About Desiree

This work became personal long before it became professional.

My work has been shaped by an education in science, years spent working in behavioral health and research, formal Ayurvedic training, my own complicated health journey, and the realities of motherhood and a very full life. Each chapter has changed the questions I ask about health and ultimately shape the way I support women today.

Early Questions

As a behavioral therapist, I continued to observe certain patterns that made me wonder what else might be happening beneath the surface. Many children struggled with digestion, highly processed diets, intense cravings, fatigue, and other physical patterns alongside the behaviors we were addressing.I began studying nutrition beyond my university curriculum. I studied intestinal permeability, elimination diets, the gut microbiome and the emerging research around the gut-brain axis.I became increasingly interested in a question that would shape the rest of my education: What happens when we look beyond the symptom and begin examining the physiology surrounding it?

Graduate Study

That question eventually took me back to graduate school. I initially imagined a future in neurogastroenterology, studying the relationship between the digestive system and the brain.
When an academic research scientist who had previously worked at Stanford joined our university, I entered a research path examining autoimmune-mediated blood-brain barrier dysfunction, microvascular pathology and endothelial tight-junction signaling under inflammatory conditions .The work gave me an extraordinary education in molecular biology, understanding inflammatory conditions at the cellular level and hence the cell signaling mechanisms through which disease processes unfold.

A Different Kind of Framework

I was fascinated by what was happening at the cellular level, yet I found myself increasingly interested in what happened before those pathways became targets for treatment, i.e. nutrition, digestion, stress, behavior, environment, daily routines and demands and the many influences that shape physiology over time.I ultimately left research to pursue formal training in Ayurveda where I found a very different framework for observing the body as an interconnected and continually changing system.