Perth nutritionist’s gut instinct helped heal her sick kids

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If there is one thing more terrifying for a parent than having a seriously ill child, it’s getting no real answers from any medical practitioners.

Before becoming a nutritionist and wellness coach, this was Jess Wilson’s grim reality for not one, but both of her sons.

“They were very, very sick. And it was such a shock to the system, because you never think that will happen to you,” Wilson recalls.

She says she spent four years fighting for answers as her boys endured 18 surgeries between them.

“I spent countless weeks, months, days, nights with them in hospital, constantly running to emergency. So there was a lot of medical trauma. There was no sleep, and it was a horrifically traumatic time for me, for all of us, and, of course, for the boys. My own health crashed, as you can imagine,” she shares.

In a pit of despair, the Perth mother turned to what little she could control — their diets.

“I was stuck at home with two sick babies a lot of the time so I started researching, as you do when you’re a mum in that situation, you’re up at four in the morning. And I’d come across this paleo diet, and I started making these foods at home. And the beautiful thing about food is it’s a healer, and it’s instant,” she says.

“And I would notice that I would make one healthy meal, and it would have a direct impact on how they were the next day so their journey very much made the penny drop for me.”

Her family eventually made it out of the fog and got some real help for the boys; they were diagnosed with primary immunodeficiency and received treatment for it.

Her sons Phoenix, 10, and Nash, nine, are now thriving, which she credits to a combination of holistic and medical help. “But I am vigilant about their diet and what goes in their body, and that keeps them living a normal life, and I’m just so incredibly grateful for that.”

Once they were in better health, she felt an immense responsibility to share her newfound gut health knowledge with others.

“So I went on to study, and I’ve been practising now for nearly five years,” she explains.

Wilson will soon be imparting her expertise at Synkro, which will form part of Karrinyup Shopping Centre’s expansive new wellness precinct, which opens to the public on March 8.

The centre has worked with its wellness partners Synkro and Endota Spa to curate a health and wellness offering like no other in WA. The precinct will focus on mind, body and spirit — bringing together everything from reformer Pilates, The Jungle Body, yoga, boxing, strength training and HIIT to mindset training, meditation, nutrition, breathwork, chiropractic, physiotherapy and sound healing.

Wilson says just like her role as a wellness coach, the precinct encourages a holistic approach to health.

“You can go to the gym and you can do all the things, but if you’re not eating the right foods, you’re not going to win,” she explains.

“My role at Synkro is really to provide nutrition gut health hormone testing to the members,” she adds.

There will also be group sessions where people can take part in a Q&A with the nutritionists. “And it’s all aspects of wellness that you need. You need the movement, you need the mindset, you need the nutrition. And Synkro is this amazing concept, where you can do that all in the one place and have the support of those people around you.”

Jess Wilson’s guide to gut health

Remove You’ve got to remove the things that are harming you. The big guns are wheat, processed food and alcohol. We’ve got to cut down on the big guns. If you want to heal your gut, you have to remove the things that are just not serving you.

Replace You’ve got to replace what you remove with nourishing foods, with healing foods; veggies, and proteins, and colour, and all of those beautiful things that your gut loves.

Revive You’ve also got to wake your gut up and in order to do that, you need to eat a good amount of fibre. So for example with the keto diet, there’s lots of protein, lots of fat, not enough veggies. It’s about really getting those high-fibre foods in so you can wake your gut up and it can start to work again.

Restore This is where we’re looking at stress and the impact on the gut; sleep, lifestyle, worries, anxiousness. So restore is really that mind, body approach to healing the gut.