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 certain vitamins and minerals, I knew how to read an ingredient label, I knew why I should buy organic when I could afford it, and I knew all of the foods I was supposed to avoid if I wanted to be healthy. What I didn’t understand very well 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 from the foods I was choosing.
Unfortunately, my health science degree, certifications in nutrition and integrative health coaching, or any of the official trainings I’ve been through since also failed to provide me with this fundamental understanding.
In fact, this was an understanding which I only discovered as a practitioner through independent research and as a health-seeking woman through absolute necessity.
I think this is a blind spot for a lot of health-oriented women, particularly those of us who came of age during the era when “clean eating” became almost synonymous with good nutrition and overall health.
We learned to organize food according to its perceived healthfulness: vegetables and lean proteins were good; processed foods were bad; white carbohydrates were suspicious; sugar was worse; saturated fat needed to 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 make the bad list too.
Even when the specific rules changed, the underlying philosophy remained remarkably consistent: being healthy meant becoming increasingly discerning about what we allowed ourselves to eat.
This is why I meet so many women who come to me for help with chronic symptoms related to their hormones, fertility, stress physiology, or unexplained cravings while being fairly confident that nutrition itself is not the problem.
These women already eat “well.”
Often, they eat exceptionally well by conventional “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. They can also usually tell me why certain bad foods are bad, and often have a lot to say about the importance of fiber and antioxidants.
What many have never done, however, is look at their diet through the lens of energy metabolism. Once we do this, a very different picture can emerge for us.
The question we can ask is no longer simply, “Am I eating healthy foods?” Instead, it becomes, “Am I giving my body enough of the raw materials it needs to meet its actual energy demands?”
Those are not the same question, and one big thing this second question does is it requires that we actually, potentially for the first time in our lives, take stock of our daily energy demands, our metabolic rate, and that we get very honest with ourselves 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 adequately nourished because I believed exactly the same thing for years.
I started out as a fairly typical low-fat, low-calorie health-food eater in my teens — mainly as a dysmorphic way to try and control how I looked (i.e. how out-of-control I felt). In my twenties, I became vegan and spent some time experimenting with raw food diets, working at one of the more famous vegan, raw food cafes, Cafe Gratitude. This was intended to be a way of flooding my body with the micronutrient-rich alkaline foods that would cure me of all my supposed infections and imbalances that I’d either self-diagnosed or received some vague lab marker around.
When my body eventually made it clear that this wasn’t working for me through, essentially, deteriorating, I brought animal foods back in and moved into the world of paleo, which was followed at different points by keto, carnivore, and moderate to low-carb versions of paleo.
There were periods when I practiced intermittent fasting, restricting my eating to particular windows of the day, and basically feeling like I might pass out in the name of some reductive data that says that starving ourselves will lead to better health. An idea, by the way, that I now know has only ever been tested on men’s bodies and definitely caused more harm than good on my own sensitive female physiology.
The philosophy I worked from changed repeatedly, 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 ate the rainbow. I ate enormous amounts of vegetables. I drank mason jars of vegetable juice, and ate salads as meals. I avoided gluten and processed sugar, I minimized saturated fat and avoided dairy almost completely for more than a decade. I spent an amount of money that was frankly ridiculous relative to my income on organic, high-quality food because taking care of my health mattered that much to me.
But I didn’t feel particularly healthy, and I suffered from the craziest cravings — to the point that I developed an eating disorder around my cravings and impulsive behaviors they induced.
I struggled with sensitive blood sugar, low energy, thyroid-related symptoms, histamine issues, and food cravings that could become so intense that they interfered with my ability to think about much else. I could spend the entire day eating what I considered an exemplary diet and then find myself desperately wanting simple carbohydrates at night or after a stressful event. In the afternoon, I sometimes wanted chocolate so badly that I would go out, buy an expensive chocolate bar, eat the entire thing, and then sleep poorly afterward due to the impacts dark chocolate (the only kind you can eat when you’re dairy-free & low-sugar) has on circadian health and sleep hormones.
I interpreted these experiences through the same framework many women do: I was doing everything “right,” so the cravings must represent something 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 simply couldn’t be trusted around certain foods. Unfortunately, I spent years believing all of these things about myself, my body, and foods.
What never occurred to me was that the cravings themselves might contain useful information about what my body was needing, and wasn’t getting.
And this is one of the biggest downsides following generic diets that tell us to eat less of something or to eat specific foods for their micronutrients alone; we often override our own bodily signals and can end up at war with our cravings because they ask us for things that we’re told are off the menu.
Think about it. Most of the time, when we have overwhelming cravings, they’re for sugar, carbs, ice cream, chocolate, salty food, greasy food, red meat. All of these are foods that offer us very specific nutrient profiles needed for energy production: glucose, minerals, fat, sodium, dense protein, higher carbs.
It’s no accident we’re craving these foods, and if we fight to override our cravings instead of working to understand why they’re there, we may bury an unmet need deeper, leading to other issues down the road.
That intense chocolate craving I mentioned that I used to live with? This disappeared completely when I got my overall energy, minerals, and dairy consumption up. And those crazy sugar cravings that led me to years of bing eating?? Well, I haven’t had those in years either since prioritizing getting my blood sugar up and developing tools for regulating my nervous system so that I don’t use up so much sugars when I’m stressed.
And you know what I do when I DO have higher stress that drives my cravings for carbs up? I eat more carbs.
We Talk About Nutrients Constantly, but We Talk Much Less About Energy.
One of the strange things about modern wellness culture is that you can become incredibly educated about food without developing a particularly sophisticated understanding of energy metabolism at all. You can know what magnesium does, what foods contain vitamin C, why polyphenols are beneficial, and which vegetables contain the most antioxidants, while simultaneously having almost no idea how much carbohydrate, protein, fat, or total energy you’re actually eating each day!
Even more importantly, you likely aren’t aware how much energy you need to be eating for each day.
This distinction between eating for nutrients alone and eating for energy matters because the human body does not run on “clean” food as an abstract category.
Our cells require usable energy. ATP—adenosine triphosphate—is the molecule cells use as an immediate energy currency, and producing it depends on metabolic pathways that ultimately require adequate substrates (a molecule that an enzyme acts upon) and nutrients. Food, therefore, isn’t merely a collection of beneficial or harmful compounds — it’s quite literally our fuel for every cell in our bodies.
When available energy becomes inadequate relative to physiological demands (i.e. stress), the body doesn’t simply continue operating normally while politely waiting for us to eat more. It adapts.
It will kick up our cravings to drive us to eat more if we’re burning through more energy too fast… but after a while, the body adapts to a lower fuel intake, even if we’re still navigating the same amount of stress. This isn’t an alternative-health concept; low energy availability is an established area of physiological research. Energy availability refers, broadly, to the dietary energy remaining for physiological functions after the energetic cost of exercise is accounted for.
Research has associated insufficient energy availability with changes in endocrine function, reproductive physiology, bone metabolism, and other system functions, and researchers have also observed changes involving thyroid hormone physiology under conditions of low energy availability, which essentially means our thyroid tends to drop when we’re undernourished for too long.
This topic becomes especially interesting when we look at women.
Female reproduction requires substantial metabolic investment, and our reproductive physiology is responsive to our body’s nutritional and energetic environment and demands. The literature clearly describes a negative energy status as capable of disrupting hypothalamic signaling involved in reproduction, which is why when we under-eat, we can often end up with irregular periods, anovulation, or amenorrhea. This doesn’t mean every woman with hormonal symptoms is under-eating, nor does it mean 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.
This is something I wish I had understood much earlier in life, and this is something that I want all women to understand.
Health-Oriented Women Can Become Surprisingly Under-Nourished
Over the past six years of working intimately with health-oriented women, I’ve seen my own story reflected back to me in different forms again and again.
These are generally not women living on fast food and soda who’ve never thought about nutrition — they’re often the opposite. They care enormously about their health, they know a tremendous amount about ingredients, and different diets. Many of them have been vegetarian, vegan, paleo, keto, gluten-free, dairy-free, low-fat, low-carb, intermittent fasting, or some combination of these over the years, and they can tell me why every restriction exists.
Then we actually look at what they’re eating.
Sometimes there isn’t enough carbohydrate in her daily intake, sometimes there isn’t enough protein, sometimes fat has been kept low for years because saturated fat still feels frightening. Or alternatively, they replaced their carbs with too much fat and it’s not converting well into usable energy. Sometimes multiple food groups have disappeared entirely, leaving a diet that looks colorful and nutrient-conscious but is surprisingly difficult to obtain energy from. Sometimes a woman is eating large amounts of lean protein and fibrous veggies and feels physically full, but her body continues asking for energy later in the day… because she’s filling up on cellulose and water!
This distinction between fullness and nourishment has become increasingly important to me, and it’s actually a pet peeve of mine for people to assume that a salad is the health food of choice.
A large salad with chicken breast can create substantial stomach fullness, but that doesn’t mean it makes a great meal! In fact, salads really came on the scene (as more than a side for a full entree) in the eighties when it was made clear that the most satiating foods are fiber and lean protein. Since everyone was on some kind of diet in the eighties, it became fashionable to eat a salad with chicken with some minimal vinaigrette dressing.
Salads are, essentially, the diet pill of the food world; you get to fill yourself up on little to nothing.
If a woman is consistently full after meals but repeatedly finds herself prowling the kitchen for chocolate, cereal, bread, or sugar at 9 p.m., I don’t immediately assume that the problem is a behavioral failure that needs to be controlled — I want to know what she ate all day.
I also want to know what she’s been eating for the last several years, what happens during her luteal phase, what her relationship to stress is, if she’s going too long in between meals, what foods she’s been afraid to eat, and whether her supposedly uncontrollable appetite becomes considerably less mysterious once we account for what her body has actually been receiving and going through.
The Fertility Piece Matters, Too
This way of thinking becomes particularly important for women who are trying to conceive or hoping to become mothers later in their reproductive years. We sometimes talk about fertility as though it exists in its own little compartment of the body, separate from metabolism, thyroid physiology, stress, blood sugar, and overall nutritional status. But of course, physiologically, these systems are interconnected.
Research on reproductive endocrinology has shown that metabolic signals interact with the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis, the system involved in regulating ovulation and reproductive hormone signaling. So, low energy availability can alter signals involved in this system, and lead to all kinds of reproductive issues.
Thyroid physiology is also closely intertwined with female reproductive health, and a recent review estimates that thyroid disorders affect nearly 14% of adult women (likely far more than this in reality), and as I’ve addressed many times before in podcasts, women are almost 8 times more likely than men to receive treatment for thyroid disorders. This is one reason I’m much less interested now in whether a fertility-focused woman’s diet looks virtuous and clean… and much more interested in whether it is actually supporting her energy needs.
For many women, the answer to their health needs may involve eating more, not becoming more restrictive.
It may mean bringing simple carbohydrates back into meals more consistently so that she has easily available energy that the body doesn’t have to work tremendously hard to access. It may mean increasing protein, so that she’s getting closer to 100g a day (the general number I tend to suggest the average woman aim for), or it may mean reconsidering foods she’s avoided for years, and paying more attention to total caloric intake.
In my view, all of this involves recognizing that fertility places real demands on the female body and that a chronically stressed woman who is also attempting to control her weight, restrict carbohydrates, fast, exercise heavily, and maintain a long list of dietary exclusions… may be sending her physiology a very different message than the one she intends!
This is where Bioenergetic Nutrition dramatically changed things for me
When I talk about a bioenergetic approach to nutrition, I’m talking about looking at food first through the lens of energy metabolism: how effectively our cells are able to take the nutrients and fuel we eat and turn them into usable cellular 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 when needed, digesting our food & absorbing as much nutrients as possible from that food, thinking (a VERY energy intensive exercise for those of us more intellectual types), moving, and supporting reproductive function — all of this depend on our ability to continually produce and use cellular energy.
From this perspective, nutrition isn’t only about whether a food contains antioxidants or micronutrients, whether it’s been labeled inflammatory, or whether it appears on somebody’s list of “clean” foods. What matters just as much, if not more, is if a food is able to increase our energy production and thus lower our overall stress load at any given time.
We also have to ask whether the diet as a whole is supplying enough usable fuel, protein, fats, vitamins, and minerals for the body to meet its metabolic demands without having to continually compensate for an energy shortage.
As it turns out, many women live their entire lives within bodies that are consistently compensating for energy shortages!
This is where bioenergetic nutrition can look very different from the clean-eating framework many women have been taught. Rather than beginning with restriction—What should I eliminate? Which foods are bad? How can I eat fewer calories or carbohydrates?—I tend to begin with adequacy: What does this particular body need in order to be well-fueled? Is she eating enough overall? Is she getting enough carbohydrate and protein? Is she getting the nutrients required for normal metabolic function? How well is she actually tolerating and utilizing what she eats, and are her current cravings and symptoms telling us something about the gap between her energy intake and her energy demands?
This approach doesn’t mean that food quality suddenly doesn’t matter, or that every person should eat exactly the same way — it means that “healthy” food isn’t particularly helpful if our definition of healthy eating leaves a woman chronically under-fueled.
The goal of a bioenergetic approach is ultimately to create the nutritional conditions that support robust energy production, so the body has adequate resources not only to keep us alive, but to support the higher-energy functions associated with feeling generally well. We want a nutritional philosophy that helps us in adapting to life’s different stresses, and, when relevant, maintaining our reproductive function for as long as we can as women.
When I began learning about bioenergetics, energy metabolism, and the relationship between stress and fuel demands, I finally had a framework that helped explain experiences I’d spent years trying to control, to no avail.
I began to question the assumption that every intense desire for sugar represented a pathological relationship with sugar, and that my own sugar cravings must be some kind of bacterial or candida overgrowth demanding I eat more sugar only to feed pathogens inside of me. Looking back now with a much deeper understanding of physiology, I feel a bit embarrassed by this reductive view of my own body’s relationship to sugar.
While, yes, sugars do feed overgrowths of pathogenic organisms within us… they also feed our own cells the substrates needed to produce the energy for healthy immunity in the first place! When we’re craving sugars, fats, and denser foods, it’s not only the non-human organisms inside of us asking for that fuel, it’s our own energy-demanding cells!
This is why low-carb diets designed to starve out things like candida and SIBO tend to backfire and these overgrowths have such a high recurrence rate; we’re not only starving these organism’s fuel source — we’re also starving our own, which places our body under a lot of stress that our immune system then has to contend with.
I began to think more along the lines of: if I consistently wanted fast, carbohydrate-rich energy at particular times of day, what if I stopped moralizing that signal long enough to ask what preceded it?
- Had I eaten enough at my last meal?
- How much carbohydrate had I actually consumed?
- How long had it been since I ate?
- Was I relying on caffeine to compensate for low energy?
- Was I in a higher-demand phase of my menstrual cycle?
- Did I sleep well the night before?
- Was I in a place in life that was generally stressing me out?
- What happened to the craving when I changed the conditions that came before it?
This curiosity changed my relationship with food far more than another list of forbidden ingredients ever did, and I also noticed a shift in my cravings and my overall energy when I began to give myself the foods that I craved most, even if I was getting them from healthier more well-balanced sources.
And this is an important distinction: I don’t think every craving can be reduced to one nutritional deficiency or that every woman should respond to every desire for food by eating whatever she wants without context. I’ve seen this kind of logic within certain dietetics circles and “intuitive eating” philosophies, where people justify eating empty industrially processed foods every day because they were craving them, or chose to get their protein from peanut butter because their “intuition” told them to.
None of this makes sense based on what we know intuition to actually be (pattern recognition developed over time through deep knowledge and familiarity with a topic), what we have scientific data to confirm (nutritional profiles of different foods), and the widespread factors that influence individual cravings.
Appetite is influenced by many things, including exposure to certain foods through marketing and environment, and psycho-emotional states.
But I also no longer believe that persistent cravings should automatically be treated as noise we need to suppress, either, because they’re pointing to things we need to pay attention to.
In my work, cravings are important data points, but they’re just one of many data points we can use to guide us.
This shift — from treating the body as something that needs to be controlled, lest it sabotage the goals we established, to treating it as something that can be investigated —is at the heart of how I now practice women’s nutrition.
What I Actually Do With Women Now
When a woman works with me, I don’t simply tell her to eat more carbs or hand her another standardized meal plan because I want to understand how she arrived at her current physiology.
I look at her dietary history and her current intake. I want to know what she has restricted, what she has emphasized, how regularly she eats, what her macronutrient intake actually looks like, and how all of this relates to her symptoms and her health history. I use HTMA as part of my work to evaluate mineral patterns, alongside a full nutritional analysis, and I can incorporate other existing lab work when appropriate. From here, we can identify places where her current diet may not be meeting her needs and begin teaching her how 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 sets us up to shift our intake throughout our lives, depending on what our demands are, our personal preferences, and the resources available to us.
Importantly, I don’t treat HTMA as a standalone diagnosis or pretend a mineral test can explain every symptom a woman has — it’s one piece of a larger picture. The point is to put information together: diet, history, symptoms, stress, appetite, laboratory information when available, and the patterns we’re seeing in real life.
Then we make changes.
For many women, that means becoming much more intentional about macronutrients, particularly adequate carbohydrates and quality protein, while including nutrient-dense sources of fat and reconsidering foods they’ve excluded simply because they learned years ago that these foods were “bad.”
Since we understand that our protein intake will need to be adequate to meet the bodily demands of immune and cognitive functions, tissue repair, muscle synthesis, and avoiding tissue wasting for as long as possible, keeping our protein intake consistent, optimal, and well-sourced will become a priority. And since we get our energy from carbs, and our energy demands change throughout the month based on where we are in our cycle, how much we’ve slept, whether we worked out, how demanding work is, we understand that our carb consumption may need to vary day-to-day based on these factors… but should never dip too low, lest we increase our reliance on stress hormones to get us 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 requirement to fuel our non-health-related ambitions in life. The woman who thought she had an uncontrollable sweet tooth may find that she doesn’t spend every night thinking about sugar anymore or battling with her habit of using ice cream to calm herself down. The woman who believed she couldn’t keep chocolate in the house without eating it all at once may discover that chocolate becomes much less compelling when she isn’t arriving at 4 p.m. under-fueled.
Someone who has spent years micromanaging every ingredient she consumes may find she can actually loosen her grip on food because her appetite feels more predictable, and she can take the pressure off every meal being a multivitamin, and simply ensure she’s getting enough fuel for her energy needs.
That, to me, is a much more meaningful form of food freedom than simply giving yourself permission to eat everything while still feeling physically unwell and psycho-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 messages like this on my socials and in my podcast or emails, and I understand it.
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 carbohydrates 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 I think wellness culture gets into trouble when it replaces one overly simplistic nutritional ideology with another.
My argument isn’t that every mainstream recommendation is wrong or that every food you’ve been taught to limit should suddenly become the foundation of your diet — within the overly-simplified catastrophizing of many nutrition influencers and mainstream dietetics recommendations is often some truth to be found.
My argument in this article is that context matters much more than clean-eating culture has taught us to believe.
If you’ve spent years eating clean and you’re still struggling, I’m not suggesting that nutrition is necessarily the sole cause of your symptoms because lifestyle, habits, financial stress, relationship issues, and environment all contribute greatly to a woman’s overall sense of wellness and agency over how she feels. As a woman who’s struggled with how she’s felt since childhood, I know firsthand that chronic health problems are rarely as simple as being caused by one thing, and good nutrition isn’t a substitute for appropriate medical evaluation, or the need to address deeper stressors or traumas.
But I also wouldn’t dismiss nutrition simply because you eat vegetables every day. Most of the women who have come to work with me over the years ate vegetables every day, often at every meal! They didn’t seek out my guidance and pay me out of pocket for private coaching because their diets were working for them, I can assure you!
If you have persistent cravings, energy crashes, menstrual or fertility concerns, a long history of restrictive diets, or you live with the sense that maintaining your version of “healthy eating” requires constant vigilance, I think it’s worth investigating whether you’re actually adequately nourished—not according to an Instagram definition of clean eating, but according to the needs of your actual body and direct firsthand experience.
That was the question I failed to ask myself for years when I was chasing metrics of good health set by the outside world, while ignoring how little this was working for me in reality.
I was so focused on whether I was eating the right foods that I wasn’t asking whether I was eating enough of what my body actually needed, and because I believed my diet was already exemplary, I kept searching elsewhere for increasingly complicated explanations for problems that, at least in part, were being perpetuated by the way I was feeding myself. I also tended to surround myself with people who ate like me and saw me as a paragon of health because they saw a petite, small-bodied female mass-consuming veggies at every meal.
Unsurprisingly now, it was the least health-oriented people in my life who were often pointing out the discrepancy between my ideas about health and my actual health, with great concern.
This included boyfriends with little to no concern about nutrition who didn’t see me as benefiting from my immense efforts, and relatives who knew me for years and watched me struggle, regardless of what diet I was on, or how much I focused on health.
I’ve had countless clients with similar patterns. They come to me prepared to discuss supplements, hormones, trauma, nervous-system regulation, histamine, fertility, thyroid function, or complex testing—and don’t get me wrong, many times we absolutely need to discuss these things–but I also want to know what they ate for breakfast, and how they feel about eating foods they’ve deemed “bad.”
Sometimes the deeper work starts with something surprisingly basic, and we just have to reinforce the foundations again and again until we can pivot and focus on more specific or complex issues, like methylation and sex hormonal imbalances.
A Different Way to Think About Nourishment
I don’t want women leaving clean-eating culture only to enter another rigid nutritional ideology — I want women to become more physiologically literate.
I want women to inoculate themselves from any marketing or messaging that sells them panaceas or reductive stories about nutritional science and what health 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 can change what adequate nourishment looks like for each of us, why macronutrients matter just as much as micronutrients, and why a plate full of objectively nutritious foods can still be insufficient 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 must need more rules, more restrictions, and more intellectualizing around food in order for them to feel like they can nourish themselves enough to move on with their lives and focus on other things!
Obviously, if we’re trying to improve our health, resolve unwanted symptoms, increase our fertility, conceive naturally, improve our chances of a healthy and safe pregnancy, birth, and postpartum, and enjoy our bodies as we age, focusing on nutrition, to some extent, is going to be important!
But, how much time and energy we place into this endeavor should be balanced with the success we’re seeing from our choices through better health in all those areas. AND, we want to improve things so we can focus on other things–not so eating clean can become the center of our days!
Sometimes your body is asking for something with your cravings and symptoms, and we should at least be willing to listen before deciding our body just needs to shut up.
This is, unfortunately, what I see a lot in the clean eating world just as much as I see this in the medical community — it’s just following a different path to the same conclusion: overriding the body’s messages with some ideological approach to controlling it’s signals, we’re just using dietary restrictions and salads instead of pharmaceuticals.
I guarantee you, ladies, this is not a sustainable path!
If This Message Resonates with You
If you read this and recognized yourself in anything I shared—the years of clean eating, the rotating dietary restrictions, the chronic symptoms that never quite resolve, or the cravings that seem completely inconsistent with how “healthy” you eat—this is exactly the kind of pattern I work with in my practice.
In my work with women, 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 look at other lab work you already have so that we’re not evaluating your food intake in isolation. From there, we work on dialing in your nourishment based on your actual intake, symptoms, history, and energy needs rather than simply giving you another generic definition of healthy eating.
If this approach speaks to you, you can schedule a free chat with me to talk about what’s been going on and whether working together makes sense.
And if fertility is specifically what brought you here—particularly if you want to make sure you’re nourishing yourself appropriately as you work toward conception—you can also explore the coaching container I created specifically to support women through that process. In this container, Nourishing The Mother, I take all of the work I’ve done over the years in my practice with women’s metabolic health: mineral balancing, addressing complex trauma and chronic stress’s impact on nervous system health, cycle tracking guidance, and more… and I combine it all to address a modern woman’s conception, pregnancy, and postpartum needs.
The percentage of women in their late twenties to early forties who are being diagnosed with infertility, hormonal imbalances, and postpartum mental illnesses has skyrocketed in the past decade, with little to no attention being placed upon their overall health and well-being by mainstream medical institutions.
Many of these women invest thousands of dollars and ample time and energy into clean eating for the sake of their fertility and overall motherhood journey, sometimes with success. But many times, women continue to struggle with their health and fertility, despite extensive efforts. What I see in my practice is that there are often deeper issues — at the cellular and nervous system level — in these women’s bodies that are getting in the way of their success. The medical solutions they’re sold on often cost even more, and offer them nothing in the way of cellular replenishment and nervous system re-patterning.
And in the holistic health world, this is where the generic approach of eating clean falls short for many of us who need a more sustainable approach to our fertility and energy needs.
You may not need to try harder at eating clean.
You may need a completely different way of understanding what it means to be nourished as a modern woman — for you and for your current or future family.
