Andrea Love bomb

Hi, my name is Andrea, nice to meet you!

Whether you’ve recently learned yoga, tried an Ayurvedic cleanse, tasted healing khichdi for the first time, or attended a wellness retreat that you loved, and you want to deepen that beautiful experience of Ayurveda … 

Or, you need support to heal your gut, reverse your chronic disease, ease your IBS, lose weight, get rid of your gas and bloating, reduce brain fog and fatigue, increase your energy, balance your blood sugar, or for any other health concerns you’re facing, I’m pretty sure I can help you. (HINT: It all starts in the gut.)

Let’s have a chat and explore the many possibilities for healthy living through Ayurveda. 

Dear friends, you have come to the right place!

  • for wisdom that’s rooted in Ayurveda and nature’s intelligence
  • for holistic support to take back your energy, freedom, and flow
  • for practical advice on navigating special diets and healing protocols
  • for digestive health coaching to conquer your unruly gut and find your Tummy Joy

I support busy entrepreneurs, creatives, and professionals who know that the optimal health and happiness they seek for themselves is theirs, if they could only discover the root cause of their problem and get some support. 

At Good Gut we support our community to find, release, and crush all obstacles to their health through loving actions that nourish body, mind, and spirit.

We show you how to choose your food and cook in ways that nourish your whole self, until you feel full of love and strength. 

The self-love, self-care, and safe space we create for ourselves extends from our kitchens to all areas of our lives, where we thrive and live dynamic and full lives of limitless potential.

Andrea Tummy Joy

My Story

IN A NUTSHELL

For as long as I can remember, I struggled with a sensitive stomach, frequent indigestion, and dyspepsia. My pain was constant and relentless. I didn’t know what it was to feel comfortable or relaxed, so I fixated on the problem, and the pain stole my energy, making me feel weak and emotional.

A search for healing in my early 20s led me down many roads, but nothing worked, or felt right, until I discovered the universal wisdom of Ayurveda. From that moment on, joy entered my life, and one by one, all the answers became clear.

My mission is to help people like you discover their freedom from gut health issues and chronic disease. With Ayurveda, anything, and everything, is possible.

I am a certified Ayurvedic Digestive Health Coach, and an Ayurvedic Chef. I also have a Master’s in Journalism, with an undergrad in the Humanities, and I love to teach, and speak about Ayurveda, nutrition, digestion, and gut health.

THE OH-SO-VERY LONG VERSION

It took me over 40 years to realize that my lifelong stomach pain is connected to my anxiety. It got really bad a couple years after I left my sheltered childhood home to attend university in a new, and more liberal city.

My new friends seemed to have completely different ways of seeing things, and they knew many truths that I had never heard before.

It shattered everything I thought I knew about the world over and over, and my inability to digest all the new information filled my heart with rising fear and pain.

I felt like the relative safety and security I had once felt when living with my parents was gone forever. As an overly sensitive young person, I frequently felt overwhelmed.

To make matters worse, after 2 years of university, I took a semester off to travel in Central America.

This made my situation much worse, as I didn’t know what to make of the human suffering, poverty, and hardship I observed there.

When I contrasted life in Central America with my own, I felt anxious and confused. I couldn’t reconcile my life experiences in a way that made any sense, and my anxiety and confusion manifested as constant digestive pain and mental distress.

Anxiety was a familiar friend that I didn’t realize I had at the time, but as a child I had spent years feeling fear in the night, and nausea in the morning.

After I realized that I had the power to heal myself, I began my search for solutions. 

I explored everything from reiki and crystal therapy, to looking for gurus, sound healing, Deepak Chopra, and more. Over a few years of exploration, I came to understand that there’s more to being a human being than just the physical body, and that the root cause of my suffering might be in my mind, emotions, feelings, and my existential spiritual questions. All of it was impacting how I felt, whether I was aware of it, or not.

As I was delving into life’s mysteries, the one thing that brought the most comfort, and made the most sense to me, was cooking.

Cooking is a Practice of Self-Love

My time in the kitchen felt healing. The heat of the stove felt nourishing. The food I made with care and attention felt like an act of self-love and nurturing, and my anxious body and mind felt assuaged.

I wasn’t cooking just any old thing either. That was before I had a computer or smartphone. Instead, what I had was a thick food bible called “Healing With Whole Foods.”

The book was written from an Eastern perspective, with language from Traditional Chinese Medicine like excess and deficiency, and yin and yang energies.

I tried to self-diagnose my symptoms of sluggishness, fatigue, constipation, and bloating. I examined my tongue and the color of my skin, and experimented with foods and recipes that might balance me out and make me feel better.

I was intrigued by a spiritual approach to cooking, and the idea that our relationship with food had such huge healing potential. I thought back to my experiences in Central America, where local food was all that was available, and how incredible tortillas, eggs, soft cheese, and tomatoes tasted for breakfast.

It wasn’t hard for me to recognize that if I wasn’t cooking for myself, someone who didn’t care about me probably was. Processed foods are cooked by machines, and most restaurant cooks are just doing their jobs. I decided that where my food came from mattered to me.

Around that time, I also acquired a mind-blowing mystical book, my entry into the world of Ayurveda, called “Life of Balance,” by Maya Tiwari. I was blown away by her concept of food sadhanas, which refers to practices performed with a spiritual intent.

After that, I read and studied every book I could get my hands on that related to food and spirituality, from Diet for a Small Planet, to Macrobiotics, to raw foods, herbal medicine, and more Ayurveda.

I noticed that every time I put effort into cooking for myself, I would receive a rush of positive healing energy from the food. I was finally starting to understand how to create balance in my life.

I don’t know if I actually managed to shift any excess or deficiency states in my physical body, but I do know that the simple act of cooking became my lifeline to manage my pain and anxiety.

It probably didn’t hurt that I was cutting out processed foods and consuming mostly whole foods. And the healthier lifestyle I adopted, that incorporated meditation, mindfulness, and looking within, was certainly a part of it as well.

However, I was languishing at this point. I still didn’t feel like myself, and I really didn’t know what to do about it.

Around that time I spent two dark years taking a deep dive within. I lived by myself in a teepee in a river valley and literally did the “chop wood carry water” thing.

One evening, still unsure about what to do with my life, I found myself standing over a pot of bubbling lentils on the stove in this cabin in the woods, when a very clear thought entered my mind: “I can cook!”

My first thought was to learn from the guy who wrote Healing With Whole Foods, Paul Pitchford. Turns out he lived and worked at a massage therapy institute in the mountains of northern California, and they offered work exchanges. I went there, and got to cook organic food in a professional kitchen and take some courses at the same time.

That was the beginning of a 7-year professional cooking career.

I was head cook at a fully vegan cafe, cycled through from salad duty to head cook at a pioneering vegetarian restaurant called Re-Bar, worked garde manger and saucier in fine dining, and created dinner specials at a fully organic West Coast farm-to-table restaurant.

During that time I was vegetarian for about 5 years, but there was something I wasn’t doing right, because I was craving sugar, and I didn’t feel balanced. I was forced to start eating meat again, even though I didn’t like it.

Another huge turning point came when I met my future husband, who is from India. Visiting India for the first time, and staying with my parent-in-laws brought me back full circle to my fond memories of Central America, where food was cooked from scratch with loads of love, and from simple ingredients.

My husband has never eaten meat in his life, so I decided to take the plunge and become vegetarian for the second time, but this time I felt much better because I learned to cook Indian food. For the first time in my life, I felt perfectly satisfied by my strictly vegetarian diet (that includes dairy).

Since then I’ve developed an Ayurvedic approach to the use of spices and balanced flavors to create incredibly satisfying food for the mind and body.

And, finally, after years of dabbling in Ayurveda, I decided to enroll in a 560-hour course, “Mastering Ayurvedic Digestion & Nutrition,” and got certified as an Ayurvedic Digestive Heath Coach. 

Not surprisingly, the answers were in plain sight! The truth is: simple changes in diet and lifestyle DO create massive shifts in wellbeing.

Ayurveda’s approach to diet and lifestyle is aligned with the seasons, the five elements, and natural rhythms that govern all of us. Its principles are both universal, and highly individualized.

By surveying one’s symptoms holistically using Ayurveda, imbalances that are the source of one’s pain become clear. 

Most approaches to diet and lifestyle focus on rules and prescriptions, but Ayurveda is about strengthening the power of the individual’s intuition and inner guidance through simple actions like cooking a bowl of food containing the foods that nourish you.

I spent over 25 years learning about digestion holistically so that I could help someone like you.

Right now, I am offering a 6-week program “Happy Eater.” I also offer 1:1 Ayurvedic Health Coaching