Melissa Braga, BSN, RN and Owner of New Well Being, LLC

I haven't always been the healthiest version of myself. There was a time I was chronically sick and was almost always on some type of medication. Growing up I was the average typical kid. I played in the school symphonic band, played tennis, and although brought up in a European household with mostly homemade dinners, I ate the standard American diet when it came to sandwiches, candy, McDonalds, drinking soda from time to time. With that, I was constantly sick. Throughout my childhood, teens, and 20's - I had chronic ear and sinus infections many times throughout the year, strep throat from time to time, headaches, and constipation that would cause me to keel over in pain.

Everything that we consider to be "normal" childhood sickness, I had. Because of all that I was on different antibiotics multiple times a year, and so many other over-the-counter medications like Sudafed, Advil, DayQuil, NyQuil, etc. This completely wrecked my gut.

While in nursing school I received multiple injections which caused my body to have an autoimmune reaction, was diagnosed with IBS and prescribed more medication. Stress and poor eating habits along with medications wrecked havoc on my gut and my immune system continued weak. I felt tired all the time and relayed it to stress from school and kept plugging along. I had no idea the importance of nutrition and what we put in and on our body and how it truly affects the way our body can heal.

So while working as a nurse, I started to see that my patients were not getting better but their medication lists kept getting longer. It was then that I had the "ah-ha" moment and realized that everything I was doing was not working. So I started to look into other avenues. Changing my lifestyle, exercising, and taking supplements. With that I noticed I wasn't getting the sinus and ear infections all the time. My IBS was better, but I still had some gut issues which I continued to believe it was stress.

It wasn't until my miscarriage that I realized that I was still missing something. My body was not healing. It was then I was sent to a Nutrition Response Testing® Practitioner and she had found so many underlying causes and that my body still was holding on to so many toxins. Within a few weeks I started to feel better; more energy, less bloated, and it was a game-changer. I knew then this was something more people needed and with so many people to help, I quit my job and took off to training and have kept educating myself and working on helping YOU find the root cause of what is going on. I practice full time as a Natural Health Practitioner, analyzing root causes through Nutrition Response Testing and am currently expanding my knowledge with a certification in Natural Functional Medicine in order to help people both in-person and virtually.