Filipa “Filly” Bellette recovered from body burnout by addressing perfectionism, nervous system stress and the hidden belief beneath her chronic symptoms.

After her health crashed following the birth of her first daughter, Filipa “Filly” Bellette responded the way she always had to hard things. She tried harder.

She had pushed herself through school, fitness, work, and any achievement. Now, she brought that same intensity to healing — researching, experimenting and trying to get every choice right.

She found that food helped, along with supplements, lab testing, and low-tox living. So did finding underlying causes such as adrenal fatigue.

But each time Filly improved, she still had to carefully manage her life to keep her symptoms under control. Eventually, she realized the issue wasn’t just what her body needed. It was the fear-driven pattern underneath all the doing.

“At the deepest root of all of that was this hidden, unconscious belief that I was weak and incapable,” she says.

That belief had shaped her life for decades. It fueled the perfectionism, overdoing, and high-achieving patterns that helped her succeed. But it also kept her body braced for danger, even when she was doing everything “right.”

 

Early Signs of Body Burnout

Long before Filly became a functional medicine practitioner, clinical nutritionist, trauma therapist, and body-mind coach, she was a self-described “studyaholic.”

In high school, she pushed for A-pluses. Later, she earned a PhD in creative writing. At the time, her work had nothing to do with health. Today, she sees how much of that education has come full circle in the way she works with clients around beliefs, language, and identity.

While childbirth had kicked off a health crash, her symptoms started well before pregnancy. As a teenager, she experienced signs of polycystic ovary syndrome, or PCOS, a hormonal condition that can affect menstrual cycles, ovulation and fertility, though she wasn’t diagnosed until later when she and her husband were trying to have children.

She also developed vasovagal episodes, a stress-triggered fainting response. When her body was under stress, she would faint. Her mother, a nurse, took her to specialists, who investigated epilepsy and scanned her brain. Eventually, one specialist told her she likely “just gets stressed out” and suggested she wiggle her fingers and toes.

The advice sometimes helped her stop an episode from progressing, but it didn’t address why her body was reacting that way in the first place.

A Traumatic Birth and Postpartum Health Crash

Years later, while trying to conceive, Filly was still pushing hard. Her perfectionism had expanded beyond academics into fitness, and she was overtraining in boot-camp-style workouts. After a miscarriage, her body didn’t bounce back. She remembers going for a two-kilometer run that usually felt easy, only to feel like her body was made of lead.

“Now I can look back, and I can definitely see that I was starting to drop into adrenal fatigue,” she says.

Then came her first daughter’s birth. Although the pregnancy had been mostly routine, the labor was traumatic and damaged her bowel and bladder. For three or four months, she had no sensation to urinate and needed a catheter and bladder retraining.

After that, her symptoms multiplied: repeated UTIs, hospital visits, antibiotics, constipation, gut issues, hormone problems, histamine intolerance, chemical sensitivity, body pain, anxiety and depression.

“I just felt like I was accumulating more and more health issues,” she says. “Kind of like most of the ones that we see in chronic health and illness, I had it.”

Discovering Food as Medicine

Like many new mothers, Filly initially assumed some of what she was feeling was normal postpartum exhaustion. Bloodwork showed her thyroid swinging between hypo and hyper patterns, but not enough to warrant medication.

When her first daughter, Poppy, turned one, Filly’s sister gave her the book Deep Nutrition, and the idea that food could help heal the body changed everything.

“I was mind-blown,” she says. “I was like, you can heal your body using healthy food.”

She began fermenting, sprouting, eating organ meats, seeking out raw milk, changing her kitchen and removing toxins from her skincare and cleaning products. Her kitchen became a lab. Her husband tolerated the organ meats for about three months before telling her he couldn’t eat another sheep brain.

It was intense, and looking back, Filly sees the same all-or-nothing pattern in that phase of healing.

“If I could go back in time and coach younger Filly, I would say, this is so lovely and wonderful what you’re doing, but you don’t have to do it in a 100% all-or-nothing way,” she says.

Still, the nutrition helped. About a year later, she was starting to feel better.

Functional Medicine Helped — But Wasn’t Enough

When she became pregnant with her second daughter, Elsie, Filly hoped things would be different. Because she still carried trauma from her first birth, she chose a cesarean, and the recovery went well. She started picking up her studies, business, and work again just two weeks after giving birth, but it was too much. Her symptoms flared again.

By then, Filly had become a practitioner and enrolled in a three-year functional medicine mentorship. With the help of her mentor, she ran her own lab tests and created protocols. The testing showed widespread body system burnout, including adrenal fatigue, depleted dopamine, mitochondrial issues, gut pathogens, poor microbiome health, and depleted detox pathways.

Over the next year to 18 months, she worked through those systems with supplements, food as medicine, and lifestyle changes. Once again, she improved.

To stay well, she needed perfect sleep, a restrictive diet, and careful stress management. As long as she stayed inside those restrictive guidelines, she could function.

Then COVID hit. Her husband’s gym business closed, her clients disappeared, and financial fears surged. Filly developed insomnia for the first time, and her symptoms came raging back, especially anxiety and histamine intolerance.

This time, the physical tools didn’t work. She reran labs and took supplements, but many of her results looked good. Her body, however, was still acting like it was under threat.

That led her to the deeper layer she had resisted.

The Hidden Belief Behind Her Symptoms

Filly had watched her husband go through his own burnout recovery and inner healing work, but for a long time she didn’t think she needed that kind of support. But when her symptoms returned and the physical protocols no longer worked, she began exploring unconscious-level healing.

Working with a coach, she eventually identified the limiting belief that had been driving much of her life — that she was weak and incapable.

That belief had fueled her perfectionism, overachieving, and overdoing. She felt she had to perform at 110% so no one would discover the truth. Consciously, she could point to her PhD, awards, business, and children as evidence that she was strong. But unconsciously, the old belief was still running.

It also shaped how she saw her body.

“My body’s weak, it’s incapable, I have to manage it, I have to wrap it up in cotton wool,” she says. “I have to be really restrictive in how I lived in order for me to be symptom-free.”

Rewiring the Nervous System

Filly traced that belief back to a moment when she was about seven years old. She stood on a stage to give a memorized talk. She believed she could do it and wanted her parents to be proud. But adrenaline took over. She forgot the words, turned bright red, and burst into tears in front of about 100 people.

Over time, she collected more evidence for the identity of being weak and incapable. Healing meant going back to those “sticky memories” and changing the emotional charge around them. She worked to identify the first time she accused herself of being something unkind, then revisited those memories and created new evidence that the belief wasn’t true.

She also used self-talk and visualization.

“At the end of my reprogramming session, I was either crying, or getting goosebumps, or having some sort of visceral or emotional change, where I knew it was going beyond just the conscious mind and making change in the unconscious,” she says.

Life After Body Burnout

Today, Filly says she has no chronic health issues. She eats all foods, has more flexibility, and no longer has to micromanage every variable to stay well. She knows her boundaries, understands what her body likes and listens when her body is trying to communicate via symptoms.

If she is out of alignment or ignoring something, she may feel tension in her diaphragm or chest. If she continues to push past that message, some histamine-like symptoms may appear.

“The moment that I have a conversation with myself, I take action, all of that switches off without taking a pill or going on the low histamine diet,” she says. “It’s kind of like just this beautiful communication pathway.”

Her healing also changed the course of her career. Today, Filly and her husband, Chris, run a practice together. He is an NLP burnout recovery coach, and she brings together functional medicine, clinical nutrition, trauma therapy, and body-mind coaching. NLP, or neuro-linguistic programming, is a coaching approach that looks at patterns in thoughts, language and behavior.

Advice for Others With Body Burnout

For others experiencing body burnout, Filly encourages beginning with awareness. Many people in burnout are disconnected from themselves, their bodies, and what they truly want. They are stuck in go-go-go mode, often driven by fear.

Her suggested starting place is simple: go outside, take off your shoes, lie in the grass, place one hand on the heart and one on the belly, and ask the body what it needs.

And for the perfectionists and all-or-nothing achievers, her advice is often the opposite of what they expect: do less, go slower, and be a little messier.

Most of all, she encourages people to change the way they see their bodies.

“Your body isn’t fighting against you, it’s fighting for you,” she says.

Find and follow Filly at chrisandphilly.fm, where you can also find The Ending Body Burnout Show podcast, assessment quizzes and her book, Ending Body Burnout.

The Steps That Helped

  • Food as medicine — Filly turned to nutrient-dense foods, fermenting, sprouting, and traditional foods to support her body. The added nutrition helped her begin to rebuild.
  • Low-tox living and environmental awareness — She removed toxins from skincare and cleaning products and began looking at environmental contributors such as mold.
  • Functional medicine testing and protocols — Lab testing helped identify adrenal fatigue, depleted dopamine, mitochondrial issues, gut pathogens, microbiome problems and detox pathway challenges, allowing her to take steps to address them.
  • Nervous system and trauma work — When physical protocols were no longer enough, Filly explored the unconscious beliefs and distressing memories that were keeping her body in survival mode.
  • Reprogramming core beliefs — She identified the deep belief that she was weak and incapable, traced it back to childhood, and worked to rewrite the emotional charge and evidence around that belief.
  • Changing her relationship with symptoms — Instead of seeing symptoms as proof that her body was broken, she learned to see them as communication and respond with curiosity.