Love Your Gut

Your client has done everything you asked. She’s finished the antimicrobials, tried the elemental diet and low FODMAP, and she’s still constipated, bloated, and exhausted. So what are you missing?

In Part 2 of the practitioner series, Dr. Heather shares the story of Sara, a client who came to her team after six SIBO protocols. She also explains why the next move for your most stuck clients may not be in the gut at all. Dr. Heather covers why HTMA has become one of the first tests her practice runs, and she takes on the two obje...

Have you ever sat across from a complicated client and thought, “I don’t even know where to start”? You’re in good company. 

More than a third of the clinicians who applied to gutPractitioner wrote some version of that same sentence. 

In part one of this practitioner series, Dr. Heather covers what that thought actually points to, and why it shows up even for dietitians with years of training. 

She explains why low FODMAP, fiber, probiotics, and magnesium work best as tools inside a plan, how a framework gives your clinical judgment something t...

Have you ever looked down before flushing and thought, “That doesn’t look right”? Most women do, and then they move on with their day. In this episode, Dr. Heather explains why every trip to the bathroom is a report card on how your digestion is working, from your stomach all the way down.

After 20 years of her own gut issues and more than 1,000 clients, Dr. Heather has seen the same patterns again and again. Women do everything right, with the fiber, the magnesium and the probiotics, and still don’t get relief. She uses a simple assembly...

Is there a gut protocol sitting in your inbox right now, or a supplement order still in the box on your counter? If you’ve been calling yourself lazy or undisciplined for not starting, this episode offers a more accurate explanation.

Dr. Heather explains functional freeze, a nervous system state that lets you keep up with work, family, and every deadline while the one thing that’s just for you stays untouched. She shares her own story of staying stuck for months on a decision she already knew she needed to make, and explains why years of prot...

You felt amazing after the antibiotics, the iron infusion, or the SIBO protocol, and then six months later your symptoms were right back where they started. 

On todays episode, Dr. Heather explains why results fade even when the protocol worked. She also covers why more information so often leads to more confusion, and shares a personal story about what actually created lasting change in her own life this year.

What you'll learn in this episode:

What if something else is getting to your iron before you do?

This week, Dr. Heather picks up where last week's episode left off. She explains why your iron panel works like a balance sheet: it can show you what's in the account, but it can't always show you who's spending it. Then she walks through the three hidden suspects she looks for first when a client's ferritin refuses to budge. One of them is among the most common infections in the world, and most people who have it never know. They can all go unnoticed for...

Dr. Heather's ferritin was 9 four months postpartum, and she had a doctorate in clinical nutrition at the time. She still couldn't fix her own labs, and she spent months doing exactly what you've been doing: assuming she had the wrong iron rather than the wrong theory.
 This episode takes apart the belief that almost every woman with low ferritin is operating under. Low ferritin, therefore more iron. It's the most reasonable belief available, it's what your doctor believes, and for some women it works perfectly. If you're still listening to podcasts about your ferritin, you're not one of t...

Round two with the gutTogether team. Macy and Tyler are back, and this time we're talking about the iron and ferritin cases that have filled our caseload for the last six to eight months. If you've taken iron for months and watched your ferritin barely budge, or you've had an infusion and ended up with brand new GI symptoms, this conversation explains exactly why that isl. 

We get into the iron recycling system, why copper and ceruloplasmin quietly run the whole operation, what gut infections do with the iron you take, and why ferritin sometimes drops before i...

Have you ever wondered what it was like to sit "behind the scenes" with the gutTogether® team? Today's podcast episode is a "must listen"! Dr. Heather sits down with 2 of the gutTogether® RD's to discuss the 6 common roadblocks they see when working 1:1 with clients. If you've ever felt like no matter what you do, you can't get over your symptoms, this is a good one! 

(and make sure you stay until the end for some bloopers!)

Have you ever looked at a complicated client and thought, “I don’t know where to start”...

You can count the cost of your gut issues in supplements, copays, and elimination diets. But the biggest cost has never shown up on a single receipt, and chances are you've never once added it up.

On this episode, I'm talking about the bandwidth your symptoms are quietly taking from you every single day. I'm sharing what surprised me most about my own healing after twenty years of GI issues, the moment I realized how much mental energy my symptoms had been eating, and what my clients tell me they actually got back when their bloating resolved...

Nine out of ten babies in the US are now missing one or more of the keystone bacteria their immune system needs to develop properly. 

Stephanie is a PhD scientist, co-founder and CEO of Persephone Biosciences, and a mom who built her company's biggest study after a pediatric researcher asked her a question that stopped her cold: if you can fix the microbiome of cancer patients, why not fix it in babies? That question led to MyBabyBiome, the largest microbiome study of US infants to date, and to the discovery that something has shifted in h...

Minerals are often the missing link in any health related concern AND the biggest needle mover for individuals who have "tried everything". 

If you've done the SIBO protocol, the parasite cleanse, the supplement stack, and your body still isn't responding, this episode is probably the piece you've been missing. Lisa Pitel-Killah is the founder of Vykon Customs and one of the people I trust most in the mineral world (I did my HTMA level one and level two training with her), and in this conversation we cover why minerals have to come before every other protocol, what's a...

There's a parasite moving across the country right now so Dr. Heather went down the rabbit hole to give you a clear way to think about the 2026 Cyclospora outbreak. 

If you've had a stomach bug over the last couple of weeks that seemed to clear up and then came roaring back, this one is worth your time. That relapsing pattern is one of the biggest clues for this particular infection, and it's the thing most people miss.

Heather breaks down what Cyclospora actually is, why this outbreak has been so hard to trace, what genuinely l...

If you've accepted the 2pm crash as just "who you are," this episode is going to challenge that.

That afternoon wall with the brain fog, the chocolate craving, the counting down until bedtime, isn't a personality trait. It's your body telling you something. And in most cases, there are very real, very fixable reasons behind it.

In this episode, we're talking about what's actually driving your afternoon energy crash: blood sugar instability, mineral depletion (magnesium, sodium, potassium, iron, and copper), and what it actually means to be hydrated. Plus, four simple habits to...

Think about the last trip you took. Were you actually there for it, or were you running a quiet background math equation the whole time, tracking what you ate and wondering if you'd be too bloated for dinner?

For a lot of people with gut issues, travel is something to survive rather than enjoy. But here's what's interesting: some of the women Dr. Heather works with who struggle the most at home actually feel better on vacation. They eat foods they normally avoid, skip their usual protocol, and come back more regular and less bloated than they've...

If you dread the week before your period and your labs keep coming back "fine," this episode is for you.

In this episode, Dr. Heather walks through a real client case: cycle-linked headaches, heart palpitations, fatigue, and itchy skin that had been written off for years. She was already taking magnesium and nothing was technically wrong. But every month, the symptoms showed up anyway.

What her HTMA revealed had nothing to do with hormones. Within a few weeks of targeted mineral support, the headaches were gone, the palpitations were gone, and her energy was noticeably...

In this practitioner focused episode, Dr. Heather Finley breaks down what Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis (HTMA) actually measures, why it captures things that standard blood serum testing misses, and how practitioners can use it to understand a client's cellular mineral status, oxidation rate, and toxic metal burden. 

She also addresses the hard questions about HTMA validity directly, including the lab variability research, the lack of a universal clinical standard, and AMA non-recognition.

Topics covered: how HTMA differs from bloodwork, the Big 8 minerals and significant ratios, oxidation rate and metabolic typing, hidden copper toxicity, HTMA validity a...

Most people think about magnesium for constipation and digestion. 

What if the problem isn't that you're deficient in magnesium? What if the minerals you already have can't actually do their jobs?

That's what copper does. And it is one of the most overlooked minerals in functional nutrition.

In this episode, Dr. Heather covers the copper-zinc-iron-thyroid connection and why it matters so much when it comes to constipation, low ferritin, slow motility, and fatigue that doesn't budge.

What you'll hear in this episode:

This is part 3 of the iron/ferritin series! 

Three episodes, three clients, three different breakdowns in the same system:

Part 1: Ashley's body couldn't absorb iron because of active gut infections and a system in defense mode.

Part 2: Danielle's body couldn't transport iron because of low ceruloplasmin, copper utilization impaired by long-term zinc, and microbial activity driving inflammatory sequestration.

Part 3: Jessica's body couldn't store iron because the terrain was depleted, the nervous system wasn't in a building state, and the downstream conditions for storage weren't in place.

Same symptom. Three c...

Most people assume low ferritin means they need more iron. But what about the woman whose ferritin is actually high and she still feels exhausted, is still losing hair, and is still bloated every single day? That's the case this episode is built around, and it's one of the most important iron stories Heather has ever told (because it goes WAY beyond iron)

This is Part 2 of a three-part series on iron, and it covers what happens after iron is absorbed and why it can still fail to reach the cells that need it. Dr...

If you've been taking iron consistently and your ferritin still won't move, this episode is going to help you understand why. 

This is Part 1 of a three-part series on iron, and it starts where most ferritin problems actually begin: absorption. Dr. Heather walks through the case of her client Ashley, whose years of stress, grief, antibiotics, hormonal birth control, and mold exposure created a gut environment that couldn't absorb iron no matter how much she took. Dr. Heather also  breaks down exactly why iron intake is only one small piece of a much bigger system.

In...

Gas is one of those symptoms people joke about publicly but privately can wreck your confidence, keep you anxious before meals, and make you dread situations that should feel normal.

The thing is, gas isn't random. The smell, the timing, and the pattern are all clues, and once you know how to read them, you can stop guessing and start actually supporting your digestion.

In this episode, Dr. Heather breaks down the most common gas patterns, what they're pointing to underneath, and why removing more foods is rarely the answer.

What we...