For the better part of two decades, I thought I knew a lot about nutrition. And in some ways, I did.
I knew which vegetables were high in which vitamins and minerals, how to read an ingredient label, why to buy organic when I could afford it, and every food I was supposed to avoid if I wanted to be healthy. What I didn’t understand was something much more fundamental: how much energy my body actually needed, where that energy was supposed to come from, and what happened physiologically when I consistently failed to provide enough of it.
Neither my health science degree, my certifications in nutrition and integrative health coaching, nor any of the official trainings I’ve done since gave me that understanding. I only discovered it through independent research and clinical application as a practitioner, and out of sheer necessity as a woman trying to get well herself.
I think this is a blind spot for a lot of health-focused women, especially those of us who came of age when “clean eating” became almost synonymous with good nutrition and health.
We learned to sort food by how healthy it seemed: vegetables and lean proteins were good; processed foods were bad; white carbs were suspicious; sugar was worse; saturated fat should be minimized; dairy was questionable; red meat should be limited. And depending on which health community we found ourselves in, gluten, grains, eggs, fruit, starch, or animal foods might eventually join the bad list too.
Even as the rules changed, the underlying philosophy stayed remarkably consistent: being healthy meant becoming more and more selective about what we allowed ourselves to eat.
That’s why so many women who come to me for help with hormonal symptoms, fertility, stress, or unexplained cravings are often fairly confident nutrition isn’t the problem for them until they hear me saying some pretty unorthodox stuff about nutrition on a podcast, and are suddenly reconsidering everything they thought they knew!
They already eat “well.” Often, they eat exceptionally well by clean-eating standards; they eat vegetables at nearly every meal, buy expensive supplements, choose organic food, avoid processed sugar, and have spent years educating themselves about ingredients and additives. They can usually tell me exactly why certain foods are bad, and they have a lot to say about fiber and antioxidants.
What many have never done is look at their diet through the lens of energy metabolism. When we do this, a very different picture often emerges for us.
The question stops being “Am I eating healthy foods?” and becomes “Am I giving my body enough of the raw materials it needs to meet its actual energy demands?”
Those aren’t the same question. The second one asks us to take stock, maybe for the first time, of our daily energy demands and our metabolic rate, and to get honest about where our energy is actually coming from. (Hint: it’s often coming from stress hormones.)
The Problem With Measuring Nutrition by “Cleanliness”
I understand why women believe that eating clean means they’re well nourished, because I believed the same thing for years myself.
I started out as a fairly typical low-fat, low-calorie health-food eater in my teens, mostly as a way to control how I looked, which really meant how out of control I felt. In my twenties, I went vegan and experimented with raw food diets, working at Café Gratitude, one of the better-known vegan raw food cafés in California. I was trying to flood my body with micronutrient-rich, “alkaline” foods that would cure me of all the infections and imbalances I’d either self-diagnosed or found hints of on some vague lab result.
When my body made it clear this wasn’t working, essentially by deteriorating, I brought animal foods back in and moved into paleo, followed at various points by keto, carnivore, and moderate- to low-carb versions of paleo, depending on who I was listening to at the time and what was going on with my chronically moody gut.
There were periods of intermittent fasting, when I restricted eating to certain windows of the day and basically felt like I might pass out, all in the name of research suggesting that eating less often would make me healthier (if I happened to be a man or a non-cycling woman, that is!) I now know that much of that research wasn’t designed around female physiology, and it definitely did my own sensitive female body more harm than good.
The philosophy kept changing, but there was one idea I almost never questioned: better health would come from finding the right foods and having enough discipline to avoid the wrong ones.
And boy, was I disciplined! I started out by eating the rainbow, which meant I ate enormous amounts of vegetables. I drank mason jars of vegetable juice and ate salads as meals. I avoided gluten and processed sugar, minimized saturated fat, and cut out dairy almost completely for more than a decade. I spent a frankly ridiculous share of my income on organic, high-quality food, because my health mattered that much to me.
When my diet pivoted and leaned on animal foods, I followed the same principles, but instead of avoiding saturated fat and meat, I avoided sugar and grains with the same level of discipline.
I didn’t feel particularly healthy in my vegan days, and my cravings were so intense that I developed an eating disorder around them and the impulsive behaviors they led to.
My health improved with the addition of animal foods, but still plateaued and required excessive maintenanceI that took over my life’s focus. I struggled with sensitive blood sugar, low energy, thyroid-related symptoms, histamine issues, and cravings that could make it hard to think about anything else. I could spend all day eating what I considered an exemplary diet, then find myself desperate for simple carbohydrates at night or after a stressful event. Some afternoons I wanted chocolate so badly I’d go buy an expensive bar, eat the whole thing, and sleep poorly afterward from the caffeine and theobromine in the dark chocolate (the only kind you can eat when you’re dairy-free and low-sugar).
I interpreted all this the way many women do: I was doing everything “right,” so the cravings must mean something was wrong with me. Maybe I was emotionally eating, maybe I lacked discipline, maybe sugar was addictive and I needed to avoid it at all costs, or maybe I just couldn’t be trusted around certain foods. I spent years believing all of these things about myself, my body, and food.
What never occurred to me was that the cravings might contain useful information about what my body needed and wasn’t getting.
This is one of the biggest downsides of generic diets that tell us to eat less of something, or to choose foods for their micronutrients alone: we learn to override our body’s signals, and we can end up at war with cravings that ask for foods we’ve been told are off the menu.
Think about it. Most overwhelming cravings are for sugar, carbs, ice cream, chocolate, salty food, greasy food, or red meat. Each of these offers specific nutrients involved in energy production: glucose, minerals, fat, sodium, dense protein, and plenty of carbohydrate.
It’s no accident we crave these foods. If we fight our cravings instead of trying to understand them, we may just bury an unmet need deeper and create other problems down the road. And not only physiological problems, but behavioral, and psycho-emotional!
That intense chocolate craving I used to live with? It disappeared completely once I got my overall energy intake, minerals, and dairy consumption up. And the sugar cravings that fueled years of binge eating? I haven’t had those in years, since I started prioritizing stable blood sugar and developing tools to regulate my nervous system, so I don’t burn through so much sugar when I’m stressed or feel like I have no resource for regulation other than eating.
And when I do have higher stress that drives up my cravings for carbs? I eat more carbs.
We Talk Constantly About Nutrients, but Rarely About Energy
One strange thing about modern wellness culture is that you can become incredibly educated about food without understanding much about energy metabolism at all. You can know what magnesium does, which foods contain vitamin C, why polyphenols are beneficial, and which vegetables have the most antioxidants, while having almost no idea how much carbohydrate, protein, fat, or total energy you’re eating each day.
Even more importantly, you probably don’t know how much energy you need each day.
That distinction matters, because the body doesn’t run on “clean” food as an abstract category.
Our cells need usable energy. ATP (adenosine triphosphate) is the molecule cells use as their immediate energy currency, and producing it depends on metabolic pathways that require adequate fuel and nutrients. Food isn’t just a collection of beneficial or harmful compounds. It’s quite literally the fuel for every cell in our bodies.
When the energy available falls short of what the body needs (under stress, for example), the body doesn’t keep operating normally while politely waiting for us to eat more. It adapts.
At first, it ramps up cravings to push us to eat more if we’re burning through energy too fast. But over time, it adapts to running on less fuel, even if we’re still dealing with the same amount of stress. This isn’t a fringe alternative-health idea. Low energy availability is an established area of research. Energy availability refers, broadly, to the dietary energy left over for the body’s functions after the energy cost of exercise is accounted for.
Research has linked low energy availability to changes in endocrine function, reproductive function, bone metabolism, and other systems, including lower thyroid hormone activity. In other words, thyroid function tends to drop when we’re undernourished for too long.
This gets especially interesting when we look at women.
Female reproduction requires substantial metabolic investment, and it’s highly responsive to our body’s nutritional and energy environment. The research clearly describes how low energy status can disrupt the hypothalamic signaling involved in reproduction, which is why undereating can lead to irregular periods, anovulation, or amenorrhea (missing periods). That doesn’t mean every woman with hormonal symptoms is undereating, or that food alone explains every fertility problem. It means something more basic, and in my opinion very important: the female body pays close attention to energy availability.
I wish I’d understood this much earlier in life, and I want every woman to understand it.
Health-Focused Women Can Be Surprisingly Undernourished
Over six years of working closely with health-focused women, I’ve seen my own story reflected back to me again and again.
These generally aren’t women living on fast food and soda who’ve never thought about nutrition. They’re often the opposite. They care enormously about their health and know a tremendous amount about ingredients and diets. Many have been vegetarian, vegan, paleo, keto, gluten-free, dairy-free, low-fat, low-carb, or intermittent fasters, or some combination of these, and they can explain why every restriction exists.
Then we look at what they’re actually eating.
Sometimes there isn’t enough carbohydrate. Sometimes there isn’t enough protein. Sometimes fat has been kept low for years because saturated fat still feels frightening, or, alternatively, carbs have been replaced with so much fat that it isn’t converting well into usable energy. Sometimes whole food groups have disappeared, leaving a diet that looks colorful and nutrient-conscious but is surprisingly hard to get energy from. And sometimes a woman eats large amounts of lean protein and fibrous vegetables, feels physically full, and yet her body keeps asking for energy later in the day, because she’s filling up on fiber and water!
This distinction between fullness and nourishment has become increasingly important to me, and honestly, it’s a pet peeve of mine that people assume salad is the ultimate health food.
A big salad with chicken breast can make you feel very full, but that doesn’t make it a great meal. Fiber and lean protein are among the most filling foods there are, which is exactly why the salad-as-a-meal became a staple of the diet-obsessed eighties and nineties: chicken, greens, and a minimal vinaigrette let you feel full on very little.
Salads are essentially the diet pill of the food world: you fill up on almost nothing.
So if a woman feels full after meals but keeps finding herself prowling the kitchen for chocolate, cereal, bread, or sugar at 9 p.m., I don’t assume the problem is a behavioral failure that needs more control. I want to know what she ate all day. (I go deeper into this pattern in my article on whether you’re accidentally on a low-energy diet.)
I also want to know what she’s been eating for the past several years, what happens during her luteal phase, what her relationship with stress is like, whether she’s going too long between meals, which foods she’s been afraid to eat, and whether her “uncontrollable” appetite becomes much less mysterious once we account for what her body has actually been receiving and going through.
The Fertility Piece Matters Here, Too
This way of thinking is especially important for women trying to conceive, or hoping to become mothers later in their reproductive years. We sometimes talk about fertility as if it lives in its own little compartment, separate from metabolism, thyroid function, stress, blood sugar, and nutritional status. But physiologically, these systems are deeply interconnected.
Research in reproductive endocrinology shows that metabolic signals interact with the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal (HPG) axis, the system that regulates ovulation and reproductive hormones. Low energy availability can alter the signals in this system and lead to all kinds of reproductive issues.
Thyroid function is also closely intertwined with female reproductive health, and thyroid disorders are remarkably common in women, who are five to eight times more likely than men to have thyroid problems. That’s one reason I’m much less interested now in whether a fertility-focused woman’s diet looks clean and virtuous, and much more interested in whether it’s actually meeting her energy needs.
For many women, the answer involves eating more, not restricting further.
That may mean bringing simple carbohydrates back into meals more consistently, so she has easily accessible energy her body doesn’t have to work hard to use. It may mean increasing protein to something closer to 100 grams a day, which is the general target I suggest for many women. It may mean reconsidering foods she’s avoided for years, and paying more attention to her total calorie intake.
All of this comes down to recognizing that fertility places real demands on the female body. A chronically stressed woman who is also trying to control her weight, restrict carbohydrates, fast, exercise heavily, and maintain a long list of dietary exclusions may be sending her body a very different message than the one she intends!
What Is Bioenergetic Nutrition?
When I talk about a bioenergetic approach to nutrition, I mean looking at food first through the lens of energy metabolism: how effectively our cells can take the fuel and nutrients we eat and turn them into usable energy, primarily in the form of ATP.
Every process in the body requires energy: maintaining body temperature, producing hormones, repairing tissue, mounting an immune response, digesting food and absorbing as many nutrients as possible, thinking (a VERY energy-intensive activity for us more intellectual types), moving, and supporting reproduction. All of it depends on our ability to continually produce and use cellular energy.
From this perspective, nutrition isn’t only about whether a food contains antioxidants, whether it’s been labeled inflammatory, or whether it appears on someone’s list of “clean” foods. What matters just as much, if not more, is whether a food helps increase our energy production, and in doing so, lowers our overall stress load.
We also have to ask whether the diet as a whole supplies enough usable fuel, protein, fat, vitamins, and minerals for the body to meet its demands without constantly compensating for an energy shortage.
As it turns out, many women spend their entire lives in bodies that are constantly compensating for energy shortages!
This is where bioenergetic nutrition looks very different from clean eating. Rather than starting with restriction (What should I eliminate? Which foods are bad? How can I eat fewer calories or carbs?), I start with adequacy: What does this particular body need to be well fueled? Is she eating enough overall? Is she getting enough carbohydrate and protein, and the nutrients required for normal metabolic function? How well is she tolerating and using what she eats? And are her cravings and symptoms telling us something about the gap between her energy intake and her energy demands?
This doesn’t mean food quality suddenly doesn’t matter, or that everyone should eat the same way. It means “healthy” food isn’t much help if our definition of healthy eating leaves a woman chronically under-fueled.
The goal of a bioenergetic approach is to create the nutritional conditions for robust energy production, so the body has enough resources not just to keep us alive, but to support the higher-energy functions that make us feel well. We want a way of eating that helps us adapt to life’s stresses and, when relevant, protects our reproductive function for as long as possible.
When I began learning about bioenergetics, energy metabolism, and the relationship between stress and fuel demands, I finally had a framework that explained experiences I’d spent years trying, and failing, to control.
I began to question the assumption that every intense desire for sugar meant a pathological relationship with sugar, or that my cravings must be caused by candida or some other overgrowth demanding sugar to feed itself. Looking back with a much deeper understanding of physiology, I’m a little embarrassed by that reductive view of my own body.
Yes, sugar can feed overgrowths of unwanted organisms. But it also gives our own cells the fuel they need to produce energy, including the energy required for healthy immunity. When we crave sugar, fat, and denser foods, it isn’t only the organisms inside us asking for fuel. It’s our own energy-hungry cells!
This is also why I believe very low-carb diets meant to starve out candida or SIBO often backfire, and why these overgrowths so often come back. We’re not only starving these organisms of fuel. We’re starving ourselves too, which puts the body under stress that the immune system then has to deal with.
So I started asking different questions. If I consistently wanted fast, carbohydrate-rich energy at certain times of day, what if I stopped moralizing that signal long enough to ask what came before it?
👉 Had I eaten enough at my last meal?
👉 How much carbohydrate had I actually eaten?
👉 How long had it been since I ate?
👉 Was I relying on caffeine to make up for low energy?
👉 Was I in a higher-demand phase of my cycle?
👉 Had I slept well the night before?
👉 Was I in a stressful season of life?
👉 What happened to the craving when I changed what came before it?
That curiosity changed my relationship with food far more than any list of forbidden ingredients ever did. My cravings and overall energy also began shifting once I started giving myself the foods I craved most, even when I got them from healthier, more balanced sources.
This is an important distinction. I don’t think every craving can be reduced to one nutritional deficiency, or that every woman should answer every food desire by eating whatever she wants without context. I’ve seen that logic in some dietetics and “intuitive eating” circles, where people justify eating heavily processed foods every day because they craved them, or get their protein from peanut butter because their “intuition” told them to.
None of that makes sense given what intuition actually is (pattern recognition built over time through deep knowledge and familiarity), what science tells us about the nutritional profiles of different foods, and the many factors that influence cravings, including marketing, environment, and emotional states.
But I also no longer believe persistent cravings should automatically be treated as noise to suppress, because they often point to something that deserves attention. In my work, cravings are important data points, just one of many we use to guide us.
This shift, from treating the body as something to control lest it sabotage our goals to treating it as something to investigate, is at the heart of how I practice women’s nutrition now.
What I Actually Do With Women Now
When a woman works with me, I don’t just tell her to eat more carbs or hand her another standardized meal plan. I want to understand how she arrived at her current physiology.
I look at her dietary history and current intake: what she’s restricted, what she’s emphasized, how regularly she eats, what her macronutrients actually look like, and how all of this relates to her symptoms and health history. I use HTMA to evaluate mineral patterns alongside a full nutritional analysis, and I incorporate other lab work when appropriate. From there, we identify where her diet may not be meeting her needs, and I teach her to think about nutrition through the lens of energy metabolism rather than another set of good-food/bad-food rules.
Bioenergetic nutrition is a set of principles and an approach to eating, not a specific diet, which means it can flex throughout our lives as our demands, preferences, and resources change.
I don’t treat HTMA as a standalone diagnosis or pretend a mineral test can explain every symptom. It’s one piece of a larger picture. The point is to put the information together: diet, history, symptoms, stress, appetite, lab results when available, and the patterns we see in real life.
Then we make changes.
For many women, that means becoming much more intentional about macronutrients, especially adequate carbohydrates and quality protein, while including nutrient-dense fats and reconsidering foods they cut out years ago simply because they learned those foods were “bad.”
Protein needs to be adequate to support immune and cognitive function, tissue repair, and muscle maintenance, and to prevent the body from breaking down its own tissue, so keeping protein consistent and well sourced becomes a priority. Carbohydrates are our most readily available energy source, and our energy demands change throughout the month depending on our cycle, our sleep, our workouts, and how demanding work is. So carb intake may need to vary day to day, but it should never dip too low, or we end up relying more heavily on stress hormones to get through.
And something interesting often happens when we do this: food becomes less dramatic.
Eating becomes less of a project and more of a daily way to fuel the rest of our lives. The woman who thought she had an uncontrollable sweet tooth may find she no longer spends every night thinking about sugar, or reaching for ice cream to calm herself down. The woman who believed she couldn’t keep chocolate in the house may find it much less compelling once she isn’t arriving at 4 p.m. under-fueled.
Someone who has spent years micromanaging every ingredient may find she can loosen her grip on food, because her appetite feels more predictable. She can stop expecting every meal to be a multivitamin and simply make sure she’s getting enough fuel for her needs.
To me, that’s a far more meaningful kind of food freedom than giving yourself permission to eat anything while still feeling physically unwell and emotionally dysregulated around food.
But Haven’t We Been Told to Avoid Certain Foods for a Reason?
This is usually where resistance comes up when I share these ideas on social media, my podcast, or my emails, and I understand why.
If you’ve spent twenty years hearing that saturated fat causes heart disease, sugar causes diabetes and cavities, red meat causes cancer, dairy is inflammatory and mucus-producing, and white carbs are nutritionally inferior, you aren’t going to abandon those beliefs because someone on the internet tells you to eat more freely.
Nutrition science is complicated, and wellness culture gets into trouble when it replaces one overly simplistic ideology with another.
My argument isn’t that every mainstream recommendation is wrong, or that every food you’ve been told to limit should become the foundation of your diet. There’s often some truth buried inside the oversimplified catastrophizing of nutrition influencers and mainstream dietary advice.
My argument is that context matters far more than clean-eating culture has taught us.
If you’ve spent years eating clean and you’re still struggling, I’m not suggesting nutrition is necessarily the sole cause. Lifestyle, habits, financial stress, relationships, and environment all contribute enormously to how a woman feels and how she behaves each day. As someone who has struggled with how she feels since childhood, I know chronic health problems rarely have a single cause, and good nutrition isn’t a substitute for appropriate medical evaluation or for addressing deeper stressors and trauma.
But I also wouldn’t dismiss nutrition just because you eat vegetables every day. Most of the women I’ve worked with over the years ate vegetables daily, often at every meal! They didn’t seek me out and pay for private coaching because their diets were working, I can assure you.
If you have persistent cravings, energy crashes, menstrual or fertility concerns, a long history of restrictive diets, or the sense that your version of healthy eating requires constant vigilance, it’s worth investigating whether you’re truly well nourished: not by Instagram’s definition of clean eating, but by the needs of your actual body and your own lived experience.
That’s the question I failed to ask myself for years, while I chased outside measures of good health and ignored how poorly they were working for me.
I was so focused on eating the right foods that I never asked whether I was eating enough of what my body needed. Because I believed my diet was already exemplary, I kept searching for increasingly complicated explanations for problems that were, at least in part, being perpetuated by how I was feeding myself. I also surrounded myself with people who ate like me and saw me as a paragon of health, a petite woman eating piles of vegetables at every meal.
Unsurprisingly, looking back, it was often the least health-oriented people in my life who pointed out, with real concern, the gap between my ideas about health and my actual health. That included boyfriends who didn’t care much about nutrition and couldn’t see me benefiting from all my effort, and relatives who’d watched me struggle for years, no matter what diet I was on.
I’ve had countless clients with similar patterns. They come to me ready to discuss supplements, hormones, trauma, nervous system regulation, histamine, fertility, thyroid function, or complex testing. And don’t get me wrong, we often do need to discuss those things. But I also want to know what they ate for breakfast, and how they feel about eating foods they’ve labeled “bad.”
Sometimes the deeper work starts with something surprisingly basic, and we have to reinforce the foundations again and again before we can move on to more specific or complex issues, like methylation or sex hormone imbalances.
A Different Way to Think About Nourishment
I don’t want women to leave clean-eating culture only to join another rigid nutritional ideology. I want women to become more physiologically literate.
I want you to be able to see through marketing that sells cure-alls or reductive stories about nutrition science and what healthy eating looks like. I want you to understand why your body needs energy, why your reproductive system is so sensitive to your nutritional status, why stress changes what adequate nourishment looks like, why macronutrients matter just as much as micronutrients, and why a plate full of objectively nutritious food can still fall short for the person eating it.
Most of all, I want women to stop assuming that struggling with appetite means they’ve failed at self-control, and that their bodies need more rules, more restrictions, and more intellectualizing before they can feel nourished enough to move on with their lives.
Obviously, if we’re trying to resolve symptoms, improve fertility, conceive naturally, have a healthy pregnancy, birth, and postpartum, and enjoy our bodies as we age, nutrition is going to matter. But the time and energy we put into it should be balanced against the results we’re actually seeing. We want to improve our health so we can focus on other things, not so that eating clean becomes the center of our days!
Sometimes your body is asking for something through your cravings and symptoms, and we should at least be willing to listen before deciding it just needs to be quiet.
Unfortunately, I see the clean-eating world do the same thing I often see in conventional medicine, just by a different route: overriding the body’s messages with an ideology of control. One uses pharmaceuticals; the other uses dietary restriction and salads.
Trust me, ladies, that is not a sustainable path.
If This Message Resonates With You
If you recognized yourself in anything I’ve shared (the years of clean eating, the rotating restrictions, the chronic symptoms that never quite resolve, or cravings that don’t make sense given how “healthy” you eat), this is exactly the kind of pattern I work with in my practice.
I combine a detailed analysis of your current nutrition and dietary history with my signature HTMA interpretation to look at mineral patterns that may add useful context to what you’re experiencing. I can also review lab work you already have, so we’re not evaluating your food intake in isolation. From there, we dial in your nourishment based on your actual intake, symptoms, history, and energy needs, rather than handing you another generic definition of healthy eating.
If this approach speaks to you, you can book a free chat with me to talk about what’s been going on and whether working together makes sense.
And if fertility is what brought you here, especially if you want to make sure you’re nourishing yourself well as you work toward conception, you can also explore Nourishing the Mother, the coaching container I created for exactly this. It brings together everything I’ve learned in my years of working with women’s metabolic health, including mineral balancing, addressing the impact of complex trauma and chronic stress on the nervous system, and cycle-tracking guidance, and applies it to a modern woman’s conception, pregnancy, and postpartum needs.
Rates of infertility, hormonal imbalances, and postpartum mental health struggles among women in their late twenties to early forties are a growing concern, and mainstream medicine often pays little attention to these women’s overall health and well-being.
Many of these women invest thousands of dollars and enormous time and energy in clean eating for the sake of their fertility and motherhood journey, sometimes with success. But many keep struggling despite their efforts. In my practice, I often find deeper issues at the cellular and nervous system level getting in the way. The medical options they’re offered can cost even more, and they rarely address cellular replenishment or nervous system repatterning.
That’s also where the generic clean-eating approach falls short for so many of us who need a more sustainable way to meet our fertility and energy needs.
You may not need to try harder at eating clean.
You may need a completely different understanding of what it means to be nourished as a modern woman, for yourself and for your current or future family.
