Are you struggling with unexplained symptoms?
Do you feel inflamed, tired, foggy and frustrated?
Perhaps you have an autoimmune diagnosis?
I'm a Nutritional Therapist specialising in gut health and autoimmune disease. With a Functional Medicine approach, I help people understand the triggers & root causes of their condition, so they can regain control of their health and feel better.
I offer private 1 to 1 nutritional therapy consultations over Skype or Zoom and from my clinic in Ljungbyhed, Sweden.
Book now for a free, no obligation, discovery call, to discuss your health concerns and how I may be able to help.
Elsa Qvarsell DipION, mBANT, CNHC
Consultations
My Story
I’m originally from Stockholm but have lived abroad for over half of my life. I moved to London in 1999 where I worked as a freelance photographer until 2012 when I moved to Berlin. The debilitating back pain that I had been suffering with was finally diagnosed as Ankylosing Spondylitis and a lifelong treatment with drugs was proposed.
The thought of taking powerful immunosuppressant drugs with unpleasant side effects for the rest of my life scared me into searching for a drug-free alternative. Carol Sinclair’s book about the Low starch diet for IBS and AS gave me some hope, but I found it difficult to follow and gave up after 6 days without any reduction in pain.
Years later I was still in agony, despite taking anti-inflammatory medication (NSAIDS).
I turned to Google and started researching the diet approach again. That’s when I came upon this famous Ted Talk by Dr Terry Wahls which gave me the push I needed. I learned that the inflammation in my back could be linked to my gut and I set out on a major reinvention of my diet. I also learned that having 2 – 3 bowel movements a week is not normal!
I changed my diet and this time I stuck with it. After 6 weeks I noticed a major reduction in pain, a good indicator to keep on going. I could now easily get out of bed in the morning whereas previously I had often felt like a 90 year old woman, rolling out of bed and limping or crawling to the bathroom.
To keep motivated I read obsessively about nutrition and its connection to the immune system. My passion for the subject continued to grow and a year later I started a 3 year course in Nutritional Therapy at the renowned Institute for Optimum Nutrition in London from which I graduated with a wealth of knowledge in evidence based nutrition.
I now understand how my previous poorly executed vegetarian diet, high in refined carbs, combined with binge eating and a whole lot of antibiotics led me down the path towards a diagnosis of disease.
I do have the gene associated with AS, but genes only account for around 30% of our risk to develop a disease – as Dr Bert Griffith once said “Genes load the gun, but lifestyle pulls the trigger”.