Why 'zebra'
8 min read
In medicine, there's an old saying: when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. It means look for the common explanation first. Most patients are the horse. Some of us are the zebra — the rare, layered, harder-to-diagnose case where nothing shows up clean on one test, because it was never going to be one thing. I'm a zebra. I'm telling you that up front because it's the reason this business exists.
The list, laid out plainly
Over the years I've been diagnosed with mast cell activation syndrome, POTS, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome [the hypermobile type, hEDS] and other connective tissue issues, alongside a history of endometriosis, polycystic ovarian syndrome and ulcerative colitis. Read individually, those look like unrelated diagnoses collected over a long medical file. They are not unrelated. They talk to each other constantly, and for years no one told me that.
How they actually connect
Connective tissue holds your whole body together — joints, blood vessels, organs, gut lining. When that tissue is inherently looser or weaker, as it is in EDS, everything built on top of it becomes more vulnerable: joints sublux, organs prolapse, blood vessels don't constrict the way they should [which is a big part of what drives POTS], and the gut lining itself becomes more permeable, which tangles directly with conditions like ulcerative colitis and food reactivity. Mast cells, which sit heavily in connective tissue, become more reactive in this environment — which is where MCAS enters the picture, often flooding the body with histamine at the smallest provocation. PCOS and endometriosis add another layer of hormonal chaos on top of all of it, and hormones and mast cells influence each other directly, which means a flare in one system can quietly stir up another.
None of this is "in my head," and none of it is one problem with five different names. It's one connective-tissue-and-immune-system foundation, expressing itself through several different diagnoses at once.
Why perimenopause makes it louder
Estrogen doesn't just run cycles — it also helps regulate mast cell activity and histamine breakdown. As estrogen starts fluctuating in perimenopause, all of the above can get louder, not because anything new is wrong, but because the hormonal buffer that was holding some of it steady starts to shift. I've watched this happen in my own body, and I've watched it happen in more and more women I've come to know over the last few years — women whose relationship with their own connective tissue started visibly declining right around this same window of life.
The advice that does not work for us
If you have connective tissue issues, you have almost certainly been told to just take collagen. I understand why — it sounds logical, tissue problem, take the building block. But for many of us with EDS or related connective tissue conditions, the issue was never a lack of raw collagen. It's that the body's ability to properly assemble, cross-link or process collagen is what's actually impaired. Taking more of the raw material doesn't fix a structural or processing problem, and for some women it does nothing at all, or even worsens histamine symptoms since collagen supplements can be a histamine trigger themselves. This is one of the pieces of advice I most want women to stop being handed without question.
Why I built this business
I'm not a scientist. I'm a woman who spent years being told her labs looked fine while her body clearly wasn't, and who eventually had to become fluent in her own physiology because no single specialist was going to connect all of these dots for me. Simplicity Provisions exists because food is one of the only levers I get to pull every single day, in a body that's managing all of this at once — and I built it because I know I'm not the only zebra out there quietly wondering if she's imagining the whole tangled mess.
If any part of this list sounds like your own file, you're not imagining it either.