Meet your Functional Health Engineer, Eva Tonelli
I spent over twenty-five years as an engineer/project manager, building things to last. Then came the hardest challenge of all: rebuilding myself.
Engineering teaches you to approach every problem through a rigorous process. There's no room for guesswork — you brainstorm solutions, follow standard operating procedures, test, verify, and you trace each issue back to its underlying causes and conditions before attempting any corrective action. If you find a design deficiency, you implement targeted changes — never a band-aid fix. That's how you build lasting solutions, whether you're building a bridge or writing software.
No one applied that same standard to my own health when I needed it most. Eventually, I had to.
The break that changed everything
Until November 2017, I was content with my life. I felt healthy, I felt good about my relationships with family and friends, I followed a whole food diet, and I kept up a solid exercise routine, all while managing a demanding career in engineering. But at the end of that year, a life-altering event changed everything: my son's unexpected transition due to SUDEP (Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy). In an instant, my world stopped spinning. I lost all sense of purpose, and I had no will to live.
Grief isn't something you "get over," and I believe that, and I say it honestly. When I say I had no will to live, I mean it in the truest sense: I wanted nothing more than to cross over and be with my son again. Losing my only child didn't just take him from me — it took every future I'd imagined, every plan, every hope left to dream. Life lost all meaning and purpose. I couldn't function. It was the darkest stretch of my life, and more than once, I prayed for God to take me, too.
Most people around me went quiet. Friends and family I'd known for years stopped showing up — not out of cruelty, but because the loss of a child is a weight almost no one is equipped to carry alongside you. And the truth is, nobody wants to talk about death. I understand that now. But death, and life after death, were the only topics I wanted to talk about, every single day. If you've lived through this kind of loss, you already know exactly what I mean.
What carried me through wasn't willpower; it was faith. My husband became my anchor, caring for me when I couldn't care for myself. There were also the earthly angels — those who had already walked their own grief journeys and, recognizing mine, reached back to lift me up, often before I could even ask for help. I am forever grateful for every one of them. From the very beginning, before I had any other proof to lean on, two beliefs kept me standing: this was not about me, and my son was — and is — in a better place.
Returning to engineering was impossible. PTSD and complex grief overtook my mind and body — I couldn't function at a desk, much less manage a project. A couple of months into grief, I asked my husband to drive me to Farmer Michael's, a local farmer that I had known for two years. I told him I couldn't work as an engineer, but I needed to do something with my hands just to survive. Michael, in his quiet generosity, said yes without hesitation.
I began volunteering at Michael's farm as often as I could, though some mornings I could barely get out of bed — the pain was that deep. Some days, I'd wander into the middle of the fields to scream or cry, surrounded only by ladybugs, birds, butterflies, and, far off, a few Hmong women quietly weeding. Michael taught me everything I know about organic, no-spray farming. Thanks to his generosity, I eventually started a small farm of our own in the Sierra Foothills of California. That same summer, I even worked the local farmers market — something I dreaded, because I wanted nothing more than to avoid people. But Michael was clear: if you're growing it, you have to get out there and sell it. So I did.
"Everything looks normal." I knew that wasn't true.
Years slipped by as I poured myself into the farm, delivering seasonal veggies to local customers each week. By the fifth year of grief, I felt a pull to return to engineering — hoping that stepping back into my old career might restore some sense of normalcy. I told myself that if I could just get back to work, everything would fall into place. But reality proved otherwise. After a year of juggling full-time engineering with the demands of the farm — and feeling my brain chemistry was never quite the same — my body finally gave out. I woke up exhausted every morning, burned out by afternoon, relying on coffee and chocolate just to keep moving. My digestion was a mess — bloating, nausea, swings between constipation and diarrhea. Brain fog so thick I couldn't even update a spreadsheet, something I once did in my sleep. I kept telling my husband my brain chemistry had changed, but I didn't know what to do. Monthly vertigo attacks. Debilitating muscle spasms that came out of nowhere. And worst of all, sudden, unexpected bouts of dizziness that could strike at any moment, without warning. My temper was so short that simple conversations with my husband became arguments, and most nights I cried myself to sleep. What I learned, painfully and slowly, is that ignoring my body and nervous system would never bring me closer to my son. It would only pull me further from everyone still here who needed me.
I asked my doctor for meaningful lab work to get to the root of my symptoms. I was constantly researching, encountering concepts like HPA axis dysregulation, abnormal cortisol patterns, and hormonal imbalances, but I couldn't pinpoint what was actually happening and hoped my doctor would help me make sense of it. Instead, he kept running the same standard tests — no comprehensive thyroid panel, no hormone or cortisol testing. Frustrated, I ordered some labs myself, but I didn't know how to interpret the results. I turned to podcasts and YouTube, piecing together whatever insight I could find. My doctor insisted those "fancy" tests weren't needed, ran a different set, and told me everything was "within normal range." On paper, I was fine. What I got, yet again, was a prescription for sleeping pills and anti-anxiety meds. At 53, no one had ever brought up hormones or menopause — not once. I didn't even know it was something I should consider, let alone expect, from conventional medicine.
I was not fine. And I have never been the type of person who lets a printout override what my body is telling me.
So I did what I knew best when faced with a broken system: I got curious, rolled up my sleeves, and started searching for answers. Farming had already been my survival mechanism — transforming grief into something that could feed and sustain others, and, in the process, myself. Even now, almost nine years later, it still grounds me. This time, I turned that same engineer's mindset — the one that once managed complex projects — toward the toughest project yet: understanding and rebuilding my own body.
The insurance maze, the impossible price tags
Here's what nobody tells you about having "good" insurance: it doesn't mean good access. I called practitioner after practitioner and heard the same line — "Dr. So-and-So isn't taking new patients." "Indefinitely?" I'd ask. Every time, silence. So I went looking outside the network, straight into a wellness market charging astronomical fees for programs I couldn't verify would even work for me. Good insurance, unusable. Real money on the table, no guarantees. It felt absurd. It also felt familiar — this was a project with bad specs and no clear owner, and I am, if nothing else, a problem solver.
I approached the search like an engineer, setting clear requirements: a provider who would treat my whole body as an interconnected system, who could also prescribe bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, and who would fit a budget I was genuinely willing to stretch — but only for something real. Needless to say, the odds were not exactly in my favor.
Answers that raised more questions
I eventually found a women's health program that looked promising — it ran real functional labs: a GI-MAP stool test, a DUTCH hormone panel, and comprehensive bloodwork covering all the essentials, all before even considering hormone therapy. On paper, it sounded like exactly what I needed. In practice, it took more than six months just to get referred to a licensed practitioner — and by the time I finally did, my cognitive symptoms had only gotten worse, not better.
The labs came back loaded with information: high H. pylori and other harmful bacteria in my gut, crashed sex hormones, high inflammation, sky-high cholesterol. I got three thirty-minute calls to make sense of it. Recommendations were scattered across pages of notes, heavy on supplements, light on why. One requirement stood out — eat up to a gram and a half of animal protein per pound of body weight; no vegetarians or vegans allowed in the program. Later, results from my Functional Diagnostic Nutrition metabolic typing would tell me exactly why that advice backfired on my body. At the time, I just knew I was more bloated, more constipated, and heavier than when I started.
I tried two well-known online hormone platforms while I waited. Both were one-size-fits-all. Neither fit me. In October 2024, after six straight days of severe dizziness, I ended up in the hospital for two nights. Every test came back normal. No answers — just the familiar feeling of being dismissed by a system that had run out of ideas for people who don't fit the standard chart, or shall I say, the midlife woman?
Finally, a plan — that still wasn't the whole answer
In November 2024, my referral came through, and I started with a naturopathic doctor who prescribed compounded bioidentical hormones and built me a restoration plan, including glutathione and B12 supplementation. I followed it exactly. I was hopeful.
By March 2025, my mood had lifted — but the dizziness and fatigue were worse than ever. Bioidentical hormones weren't the magic bullet I'd been promised. Something deeper was still unaccounted for.
The blueprint I'd been missing: my own genes
I'd heard about Kash Khan's functional genomics program back in 2023 and hesitated — I wasn't sure my genetic code could actually move the needle. After two years, thousands of dollars, and painfully little progress, I decided an engineer doesn't get to call herself thorough if she's ignoring the actual blueprint. I enrolled.
Within a month, I had my DNA results, and the picture cracked wide open. Two findings stood out right away as my immediate aha moments. First, I don't have the genes to process externally supplemented glutathione — meaning six straight months of glutathione therapy hadn't healed me; it had quietly stripped my body of vitamins and minerals it needed for something it was never built to do, which helped explain why I could barely lift my arms. Second, I'm a poor methylator, which meant the form of B12 I'd been given was the wrong one for my biology entirely.
But those two were only the beginning. My genetic blueprint revealed a much broader pattern of susceptibilities in how my body handles stress, detoxification, and nutrient processing, and further testing added more layers still coming into focus — mold exposure and heavy metal burden, more pieces of a puzzle that finally had edges.
When I brought these discoveries to my ND, the conversation didn't go the way I'd hoped. But by then, I'd already learned the most important lesson: individualized data had accomplished in a matter of weeks what years of well-intentioned practitioners couldn't.
I asked Kash the obvious next question — how could an engineer who'd lived this take what she'd learned and go help others? His answer: pursue Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Practitioner and Functional Genomics certifications; engineers make exceptional health practitioners… We're trained in exactly two things this field is starving for — pattern recognition and problem solving.
Learning to read what my own body had been trying to tell me
Becoming a student again wasn't easy, and it wasn't the coursework that humbled me — it was how little I knew about my own biology. I could calculate the load a bridge could bear, but I'd never been asked to find my adrenal cortex or explain what a hormone actually does. Biology and anatomy weren't part of the engineering curriculum, so decades later, I found myself cracking open a biology textbook for the first time — this time, the stakes were my health, not a grade.
With every module — Functional Diagnostic Nutrition® (FDN) and Functional Genomics alike — I recognized my own story in the material: H. pylori overgrowth, crashed hormones, cortisol dysfunction, slow-oxidizer metabolism that had never been screened for, poor methylation that made even my supplements backfire. Most important of all, I understood how grief-driven chronic stress and accumulated trauma combined with suboptimal gene pathways could create the perfect storm FDN calls Metabolic Chaos®. I wasn't just learning a framework; I was finally being given the language for years of symptoms I'd endured without a name. For the first time, my engineer's brain and my client's body were reading from the same page, and everything changed. Through advanced functional lab testing, I uncovered the missing pieces that standard bloodwork had overlooked: hormone imbalances, gut dysfunction, nutrient depletion, and signs of cellular stress.
With personalized, data-driven lifestyle changes, I finally made sense of my symptoms, restored balance, and began rebuilding my health.
Health is a continuous journey, one step and one empowered choice at a time
Drawing on both my experience as an engineer and my journey through profound grief and personal healing, I bring a unique perspective to my work as a Functional Diagnostic Nutrition® Practitioner and Certified Functional Genomics Practitioner. I know firsthand that true wellness isn't achieved through guesswork or generic solutions, but through a process that honors both the science and the individual.
My mission is to guide proactive, health-conscious individuals in understanding how grief, trauma, and genetics can create the underlying imbalances behind mood swings, burnout, or fatigue — so they can reclaim the wellness, mental clarity, and energy they deserve.
Through individualized data, practical strategies, and genuine partnership, I help you create your own blueprint for health — so you can reclaim energy, mental clarity, and a renewed sense of purpose, regardless of where your journey began.
What I've learned on my own health journey is that well-being isn't a finish line — it's a lifelong process, shaped by daily choices, hard-earned lessons, and life's unexpected turns. As your body, mind, and circumstances change, so does your definition of wellness. You'll have smooth stretches and setbacks, but true progress comes from listening inward, adapting, and giving yourself patience and compassion. Growth, resilience, and transformation emerge when you honor your whole self — mind, body, and spirit — and remain open to change.
In our work together, we look at your health as an integrated whole. Through advanced functional lab work, genomics, and a deep understanding of your lifestyle, we move beyond guesswork to uncover what's really holding you back — so you can make empowered choices with clarity and confidence. I believe our spiritual well-being is just as crucial as any lab result; we're more than just bodies — we're souls on a journey, and lasting health honors that truth.
Healing is never linear or one-size-fits-all. My story taught me to rebuild not just my health, but also my purpose, by blending science, intuition, and the unwavering support of those who stood by me. Now, I'm here to walk alongside you as you create your wellness blueprint — not with shortcuts or empty promises, but with evidence, empathy, and genuine partnership. Your path will be uniquely yours, but you don't have to walk it alone. Together, we'll discover what's possible — one step and one empowered choice at a time.