The Story Behind Everything I Teach
A Physical Therapist's Most Honest Post Yet
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This post is different from my others.
I am not here to teach today. I am here to tell you where all of this actually comes from. The movement resets, the tools, the research, the program, the experiment I am currently running on my own body. None of it came from a textbook. All of it came from living through some of the hardest years of my life and refusing to stop figuring it out.
So here it is. The real story.
I planted the seed in 2019
I incorporated PT Pearls LLC in the fall of 2019. I had been a physical therapist for over 25 years at that point and I knew my knowledge was bigger than any clinic could contain. I wanted to find a way to share it more broadly. I just did not yet know exactly what that looked like.
Then COVID hit the world in early 2020. I was a part time employee at the time and I was the first one furloughed despite my experience and tenure. That moment clarified something fast. No matter how much I knew or how hard I worked, as long as I was building someone else's business I would never have real control over how my knowledge reached people. PT Pearls stopped being a someday idea and started being the plan.
August 2020 changed everything
Then I got COVID myself. August 2020. I could not move for two weeks. I have treated bodies for decades and I have never felt anything like that. The soreness was unlike anything in my clinical experience.
What followed were not just weeks of symptoms. It was years. Brain fog. Joint aches. Mood swings. Low energy. A rash on the left side of my stomach that appeared during COVID and has never fully gone away. It flares with heat, stress, and illness. It is still there today.
Perimenopause began overlapping with the long haul symptoms and I could not separate one from the other. I am a PT. I understand the body. And I still did not have answers.
So I started doing what I have always done. I went looking.
2021: Finding what my body could actually tolerate
Through my own research I discovered blood flow restriction training and whole body vibration. I got my own BFR bands and my own vibration plate. I became a certified BFR coach. The lower loads and lower intensity meant my body could actually move again without sending me into a cascade of symptoms. For the first time since getting sick I felt like I had found something that worked with my body instead of against it.
It did not fix everything. But it gave me movement back. And that mattered more than I can explain.
2022: When work stress became another stressor my body could not absorb
I had spent 25 years with the same company and I am genuinely grateful for what that chapter built in me as a clinician and a leader. The people were good. The foundation was real. But institutions change and this one did. Priorities shifted away from patient care and toward metrics and revenue. Things that had been agreed upon were no longer honored. I was asked to compromise in ways I was not willing to compromise. So at the end of that year I resigned.
The next chapter brought its own challenges. I spent eight months in an environment with the highest stress I have experienced in 30 years of practice. I learned a great deal. I also learned exactly what I did not want. And somewhere in the middle of that discomfort PT Pearls stopped being a side project and started being the exit plan.
What I did not fully understand yet was that my body was absorbing all of it. The mood swings that felt completely out of character. The physical reactions to stress that seemed disproportionate. My body was keeping score and I did not yet have the full picture of why.
I left that second situation in August 2023 and started a new job in September. I still work there now 30 hours a week. But my eyes were wide open. Unless I built something of my own I would never truly have control over how I shared my knowledge and made a difference.
That clarity pushed me to invest in myself differently. I connected with a year long intensive mentorship through a PT turned entrepreneur who works with healthcare professionals building their own businesses. It was expensive. It was intensive. It changed how I think about my own brand, my audience, and what I am actually building. I have continued working with his group in different capacities since because the business and marketing side of this work is just as much a skill as the clinical side and I had to learn it from scratch.
2023: Finally getting some answers
A trusted colleague, a nurse who had pivoted to functional nutrition and wellness, introduced me to DNA testing through IDLife. I took the test.
My neighbor happens to be an integrative medicine doctor. He was kind enough to sit down with me neighbor to neighbor, review my results, and walk me through what he saw. What he found connected a lot of dots.
I carry the MTHFR gene mutation. I know the abbreviation looks like something else entirely. What it actually means is that my body's detox pathways do not work as efficiently as they should. Toxins and chemicals can build up faster than in someone without the mutation. Most people who have it do not even know.
Here is what surprised me when I dug into the research. MTHFR is not rare at all. Studies estimate that somewhere between 30 and 70 percent of people carry at least one variant depending on which variants are included. The highest frequencies show up in Italian and Mediterranean populations specifically and research on Polish populations shows similar numbers, nearly 45 percent carrying at least one variant. My mom was 100 percent Italian. My dad is Eastern European. The odds that I carry this were actually pretty high and I just never knew to look for it.
What also caught my attention was a 2021 journal study that found a correlation between MTHFR prevalence statistics and COVID-19 severity. Given what happened to my body when I got COVID that did not surprise me at all.
The lifelong clues were there too. My whole life I have been sensitive to loud noise, strong smells, perfume, cleaning products, anything with bleach. I cannot be around them. Once I learned that my detox pathways are less efficient than average a lifetime of those quirks suddenly made sense. My body was reacting to chemical exposures more strongly because it was not clearing them as efficiently as it should.
My neighbor believed the viral response from COVID likely activated that gene. And my history of mono in college with a lingering Epstein Barr viral count that followed may have added another layer. Now when any significant stressor hits, illness, heat, or life overwhelm, my body goes into a full regression. It is not in my head. It is in my biology.
This is when test not guess stopped being a concept and became a personal philosophy.
If you have spent years searching for answers, dealing with unexplained sensitivities, inflammation that will not resolve, fatigue that does not match your lifestyle, it might be worth looking into. Maybe you need methylated vitamins. Maybe you need to support your detox pathways before you add anything else. Maybe inflammation has been the root issue all along. The DNA test I did through IDLife was what finally gave me a roadmap instead of guesses.
2024: The year grief became physical
In late July 2024 my mom fell. She was my rock. My best friend. The person I talked to every single day.
She had multiple fractures. My brother and I got back to be with her as soon as we could. She was bruised all over and in excruciating pain. They were doing what they could to keep her comfortable. I stayed for a few days then came back home.
The following weekend more family came in. My kids got to see her over a video call. I kept trying to reach her that day but we kept missing each other. That was the weekend she made her own decision. She chose to stop the comfort measures and the medications that had been managing things because the progression of her underlying conditions was not going to allow for real improvement. Within a day of that decision she was no longer coherent.
I called when I got home that evening. They held the phone up to her ear. I talked to her. She could not answer back. I have to believe she heard me. That one sided conversation with a lot of crying was my goodbye.
She was gone within a day or two. August 2024.
I was not there for that final weekend. I was at a mandatory continuing education course I could not skip. I needed those credits to renew my license and I did not have enough time to push it. I still carry that. Some things you just do not get to redo.
Three months later, by November and into early December, my body was in another full regression. More weight gain. More fatigue. More of the cascade I had learned to recognize but was still learning to manage.
The 90 day pattern I could not ignore
In the summer of 2025 I took a hormone health course and one observation from it has never left me. When you are experiencing unexpected body changes, weight gain, fatigue, immune issues, look back roughly 90 days and you will likely find the stressor or life event that set it in motion. When I heard that I immediately thought back to my own timeline. My mom passed in August 2024. By November and into December my body was in a full regression. Roughly 90 days later. Then the flu in December 2025 and another spike about three months after that. The pattern was sitting right there in my own history the whole time.
The science behind this is well established. Research in psychoneuroimmunology, the study of how stress affects the body at a cellular and immune level, consistently shows that major life stressors suppress immune function and trigger measurable physiological changes in the weeks and months that follow. Grief in particular has been linked to immune dysregulation, and increased health risks that can persist for months after a loss.
The body keeps score on its own timeline. Not ours.
Where I am now
I am currently at the heaviest I have ever been in my life. I have the knowledge. I have the tools. I have the research. And my hormones and my genetics and my grief are still doing whatever they want some days.
But I am also the most informed and intentional I have ever been about my own health. I know what triggers my regressions. I know what my genetics need. I know which tools work with my body instead of against it.
I track everything with my Hume Health scale. It goes way beyond weight and breaks down body fat percentage, muscle mass, hydration, and metabolic trends so I can see what is actually changing versus what just feels different. If you want one use my referral link and we both get $20 off.
I am currently a few weeks into a personal experiment using BFR, whole body vibration, daily movement resets, and that scale to track real numbers in real time. I will share the full results and everything I learned in an upcoming post.
Why I share all of this
I am not sharing this because my story is harder than anyone else's. I am sharing it because I suspect you have your own version of it.
A body that changed when life got full. A health strategy that stopped working. A gap between what you know you should do and what your body will actually cooperate with on the hard days.
Modern medicine is a gift and I am grateful for it. But so much of it addresses symptoms rather than root causes. Functional medicine exists and it is powerful but not everyone has the time or the money to access it. That gap is where I live. That gap is what I am trying to help close.
If I can help you individualize even a few things based on your own biology, your own patterns, your own life, that is a win. Test not guess is not just a phrase I use. It is the thing that changed everything for me.
Everything I teach came from needing it myself. That is the only kind of guidance I have ever fully trusted and it is the only kind I am willing to offer.
Where to start if any of this resonates
If you want structured daily movement that fits the life you actually have the Sit Safer Move More program is where I would begin.
If you want to start understanding your own biology the free IDLife Health Assessment takes about 10 minutes and gives you a personalized health score with research backed lifestyle and supplementation recommendations tailored to your specific health history. It is a check and balance for what you are already taking and a starting point if you are not sure where to begin.
And if you want to go deeper the ID Life DNA test maps how your body processes nutrients, how you respond to exercise, and what your genetic blueprint actually needs. It is what changed everything for me.
Stop guessing. Start testing.
Lori
Your Movement Detective
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