Marcia Wolf’s Journey to a Better Night’s Sleep
Marcia Wolf came to Princeton Integrative Health looking for answers—and a better night’s sleep. No matter what sleep remedies she tried, she continued to wake up at the same time every night and could not easily fall back to sleep. As a healthcare recruiter, she knew where to turn for help, yet the middle-aged Lawrenceville woman could barely function by the end of a long work day.
“By the time I got home from work, all I wanted to do was sit on the couch and do nothing,” she says. Over the years, she put on weight, felt increasingly more fatigued, and was prescribed medication to help manage her chronic health conditions such as high blood pressure and pre-diabetes. She had a hysterectomy at a fairly young age and experienced troublesome shifts in her hormones.
An avid collector, Marcia continued to spend many of her weekends at yard sales and flea markets. She had a full house—a partner, two sons, a dog, two cats, and literally hundreds, and maybe thousands, of random items she had collected over the years. She did not see the connection between her lively but cluttered home, her hectic job, her fluctuating hormones and her poor diet.
She just knew that she was sick and tired of feeling sick and tired.
“Then I heard about Princeton Integrative Health from an acquaintance and how they take time with each patient and don’t just prescribe pills for everything. They look at the root cause of things to try to figure out what is going on,” she says. She already knew that adequate sleep was an important part of a healthy lifestyle and that she wasn’t getting it. She also knew that lack of sleep can not only make you irritable, but also contribute to weight gain, memory loss and inflammation.
Without anything to lose, except some extra weight, she signed up for the Empowered Health Program at Princeton Integrative Health (PIH). Her journey began with a lengthy and thorough medical consultation and evaluation and both conventional and functional laboratory testing. “Dr. Vinny, Jenna and Patti worked as a team to help me get in tune with what was happening in my mind and my body,” she says. “Although I had had a hysterectomy 14 years prior, I didn’t realize how much it had zapped my hormones until I had an advanced hormone test called the DUTCH test.”
Marcia began to supplement her regular appointments at PIH with books and workshops around what she was learning about herself through the PIH team. She began a food journal to better understand her relationship with food and to map the progress she was making toward eliminating sugar and other potentially damaging substances.
Because she works at home most days, her visits to PIH became a great way to break up her week and socialize with her newly found friends at PIH. After completing the initial program, she did not hesitate to sign up for another.
In addition to making significant changes to her diet, Marcia has begun the process of decluttering her home through PIH's Organizational Strategist, Gayle Gunn. “Getting in touch with myself has helped me to realize that I need to reduce the weight of all the ‘stuff’ (literally and figuratively) I had been carrying around,” she says.
Marcia reports having more energy and less brain fog. Her family even says that she is “nicer” to be around, she jokes. Best of all, she has reduced her medication from four to two prescriptions. “I have made so many important changes to my lifestyle,” she adds. “And I feel great!”