This is everyday wellness, a podcast dedicated to helping you achieve your health and wellness goals and provide practical strategies that you can use in your real life.

And now, here is your host, Nurse Practition practitioner Cynthia Thurlow.

Well, today I am so excited to be joined

by Courtney Contos. After years of working in restaurants and

cooking and 16 years of teaching cooking, Courtney realized that she would

probably cook most anything even without a recipe. But what she did not know until recently was how to

nourish herself, food is information. After suffering for 12 years with chronic

debilitating rheumatoid arthritis and being told she would spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair, she reversed her symptoms and now helps people as a board certified health coach, specializing in functional medicine.

Welcome, Courtney, I've been so excited to interview you.

Oh, I appreciate this time together and I'm really excited to share my story with your beautiful tribe and to give hope to others.

You know, we're just spreading information and hope so other people can transform. So this is great time together. Yeah, and I think you know one of the things I was mentioning before we started recording is that typically, you know, a week or two ahead of

interviewing certain guests, I'll reach out on social media and ask, you know,

mostly women, that's mostly who follow me, what they are interested in learning

from guests and so I've kind of incorporated that into areas that I interested in autoimmune disease, it's important for us to kind of in the context of explaining what that is because there may be people listening who aren't familiarized with that term and really kind of defining it and explaining that it's all about the immune system mistakenly attacking your own body.

And it can be systemic, meaning, you know, thinking of things like lupus or could be localized.

I know for you, you had roomitoid arthritis and obviously that attacks the joints but obviously also

localized and systemic because I'm sure it wasn't just one joint that was impacted and the other really

interesting thing about autoimmune disorders is that they largely impact women much more than men at a 2 to 1 ratio.

And some of the more common examples, we have talked about rheumatoid arthritis briefly psoriasis type 1 diabetes

lupus multiple sclerosis are all examples there are a lot of them even syliac those are all terms I'm

sure people have heard of but what I think is really interesting is when I was doing my reading because I have had some autoimmune disorders as well, there's usually a trigger or an impetus.

And so, you know, as you were kind of going

...