How We Reversed Chronic Illness (And Why I Started West Texas Soap Co)

Natural solutions for chronic illness, fatigue, IBS, and disease reversal. Our family healed without medication—here’s how.

You may be wondering how I got here, running a business focused around natural products and education. The truth is, my true passion has never really been natural products, but instead natural healing and disease reversal. This is because my husband and I were both very sick until God led me to the answers that reversed our illnesses and gave us our lives back when the doctors couldn’t help. This was a long journey with many layers that I am currently breaking down in a book series, as it’s just too much to tackle in another written form. But here is a quick introduction and rundown so you can learn more about the “why” behind West Texas Soap Co.

I had more symptoms than I can list in this short blog, but here are some of them. The doctors were unable to provide any help, and I was determined to get my health back. I was only 22 and felt 80 with the chronic inflammation and pain, constant infections, IBS, and over the years it escalated to very serious issues like blood sugar and blood pressure imbalances, severe chronic fatigue syndrome—affecting my ability to care for my two young sons—insomnia, and even reacting poorly to direct sunlight.

My husband was dealing with chronic high blood pressure (hospitalized several times near stroke), inflammation, pain, IBS, severe regular panic attacks, daily migraines, and creeping closer to pre-diabetic blood markers.

Through many years of research and application, I reversed every single issue in both of us, along with many health issues in my children like cyclical vomiting syndrome, severe digestive issues, IBS, and chronic headaches, to name a few.

There were several pieces to the puzzle needed to rebuild our health from the ground up. The first step was removing all fake food from our diet and changing to real food only. For us, removing gluten helped a lot, as current flour is too highly processed to digest properly and causes many issues for many people. Then we moved on to rebuilding our destroyed gut with parasite cleanses, collagen supplementation, probiotics, and a few other techniques. The next step was removing toxic products from our home. I started with a couple of products each month and eventually ended up at nearly 100% natural products in every area of our house.

Then we made a big move that was required to dramatically lower our stress levels—and it worked. We saw our health continue to improve as our new environment was much less stressful. The next huge step that cleared up our remaining issues was limbic system retraining. This one was very powerful at fixing the things nothing else would, like the growing food intolerances, chemical sensitivities, and my chronic fatigue syndrome. Mixed into all of this was intentional movement and exercise, sunshine exposure and plenty of outdoor time, and other healing modalities that I found along the way.

This journey happened over many years (I’m 36 now), and I’m still learning new things regularly that we add into our life to continue growing in health. I’m excited to get these ideas down in a series of small books including all the science to back it up and explain why it worked. I’m nearly done with the first book! It will be released in helpful small chunks so others can start to apply the teachings over time and build on each healing modality as the next book is released.

So what does this have to do with the soap business starting nearly four years ago? Well, I started making soap a long time ago as a fun craft project at home, using artificial colorants and fragrances and Crisco (which I now stay very far away from!). Even with those unhealthy ingredients, the soap healed my husband’s psoriasis and helped our skin not be so dry. As I learned more about how the ingredients in our food were making us sick, it naturally seeped over into learning how the ingredients in our household products were making us sick as well. The more I learned, the more things I made myself because the natural versions at the store were too expensive, and I wasn’t totally sure how natural they were since the labels were so hard to understand.

We started noticing more and more positive changes as we changed more products. When I made the big plunge of changing our laundry soap and making our home free of all unnatural fragrances, we started noticing a huge shift in our sense of smell. All of a sudden, we could smell everyone and everything around us, and we were alarmed at how toxic everyone smelled with their laundry soaps and perfumes. We can literally smell people’s laundry soap when they stand near us. It’s insane. We almost cough and run when we end up near the laundry soap aisle. That’s when we truly realized how unhealthy all this stuff is, but we are just so desensitized to it from lifelong exposure. Once you remove that exposure, your alarm bells start working again, warning your body of toxic exposure. EWG.org verifies all of this with their comprehensive scientific data analysis on ingredients in so many products people use that are proven to cause alarming health issues in children and adults.

This is why I only use simple ingredients and 100% natural fragrances and colorants in everything I make. I’ve seen too much data and science to use anything else. This has been validated as an amazing choice by the many customers who have shared their testimonies with me about how much my products have improved their skin, hair, and even their exhaustion levels by no longer having toxic overload. I began to make and sell these products as a way to supplement my family’s income because I was already making them all for us anyway. I actually make a lot more products for our home than I currently sell.

At the core and foundation of this business is our story—our healing journey, our testimony. This is why I’m working to transition this business into far more than just selling products, but to educate and help others heal their families. Because I’m a very intentional person, I share all of the other areas in my life I’m intentional about—the areas that are pivotal and important, like raising children and faith in Jesus. Health is far more than physical health; it includes mind, body, and spirit. I have done a lot of hard work to become mentally and spiritually healthy as well, and I work hard to make sure my kids have a childhood they don’t need to heal from. This is all stuff I share here as well. If it’s something I’m interested in or I find important or valuable, I share it, and it all comes from personal experience.

If you want to follow along as I continue to work toward sharing more about our healing journey, please subscribe to my newsletter so you don’t miss new posts, book releases, or product updates!

💛Tej’a