Mariella Gut Health Expert

Feel Good in Your Body All Day

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I poured red wine on my own new dress in a restaurant bathroom so my husband wouldn’t ask why I suddenly wanted to go home. I had already spent most of dinner holding my napkin across my stomach. The stain was deliberate. My husband still thinks I’m unbelievably clumsy with red wine. For most of my career, I was the person women came to when they were trying to figure out why they felt off. I’m a registered dietitian and I’ve spent most of fourteen years working with women, so friends sent me photos of supplement labels, clients brought bags of bottles into appointments, and my sister once FaceTimed me from a vitamin aisle because she couldn’t choose a magnesium. I was annoying about probiotics and probably worse about “detox” products. Which makes what happened to me slightly embarrassing. My own kitchen counter eventually looked like a supplement store. My stomach had been getting worse for a long time, but it was inconsistent enough that I kept talking myself out of how much it bothered me. I could get dressed in the morning with a normal-looking stomach and be undoing the same waistband under my desk by late afternoon. Some afternoons I would read the same email twice, then make another coffee because my brain just wasn’t cooperating. I could sleep a perfectly respectable number of hours and still wake up tired. I knew all the obvious explanations. Food. Stress. Perimenopause. Gut bacteria. Sleep. I wasn’t clueless, and weirdly I think that made it easier to stay stuck because I could always come up with a reasonable explanation for whatever was happening that week. I cut dairy for a while, then gluten. I stopped drinking. I switched probiotics more than once, added magnesium at night, digestive enzymes with meals, fiber in the morning and B vitamins because maybe the afternoon crash was an energy thing. There was a greens powder too. It tasted like somebody had blended a lawn. Some of it helped, which was what kept me doing it. The probiotic would settle my stomach for a few days. The enzymes made certain meals easier. Magnesium helped me sleep. Nothing was completely useless, so I never had one dramatic moment where I could say the whole approach was wrong. Something would improve and I’d keep it. Something else would still bother me and I’d add another thing. That went on for longer than I like admitting. My husband noticed the clothing part before I admitted how much attention I was paying to it. If we were going somewhere after work, he got used to sitting on the edge of the bed while I changed. Sometimes I’d put something on, look at my stomach, take it back off and put on something looser. He never made a big deal about it. He just learned that when I said, “I’m almost ready,” he probably had time to check his phone. The point where it stopped feeling merely annoying happened at a continuing-education conference in Chicago. I was there to speak on a panel about digestive health. My navy trousers fit perfectly when I got dressed that morning. By mid-afternoon I was standing in a hotel bathroom with the button open, pulling the waistband away from my stomach with both hands. I had another session downstairs in less than an hour. I remember looking at myself sideways and thinking, I cannot go down there and talk to women about gut health when I physically can’t close my own pants. So I left the hotel and walked to a department store. I bought maternity pants. The saleswoman asked how far along I was. I panicked. “Four months.” She smiled and said, “You’re barely showing.” And I thanked her. That is still the part that gets me. I thanked a woman for telling me I didn’t look very pregnant when I wasn’t pregnant at all. I changed in the fitting room, shoved my real trousers into my tote bag, went back to the hotel and spent forty-five minutes talking to a room full of women about digestion. Nobody knew there was a stretchy maternity panel under my blouse. When I got home, I somehow made the situation worse. I cut the maternity label out with kitchen scissors. Not the price tag. The actual maternity label. Then I pushed the pants behind two sweaters in the back of my closet. I told myself I had only bought them because the waistband was comfortable. I wore them four times that month. My husband found them while putting laundry away. He held them up and said, “Are these maternity pants?” Then his face changed a little. “Wait. Is there something you need to tell me?” For a few seconds I could see him trying to figure out whether I was pregnant and had somehow not told him. I could have ended it immediately. Instead I laughed and said, “No. God, no. They’re just comfortable.” He looked at me for another second, put them back and left it alone. I hated that I did that. This was my husband. He had seen me give birth. He had seen me sick, sweaty, half asleep, everything. And apparently admitting that I had secretly started wearing maternity pants because my stomach got that big by evening felt worse than letting him wonder for a moment whether I had hidden a pregnancy from him. I kept thinking about it at work. A few nights later I was finishing notes after my last client and saw Denise’s name on my schedule for the following week. I had been seeing her on and off for almost three years. She was 47, had three kids, worked full-time and had absolutely no interest in making nutrition another full-time job. I once asked her to track vegetables a little more closely and she told me she would rather stay bloated than start weighing spinach. Her stomach was the main reason she originally came to me. She said she looked “six months pregnant” by dinner. Over time there were other things too. Foggy afternoons. Digestion that would improve and then act up again. Weeks where she felt puffy and heavy. We had made progress. That part matters. Changing breakfast helped. A probiotic helped for a while. We adjusted foods, added fiber, magnesium, eventually a greens powder. There was nothing obviously stupid about the plan. That was what started bothering me. I opened her last note, then pulled the supplements out of my own tote bag and desk drawer. I had nine bottles between work and home at that point. When I started writing down what each one was supposed to help with, my routine looked uncomfortably similar to Denise’s file. One thing for my gut. Something for regularity. Something because I wasn’t sleeping well. Another thing because I was exhausted. Another because maybe hormones were involved. Every decision made sense when I looked at it by itself. Together, it looked ridiculous. I remember sitting there wondering how long I was planning to keep doing this. That was the question I couldn’t answer. I wasn’t suddenly discovering environmental health at 43. I knew what heavy metals were. I had read papers about microplastics. I knew enough about gut organisms to have opinions. I had just always kept those things in different mental drawers. Microplastics and metals were exposure issues. Gut bacteria belonged in gut health. Parasites were mostly something I associated with travel and people online holding questionable things up to the camera. My own bloating was probably food. Or hormones. Or stress. Or whatever explanation made sense that week. Looking at Denise’s file beside my supplement pile made all of those neat little categories feel less neat. Her message thread was still attached to the chart. A few weeks before Chicago, Denise had told me her sister mailed her “some liquid cleanse thing.” I had replied: “Please do not replace your whole routine with TikTok detox water 😂” She wrote back: “Not TikTok. My sister is just annoying.” I had dismissed it almost immediately because I had already decided what category it belonged in. Cleanse. No thanks. With her appointment coming up, I pulled the message back up because now I actually wanted to know what she had bought. I still wasn’t interested in taking it myself. I just wanted to know what she had been doing before she came in. When Denise walked into my office the next week, I knew she had changed something before she told me. She normally tied a cardigan around her waist once her stomach started bothering her. That day she was wearing jeans and a fitted white T-shirt. No cardigan. She sat down and said, “Okay, don’t yell at me.” I knew what she meant. “The sister thing?” She nodded. “I stopped taking half the stuff.” That should have annoyed me because she had ignored the plan. It did annoy me. What annoyed me more was that she looked better while ignoring it. I asked what she had actually been taking and she pulled up the bottle on her phone. CLEANSL8. The name did not improve on second viewing. I told her it sounded like something I would normally make fun of. She said, “I know. I told you my sister is annoying.” I laughed, but I took a picture of the label. That night I finally sat down and looked at CLEANSL8 properly. I wasn’t excited about it. If anything, I was looking for a reason to dismiss it so I could tell myself Denise had just happened to have a good week. I knew some of the ingredients already. Modified citrus pectin, oregano, chlorella. A couple of the others I had to look up again because I knew the names but couldn’t have told you exactly why they were in there without checking. And somewhere in the middle of doing that, I realized I had spent twenty minutes trying very hard to prove the product was stupid. Which, if I’m being fair, probably had less to do with the formula and more to do with the fact that my client had ignored half of what I told her to do and walked back into my office looking better. That bruised my ego more than I wanted to admit. What kept me on the page wasn’t any one ingredient. It was the way the formula was put together. They were talking about several different things at once instead of acting like one probiotic, one herb or one “detox” ingredient was supposed to explain everything. A month earlier I probably would have rolled my eyes and closed the tab. But I had just spent an evening staring at nine bottles on my own counter, every one of them there because I had tried to solve some separate little piece of how I felt. So I couldn’t dismiss the idea as quickly as I wanted to. I still wasn’t sitting there thinking I had parasites, heavy metals, microplastics and every other thing they mentioned all at once. That would have been ridiculous. What I kept thinking about was Denise. She had been taking fewer things than before. She had stopped following parts of the plan I gave her. And she had walked into my office without the cardigan she normally tied around her waist when her stomach got bad. That bothered me more than anything on the website. There was also a section about the liquid format and absorption. I saw the percentage they gave and took it with a grain of salt because I’m skeptical of almost every neat percentage on a supplement page. But I was also sick of swallowing capsules, and the idea of trying one liquid instead of adding another bottle of pills to the pile was appealing. The product page didn’t really convince me. Denise did most of that without trying. The page just gave me enough reason to stop dismissing what I had seen with my own eyes. I ordered one bottle mostly because I wanted to know if I could reproduce what had happened with her. I didn’t tell Denise because I did not need one of my clients checking in on me like I was homework. I also didn’t tell my husband. Another supplement box at the door had become a running joke and I wasn’t ready to defend this one. When it arrived, I used it the way the bottle instructed and tried not to change the rest of my routine. I wanted to know what I was actually looking at. The first thing that got my attention was embarrassingly ordinary. One afternoon I reached down to undo my pants out of habit and realized the waistband wasn’t bothering me. I had had good days before, so I didn’t make much of it. What I did do was pull out the navy trousers from Chicago the next morning. Part of me wanted them to get tight because then I could stop wondering whether I was getting excited over nothing. They didn’t. I wore them through work, ate normally, came home and they were still buttoned. I kept waiting for the old evening stomach to come back hard enough that I could say, “There. Same as always.” A few days later my husband walked into the bedroom while we were getting ready for dinner. He sat on the edge of the bed like he usually did. Then he looked at me. “Do you need to change?” I looked down at my jeans and realized I had been wearing them since morning. “No.” He stood up, grabbed his keys and walked out. That was all. But I stayed there for a second because he had gotten used to waiting for me, and I had gotten used to making him wait. The next time Denise came in, she looked behind me before she sat down. “You tried it.” I asked how she knew. She pointed to the back of my chair. “You don’t have the cardigan.” I looked over. For years I had kept one there because I tied it around my waist on bad afternoons. At some point I had stopped bringing it into the office. I hadn’t even noticed. That night I went home and pulled the maternity pants out of the closet. My husband was in the bedroom. I held them up and said, “I lied to you about these.” He looked at the pants, then at me. “What do you mean?” “I bought them because my stomach was so bloated at that conference that my real pants wouldn’t close.” He stared at me. Then his mouth actually fell open. “You let me think you were secretly pregnant because you were bloated?” I covered my face. “For like three seconds.” He sat down on the bed laughing. Not mean laughing. The kind where he was trying to talk and couldn’t. “You told me they were comfortable.” “They were comfortable.” That made him laugh harder. I wanted to crawl into the closet. Then I started laughing too. I had hidden those pants behind sweaters because I was too embarrassed to tell my own husband why I owned them. Now I was standing there holding them in front of him like an idiot. I dropped them into the donation bag. He looked at me and said, “Should we cut the label out first?” I threw one of the sweaters at him. I’m still a dietitian. I still care about food, hormones, sleep and gut health, and I still use supplements when they make sense. I just don’t automatically assume every complaint needs its own bottle anymore. If your counter is starting to look the way mine did, and you’re doing all the “right” things but still planning your clothes around dinner, dragging yourself through the afternoon or adding another supplement because the last one only helped one piece, I would at least look at CLEANSL8. I didn’t buy it because I suddenly became a cleanse person. I bought it because the way it was built made more sense to me than adding bottle number ten. I still own the navy trousers from Chicago. I wore them last week. I didn’t think about them once until I took them off that night. That probably says more about what changed than anything else I could write. If any of this sounds like your life right now, this is the page I wish I’d looked at before I bought bottle number ten. trybiocleanse.com/pages/cleansl8 P.S. If your supplement cabinet is getting ridiculous, pull everything out once and write what each bottle is actually supposed to be helping with. Don’t make a spreadsheet. I’m a dietitian and even I didn’t do that. I just wrote it down beside each one. Seeing nine separate little jobs sitting in front of me was the first time my own routine looked as strange as it felt. P.P.S. And yes, I know the name CLEANSL8 sounds like exactly the kind of thing I would normally make fun of. Denise still reminds me that my first response to her was basically, “Absolutely not.” I had already done the tea, the powder, the capsules and the kind of detox that mainly confirms your bathroom plumbing is working. I almost dismissed this one for the name alone. I’m glad I actually looked at what was in it first.