490: When Your Body Won't Calm Down: What I Learned About Histamine, Mast Cells, and the Hidden Cause Behind My Mysterious Reactions
5 Dec 2025 · 26 min
Podcast episode in which host Natalie Jill recounts getting food poisoning in Bali that led to severe histamine reactions, hives, and mast cell activation-like symptoms. She describes diagnostic findings (E. coli and a parasite on GI mapping), an allergic reaction to metronidazole (Flagyl), learning about histamine intolerance and mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), experiencing suspected scombroid poisoning from fish, and the short-term treatment she used (low-histamine diet, antihistamines, Pepcid, DAO enzyme, vitamin C/quercetin, PEA, and a short steroid course) plus plans to repair her gut.
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Have you ever been in a stretch where your body just will literally not cooperate? Where it feels like everything you're doing, every meal, every supplement, every little thing, sets you off? Well, that was me right after returning from Bali, which had been on my bucket list for years. And I debated about sharing this, but I have to because it's a crazy freaking story.
Welcome to Midlife Conversations. I'm your host, Natalie Jill, and I'm passionate about having amazing conversations that matter to us midlife women. On this podcast, I do what I do best, taking complicated health topics and breaking them down simply so that we can optimize aging together. I share actionable steps to help you thrive in what I believe are our best years to come. Join me as I interview the most inspiring people living their best midlife years and dive into essential topics like hormone changes, health optimization, weight management, blood sugar, emotional well being, relationships, beauty, and so much more. Have you ever been in a stretch where your body just will literally not cooperate? Where it feels like everything you're doing, every meal, every supplement, every little thing, sets you off? Well, that was me right after returning from Bali, which had been on my bucket list for years. And I debated about sharing this, but I have to, because it's a crazy freaking story. And that what I learned, my gosh, about travel and our gut and different level of parasites and strange things that we can catch, and then also, my gosh, histamine and mast cell activation. I've got a story for you today, but I also am going to share all the things that I learned, so you're in for a wild ride. All right, let me take you back. And first of all, I want to acknowledge, for those of you kind of hanging on about my last solo episode when I did a deep dive around hormones, I did get that dialed in, and I promise that will be coming in the near future. I'm still waiting on some final things around that before I can put together another episode, really detailing out what I changed and did. But I've been sidetracked for the last two weeks. I've been dealing with getting basically a PhD in histamine and mast cell activation, and I'm going to explain why and why this is something you might be interested in learning just a little bit about, too. I'm not suggesting getting a PhD in it by any means or being obsessive and learning all things, but I think you might find this interesting. So let me take you back for a minute. So, several weeks ago, I went on my bucket list trip to Bali. I had Wanted to go there my whole life. I had so many fantasies about what that was going to be. And let's just say it's not what I expected at all. Not at all. Did not do my research. Even though I was on with an amazing group and we curated incredible experiences, it just wasn't what I was expecting. I'll leave it at that for now, because that's not the point of this episode. But what I want to share is that their process for cleanliness, food handling water, is not like we have in the United States or in Canada or in Europe. It is not the same. It is very, very, very underdeveloped country. And even if you're staying at nice resorts and being careful and drinking only bottled water, you can be very susceptible to picking up things even. Even if you think you're being really careful. Like, I pretty much only ate at the resort. I only drank bottled water. I brushed my teeth with bottled water. I really thought I understood gut health. I did the right things, taking probiotics and enzymes and binders. I did all the things that I thought I should do to prepare. And let me just let you know, kind of. I'll jump to the chase and why I'm gonna get into this whole topic today. When I was in Bali, I got sick there. Like, really bad stomach. Food poisoning, now that's common in Bali. They call it bali belly or traveler's diarrhea. But I was really sick for a few days and I sucked it up and just was like, okay, well, I won't eat and I'll just drink a lot of water and I'm gonna get it together. But I didn't feel good at all. And to spare you all the details, it was not pleasant. So I knew I picked something up. And being the obsessive person who likes to fix everything, I right away was like, I gotta get on this. Obviously I picked up, but I know what to do. So one of my friends who happens to be a doctor was there. She right away gave me an ivermectin. Think what you want about ivermectin, but it is a really great pharmaceutical for knocking out worms, parasites. So I took that, took two rounds and we weren't done. So I get back from Bali, had my stomach had settled down some, and when I arrived home, I had a present from my friend Laura. They got Genie. She had a GI mapping stool test waiting for me. She was excited. She's like, we are going to catch whatever it is you got. This is going to be good. There is Something in there. So I took the test as soon as I got home. And while I was waiting for the test results, I went into full on war with my body with like I'm getting rid of whatever I caught, which meant doing all the biohacking stuff. Like I'm going to be in my infrared sauna every day, I'm going to be doing my red light, I'm going to be sweating, I am going to get this out of me, I'm drinking lots of water, eating fresh foods and, and I'm going to start doing a whole kill off protocol. So that meant taking herbs and stuff to just kill off whatever was fricking going on in my body. Now I've done that before. I have done parasite cleanses. And what was happening, the first thing that was happening was I really started feeling feverish. And there's something called a Herxheimer reaction. And a Herxheimer reaction can happen whenever you kill invaders off too fast and it's dying off basically in your body. So let's just say you have a parasite or you pick up some weird microbe, microbial something, you kill it off your body. If it can't get rid of it fast enough or you're killing it off too fast, you have what's called a Herxheimer reaction. So I thought literally that's what it was. So with all the contacts I have and what I knew, I was like, well, I just need to support my body more. That means I just need to support my liver, my kidneys, I just gotta up the detox game like went into overdrive there because that's what I, what I tend to do. But I wasn't feeling better and in fact my stomach issues were coming back really strong, getting a lot worse and it was really upsetting. So my doctor prescribed me Flagyl. Why does she prescribe me Flagyl? Well, we knew I had caught something. And now my GI mapping, which is the test that I took, showed clear E. Coli and it also showed a parasite, like an, like a protozoa. I don't know, I guess they're different things, but it showed that I literally picked up two specific things. The GI mapping does not show everything, but it showed these two things. And with this version of E. Coli it. And that wasn't stopping. My stomach was really a mess. I was going to need to take an antibiotic. Well, the first line of defense for that is an antibiotic called Flagyl. Now I know antibiotics destroy our gut, I'm very aware of. But if you understood what my Stomach felt like I had to do this. So here's where the fun stuff starts. I was prescribed seven days of 21 Flagyl and I took the first two doses and I had a full on allergic reaction. Like full on allergic reactions. So weird. Warmth, flushing, anxiety, full body hives. Like head to toe itching, crazy hives. What I had not had hives. So I thought, okay, this isn't good.
The second dose, because we thought it was just coincidence, whatever. But I, you know, taken them kind of close together. Was the one that really kicked it off and did this. But the part that made me go, I cannot finish this at all. This is not good is I felt that throat closing, which is an allergic reaction. So called my doctor threw the antibiotic way. It's a myth that you can't stop an antibiotic if you're having an allergic reaction. You have to throw it away. I'm like, can't do this, that's not gonna work. Decided to do get another one to have on hand, but thought, okay, let's just, let's just let this ride out. I'm gonna do this naturally. So after that flagile incident, some of you are following me on social media and you saw that everything I was eating, all of a sudden everything I was eating was making me break out in hives. And it was kind of like, you know, when you're, if you, those of you listening that have had a baby, you know when you're like in labor, you get that contraction, it's like coming on. You get the, it's like coming, it's building up. And then all of a sudden you get this like, feeling. And then all of a sudden you're like, oh, here it comes, here comes. And you get the contraction. Okay, with hives and histamine. This is what was happening to me. I would eat a meal within 15 or 20 minutes, I would get this warm flush feeling. And it would come in from like my chest. It would go up, like my face, down my left arm, down the left side of my body. And then it would like kind of central out on my back, this really warm feeling. I would feel this like prickly feeling. And then all of a sudden hives would just come on out of nowhere, like all over my body. Itching, hives, crazy hives. And this really extreme anxiety, like heart pounding, heart racing. I would start sweating. What the heck was going on. Now the interesting thing is it would come on, I feel it coming on, it would flare up and it would be about 30 minutes or so, and then it would start dying down. Okay, what the heck is going on? So I'm on a text thread with many of my doctor friends. I'm letting them know what's going on, and they have different theories. You know, some of them were saying, oh, it's your body. Still detoxing, the stuff. We just got to support your liver more. And the others are like, I don't know, this sounds like a. Like a histamine response. Well, I have an obsessive brain, and I go really, really deep when I'm trying to figure something out. And I really started researching both of these things. And what I was finding is the more I was following the, oh, you just got to support your liver and your kidneys, the worse I was getting. It wasn't helping. And I remember messaging Laura and saying, hey, all this stuff I'm doing, like, these binder, it's making me worse right now. And she agreed. I just had to stop. So I stopped it all. I started studying about histamine, and I got, like, this crash course in histamine, which I'm going to tell you some of the stuff I learned in just a minute. But what I learned was that I needed to absolutely cut out these foods in histamine. And I understood this could not be permanent. I understood there had to be a why. But right now, I just didn't want to have the hives, and I didn't want to have this reaction every time I was eating. So I did a little crash course in histamine, and here's what I learned. And just listen. I'll get back to the story in a second here. Histamine is actually necessary. Okay? It's a chemical messenger that our body makes to fight germs and heal tissue. This is really relevant. So when something comes on, think mosquito bite, spider bite, something that's an invader. Histamine is this messenger that's going to come on and it's going to actually fight it and heal tissue. So that's good. However, it also, while it's doing that, it's going to increase your circulation, it's going to boost your stomach acid, and it keeps you alert. So all good things. It should be good. You need it. But when your body can't break it down fast enough, like what was happening to me, that histamine starts to really build up. Now it can start misfiring. So once it's not breaking down in your body fast enough, it can start to really build up. That's where you hear people having a histamine allergy or histamine intolerance, or maybe they went through menopause and all of a sudden they're sensitive to histamine or things didn't used to bother them that now were. Well, I learned during this that two enzymes, one's called dao, which is in the gut, and another HNMT in our tissue normally clears it, but for some reason this was not happening right now. So basically, when you have stress, a gut infection, certain medications, or just even your genetics, it can basically slow all that down and it lets your histamine start piling up. So basically it caused what I was getting, this flushing, itching, racing, heart anxiety, even gi. Upset. So it's basically like. Let me give you a little analogy here. It's basically like you have this group chat. You know, we're all in a group chat that's like going off non stop, beep, beep, beep. But there's nothing urgent. And you're like, all right, all right, I'm not going to check it now. I mean, that's kind of what's happening when your histamine is misfiring. It just keeps alerting even though you're out of danger. Okay, this started from that flagyl. But here's the food connection. Histamine forms as food ages. The problem is all food ages, even unprocessed, natural, real food. So let me just talk to you about what's high in histamine? Like really high. Leftover food. Yep. You go to a restaurant, you get a meal, or you cook something at home and you put the leftovers in the fridge. Histamine. Field day starts growing histamine. Fermented foods, things that we think are really good for our gut. Very, very high in histamines. Aged cheese, something I love. High in histamine. Anything smoked. Smoked meats, certain fish. High in histamines. Avocado, one of my favorite fats. High in histamine. Nightshades like tomatoes, potatoes. High in histamine. And then, ladies, sit down for this one. Wine, chocolate, and many nuts. High in histamine. Okay, so what's actually low in histamine? Because this was frustrating. I'm like, what's actually low in histamine? The list is not very long, y'. All. Sweet potatoes, zucchini, bok choy. A few fruits like blueberries, apples, melon, white rice. The one fat I could find low in histamine. Olive oil. And then here's the deal on protein and meats. This blew my fricking mind. If a meat is caught and cooked within 30 minutes. So like think you catch a fish and you eat it within 30 minutes low on histamine. As soon as you put it in the fridge it starts growing histamine. What? What? I couldn't, I didn't. Blew my mind. So what did that mean for me? Because I'm not obviously not going fishing and just going to pick up my fish and eat it right then I'm not that savage. So that meant I need to go to the store and buy the freshest cuts of meat, eat it that day and freeze any leftovers. Now if that's not practical, what would that mean for someone else on a histamine free diet? That means you have to buy meat, freeze it and only defrost it as you're ready to eat it. It's a pain in the butt, I'm not going to lie.
So I realized basically all the healthy food I was eating, everything, avocado, leftovers, all making me worse. So this was first of all back to me in a second. But why does this matter for you? Well basically if you are listening at all and you're like wait, I get flushed or flushed or itchy or anxious or heart palpitations after I'm eating histamine overload might be something to look at. Like you don't have to have as much of allergic reaction as me or the hives. But if you are have been wondering why some meals you get flush or itchy or anxious or these heart palpitations, it could be histamine. And in midlife, stress, gut changes, hormone swings, they all make it a lot harder to clear. So understanding this, you might not have to go as extreme as I had to go. But just lowering that load, just like we lower toxic load or anything else really could make a big difference. So that's why I wanted you to be aware. Okay, so so kind of part two of histamine. So let me explain and then I'm going to get back to the whole story here. So let's I want to talk about mast cells for a minute now. Mass cell activation syndrome, M C A S I've seen a lot about lately on social media now probably because I was google searching and chat gpting like every freaking thing I can learn about histamine. But all of a sudden I started seeing a ton on mast cell activation and I think you might start to as well. It's getting to be a more popular topic but let me explain the connection here. So mast cells, we all have them and they're Basically our immune guard dogs. So they're in our skin, they're in our gut, they're in our airways, our blood vessels, our heart. They're everywhere. And they release histamine and other chemicals when they sense any kind of danger. Okay, great. That's how our bodies are supposed to work. Now, usually they calm once the threat passes, but sometimes they can misfire and stay on high alert. That's what's called mast cell activation syndrome. So basically, your alarm clock in your body, it gets stuck on an on mode. Gets stuck on an on mode. So common symptoms of that are hives, flushing, bloating, nausea, diarrhea, racing heart anxiety, brain fog, wired but tired feeling. Hello. This list I just read, doesn't that sound like menopause and perimenopause too? What? I never thought about this. Doesn't this also sound a lot like some long haul Covid stuff? Huh? Doesn't it also sound like some unmanaged autoimmune diseases that have gone haywire? Yep, it sure does. So mast cell activation syndrome. It's basically your body's alarm caught, gets stuck. The alarm goes off, and it gets stuck there. So it's kind of like your smoke alarm's blowing. Okay, great. But there's not a fire. You just burnt some toast. It's a massive misfire and overload. That's important. Now, as you. As I'm sharing this with you, as I was learning about this, I thought, okay, something's going on. I got this infection in Bali. I had just had back surgery. I got sick on the plane to Bali. I'm definitely been stressed. I've got a lot. I had that long, crazy. Travel was stressful too. I'm in midlife. I just went through a hormone thing. Whoa. My mast cells are misfiring. This is starting to tie together. So this matters because hormone shifts help it rise. Added stress, disrupted gut bacteria, infections. There's a whole list of things that can help this start to misfire. So it's also showing up really heavy right now. I went down the whole rabbit hole here post Covid. So if you either had Covid itself or you had vaccines and haven't felt right since then, it is showing up this mast cell activation syndrome on top of that as well. So what it creates in our bodies is this new sensitivity, this inflammation, this anxiety or fatigue that it just. And it just doesn't fit into, like, a simple diagnosis. It's not like, here, just take a Xanax, and it's gone. It's not just fix Your gut, and it's gone. So I wanted to bring this up first. Okay. So why it happened to me so hard? Well, I mean, obviously my back, surgery, travel, I had a whole hormone situation. So when, you know, I felt kind of funny sharing someone's social media stories and with good intentions. Some people message, they're like, why does everything seem to happen to you? Well, here's the thing. When a lot of things seem to happen to us, usually it all goes together. That's kind of that light bulb moment. I realized, yeah, the same people that end up getting an explant like I did and living, finding out they're in black mold and then seem to have gut health problems, and maybe their hormones are going haywire. The reason it seems like something's always happening to them is it all really does link together because of an immune misfiring, which I firmly see now that this mast cell activation conversation is way bigger than I imagine. Because the people that are like, literally, it seems like one thing's after the next. They are actually related. They are actually related. It makes a lot of sense. Okay, so let me just kind of go back to what I figured out here, and what do we even do about it? I mean, heck, what do we do about it? Because you can't. You can't live like that. And I certainly couldn't live like that. Well, for a good two weeks, I went as strict histamine free as I could. And there's a protocol. And functional medicine, doctors, naturopaths, and western all kind of agree on this protocol. And somebody. Somebody listening, one of you listening might go, I would never do that. Well, let me tell you. When you want to pull your. Your skin off because of hives head to toe, and you have round the clock anxiety, you might be open to this protocol too. So the protocol is this. You take Pepcid. It's literally Pepcid twice a day, 10 to 20 milligrams twice a day, before breakfast, before dinner. You take an antihistamine, and the choices are basically Claritin, Zyrtec, or Allegra. Okay. I tried all the natural ones first. They did squat. So Claritin, Zyrtec, or Allegra you play with. Which one you think is best for you. We're all wired different. For me, Zyrtec was way too strong. Allegra made me feel like I was on speed. Claritin seemed to be the winner. Not Claritin D, just regular Claritin. So you take a Claritin every day. You take a Pepcid twice a day. And then before meals, you take dao, which is an enzyme and you take vitamin C and quercetin. Okay? This is literally the treatment for mast cells, for mast cell overreact. It tells your body it's safe. So I did all that. I started adding it. I started really looking into what histamine is in. And I realized with me, in my case, I was super sensitive to literally everything. Like the smallest amount of histamine was setting me over. So I'm going to tell you about my breaking point and why this is going to be a no longer thing. And I've. I feel like I've truly solved this at this point. I'm going to be, I have, I'm going to have fixed this. I'll tell you why. So I'm eating histamine free. I'm watching every meal. I shared some of these on my stories. Like I would have basically beef with sweet potato or egg. Egg for me wasn't triggering me. Egg with some cantaloupe or egg with, you know, a piece of fruit that was approved. A lot of vegetables are approved. A lot were not.
But what I was noticing is some of my safe meals were still giving me this reaction. And one of them was anytime I added chicken and I was really frustrated, I'm like, I just did everything right. I literally had chicken and bok choy and a sweet potato. And why am I getting this crazy reaction again? So that's when I learned that chicken is one of the fastest growing proteins for, for bacteria. So when you buy fresh cut chicken, it quickly starts to grow bacteria, it quickly starts to grow histamine. It's near impossible to have chicken that does not have histamine in it. And if you're super sensitive like I am right now, Chickens out. So what happened was, and I'm airing this later than this recording. So as I'm recording this, this was last night. As I'm airing this, it's a couple weeks out. Okay. But what happened was.
This was the final straw. I had dinner or. Sorry, no, not dinner. It was lunch. It was like a two o' clock lunch. I made chicken that I didn't catch, but I bought it that day. I had half a chicken breast, I had bok choy and I had white rice. And within 30 minutes it all came back. The hives, the flushing, the what's going on. My throat starts feeling like it's going to close. What? The actual frick. And now I'm anxious. It gives you like massive anxiety. I'm at my wits end. In fact, I had made a story on Instagram like, oh, this is what I'm making. And I said, let's see how I do with chicken. Well, I didn't report back after because I ended up in the er and this is where I believe God intervened because I went to an urgent care first. I'm like, I don't know what's going on. My heart's racing, I'm sweating. Every time I eat. I have got this. So instantly, you know, a 54 year old woman, you walk into urgent care, they think it's your heart. So I'm like, I really don't think it's my heart. But Yeah, I agree. EKG. And they said, listen, we can do an EKG here. We'd only do the 10 second one. We really think you should go to the hospital down the street. They're never busy. I bet you'll get right in and they can get you answers. So I go to the er, which last thing I feel like doing, but I'm like, I've got to get to the bottom of this. I go in, they take me, they run all the heart stuff. My heart's fine. My blood pressure and my, you know, heart rate's off the fricking charts, which is what was happening every time I was eating. The hives are flared up, the whole thing. They're, they're working through all the stuff. They come back in, you know, okay, you're cleared with the heart stuff. And you know, I was there. They're, they're mostly sounding an alarm for the heart stuff, right? Obviously. But the doctor comes in and this is where. This is a God intervention. I'm sorry. The doctor happens to be from the area of the world that I was in and got sick. I can't even believe it. And he says to me, because I tell him, hey, this started in Bali. I got food poisoning. And he says to me, this, this is going to change my life forever. He said, did you eat fish there? And I said, yep, I sure did, every day. You have scromboid poisoning. What? What's scramboid poisoning? You have scromboid poisoning. It's a reaction to high histamine fish that mimics an allergy. And most people, when they get that, they get very sick in the stomach, very sick. And it passes for some people. And a lot of people, they now get a histamine allergy. They're allergic to hives. I'm sorry. They're allergic to everything with histamine. They break out in hives every time they eat. What? I never heard of this thing. Are you kidding me? But it all starts making sense. So then the question is, well, what the heck do I do about it? Is it going to pass? Is it going to. He said, oh, it's, It'll pass. You just need to calm down these mast cells.
Wow. Okay, so had my answer. Had my fricking answer. So what the heck do you do for scramboid poisoning? Well, it's the same mast cell activation. You have to do all the things, avoid, you take antihistamines, do all the stuff. But the next step for me was a cortisone, not as a, it was steroids. Why steroids? Well, if you, if you're my age, we remember in the 80s and 90s we were all scared of taking steroids to stop these types of immune reactions because of just all the nasty side effects. Well, those have come a long way. And the reason I said yes to doing these steroids is it basically resets your system. It tells you you're safe, you're okay, we don't need to keep firing off the fire alarms. This is going to reset everything and you're going to feel a lot better. It's going to calm everything down.
So wow. To that intervention, wow. To learning about scramboid poisoning. I'd never heard of that. Wow. To having this nudge that I need to go to the er. And that's what we did there. So, okay, so where am I right now? Well, I'm recording this right now. I'm airing this later. But I wanted to record it. I was like really fresh in my brain. What that meant for me was I got home, I had a steak, I had no issue. I was just like, I'm not eating chicken anytime again soon. And I decided I would take the steroids the next day. So as I'm recording this, I did take the steroids this morning and I gotta tell you, I feel like a new frickin person. There's no anxiety, I haven't gotten any of that warmness after any of the meals. I feel calm, I feel safe. I am still going to avoid histamine right now the best I can. I am going to still take the Pepcid and the antihistamine right now. I'm still going to take the dao, the enzyme, the vitamin C. The pea, that's another one I didn't mention. Pea, which helps calm down mast cells. I'll still be taking that and I'm Going to follow that protocol for a few weeks here. The steroid you only take for about six days, but it resets the system. And I'm going to encourage some of you. If you're really suffering with Mast cell activation, consider asking about taking a six day steroid because sometimes you just got to put out the fricking fire. And for any of you that are like, oh no, I don't do that all natural, let me tell you. I don't know how good it is for our bodies to be in a state of high cortisol fight or flight for that long. I just don't. So I think there's a really solid place for western medicine. Sometimes we, we really need it. And if it can stop the fire so you can at least clear things and start to think and take care of yourself again, I'm all about it. So that's my plan. I know it's not simple. I had to share the whole story. This is not. This was more than just a quick post and that's why I wanted to share this all here. What am I going to do next? Well, next I get to repair my gut because obviously I killed all the stuff going on. But when you do that, you kill the good stuff too. Too. I don't plan on being histamine free forever, but I will be low histamine now that I know what I know I'll be lower on the histamine for quite some time. I don't think it was supporting my body having that. I think I naturally run, you know, higher on cortisol and I fit the bill for someone who would have mast cell activation. So I'm going to be really aware of this stuff but my next step is going to be repairing my gut. Not killing stuff off but repairing it like really going, what can I do? Because for me having this histamine issue is not going to be about adding fermented foods and fixing your gut. That's not. It goes deeper than that. And when I looked at my GI mapping, many of us that have had a lot of infections or things like that going on, we have done a number on our guts and we need to take it seriously. So I'll be sharing as I go. In fact, as this airs next week, I believe on Tuesday, I haven't recorded it yet but I'll be recording an episode with the Gut Genie on on all about that. Like, what do we do next? Like how do we repair this? Like how do we make sure we have an iron proof gut? How do we make sure. This doesn't happen. What do we do if we have mast cell activation or histamine issues or food intolerances or allergies? Allergies in general. Like, how do we actually heal our gut so we can be protected and travel and not have random stuff like this happen? So that'll be coming next. Anyways, that's my story. That's what I wanted to share. So. Okay, so scramboid poisoning, if you want to look it up. Like the doctor had told me, it's more common than we think, especially in Bali. Basically, what happens is they. When they catch fish, they're not freezing it or freezing it, putting in the fridge right away. They're letting it sit out. How gross is that? They let it sit out. It grows histamine, it grows bacteria, and that gives us poisoning. Our guts don't handle that. So a lot of people that eat fish when they're traveling, especially in Bali, scrambled poisoning is big up there along with E. Coli. That's really, really fun. So. So just know that. Just know that.
And for mast cells and histamine, it's worth digging a little bit longer and a little bit more and understanding that when we feel. Feel that fight or flight, when we feel flushing, anxiety, something's not right. Don't just put it into it's irritable bowel syndrome. Or don't just say it's my age or it's PMS or it's perimenopause. Like, you gotta dig and be a detective. I talk about being a health detective all the time. I literally live that life. I am a health detective. I get to the bottom of things. And we are all a very unique science experiment of one. So we've gotta learn, you've gotta ask questions and you've gotta do the research yourself to figure out for you. But I want you to know your body, just like mine, is not broken. It's always trying to protect us. And if we're suddenly reacting to foods or stress or supplements, it's likely something we need to pay attention to. It's not just anxiety. It's not just overreaction. It literally could be histamine or mast cells that are firing a little bit too much. And it's time for us to calm. All that first fresh food, gentle gut support, Learning about that hydration, stress reduction. And something I will definitely be talking about in the near future a lot more is resetting our nervous system so we don't have to end up in fight or flight again. Anyways, I learned so much about histamine and mast cells, more than I ever planned to. I also learned that I will not be going back to Bali ever. That was not a good experience for me. I will not be eating chicken anytime in the near future. Really learned a lot about that. And you won't see me taking leftovers from restaurants anymore. Nope, that's done. That's out of the thing. And I will be watching histamine. I won't be paranoid about it, but I will be really paying attention to histamine probably for the rest of my life. All right, that's all. Thanks for joining me on this crazy conversation today.
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