about nat
I'M NATALIE LOFTHOUSE
Light Worker | Wellness Woman | Naturopathy Prac. Student
Natalie Lofthouse was born and raised in Cache Valley and resides there with her husband Rusty and five littles. She has had the opportunity to live in California, Texas and Mexico and from time to time visits her extended family in Colombia. She’s always found her way back home and has no plans of moving away again. She dreams of building her dream home on the family farm and putting down some roots with a full farm co-op to add to their already existing homestead and small cattle ranch. If you could find Natalie anywhere it would be the ocean and the mountains. As a former food blogger she loves cooking from scratch, spending time in nature, getting her hands in the dirt and constantly adventuring on a whim with her children and husband. She adores short getaways with her other half and snowboarding during the Utah winters.
Natalie has an extensive background in well versed work environments; from waiting tables at local restaurants, lifeguarding, working in the medical field, and becoming a banker. In the last decade Natalie’s entrepreneurial spirit has flourished! She’s started and owned 7 businesses in a decade and Co-Founded the Apothecary Rockee Redd in 2021. Natalie has used her background as a biology pre-med student alongside her experience as an herbalist to develop many of the product recipes for Rockee Redd that cater to an array of health issues. From time to time she enjoys her hobby business that started in 2015 as a freelance designer for new builds and home renovations. It’s her happy place used to create beautiful spaces that provoke emotion and inspiration for her clients.
Natalie is a sound healer, homeschool mama self mastery and business coach and currently studying to become a Naturopathy Practitioner. Her main focus includes Rockee Redd and Mentoring individuals who are sick of chasing their health and spirituality issues with the most recent fad diets, trendy workouts and dead ends in feeling at home with themself.
The common factor in all that she does? Helping others. She loves encouraging people to work towards achieving bigger goals than what they initially set for themselves and she cheers them on through their endeavors while instilling a self-belief within them. She aims to always leave people better than she found them and loves connecting with people from all walks of life.
Natalie’s health journey begins in 2016. She spent a weekend away in Park City with her husband celebrating their anniversary. One night while they were sitting in the spa, she began experiencing immediate discomfort and a burning sensation of pain in her genital region. She returned home a couple days later and went to her gynecologists office for a visit with no appointment scheduled. She refused to leave until she was seen and waited in the lobby for a couple hours before being taken back to the exam room. After her examination, her doctor told her she had never seen anything like it, and that it appeared to be some sort of “flesh eating
bacteria”, but that the treatment approach would be to treat it as a bad yeast infection. After having had numerous tests, undergone antibiotics, steroid creams and suffered 2.5 years she was desperate to receive an answer as to what she had. The itching, pain and discomfort was so bad that Natalie was in an unstable state of mind. Her only thought to escape the pain was to not exist, and it was something that she would entertain the thought of often.
Her husband worked nights and there were many times she would imagine going into the garage and starting the car in the early in the morning hours just before he was to come home so that her babies wouldn’t be without watch for long and she could just fall asleep forever to escape the pain she was stick in. Being a new mother to 3 children two years old and under, that wasn’t an option. She had to place ice on her genital area and ice to sleep every single night for two years and would sometimes awake to refill her ice pack in the night to continue alleviating her pain. This impeded heavily on her intimate life, receiving good rest, her ability to be physically active as she had been prior to this and overall felt like there was no end in sight. Over two years into this, multiple doctor appointments, antibiotics, creams and prescriptions, Her gynecologist finally told her the only solution to her problem was to undergo a surgical procedure to cauterize all pelvic nerve endings to end the excruciating pain and discomfort that came with the disease.
Only being 26 at the time, Natalie thought it to be insane she had never once been referred to another physician for a second opinion and several times when the idea of seeing a dermatologist for her skin related issue was mentioned, her doctor told her "they don't typically do pelvic exams so they probably wouldn't be much help." After being presented with a permanent altering of her body as a solution, Natalie fired her doctor and sought out alternative medical help since she absolutely wasn’t going to undergo a surgery to essentially have no pelvic sensation at 26 years old. She traveled an hour and a half south of her hometown to Salt Lake City, Utah to meet with a well known gynecologist, the late Dr Paul Summers. He entered her room and swabbed her skin in the affected area, went to the room across the hall and viewed her skin cells under a microscope, returned to the room and informed her she had an autoimmune disease known as Vulvar Lichen Sclerosis. Lichen sclerosis is a rare skin disease that only affects 1 in 1000 women in the U.S. and typically is only seen in women between 60-80 years of age. It causes scarring of the nerve endings and leaves the skin thin, extremely itchy and caused abrasions and blisters in Natalie’s case.
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Women with VLS monitor it with time as it increases risk of vulvar cancer by 4%. Natalie’s skin would essentially become covered in tiny blisters that would slough off and be exposed raw sores. This cycle would repeat almost every 6 weeks, leaving the skin in a permanent state of chaotic frustration, never healing enough to ease the pain. Dr. Summers went on to tell her that there are no treatments in the US for this disease as many of the recommended therapies for it are not FDA approved. Suggested long term use of steroids and lidocaine to help somewhat numb the affected area are the main things to help ease VLS. Natalie took that as a challenge to find a doctor with the available treatment necessary to remedy her issue. Soon after, she traveled as far as Bogota, Colombia with her mother, to meet with doctors about her condition and was faced with a complex therapy approach that would require her to travel to Europe to receive specific prescriptions, then back to Colombia to receive different blood therapies and treatment with these mediations to chance getting better. Similar to the US, there were no available medications in South America to do the treatment with.
The doctor she saw in Bogota was in his 70's and told her he had only encountered this specific condition twice in his career of over 40 years. If she would agree to treatment, she would be his 3rd patient to take the chance at getting better if he took her on. Of the two other patients he treated, one had a positive response, the other had none. She was up against 50/50 odds. She flew home to Utah and faced a decision of going to Europe to get the medications necessary to perform her therapies then meet her mother with her young three children for a summer of treatment in Colombia, or continue on her path of Lichen Sclerosis with little light at the end of the tunnel. Natalie felt strongly about meeting with a Dermatologist back home since her condition was skin related. She did so, and after her examination was able to meet with the two doctors and discuss options further. She underwent allergy testing and did bloodwork over the course of a week.
PA Jeffery Baugh spent nearly 2 hours with Natalie reviewing her Autoimmune disease and over 60 skin allergies and sensitivities that came back positive from allergy testing. He further discussed how to mitigate her symptoms without medication. It all boiled down to food, soaps, and fabrics.
Some of these changes included steering clear of antibiotics since they perpetuated the issue and essentially caused her body to self attack, hence why those 2.5 years of antibiotics didn’t help in the slightest with what she was dealing with. Foods that also receive antibiotics, hormones etc also needed to be things she avoided. This included meats, dairy products, eggs etc. What she consumed was crucial to fueling her disease or helping it dissipate. Almost overnight, she made the switch to plant based eating. After 4 days her skin stopped burning and itching for the first time in nearly three years. on day 9, all her skin sores had closed up as well for the first time in nearly 3 years. She was excited about life again and it instilled in her the desire to learn more and continue digging deeper to keep educating herself on nutrition, how to effectively nourish her body and remove foods that were perpetuating her disease. She implemented better food options for her children and husband and learned so much about the things that can help you through balanced meals and herbal remedies. Natalie began practicing yoni steaming with specific herb blends to help rejuvenate her vaginal and reproductive health since she has also dealt with PCOS and Endometriosis through her life. This helped with her skin immensely and she was able to find relief and peace of mind at last.
Natalie’s story, as unique as it may seem, really is so similar to the stories of so many others desperately seeking betterment in their health, heart, life and overall well being. In sharing her story, its her hope to offer inspiration to others struggling through their own chasms of health and to extend hope and encouragement to keep on going. Those who have no time for prioritizing health, will soon have to prioritize time for illness. The groundwork for happiness is health, stop chasing after the wrong things and start chasing after the right ones because YOU deserve it.
ROOTS is her passion project and gift to share with the world.
