Welcome to the Just Ingredients podcast. I'm Karin, and here we dive deep into the journey of healing and wellness.

If you're ready to learn, feel empowered, and take charge of your help, you're in the right place.

Welcome back to the show, everyone. Today, I am super excited for our show because we have the founders of

Branch Basics. And if you've been following me for a while, you know that I love Branch Basics.

We'll tell you more about what it is if you don't know what it is. But welcome to the show,

Kelly and Allison. Thank you. We're excited to be here. Well, this is a huge privilege to have you. I love that you guys are two moms running an amazing business, running a business that's trying to provide better choice products for people. So thank you for being here. On the way here, I was like, we've been trying to get on this podcast for a long time, Kelly. Thank you for having it. I'm super excited. Well, I'm so glad that you guys are here. I should tell

people we went out to dinner last night and it was super fun just to chit-chat about motherhood and

trying to be a mom and running a business. I think we covered a multitude of topics. We did. And maybe we'll

delve into some of that as we get going but i'm curious to know why did you start

branch basics and as i talked to a lot of people usually there is a help journey or something that

caused them to start this so i'm curious yeah yeah we joke that you have to either be sick or smart

to wake up right you know and so i was the sick one and Kelly was the smart one.

And so our other co-founder is my aunt, Marily, and she is just amazing. I wish she was sitting here

with us today. But she's in the Texas Hill country. She has her own health journey that we can

talk about in a little bit. But essentially, I was kind of the glue that brought the three of us together because my body crumbled in college. So Kelly and I were at the University

of Texas and Austin together. And I had grown up in Houston, standard American diet,

healthy, according to the world, you know, on birth control because I had severe acne. I was on acutane. I had my period once and it never came back. And so I was diagnosed with severe polycystic ovarian syndrome, but still just kind of thinking all these things were normal because everyone else around me had things going on. And even at like a young age, I kept in body odor, but just thinking, oh, that must just be how I am. But now looking back, I'm like the soy formula, the Eggland's best eggs, you know, all the different things that we now can look back and draw connections. So yeah, I was just the girl that could not get pregnant naturally. I was told that in high school, there's no way with the amount of cyst and your ovaries that you will ever be able to conceive naturally. So just take birth control indefinitely, come back when you're ready to conceive. And that was it. And I remember specifically asking the nurse practitioner when I was 17, is there anything that I can change or did I do anything to cause this? And it was like an emphatic, no. So many more, you know,

young ladies are getting this and this is totally normal. There's nothing you can do about it.

So I owned it, went off to college and came down with pretty serious chronic pain that, of course,

I didn't relate at all to any other issues in my body. And I just sought,

you know, all the different medical doctors advice. And I was doing PT and ralthing and acupuncture.

I mean, Eastern to Western medicine. I was on hydrocodine and muscle relaxers and painkillers all

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