I spent sixteen years trying to fix my gut before I realised I was trying to fix the wrong thing.

In 2001, at just 11 years old, I was diagnosed with Crohn's Disease.

At that age, I didn't really understand what it meant. I just knew that my life had suddenly become very different to everyone else's.

Over the next sixteen years, my world revolved around pain, medication and uncertainty. At my worst, I was taking fourteen tablets every day just to manage my symptoms. Eating became something I feared because I never knew how my body would respond and Crohn's even affected my growth, leaving me feeling disconnected from a body that never seemed to work the way it was supposed to.

For a long time, I believed that was simply the life I had been given.

Then Christmas Day 2016 changed everything.

A bowel perforation left me needing emergency surgery to save my life. Surgeons removed 30 centimetres of my intestine and just two months later I was back in hospital for another six weeks, being fed intravenously for 12 hours a day. My weight dropped to just five stone (33.6kg), roughly the weight of a small child.

Looking back now, that period stripped everything away.

It stripped away my strength, my confidence and any illusion that somebody else was eventually going to fix me.

But it also gave me something I didn't realise I needed.

A new question.

Like so many people living with chronic illness, I had spent years searching for answers. I tried different diets, different supplements and countless approaches, always hoping the next solution would finally be the one that changed everything.

Some things helped.

Most didn't.

What I couldn't understand was why every solution seemed focused on treating my gut in isolation. Nobody seemed to be asking why my body had spent so many years living under constant stress or what that stress might have been doing to everything else happening inside me.

Those questions changed the direction of my life.

Since 2017, my kitchen has slowly become filled with more than 30 different roots, leaves and herbs as I've immersed myself in understanding medicinal plants, the nervous system and the gut-brain connection. I wasn't looking for another miracle ingredient.

I was looking for understanding.

And the greatest lesson I discovered wasn't hidden inside a single plant.

It was hidden inside the question I'd never thought to ask.

For sixteen years, I believed my gut was the problem.

Looking back now, I don't think my body was ever working against me.

I think it was doing exactly what it had been designed to do.

It was trying to protect me.

When we live under chronic stress, the nervous system shifts into survival mode. In that state, digestion, recovery and repair naturally become lower priorities because the body is focused on keeping us alive.

That realisation changed everything.

For the first time, I stopped seeing my body as something I needed to fight.

Instead, I began creating daily rituals that helped it feel safe enough to do what it had always been designed to do.

Recovery didn't happen overnight.

It happened through thousands of small decisions, repeated consistently over time.

About 8 months after my ileostomy reversal, I entered my first powerlifting competition.

Not because I wanted trophies.

Not because I wanted records.

But because after everything my body had carried me through, I wanted to prove to myself that it wasn't my enemy.

I went on to break two records, deadlifting 180kg before later lifting 195kg - more than three and a half times my body weight. I became a two-time champion.

Those lifts meant far more to me than trophies ever could.

They were proof that the relationship I had with my body had completely changed.

As my story began reaching more people, it was featured by the BBC, ITV, the Daily Mail and LADbible. What surprised me most wasn't the attention. It was the thousands of messages from people who recognised themselves in my journey.

Some were living with digestive conditions.

Others were simply exhausted, overwhelmed and frustrated after years of searching for answers.

Different stories.

The same feeling.

Through those conversations, one thing became incredibly clear.

People weren't just searching for another product.

They were searching for hope.

They wanted to understand their bodies instead of constantly feeling like they were fighting them.

That eventually led me to coach people around the world. Every conversation reminded me that no two journeys are ever the same, but they all begin in the same place: wanting to believe that your body is capable of feeling better.

Everything I learned through my own experience eventually became the foundation for Cosmic Hue.

Not as another supplement.

Not as another wellness trend.

But as a daily ritual inspired by the plants, practices and philosophy that completely changed the way I understood health.

Today, more than 50,000 people around the world have welcomed Cosmic Hue into their lives, and I never take that for granted.

If there's one thing I hope you take away from my story, it isn't that I found a miracle solution.

It's that I stopped believing I was broken.

For years, I thought my body was fighting against me.

Now I believe it was trying to protect me all along.

That single shift in perspective changed the course of my life.

It also became the reason I founded Fifth Ray.

My mission today is simple: to help people build a different relationship with their bodies. To help them understand the connection between the nervous system and the gut-brain connection, normalise daily rituals that bring calm and coherence back into modern life and remember something I wish I'd learned much earlier.

You were never broken.

You may simply have been living in survival mode.

Thank you for taking the time to read my story.

— Manny Singh Tura