Deciding to be healthy in the New Year requires a look beyond the gym and the fridge to the skin, nails and clues the body can reveal.
Donna Wild of Loveland, a nutritional, herbal and dietary consultant and educator, recommends evaluating diet, identifying nutritional lacks and getting out of the habit of eating overly processed and high sugar foods. And if there are health problems that traditional medicine fails to address, natural remedies may be the preferred cure.
“Eat less processed foods and more healthy foods. And learn to cook,” Wild recommended for the New Year. “People eat their way into sickness and disease and need to cook their way out of it.”
Using natural remedies
Wild, a practicing nutritionist and herbalist for more than 30 years, aims to provide ways out of sickness and disease using natural remedies and creating diets tailored to various conditions that consist of whole, unprocessed and nutrient-dense foods.
Consuming the right nutrients in the right form is important for long-term health and helps ensure proper biological function and resolution of chronic conditions, she said.
“You never feel deprived if you are eating a much healthier diet,” Wild said. “The body was meant to assimilate whole foods, whereas with processed foods, the body sees a lot of those as toxins. … A lot of people’s detoxification methods have been compromised over the years.”
Wild consults individuals on their health needs, and she works with medical and health professionals and veterinarians on alternative modalities they can use with their patients, both human and animal. She gives lectures and webinars on a variety of topics, such as nutrition for the heart, skin and intestinal tract; male, female and children’s health; and healthy fats in the kitchen.
To provide her consulting and education, Wild went into private practice in the late 2000s, calling her home-based business Unique Perspective.
“It’s the way I look at things,” Wild said about her business name. “I don’t look at things the way traditional healers and doctors look at things. I look at things in a completely different way. … I believe the body has an innate ability to heal itself if you give it what it needs.”
Consulting on nutrition
Wild consults her clients on nutrition and offers them medical advice and recommendations for living a healthy lifestyle. She starts with a two-hour assessment that includes an in-depth patient history and review of blood work and medical tests, plus of any signs and symptoms, looking at skin, nails and the tongue. She also does things like muscle testing, a technique of identifying health issues using the body’s energy.
“The system I use, which is very involved, tells me exactly what the body wants to work on first,” Wild said, explaining that there can be yeast or parasitic, viral or bacterial infections. “These are assaults on the body. I have to get rid of the assaults on the body before I can heal them.”
Wild evaluates diet, identifies the client’s nutrient needs and pinpoints any triggers like stress.
She recommends changes or additions to diet, plus supplements as an alternative if the foods aren’t readily available and affordable for the client or as a bridge until the diet becomes effective. She makes sure to give the client options so that changes will be easier to incorporate into daily life and encourages the eating of a variety of foods.
“I see it as a puzzle of all these things they’re telling me,” Wild said. “I’m talking to them, asking them questions. That’s what medical people don’t do today is listen. Can I put the pieces of the puzzle together and help them specifically for their needs and why they came to see me?”
Wild explains a few of the natural remedies she recommends for her clients in her book, “The Skin, Tongue and Nails Speaks: Observational Signs of Nutritional Deficiencies,” which she self-published in 2012 and reissued in 2016.
She provides a reference guide for understanding how common skin, tongue and nail abnormalities can point to nutritional deficiencies and disease states. She also gives recommendations on foods to eat, useful herbs to try and treatments for everything from fatigue to hyperthyroidism, writing both to medical and health professionals and individuals who want to improve their health.
“She uses her nutrition education and personal interest and research to provide down-to-earth information about healthful and natural remedies for a variety of nutrition-related conditions,” said Shannon Perry, a retired nurse who splits her time between Loveland and Phoenix, Ariz., and met Wild through a writing group. “What I like is that her suggestions are simple and likely to be effective. She works hard to ensure her writing is clear and accurate.”
Over the past year, Wild has been writing a second book about nutrition from the garden to the table focused on organic gardening and including a cookbook.
“It’s for the new generation learning to have a healthier lifestyle and don’t know where to begin and how to do it,” said Wild, who has been organic gardening since she was a teenager and currently grows 60 varieties of herbs and a variety of produce.
Providing an ointment line
Wild uses some of the herbs she grows for her line of natural-made ointments, which she formulated in the late 2000s for her clients, family and friends and now sells online at donnawild.net. The ointments are made of food-grade materials with ingredients harvested at their peak potency for optimal healing properties, using the right varieties and parts of the plants. The herbs are infused into cold-pressed oils, selected for their naturally occurring nutrients and phytochemicals, and thickened with beeswax.
The ointments have names like What’s Bugging My Skin to treat various skin conditions from bug bites to rashes, No More Pain to treat joint and muscle pain, and Soothe Me Softly to treat dry skin and improve the complexion.
“I went into private practice and noticed that my clients have a lot of conditions that while trying to solve the problems from the inside, they needed relief from the outside,” Wild said. “Typically when something shows up on the skin, there are problems in the body.”
Wild’s two grandchildren, Jerimiah and Layla Wild, who live in Loveland and attend Loveland High School, assist her with her ointment line. They help harvest the herbs and make the products, design and print packaging labels, and provide website design and social media promotions.
“I’m helping people be aware, educating them about a lot of misconceptions out there,” Wild said. “I meet people where they are to help them get better health.”
Wild spent her entire career in nutrition, which she studied at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pa., and Colorado State University in Fort Collins, though she didn’t finish her degree, not liking the approach taken by the two universities. She worked for Standard Process West providing technical consulting and training physicians in whole food nutrition from 1988 to 2008. She also provided lectures for the Weston A. Price Foundation, a nonprofit focused on nutrition research and education, from 2006 to the present.
“It’s not an overnight fix; it’s long term,” Wild said. “I let clients know ahead of time that this is going to take awhile.”