I ate came back up. I felt HORRIBLE. My digestive system got much worse. I was SO tired. My anxiety attacks increased. The madness continued. 4 years later I graduated college with a Bachelor’s in Nursing that educated me on all the possible illnesses I had, and in my mind I KNEW I had a new one every day. My symptoms persisted and I NEVER got a straight answer as to what was wrong with me. I was exhausted. I was scared. I felt like I was NEVER GOING TO BE NORMAL AND HEALTHY EVER AGAIN. This was the reality I was living in.

Right after college graduation, I married my boyfriend of 3 years who was a Spanish basketball player. Everything seemed like a fairy tale. We moved to Spain where he pursued his basketball career and I went from the overly busy, driven, life is crazy independent woman to a stay at home wife in a different country.

Side note… 7 days before my wedding I was rushed to the hospital because I had gained 20lbs in 3 days, my abdomen was extremely distended and the whites of my eyes started turning yellow… yaaa my liver was not happy. Turns out my gallbladder was 3x the normal size and I was taken in for emergency surgery. I thought THIS was the culprit to all my problems… I barely fit into my wedding dress and a week later moved to Spain.

My symptoms worsened…and I had all the time in the world to think about it. At this point, Western Medicine was epically failing me and I knew it was up to me to figure out how to heal myself. This is when I really dug into studying and researching different integrative and holistic health modalities. I tried hundreds (literally) of different supplements, acupuncture, chiropractic, homeopathy, Ayurveda medicine, several different dietary approaches, the list goes on. Nothing gave me significant relief. It wasn’t until I started researching and trying food-grade Chinese herbs that my healing mind & body started happening. Within 6 months, I was a completely different person. I thought this was the answer I was looking for. While my health started to improve, my marriage shortly after deteriorated out of the blue. 4.5 years into marriage and 7 years into our relationship, my husband at the time came home one day and decided he didn’t want to be married anymore and had no reason other than he didn’t love me and wasn’t attracted to me anymore. You see, through these health struggles, I was at my highest weight, which was about 40lbs heavier than when I was in college and we got married, soooo ya, hearing that from the one person who was supposed to love me unconditionally was a bit rough. Once again, life had blindsided me.

I begged and pleaded for him to change his mind. I sought counseling, I bought all the books I could find on saving your marriage, I prayed constantly through my breakdowns, I gave all I could, but it wasn’t enough to change his mind. A couple months later our divorce was filed and I once again felt like my world blew up in my face. I felt like an epic failure to God and everyone around me, like I had a scarlet letter on my chest as a divorced 26 year old. I did everything “right”. I saved myself for marriage, we dated for 3 years and were friends first, we seemed to be on the same page on important issues…how could this happen? While I am a huge promoter of doing absolutely EVERYTHING you can to save your marriage, looking back I can see that the Lord rescued me and allowed for my divorce to happen in order for me to experience life and love at a level I had never experienced before. For years I had heard that I wasn’t pretty enough, skinny enough, successful enough, sexy enough…and while I had always been a confident woman my whole life, after a while these words got to me and crushed my spirit. I began to believe the lies and my body became swollen with shame, disgust, and sadness. I was at my heaviest in the last year of that marriage. I counted calories like nobody’s business, I spent hours at the gym, but not a pound would budge. Emotionally…I was starving.

So, I went through the grieving process of my divorce. The abandonment and trust issues I felt brewing. I’m SO thankful to have my relationship with Jesus. I truly don’t know how people get through hardships without a supernatural connection to get them through on the days they feel like they can’t even breathe. The Lord kept telling me to trust Him, to PRAISE Him through this process. So, I did. I started learning again what it meant to love myself again. To be confident in the woman the Lord created me to be. I dug deep to learn how to be my best self and began to identify what I really wanted from a relationship. I got my own apartment, found a new job, hit the gym as therapy, and nourished my body. The pounds fell off. I was truly learning to be happy again. My heart was being restored.

And then out of nowhere…a tall, blue-eyed blonde blast from the past Spartan of a man walked into my life and I knew all the pain I went through had a purpose. It was going to be used to help heal this man’s heart. Little did I know that my future husband had been through a very similar heartbreak that I had gone through. Without my experience, we never would have connected at the authentic and brutally honest level that we did, which cultivated something beautiful.

Fast forward 2 years later and I was again married but this time it was different. I was happier than ever, I was happy with who I was and so was my new husband. We were independently strong in who we were which made our relationship amazing. Our first baby boy was born on December 14, 2015. He was perfection. I LOVED motherhood. But, it also brought a new series of struggles.

Pregnancy killed my lower back. I found out I had a moderate-severe degenerative disk in my low back and wasn’t given many solutions to deal with the pain. The pain was debilitating. I couldn’t even bend over to lay my son down in his crib. I KNEW something had to change. This was when I first stumbled upon Beachbody workouts. I tried them and was hooked. It helped so much with my pain and I quickly grabbed onto their business as well. I had to go back to work as an RN in prison, so i had been googling all kinds of “work from home RN jobs”. This seamed like a natural fit for me. At the time, it was! It was an incredible blessing to our family!

Our team exploded. Within 2 years of coaching, I was able to almost match my RN income and trade in my scrubs for yoga pants when I became a full time work from home mom with my kiddos. Liam, our second son came in January 2018 and Maddison followed to complete our family in July 2020.

In October 2020, when the world went mad, we made the decision to move our family out of California to north Idaho to raise our kids with the morals and values important to us. This was when I really realized the freedom found in entreprenuership- The ability to work from anymore. I found another avenue to help prevent, preventable suffering… teaching smart business practices in alignment with each person’s mission and vision.

I worked with Beachbody (BODi) for almost 8 years. The time I was in business with them really did change the trajectory of my family’s life. I become the subject matter expert in our products. I spoke on stages, flew around the country for conferences and wrote numerous trainings. I loved it. I had passion and purpose in the work I was doing and it was paying all our bills.

As they do, times change. The company changed, the economy changed, the consumer changed, I changed. I knew God was calling me to more. He was calling me back to health education and empowering people to dig deeper than just kale and cardio. Over 8 years I created an amazing community- Health Patriot Nation. So, the thought of walking away from Beachbody was… I just couldn’t think about it. Until.. I couldn’t ignore the lack of alignment anymore. I knew something had to shift, I just didn’t know how. The NEXT day I received a call from the CEO of another company whose mission is to restore hormonal balance in the family unit and reduce endocrine disrupting chemicals that are wreaking havoc on so many. They offered me opportunity to speak into the product development line, to bring my ideas, educational experience and passions to help them expand their mission and bring it to fruition. Wow! Let me just say… when you make someone feel seen and valued, it goes a really long way. We prayed hard about this. 2023 was the HARDEST year on my marriage. We learned and grew through a lot. The last thing I wanted to do was add more to workload in the wrong direction. I asked myself 4 important questions…

1- Where is God leading me and calling me?

2- What are my husband’s thoughts, opinions and desires on the situation?

3- What does my family, kids, and household need most?

4- How does this impact being in alignment with my story, mission, vision and future?

Then… it was obvious. This new partnership was exactly where I was being lead by the Holy Spirit to honor the gifts God has given me and my family. All of a sudden what seemed like a gut wrenching decision…became very simple. In December 2023, the week between Christmas and New Years, I partnered with Hugh & Grace. A small company making a mighty difference and I’m so excited for what we’re growing to become. My mission to prevent preventable suffering is directly in alignment with their mission as well.

All of the hardships…all of the turmoil, the millions of tears I cried, all the questions of WHY…it was all worth it for me to be where I am now. For me to be able to hold a friend’s hand who just lost a loved one or who is going through a painful divorce, and to be able to say, “I see you, I hear you, and I feel you. You can get through this, I promise and I will help you”. How powerful is that? I wouldn’t be able to connect and relate with people in their darkest moments if I hadn’t been in the trenches myself. While I may have a completely different perspective and a few more grey hairs than the average 36 year old, I wouldn’t change it. My story has shaped me into who I am today and I’m pretty happy about that.

My mission is to now share the skills and tools I’ve learned along my journey with everyone around me whose willing and wanting to learn.

Thank you for reading my novel. I hope you feel like you know me and my heart just a little bit more today. If my passion and mission resonates with you and you’re looking for a support system to grow into the best version of you, let’s connect. I’d LOVE to chat with you and see how I can support you to live your life to the fullest.

Remember, if you aren’t operating at 100%, everyone around you suffers. Do our world a favor and live in your purpose with all your heart. Be fearless in pursuit of what sets your soul on fire.

Love,

Coach Jess

– Your Health Patriot