A 6-MONTH GUT HEALTH JOURNEY
Trust Your Gut
Where Healing Takes Root
Just as a thriving garden begins with intentional care — your gut is waiting to bloom. Discover the transformative power of the 5Rs and watch your health take root, grow, and flourish.
Your gut is a garden waiting to thrive.
OUR PHILOSOPHY
Every garden begins with soil — the invisible, essential foundation beneath the surface. Your gut is no different. When we learn to tend it with the same patience and wisdom a gardener brings to their land, something extraordinary happens: we don't just feel better, we transform.
This program weaves together the ancient wisdom of nature with modern gut health science, guiding you through six months of deep, sustainable transformation.
🌻 The Sunflower
Always turning toward the light, the sunflower embodies your innate capacity for growth and your body's natural wisdom to seek what nourishes it.
The Monarch Butterfly
A symbol of profound transformation — the Monarch reminds us that the most beautiful changes require a period of stillness, surrender, and trust.
🐝 The Honeybee
Purposeful, community-minded, and essential to the ecosystem — the bee teaches us that small, consistent actions create extraordinary abundance.
THE FRAMEWORK
The 5Rs of the Trust Your Gut Garden
Five intentional stages, each echoing a gardener's timeless practice — and each one bringing you closer to a gut that truly thrives.
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Remove
Pulling the Weeds
Identify and eliminate the triggers, foods, and stressors crowding out your gut's potential.
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Replace
Restoring the Soil
Replenish essential digestive elements — enzymes, acids, and nutrients — to enrich your inner earth.
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Renew
Planting the Seeds
Promote beneficial bacteria and microbiome-supporting practices to sow the seeds of lasting health.
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Repair
Healing the Roots
Nurture and rebuild the gut lining — the invisible root system that feeds everything above ground.
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Rebalance
Maintaining the Garden
Integrate sustainable rhythms and lifestyle practices to keep your inner garden in radiant bloom — for life.
Your 6-Month Journey
Moon cycles of transformation
Like the moon that guides the gardener's planting and harvest, your healing unfolds in six natural cycles — each one building on the last, drawing you deeper into rhythm with your own body's wisdom.
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New Ground
New Moon
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Deep Roots
First Quarter
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Full Bloom
Full Moon
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Rising Strength
Waxing Gibbous
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Abundant Harvest
Last Quarter
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Open Bloom
Waning Gibbous
Month One · New Ground
🌿 Remove — Pulling the Weeds
Like the New Moon's dark and ready quiet, Month One is about clearing. We identify and remove the foods, triggers, and patterns crowding out your gut's potential — making space for everything to come.
Month Two · Deep Roots
💧 Replace — Restoring the Soil
As the First Quarter moon casts its growing light, we replenish what has been depleted. Enzymes, stomach acid, and essential nutrients are restored — enriching the inner soil your healing depends on.
Month Three · Rising Strength
🌱 Renew — Planting the Seeds
Nearly full and visibly growing, the Waxing Gibbous mirrors your momentum. Beneficial microbes take hold, new habits deepen, and the seeds of a thriving microbiome begin their quiet, powerful rise.
Month Four · Full Bloom
🌺 Repair — Healing the Roots
The Full Moon illuminates all that you have grown. This is the heart of the journey — nourishing and sealing the gut lining, healing the invisible roots beneath everything that blooms above ground.
Month Five · Open Bloom
☀️ Rebalance — Tending the Garden
Like the Waning Gibbous — still radiant, beginning to soften — Month Five is about integration. We weave your healing into lasting rhythms, anchoring your transformed gut in sustainable daily life.
Month Six · Abundant Harvest
🌻 The Harvest — Full Bloom
The Last Quarter moon holds its light with quiet confidence — and so do you. This final month celebrates your transformation: gathering, integrating, and stepping forward rooted, radiant, and whole.
EVERYTHING YOU NEED
Your Garden Kit
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The Healing Workbook
A beautifully designed, month-by-month companion filled with reflections, trackers, seasonal rituals, and exercises to deepen your journey.
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Coaching Sessions
Personalised 1:1 coaching calls to guide, encourage, and tailor the program to your unique garden — your unique body.
Seasonal Resources
Recipes, guided meditations, gut-nourishing protocols, and educational materials released with each new phase of your transformation.
Your Guide
Dr. Mary Jo MacKinnon
FNP-BC · DNP · Functional Medicine
For more than twenty years, Dr. Mary Jo MacKinnon has walked alongside patients in primary care and Functional Medicine — listening deeply, looking beneath the surface, and asking the questions most clinics never have time to ask. Her path has always been guided by a simple, profound belief: that true wellness begins in the gut, and that the body, when properly tended, knows how to heal.
A Board-Certified Family Nurse Practitioner and Doctor of Nursing Practice, Dr. MacKinnon brings a holistic and energetic perspective to everything she does. As a Certified Reiki Practitioner and Certified Yoga Instructor, she understands that healing is not merely physical — it is a conversation between body, mind, and spirit. She has studied wellness most of her life, and she brings that lifetime of learning into every session, every program, every seed she helps plant.
She believes that most dis-ease finds its roots in the gut — and that beginning there is not just a starting point, but the most fundamental act of care you can offer yourself.
Because of the depth of care this work requires, Dr. MacKinnon works with a small, intentional group of people at a time — ensuring that every person in her practice receives the focused attention, personalised guidance, and genuine presence that lasting healing deserves.
Beyond the clinic, Dr. MacKinnon tends to a much wider garden. As a devoted beekeeper and champion of all pollinators, she understands intimately what happens when an ecosystem falls out of balance — and what it takes to restore it. She is also the heart behind Project Monarch Butterflies, a movement inviting communities to plant milkweed and help restore the Monarch's migratory path. She calls her community a Flutter — because transformation, like the butterfly, is always better when it happens together.
🌿 Functional Medicine
🧘 Certified Yoga Instructor
✨ Certified Reiki Practitioner
🐝 Beekeeper & Pollinator Advocate
Monarch Butterfly Conservationist
From the Garden
From the Flutter
Healing is deeply personal — and deeply possible. Here is what some who have walked this path have to say.
“I have to say that my digestive issues have never been better and my overall health never better. I highly recommend her services.”
“My symptoms have significantly improved. I feel lighter and healthier.”
“Mary Jo listened deeply to the health issues and concerns I have had for years with my gut system, especially after my breast cancer. She gave me a personalized plan that has helped me identify the issues in my gut garden. She showed me how much she cares and how deeply she wants me to be happy and healthy.”
QUESTIONS & ANSWERS
Common Questions
Every gardener begins with questions. Here are the ones we hear most often.
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If you are experiencing digestive discomfort, low energy, brain fog, skin issues, mood imbalances, or a general sense that something is off — and you are ready to address the root cause rather than manage symptoms — this program was designed for you. A 15-minute consultation will help us explore whether it is the right fit.
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Each month follows one of the 5Rs — Remove, Replace, Renew, Repair, or Rebalance — and includes personalised coaching sessions, your monthly workbook materials, seasonal recipes and resources, and ongoing support as you move through each phase of your healing.
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Not at all. Many participants come without a formal diagnosis but with a deep sense that their gut health is holding them back. Whether you have a diagnosis or simply know something needs to change, this program meets you exactly where you are.
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Conventional medicine excels at diagnosing and treating disease. Functional Medicine asks why — exploring the root causes behind your symptoms using a holistic, whole-body lens. Dr. MacKinnon combines her clinical expertise with energetic and integrative practices to offer a depth of care that goes far beyond a standard appointment.
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It is a warm, relaxed conversation — no pressure, no obligation. We will talk about where you are, what you have tried, what you are hoping for, and whether the Trust Your Gut program feels like the right next step for you. Think of it as planting the first seed together.
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Functional Medicine coaching programs are typically not covered by insurance. However, some HSA and FSA accounts may be used for certain services. We are happy to discuss options during your consultation to help you find the best path forward.
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Many of our participants have tried other approaches without lasting results. The difference here is the depth, the personalisation, and the holistic perspective. We do not offer a one-size-fits-all protocol — we tend your unique garden, your unique body, with care and attention to what it specifically needs.
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This program is designed to integrate into your life, not overwhelm it. Most participants find that 2–3 hours per week — for coaching sessions, workbook reflection, and implementing their personalised practices — is sufficient. Small, steady steps are what gardens are made of.
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Functional Medicine is a root-cause approach to health that views the body as an interconnected whole. Rather than treating isolated symptoms, it investigates the underlying imbalances — nutritional, environmental, emotional, and energetic — that give rise to dis-ease, and addresses them through personalised, evidence-informed care.
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By the end of the program, you will have the knowledge, tools, and practices to tend your inner garden independently. Should you wish to continue your healing journey, we will help guide you toward the right resources for your next chapter.
Your Garden is Waiting
Ready to let something beautiful grow?
Every thriving garden begins with one simple step. Take yours today — and trust your gut.
🌿 Spaces are limited — Dr. MacKinnon works with a small group at a time
Not sure if this is right for you? Let's find out together. Begin with a complimentary 15-minute consultation — a gentle, no-obligation conversation about where you are, where you want to be, and how your garden can begin to grow.