What I learned from Scrabble that completely changed how I look at symptoms

If you’ve ever played Scrabble™, you know the feeling. That one when you look down at your letters and think, “What am I even supposed to do with this??”

A random mix. Nothing obvious. Or maybe just that one decent letter, paired with X, Z, Q, and no vowels.

This is basically what functional nutrition looks like behind the scenes.

Picture this…A new client walks in to my virtual office with:

• Tiredness. All the time. And not just because they’re a busy mom.
• A basketball belly by the end of the day.
• Itchy skin that comes and goes.
• Mood swings and snapping a few select days during the month.
• Eats right. Very clean. Lots of veggies. Skips breakfast and lunch.
• A few “normal” labs. (“My doctor said everything looks fine, they’ll see me again next year…”)
• And a long, long list of things they’ve already tried, failed, and has already set them back a hefty amount.

At first glance, all these symptoms can feel like a pile of disconnected pieces.

But just like in Scrabble, it’s not about the individual letters.

It’s in how they all fit together to form that 90-point (triple word score!) game-winning word.

That low ferritin? Not just “not enough iron”. But perhaps insufficient stomach acid. Mineral imbalances. Combined with gut dysfunction. Suddenly one extra tile changes the whole board.

That itching response after eating? Not just a random food reaction. But perhaps microbiome imbalances. Impaired liver pathways. Insufficient B vitamins. Genetic expression. High stress load. Again, new word reconfigured from existing pieces.

And sometimes, you can be staring at the board thinking there are no moves left, until we look again to see that you had been focused before on the wrong part of the board entirely. (Hello, minerals, microbiome, big-picture terrain.)

Here’s the part I see most people miss: Good health detective work is not about throwing more “letters” at the problem (more supplements, more restrictive diets, more influencer protocols…).

Good health detective work is about:

• Rearranging the pieces that are already there 🧩
• Seeing patterns others have missed 🧩
• Knowing when a small shift creates a high-scoring move 🧩

When the right pieces click into place, things that felt completely random before start to make sense, symptoms stop colliding with each other, and forward movement can happen.

If you’ve been feeling like you’ve tried everything already, nothing makes sense, and you’re still not feeling your best, you’re probably not out of options. You just haven’t been given the right gameboard strategy yet.