In this episode of the Heal Nourish Grow podcast, host Cheryl McColgan speaks with holistic nutritionist Meg Gage about her personal journey with acne and how it led her to help others. Meg discusses the multifaceted nature of acne, emphasizing the importance of mindset, gut health, and customized skincare approaches. She shares insights on how stress and limiting beliefs can impact skin health and offers practical tips for listeners to start their healing journey. The conversation highlights the need for a holistic approach to acne treatment, integrating mental, physical, and emotional well-being.

Connect with Meg to learn more at her website.

Takeaways

Everyone has the potential to heal acne, regardless of their past experiences.

Mindset is crucial in the healing process; negative beliefs can exacerbate skin issues.

The body communicates through symptoms, and understanding this can aid healing.

Gut health plays a significant role in skin conditions like acne.

Customized skincare is essential for effective acne treatment.

Stress management is vital for overall health and skin clarity.

Watch on YouTube

https://youtu.be/Hv7zOyux71E

Episode Transcript

Cheryl McColgan (00:01)Hello everyone, welcome to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. Today I am joined by Meg Gage. I hope I got that right, it's spelled a little differently. And she has a really interesting health history. She's a holistic nutritionist. She specializes actually in acne, I guess, prevention and treatment. And as you can see by her skin, I mean, it looks amazing here if you're watching on video. So if you can't see it, maybe pop over to YouTube.

Meg (00:08)You did.

Cheryl McColgan (00:30)But it wasn't always this way Meg, right? So I'd love it if you could just start by sharing a little bit of your history, your health journey, and then we'll eventually get into how you came to figure out like how to get rid of acne. So welcome.

Meg (00:45)Thank you. Yeah, it's quite the journey. feel anyone who becomes a healer always has quite their own story as to how they got there. But yeah, ever since I was five, I just dealt with multiple traumas and that kind of stress of living in prolonged kind of fight flight breathe since I was little showed up very physically for me in a lot of symptoms, one of which was long standing acne.

since I was 12 and others were chronic pain, chronic fatigue, a lot of misdiagnosed disease of like fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. All the while at that point when I was 12 being put on hormonal birth control without any kind of questions asked, that's just what we did back in those days. So, you without having many cycles of my own, I was just put on these synthetic hormones as well.

And kind of throughout dealing with major health issues over the years and a couple of car accidents and whiplash and PTSD and concussions, my acne was always such a consistent thing in the background. And when I came off hormonal birth control without any prep work or understanding that after a decade, this might have crazy impacts on my hormones when they try to kind of rebalance themselves, my acne exploded into very cystic hormonal

me all over my face, all over my back, all over my bum, very painful. And it really just started my quest in kind of the natural healing world. And for the next five years, I tried everything from, you know, naturopaths to nutritionists to Chinese medicine practitioners to herbalists to acupuncture, all in a quest kind of to heal my skin and nothing worked.

And it was a very frustrating journey. I was spending upwards of $30,000 on this. It felt like a full-time job, distress when you're kind of putting 100 % of your effort into healing something for it not to work. And then just seeing so many practitioners that were telling you so many, so many varying things. And I just…

got to a point where I was like, need to do this myself. I need to listen to my own intuition. I need to take my power back. I feel like everyone's just pulling me in 50 different directions and taking my money. So that's when I became a holistic nutritionist and my mind was just blown. Once I actually learned about the body and how much could be impacting my skin, it just basically led me to my own healing journey of multiple root causes that I had lived with for my entire life.

And Geklo was kind of born very organically after that once I graduated because I was like, my gosh, if I can do this for myself, I want to do this for others and never have them go through what I went through. And also just becoming the practitioner I wanted throughout that journey, which was a really hard thing to find anyone who had been through debilitating acne or health issues and had that like understanding and validation component of what's needed out of a practitioner at that time.

So yeah, I've been doing it nine years now and helped over 2,500 clients.

Cheryl McColgan (04:00)That's amazing. you know, I'm sure a lot of people can really relate to this story, because especially people that are in their teens and then into their early 20s, a lot of people really struggle with acne. you know, there's so many, there's so many things out there that people think are the reason and, you know, nutrition, think is certainly part of it. But, you know, as you know, and as you've come to find out, that's not the whole story. So when you were originally being put on

hormonal birth control, which I think is really common and really unfortunate because it can have a lot of long term impacts on your future fertility and things like that. So I think people should really be digging into that further. And a lot of practitioners that's still kind of their go to today. But after the hormonal birth control, were there any things where you thought, you know, that was helping a little or that seemed promising initially to you and then didn't end up panning out?

Were there any of those things in there that did turn out to be a piece of the puzzle once you finally got it figured out?

Meg (05:02)But the issue always is when you're taking an either or approach, it never works, right? And that's what was happening. So, okay, fine. I was seeing an atropath who was running Dutch tests and, obviously my results were coming back with cortisol and very, very common indications of living in fight flight breeze. So sure, that's an answer. But if you're giving a very stressed out person a million supplements that are super expensive and not getting to the root of the stress, and then

I'm going, they're telling me nothing about skincare or they're not doing anything from a support perspective. Of course it's not going to work. Right? So by the same token, you're seeing an aesthetician, people always go right to skincare, right? When they're breaking out and they go see an aesthetician and they do chemical peels and lasers and all that. I was doing that on and off too. But again, there was no communication.

between the three modalities that I now do and have an understanding of the three things you need. You need mindset, you need rewiring of all the negative belief patterns, limiting beliefs, fears, to get yourself out of fight, flight, freeze and get your cortisol regulated. You need proper skincare, yes. And then you also need the internal root cause of like, what is your body trying to communicate with you? So without those, it just wasn't a complete picture. So you would never really know what was working or not because you didn't have all the pieces.

Do you know what mean? Like it just, never worked. So to me, it's like, in either approach is just wasting a lot of money for someone with acne because those protocols are extremely expensive. But if you don't have all three, you're going to think it's not working, right?

Cheryl McColgan (06:40)So it sounds like from what you're saying, I mean, it's a multifactorial problem that we're dealing with here, usually with acne. But would you say that the first thing, you mentioned mindset and you mentioned getting yourself out of stress. Would that be, for example, maybe one of the first things that you would address when you start working with somebody? Because I think stress affects so many things, not just acne, of course, but so many health problems, seems like, even if it didn't clear your acne, that'd be an amazing place to start. So could you talk a little bit more

about that and how you start to help people get out of that fight flight mode.

Meg (07:15)The root of the root of the root of everything for acne is your mindset. Like I stand by that 100%. It is always where I start with people because if you are telling yourself, I'll always have acne, nothing works for me, that's a script you're printing out and your body's gonna be like, okay, I'm gonna have more acne. I'm gonna get stuck in this state. So until we actually rewire that kind of subconscious pattern that people are having and you make your body feel

safe to heal. I don't care how perfect your diet is. I don't care how many supplements you're taking. I don't care how many expensive tests you're doing. It doesn't matter if you don't have that piece under control. And this is where I see people running into these walls, why they have these 10, 20-year acne journeys. And they say to me, without doubt, the number one thing on application is, well, I've tried it all. And I'm like, you haven't tried it all. There's something missing or else you'd be clear, right?

Right there is a limiting belief keeping you stuck in still and in this acne journey. Right? So the number one thing I do is a lot of subconscious reprogramming, eradicating the root of that fear, limiting belief, and really ensuring that your body can regulate on its own and not produce constant cortisol, which then it's going to impact things like blood sugar and sex hormones and your gut and your liver.