Love Your Gut

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:

• Why a protocol can work and still not last
• The three places Dr. Heather looks for the "leak" in recurring gut symptoms
• How the nervous system affects your ability to hold onto results
• How to tell when discomfort means change course and when it means keep going
• What lasting gut health actually looks like during travel, stress, and the holidays

Mentioned in this episode: Episode 65 (for a deeper look at motility and minerals)

Find the real root causes of your GI symptoms with our free, 2 minute Quiz! 

Take the quiz here!

Connect + Next Steps

Want daily education, stories, and gut-friendly support?
Follow Dr. Heather on Instagram

Ready for personalized 1:1 support and a clear plan?
Apply for gutTogether®

Want a chance to win a free HTMA Bundle? Leave a rating & review and email it to [email protected] with [PODCAST REVIEW] in the subject line! We choose a new winner every month! 

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 years, and none of them show up on a standard iron panel.

You'll learn:

• Why "absorption is the problem" is a correct conclusion that still leaves most women stuck
• The three suspects that can quietly drain your iron, and the clues that point to each one
• Why your body sometimes hides iron from you on purpose
• Why treating off a symptom list can make things worse, and what order of testing makes sense instead

Find the real root causes of your GI symptoms with our free, 2 minute Quiz! 

Take the quiz here!

Connect + Next Steps

Want daily education, stories, and gut-friendly support?
Follow Dr. Heather on Instagram

Ready for personalized 1:1 support and a clear plan?
Apply for gutTogether®

Want a chance to win a free HTMA Bundle? Leave a rating & review and email it to [email protected] with [PODCAST REVIEW] in the subject line! We choose a new winner every month! 

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 those women.
 Dr. Heather explains how ferritin works like savings, and taking iron is making a deposit. You can walk into the bank every week and hand them twenty dollars, and if you're spending more than you earn, your savings will not grow.
 Then she covers the three places the deposit disappears, plus the reframe for anyone who finishes this episode feeling like they wasted two years and four hundred dollars on supplements.
 What you'll learn in this episode:

• Why the belief that iron fixes low ferritin keeps women stuck for years, and how it converts every failure into a reason to try the same thing again
• What your ferritin number actually reports, and why it can't tell you anything about the cause on its own
• The three places your iron goes missing
• Why some women feel worse on high-dose iron rather than better
• The four blood markers to hold out for if your provider will only run a handful

Keep listening

Start with Dr. Heather's Story
Ep. 99: Why Iron Wasn't the Answer for My Low Ferritin

The full Iron & Ferritin Series
Ep. 112: Why You're Not Absorbing Iron (Even If You Are Supplementing)
Ep. 113: Why Your Iron Is Stuck & Ferritin Is High
Ep. 114: How Jessica Increased Her Ferritin by 20 Points in 2 Months 

More on where the deposit disappears
Ep. 100: Why Constipation Is Blocking Your Iron
Ep. 108: Why You're Still Constipated: The Low Stomach Acid Connection
Ep. 104: The Hidden Link Between SIBO, Iron & Ferritin 

More on the minerals that move it
Ep. 125: Iron, Copper, and Gut Irony Roundtable
Ep. 121: Why Minerals Fix What Protocols Can't with Lisa Pitel-Killah

Find the real root causes of your GI symptoms with our free, 2 minute Quiz! 

Take the quiz here!

Connect + Next Steps

Want daily education, stories, and gut-friendly support?
Follow Dr. Heather on Instagram

Ready for personalized 1:1 support and a clear plan?
Apply for gutTogether®

Want a chance to win a free HTMA Bundle? Leave a rating & review and email it to [email protected] with [PODCAST REVIEW] in the subject line! We choose a new winner every month! 

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 it climbs. 

Plus the question we get in our inbox constantly: should I just get the infusion?

Timestamps 

• 01:50 Pattern one: the iron supplement that doesn't move the needle
• 02:30 Your iron recycling system, and when iron is truly the problem
• 03:40 Iron is a delivery system, not a faucet
• 04:20 Almost every low-ferritin client also has GI symptoms
• 05:00 Pattern two: copper, ceruloplasmin, and iron recycling
• 07:20 Why copper becomes biounavailable (stress, liver, hormones, exposure)
• 10:00 Retinol, vitamin C, and the easier fixes
• 11:00 Zinc mega-dosing and the copper fallout
• 12:40 Minerals work like a symphony
• 13:10 High ferritin, wonky ferritin, and the Goldilocks range
• 15:30 Why one lab in isolation will mislead you
• 16:10 The gut infections we see most in ferritin cases
• 17:00 The string of pearls: digestion before absorption
• 19:00 How pathogens sequester iron
• 20:20 Iron infusions and the GI symptoms that follow
• 22:20 The macro minerals that influence iron regulation
• 23:40 Under-fueling, unaccounted losses, and dietary variety
• 26:00 "Should I get an infusion?" What her labs actually showed
• 28:20 What women are self-prescribing for iron
• 30:00 The takeaway

Find the real root causes of your GI symptoms with our free, 2 minute Quiz! 

Take the quiz here!

Connect + Next Steps

Want daily education, stories, and gut-friendly support?
Follow Dr. Heather on Instagram

Ready for personalized 1:1 support and a clear plan?
Apply for gutTogether®

Want a chance to win a free HTMA Bundle? Leave a rating & review and email it to [email protected] with [PODCAST REVIEW] in the subject line! We choose a new winner every month! 

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!)

Find the real root causes of your GI symptoms with our free, 2 minute Quiz! 

Take the quiz here!

Connect + Next Steps

Want daily education, stories, and gut-friendly support?
Follow Dr. Heather on Instagram

Ready for personalized 1:1 support and a clear plan?
Apply for gutTogether®

Want a chance to win a free HTMA Bundle? Leave a rating & review and email it to [email protected] with [PODCAST REVIEW] in the subject line! We choose a new winner every month! 

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 (hint: nobody ever says "my bloating score improved").

Find the real root causes of your GI symptoms with our free, 2 minute Quiz! 

Take the quiz here!

Connect + Next Steps

Want daily education, stories, and gut-friendly support?
Follow Dr. Heather on Instagram

Ready for personalized 1:1 support and a clear plan?
Apply for gutTogether®

Want a chance to win a free HTMA Bundle? Leave a rating & review and email it to [email protected] with [PODCAST REVIEW] in the subject line! We choose a new winner every month! 

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 how babies acquire their earliest gut bacteria.

We get into what "missing" actually means (as in, undetectable even with modern DNA sequencing), why C-section babies are twice as likely to be affected, why breast milk alone doesn't always fix it, and why Stephanie now tells clients that the most important inheritance you can give your kids is your microbiome. We also cover why the probiotic on the shelf at Whole Foods probably isn't doing what you think it's doing, and why it's genuinely not too late to shift things as an adult, even if you've had gut issues since childhood.

Dr. Stephanie Culler, PhD, is the co-founder and CEO of Persephone Biosciences. She earned her PhD in Chemical Engineering at Caltech, where she focused on gene therapies for cancer, and spent the first several years of Persephone's existence developing microbiome-based cancer therapies before shifting the company's focus to infant and toddler gut health after becoming a mother. She led MyBabyBiome, the largest study of the US infant gut microbiome to date, which found that 9 out of 10 US babies are missing one or more keystone Bifidobacterium species linked to healthy immune development (published in Communications Biology, 2025).

Persephone Biosciences makes Bloom (for infants 0 to 12 months) and Thrive (for toddlers 12 months and up), synbiotics that pair specific Bifidobacterium strains with human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) and vitamin D.

Connect With Stephanie: 

• Persephone Site (use code LOVEYOURGUT30 for 30% off your first order)
• LinkedIn

Find the real root causes of your GI symptoms with our free, 2 minute Quiz! 

Take the quiz here!

Connect + Next Steps

Want daily education, stories, and gut-friendly support?
Follow Dr. Heather on Instagram

Ready for personalized 1:1 support and a clear plan?
Apply for gutTogether®

Want a chance to win a free HTMA Bundle? Leave a rating & review and email it to [email protected] with [PODCAST REVIEW] in the subject line! We choose a new winner every month! 

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 actually driving estrogen dominant symptoms that never show on a hormone panel, the truth about calcium supplements and constipation, how to think about binders like humic/fulvic and zeolite, and the clinical reason most gut protocols plateau before they should. Whether you are an individual struggling with health concerns or a practitioner curious about minerals, this is a great listen! 

Connect With Lisa

Vykon Customs Website

Lisa Pitel-Killah on Instagram

Vykon Customs Instagram

Lisa's podcast (The Human Optimization Podcast)

Enjoyed this episode? Screenshot it and share it on Instagram and tag me at @drheatherfinley, I'd love to know what landed for you.

Find the real root causes of your GI symptoms with our free, 2 minute Quiz! 

Take the quiz here!

Connect + Next Steps

Want daily education, stories, and gut-friendly support?
Follow Dr. Heather on Instagram

Ready for personalized 1:1 support and a clear plan?
Apply for gutTogether®

Want a chance to win a free HTMA Bundle? Leave a rating & review and email it to [email protected] with [PODCAST REVIEW] in the subject line! We choose a new winner every month! 

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 lowers your risk at the grocery store and in your kitchen, and exactly what to do if you think you have it. Including the one thing that actually clears it, and the honest line between real treatment and the supplements that only ever play a supporting role.

Supplement support options (some ideas to have on hand or to support your body for prevention or treatment) 

Therasage Ozone Bubbler (DRHEATHER for 10% off)

PLEASE NOTE: this episode is NOT medical advice. Consult your provider if you are experiencing symptoms or need support. 

Find the real root causes of your GI symptoms with our free, 2 minute Quiz! 

Take the quiz here!

Connect + Next Steps

Want daily education, stories, and gut-friendly support?
Follow Dr. Heather on Instagram

Ready for personalized 1:1 support and a clear plan?
Apply for gutTogether®

Want a chance to win a free HTMA Bundle? Leave a rating & review and email it to [email protected] with [PODCAST REVIEW] in the subject line! We choose a new winner every month! 

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 try for the next 30 days, and a few mineral-rich mocktail recipes to replace that third cup of coffee.

And if you've already tried all of it and you're still crashing, that's exactly what HTMA testing is for. Instead of guessing what your body needs, you get the data.

Find the real root causes of your GI symptoms with our free, 2 minute Quiz! 

Take the quiz here!

Connect + Next Steps

Want daily education, stories, and gut-friendly support?
Follow Dr. Heather on Instagram

Ready for personalized 1:1 support and a clear plan?
Apply for gutTogether®

Want a chance to win a free HTMA Bundle? Leave a rating & review and email it to [email protected] with [PODCAST REVIEW] in the subject line! We choose a new winner every month!