Last updated on May 1, 2023.
I’m a fairly normal person in my late 20s with a normal corporate job. I have a degree in public health/nutrition that I in no way use professionally, and I live in Raleigh, NC with my dog and two cats.
I started this blog in college after being diagnosed with ulcerative colitis (a chronic autoimmune digestive disease), and it mainly functioned as an outlet for my rants and ramblings about nutrition and gut health as I navigated my rocky relationship with my colon. (We have since divorced due to irreconcilable differences.)
I’ve dabbled in just about every crazy diet you can think of, so a lot of my earlier posts talk about nutrition. I traversed the vegan > Paleo/low-carb > Ray Peat/pro-metabolic pipeline, and have emerged the other side thoroughly over it all.
I’ve also used this website to document my experience with palate expansion using AGGA; after having extraction/retraction orthodontics as a kid, I’ve now in my mid/late 20s re-opened those extraction spaces and replaced the missing teeth with implants. (PSA: Please don’t pull permanent teeth! Learn proper tongue posture and help the facial bones grow enough to accommodate all of your teeth! Your airways and jaw joints and appearance will thank you.)
I hesitate to even try to characterize what this website is now, but I think a fair assessment is that it’s a haphazard documentation of my own health experiments, as well as somewhere I can write about topics of interest in a more organized and helpful way when the mood strikes.
Most recently I started putting together the IBD Index, which was intended to be a big long-term project, but I’ve stalled out a bit. The types of posts I like to publish (like my articles about the SCD, low-FODMAP, and ketogenic diets) take a long time to put together, and I’ve been wanting to spend more of my time lately learning about psychology and the nervous system.
Ignore anything I say anywhere else on this website about what I’m currently working on or what I plan to work on soon; whatever I said, I’ve probably fallen down at least 12 different rabbit holes since then, and it’s entirely possible I’ll never make it back to whatever topic I was so fired up about at the time.
You can find all of the articles I’m proudest of in the “Deep Dives” section. In particular, my critique of polyvagal theory brings together many of the concepts I’m most interested in right now – the biology and physiology of the nervous system, the psychology of illness and healing, the integration of mind and body, and the social and linguistic factors that surround and often obfuscate health and biology. I also just think it’s fun to poke holes in popular health paradigms, especially when they’re being espoused and propagated more like religion than science.
When I’m not sporadically shouting into the void of the internet, I like to read books that are too smart for me, play piano and guitar, walk in the woods, and fix parts of my house that probably don’t need fixing.
For more on how I think about health/disease (with a decade and a half of chronic illness experience under my belt), you can check out my post About Alyssa: Background, Biases, and Philosophy on Health and Disease.
My YouTube channel has all my low-effort AGGA update videos. Sometimes I post book reviews on IG (hoping to do that more).