Welcome!

Hello! I’m Noëlle! I am a Product Designer here in the San Francisco Bay area. An organic growth into the role I’m in today, I have always been creative. One who was fascinated with the human condition, one easily able to connect the dots, one who’s good with patterns, and one that’s curious about everything. Being a designer is a part of my identity and how I view the world around me.

So why is a Product Designer getting into a discussion about Holistic Health and cleaner living? Well, While I work, and live a relatively normal life, I also have autoimmune conditions. My first was Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome(PCOS), getting diagnosed at 16 years old. At 25 I was diagnosed with Thyroiditis which simply means I’m both hyperthyroid and hypothyroid. Depending on the day/hour. When I was diagnosed with PCOS I didn’t know what to do or how to move forward except to listen to my doctors. At the time in 2009, there was minimal understanding of the condition and to this day, many doctors still don’t know much about it. Over 7 years, I had waited for an answer. I waited for help. I tried many things that doctors prescribed me but I wasn’t getting anywhere…except many hospital visits.

In 2013, I eventually became sick and tired of being sick and tired that I decided to do some research of my own and learned everything I could about my illness, hormones, the endocrine system, and how it all connected to the symptoms I was experiencing. I wanted to get to the root of the problem and learned more in a week than I did in 7 years and started my journey of cleaner living. This began with cleaning up my lifestyle in terms of food and exercise.. then slowly it became this paradigm shift when I learned how the human body, conditions, hormones, and all these are connected to the very foods we eat, whether or not we exercise, the clothes we wear, the shampoo and conditioner we use to clean our hair, the makeup we put on, even the pans we use to cook our food with.

*Details of my PCOS journey and my findings are in the PCOS part of the website so we’ll have a chance to dig deeper there. *

Now fast forward 8 years, I’ve had some friends and others come to me for help because they too were diagnosed with PCOS. As years go by, it seems as though more and more women are getting diagnosed with this condition. Wanting to be helpful and wanting to provide information after years of research, trying things, and going through this paradigm shift, I want to share what I’ve done, what worked, what didn’t, and what I’m still trying to figure out along the way. I’m not a doctor and don’t claim to be one. The goal is to just be the person I wish I had when I was first diagnosed in hopes of helping others. This resource is also for everyone. This is for anyone who has PCOS or some autoimmune condition. This is for someone who has a loved one with PCOS and wants to further understand the illness and understand what their loved one is going through. This could also be a good resource for anyone who just wants to clean up their life so they don’t deal with issues later.

Since Starting the creation of this I was diagnosed with an additional condition; Ulcerative Colitis. I will be talking about that as time goes on as well.

Note: *Even though my experience with doctors in western medicine hasn’t been the greatest that doesn’t mean every healthcare provider is like the ones I experienced. One of my best friends is Nurse Practioner and even he recognizes that the approach my doctors took weren’t the right ones. Some healthcare providers truly do care about their patients and want to find long-term solutions that help their patients get better.*

Cheers to cleaner living today for a healthier tomorrow!