Stepping into the work I do in women’s health was THE catalyst I needed in my early thirties to begin embracing my own identity as a woman.
As such, every pivot I’ve made in my business since has mirrored this exploration and the personal struggles and triumphs I’ve been through with my health and identity. And everything that I share — in my articles, podcasts, social media, and private client sessions — reflect these personal experiences, built upon the evolving conviction that true healing happens when women reconnect with their own individual agency.
As I see it, a big component of this agency is based around creating a safe home within our own unique female bodies, learning to listen to them, interpret their signals, and work WITH our bodies to meet the needs those signals are pointing us to.
If you’ve spent years trying to “fix” your health like so many of us have, then you’ve probably been taught, consciously or unconsciously, to see your female body as a collection of problems needing to be solved, and usually by someone or something outside of yourself.
In this scenario, one symptom leads to another, one practitioner recommends another test, a social media post recommends another supplement or food to eliminate, and we get yet another explanation for why our body isn’t doing what it’s “supposed” to do. Throughout these experiences, many women stop trusting in themselves and their own bodies, oftentimes early in life. And in fact, sometimes the path into the symptoms themselves is built upon this lack of trust, which only gets reinforced for us with the pathologies and treatments we’re then sold as solutions.
If this is our path, we may begin to believe that healing is hidden somewhere outside of ourselves—that if we could just find the right protocol, the right lab, or the right expert, then everything would finally click into place, and we could start feeling, looking, and functioning better; as if vitality and health happens in a vacuum.
I’ve watched this process happen hundreds of times and I’ve been a key player in it in my own life.
And for a long time, as a practitioner, I thought I was simply helping women improve their health through changing their nutrition. But today, I know the work that I facilitate runs much deeper than merely what we eat. My work is about helping women reconnect with their female bodies, understand the story their symptoms are telling, and reclaim the agency that so many of us have unknowingly surrendered to the world of wellness consumerism.
Whether a woman is preparing for conception, going through pregnancy, experiencing a chronic illness, or simply longing to feel at home in her own female body again, the journey always begins in the same place: self-nourishment.
This article chronicles the story of how this realization about self-nourishment shaped both of my signature coaching programs—Nourishing the Mother and Nourishing Our Sanity, and also how it shaped my own personal relationship to health and fertility as a woman also working toward motherhood.
My Work Has Grown Alongside My Own Life
Years before I became a women’s nutrition consultant and somatic trauma coach, I studied child development, and worked in childcare and birth-work as a doula.
I spent a decade and a half supporting women through pregnancy and early motherhood, which gave me a deep appreciation for the importance of those seasons of a woman’s life. But at the same time, I didn’t yet understand my own health through the lens of being a woman, nor did I have any vision of myself as a mother. The lack of long-term planning, dissociation, and low self-worth from my trauma history had left me completely agnostic toward motherhood on a personal level.
When I initially launched my business shortly before the pandemic hit, I wanted to help everyone.
Like many practitioners start out, I thought casting a wider net would allow me to make a bigger impact. But instead, I felt scattered, my work was shallow, and I lacked personal conviction in my marketing and my approach to my client’s health needs. Sure, some of this was a lack of professional experience, and my work would grow to be more refined over time, but everything changed when I committed to studying women’s health in depth.
I immersed myself in the research while creating my women’s health course, Habitually Healthy, exploring female metabolism, reproductive physiology, hormonal health, and nutrition science through a lens that centered on women rather than treating us as smaller versions of men.
I was blown away not only by the key differences in physiology between the sexes that drove so much of our health and basic functions… but I was also blown away by how little solid research there actually was into women’s physiology! I was blown away by the clear connection between this lack of female-centric research, and therefore, effective care, and the amount of women who were sick with illnesses that our medicinal community – in all its brilliant emergency solutions – had little understanding or treatments for. Only bandaids.
As my understanding of women’s physiology grew, something unexpected happened: My business found its direction and began to scale quickly, and so did my understanding of women’s collective patterns with their bodies.
For the first time in my life, I truly began paying attention to my own female body as well, and I took my new ambitions into women’s physiology seriously, tracking my cycle for the first time. As a lifelong tomboy with enough developmental trauma to have lived for decades in chronic survival mode, I’d habituated a lifestyle that often disregarded my physiological limitations as a woman, while simultaneously suffering the consequences of this myself through a myriad of chronic sensitivities & symptoms.
I began recognizing how stress had shaped my health and behaviors for decades, and how this connected to my story as a woman living in a culture driven by a lot of male-based metrics for success.
I discovered how deeply fertility reflects the health of the entire female organism—not just our reproductive system.
And around the same time, another crucial chapter of my life unfolded: a romantic relationship which had inspired my desire for motherhood suddenly fell apart and this brought many of my unresolved trauma patterns to the surface. It became impossible to ignore the role that chronic stress, developmental trauma, and attachment wounds had played in my health story arc, and I began to see similar patterns in the stories and symptoms of many of the women I was coaching at the time.
I kept seeing clients who were working incredibly hard, eating “perfectly,” taking the supplements, ordering the extra labs, and basically doing everything they had been told to do, yet they weren’t experiencing the progress they worked so hard for.
The deeper I looked at these women, the more I realized that nutrition alone wasn’t enough to shift the patterns they were getting stuck in, which is when I pivoted my business in the fall of 2022 and began training to work with complex developmental trauma and nervous system distress. I went through four different somatic programs geared toward addressing the deeper patterns myself and many of my clients were experiencing, and I spent two years integrating somatic trauma coaching into my practice.
And I came to another clear understanding about women’s needs: Trauma work alone also wasn’t enough, which is why so many women were making more progress with me than they had through years of talk therapy.
Women’s health simply couldn’t be separated into isolated categories because that’s not how we exist in real life.
These years of studying and working somatically with women’s trauma patterns became the foundation for Nourishing Our Sanity, a coaching container designed to help women understand the relationship between their stress physiology, metabolism, nutrition, capacity for embodiment, and their emotional health — particularly women who knew or suspected that they had C-PTSD.
I learned a lot in these years about my own patterns, how similarly they were showing up in many of the women who seek my support, and I gained a lot of insights into why personal agency is THE key ingredient in finding success with our bodies, as women.
But even this wasn’t the end of the story for me, as I grew to realize that trauma care was not the end-goal of my work, but only one important tool to be implemented with women – like myself – for whom developmental trauma was a key feature of their illnesses. I was now feeling called to merge my early career experience (working so closely with mothers and babies) with the rest of what I was offering within my coaching practice.
The Real Turning Point into Where I Am Now
As I moved into my late thirties, another realization quietly began reshaping my work: I knew that I wanted to become a mother before it was too late, and I knew that I needed to prepare for this, regardless of whether I’d find my baby’s daddy right away.
I knew that motherhood begins within me.
For years, I’d dedicated myself to helping other women, to studying physiology, to understanding trauma, and to supporting healing through the lens of the female experience. Yet I found myself looking inward at this time with new questions about my own fertility, my own future family, and how years of accumulated stress had influenced my body, hormones, and even my own trust in men.
I realized something that has become central to everything I teach today: A woman’s fertility isn’t separate from her health; a woman’s fertility reflects her health.
Whether or not a woman is trying to conceive today, tomorrow, or ever… reproductive health tells us an extraordinary amount about the cycling female body’s overall resilience, vitality, and priorities. Healthy ovulation, balanced hormones, metabolic flexibility, thyroid function, immune strength, adrenal health, nervous system regulation – these are all deeply connected, with fertility being a downstream consequence in all of this.
Fertility became, for me, not simply an outcome; it became a lens through which we could better understand the whole woman during her cycling years — beautifully distinct from men, and in need of ambitions and care all her own.
This realization gave birth to my new coaching container, Nourishing the Mother.
A container not only for women hoping to become pregnant now, but for women who want to prepare their bodies for motherhood someday, for women navigating fertility challenges, for women entering pregnancy or postpartum, and even for women approaching perimenopause who want to understand what their bodies are asking of them instead of accepting the narratives that metabolic decline is inevitable, that natural motherhood impossible after 40.
Before we mother anyone else, we must first learn how to mother ourselves, our inner child, and even our own eggs. We can become the mothers we want to be, long before the baby is even on its way. This is the calling I stepped into in my personal healthcare work and it paved the way for the fertility-focused work I now offer in my practice.
The Patterns I Couldn’t Ignore Anymore
After working with hundreds upon hundreds of women, I noticed the same themes emerging again and again: many women weren’t failing at meeting their health and fertility goals because they lacked discipline or weren’t trying hard enough; they were often struggling with accumulated exhaustion, depletion, and overwhelm.
Many women were chronically under-nourished while simultaneously believing that what was most important was that they eat “healthy” or “clean,” and this was setting them up to become prime consumers of marketing campaigns that taught them they needed an endless supply of labs and invasive treatments in order to be truly well and naturally fertile.
Many women who came to work with me were living with the same unstable blood sugar, disrupted circadian rhythms, low thyroid function, chronic inflammation, excess stress, or mineral imbalances that I had lived with for so long, only they had far far more noise around what this means than I did a decade before!
And I consistently saw the foundations that true health is built upon getting lost in the noisy world of internet health consumerism, buried beneath a lot of treatments and products that most of us could probably live without. Many women similar to myself have spent years living in stressed states, pushing past their own limitations and baseline needs, many times carrying histories of developmental trauma, perfectionism, loneliness, isolation, people-pleasing, or relentless self-pressure that was showing up in their eggs, their cycles, their low appetites.
And this was getting leveraged by those suggesting that invasive or expensive health and fertility treatments were their only solution — that late motherhood is impossible, that perimenopause is the cause of all our problems.
If so many of us have become disconnected from our bodies and the inherent agency of being a fertile woman because we weren’t raised to understand these bodies or to find agency in understanding how they actually work, we’re going to be more vulnerable to cultural memes and marketing campaigns that feed on this disconnection and this lack of agency!
This isn’t a conspiracy theory, as much as a cultural commentary on what I see happening to women in my age range who struggle with their health and fertility, consciously or unconsciously, in their twenties and thirties, only to be told that the ONLY solution is an invasive bandaid when they’re ready to conceive.
But the truth is, we often have lifestyles that further foster disconnection from our own pleasure, rest, our cyclical nature, and our own intuition as a sex. Speaking from personal experience and from witnessing so many women in my practice, it’s clear to me that modern life often teaches us that when it comes to our health, we need to push harder, research more, optimize more, supplement more, and treat our health and bodies like a stressful project with a tight deadline — and we do this with our fertility and our conception goals as well.
But we don’t get taught to ask a much more important question of ourselves, which is: “What does my body actually need from me to be well, to be safe, to be fertile, and to age gracefully?”
This is the question that I’ve been asking myself over the past few years, and what I’ve grown to understand is that once we ask this question, we must be willing to listen to the answer and to honor what that answer asks of us.
The work we’ll be called to do — with our metabolism and fertility, our nervous system and pace in life, our relationships and lifestyle choices — is what I now support my clients with in my practice. I hold them accountable when they want to jump into the next health trend online because they’re desperate for a quick fix instead of being patient with the slower progress they’re currently making, and I support them emotionally when they grieve the fact that they can no longer outsource their agency to the wrong men, to relationship drama they can no longer afford, or to a limiting belief.
Why I Believe So Many Women Feel Stuck Right Now
The wellness industry often convinces us that we’re one resolved deficiency or treatment away from finally feeling well again, and that if we just take this one supplement or get this one metric dialed in, everything not working in our health will suddenly improve or resolve.
This is a very effective marketing campaign because it speaks to our deep desire for a magic lever that will move the needle in a way all of our slow gains realistically cannot. And, don’t get me wrong — as a nutritionist, I know how important nutrients and even supplements can be to our overall health! I know how much malnourishment can contribute to our symptoms, which is why I talk so much about depletion and under-eating in my work.
But the way that wellness consumption works is that health gets presented to us as a reductive process, where some specific solution will solve all our problems.
One more lab. One more supplement. One more protocol. One more course, or expert. The message is almost always the same: something is wrong with you, but it’s your lucky day because I have the solution that will change everything! And then we get sold on some specific supplement or dietary tweak. And to be clear, as a health-oriented woman myself who has navigated her share of symptoms, I’ve been vulnerable to this kind of wellness consumption over the years as well!
Meanwhile, the foundations of true health are often quietly neglected because they’re not as seductive or effective in marketing campaigns, and they’re hard to implement on our own.
The simplest low-hanging fruits, such as eating enough, sleeping consistently, experiencing daily pleasure, feeling safe, building meaningful relationships, living in alignment with our values, slowing down, and honoring our biological rhythms… all tend to get quite a bit less attention. Part of this is because within wellness consumption culture, it’s just easier to market a panacea than it is to promote a lifestyle and nervous system change that takes a different internal state to arrive at and happens over time, through small incremental changes.
Many women end up spending thousands of dollars searching for increasingly complicated solutions while overlooking the practices that restore the body’s sense of safety and nourishment.
My work isn’t anti-testing or anti-supplement – I definitely use functional labs, HTMA interpretation, mineral balancing, nutrition, and targeted protocols every day. BUT, my work is always going to be based on the bioenergetic foundations that make whatever else we apply more effective and sustainable. By this, I’m referring to the fact that tools like labs work best when they support the larger goal – not when they replace it entirely.
In my approach to health, the goal is never dependence on any particular protocol, the goal is to become a woman who understands herself.
A Different Way Forward
Both of my coaching containers are built around the same philosophy. Whether we’re preparing for motherhood or rebuilding health after years of chronic stress, we prioritize nourishing the whole woman.
This is the only approach that’s worked for me, and I can look back at the years I struggled so immensely in my twenties and recognize how many unmet needs I had outside of my immediate health that I was trying to bypass through fixing my body. I went from naturopath to naturopath, dropping thousands of dollars on labs, supplements, and medical visits, on a perpetual elimination diet, trying to fix my health while the rest of my life remained unstable & unsustainable.
Now I offer women the support I wish I’d had during these earlier years when I was struggling so much on my own.
Together, we look more deeply at the root causes of their patterns and we address all areas of their health simultaneously, working at a pace that’s actually sustainable for each unique individual woman’s body, mind, and soul.
Inside our work together, we focus on four interconnected pillars of health – each one feeding into and complimenting the other, all being addressed simultaneously. The pillars are as follows.
Pill #1: Nourished Body & Rhythms
In this pillar, we begin with physiology.
This includes a comprehensive nutrition workup, HTMA interpretation, mineral balancing work, functional lab interpretation when appropriate, food tracking, circadian rhythm support, and identifying the metabolic patterns contributing to a woman’s symptoms.
As a nutritionist, I believe this work cannot be outsourced to any medical practitioner or therapist – each woman seeking greater health and fertility must play a key role in understanding and caring for her own physiology. This may include daily temperature and pulse readings for thyroid and fertility tracking in real time, it often includes fertility awareness method, and beginning to view her health in terms of patterns instead of seeing herself as solid pathologies or isolated symptoms.
For some women, this will be the most important pillar in our work because they have other areas of their health dialed in, but their body still needs more care and attention.
And for other women, while an essential component to their health, this first pillar may actually be less of a focus because we find that unmet needs within the other areas are at the root of their struggles – even if on the surface it looks like it’s all just physiological. The truth is, you can be doing everything technically “right” in caring for your body, but if you’re emotions, lifestyle, and soul are being neglected, you may still feel unwell much of the time!
Pillar #2: Nourished Mind & Emotions
Here we explore the emotional patterns that influence a woman’s health using approaches such as NARM, AEDP, Internal Family Systems, and somatic awareness.
Rather than suppressing emotions, we learn how to relate to them differently. Utilizing a combination of top-down (conscious cognitive capacities & verbal communication) and bottom-up (nervous system-based somatic awareness) practices, I support women in tracking emotions in their bodies, tracking distortions in their thinking, and recognizing the ways these patterns contribute to their symptoms, self-worth, behaviors, and beliefs about themselves over time.
The somatic aspects of this work tend to be much slower and deeper, requiring a level of safety and trust that each woman will approach in a different way.
This work is also much more subjective than the work we do with her physiology, but it has the power to transform the way a woman feels about how she feels, thus changing her beliefs about herself and what’s possible in life. This can often change much deeper patterns that lead to a level of agency she didn’t know was possible when she was placing on her focus on her symptoms and physiology alone.
Pillar #3: Nourished Relationships
We all know that health doesn’t happen in isolation, but we can know this while simultaneously living with unmet relational needs that contribute directly to how we experience ourselves as women, with countless consequences to our physiology and fertility.
While all humans need relationships to be healthy, women in particular are most affected by deficiencies in close human contact, being that oxytocin plays such a key regulatory role in our overall health in a way that is unique for us as a sex.
In this pillar, we examine attachment patterns, boundaries, community, family dynamics, and the relationships in our lives that either support or drain our vitality. If a woman is desiring support I offer my clients in this department if they’re struggling with their relationships, all forms of coaching do involve an emphasis on relationships.
As a result of our relational nature as a sex, working in women’s health inevitably drives me toward this topic, with this particular pillar being even more crucial in women for whom developmental and attachment trauma is a contributing factor to her physiological symptoms, as it has been for me.
Pillar #4: Nourished Soul
When it comes to healing long-standing illnesses and changing deeply-set long-term patterns, the meaning we place into our lives and their content matters. Whether we have purpose or not matters. Whether we have outlets and tools for recognizing, working with, and feeling grief matters.
Our spiritual lives influence our physiology more than we often acknowledge in this modern materialist world we now live in.
In this pillar, together, we create space for reflection, connection, and honoring the parts of life that can’t be measured on a lab report. We discuss big heavy topics such as God, soul, death, birth, aging, and the passage of time. These are topics that ancestral peoples had to face and have rituals around because they didn’t have the technologies and distractions to deny their existence or hide from their consequences.
Many of us crave rituals and experiences to reconnect us to the invisible forces in our lives from which we have no control and minimal capacity to understand with our rational conscious minds. Whether this involves participation in a religious tradition, an earth-based spiritual practice, or occasional mind-altered states we spend our remaining time integrating into daily life – humans crave connection to the sacred and without this, life (and our health) can become too much to carry.
This pillar isn’t going to be prioritized equally by all women and may not play the biggest role in our coaching sessions, but it still represents a need that I believe all women have and must find a way to meet if they want to navigate the temporary nature of health, life, and youth.
Each coaching container includes twelve one-hour Zoom sessions over three to six months, ongoing WhatsApp support between sessions, personalized protocols, lab interpretation, somatic coaching, and day-to-day guidance as you integrate meaningful change into your life.
One of the greatest privileges of this work has been witnessing what becomes possible when women stop trying to fix themselves and begin understanding themselves.
Clients tell me they feel:
- calmer.
- More resilient.
- More emotionally stable.
- They sleep better.
- Their libidos improve
- Stronger in their bodies.
Many women have gone on to conceive naturally after preparing their bodies with greater nourishment and regulation, and one of the greatest results that I’ve witnessed is that many women no longer feel afraid of food.
They understand their symptoms. They feel less alone. They know how to care for themselves with confidence. And instead of obsessing over every symptom, they begin living again.
That, to me, is real where the real healing lies; in being able to feel confident and trusting enough in our own bodies and in ourselves to care for our bodies that we can stop focusing so much on this and go out and live our best lives.
My Vision for Women’s Health
My hope is that the next decade looks very different for women; that as a culture, we stop treating women as if our physiology should function exactly like men’s.
I hope more women feel safe eating enough to actually fuel the brilliance that is their female bodies and that they focus more of being well nourished instead of looking good and remaining small. I hope we stop believing that every symptom requires another expensive intervention before we consider the rhythms of daily life, and most of all, I hope women remember that while teachers, practitioners, and coaches such as myself can offer guidance, the deepest possibilities for healing have always lived within them.
In my opinion (as a health practitioner myself), the goal isn’t to become dependent on experts, but to become deeply connected to ourselves and able to read and trust our own queues.
Because personal agency over how we feel changes everything.
If something in this story resonates with you—if you’re tired of chasing symptoms, feeling overwhelmed by conflicting information, or longing for a more integrated approach to your health—I would love to connect!
Whether you’re preparing for pregnancy, hoping to restore your metabolism, navigating chronic symptoms, or simply ready to feel at home in your body again, you don’t have to figure it all out alone. Together, we’ll explore what your body has been communicating, identify what truly deserves your attention, and build a way of living that supports not only your health today, but the woman you’re becoming and will be well into the future.
If you’re curious about working together through Nourishing the Mother, Nourishing Our Sanity, or beginning with an HTMA consultation, I invite you to schedule a complimentary discovery call, where we can get to know each other better.
I’d love to hear your story, and support you in any way that I can.
