We can spend years jumping from one piece of general advice to another, from one doctor and supplement protocol to the next, and from one restrictive diet to another, all while making little or no real progress with our health.
In today’s internet culture, it’s remarkably easy to spend hours listening to health influencers and podcasters who offer generalized advice, hoping this next thing will finally be what moves the needle for our bodies.
And when we’re trying so many things at once, it becomes harder and harder to know what’s actually helping, what’s a waste of our limited resources, and what might be making things worse. Sometimes the most random thing we do seems to make a huge difference, but without a clear way to track, we’re chasing solutions with no real evidence, working in the dark.
This is how we end up believing our better sleep came from eating kiwis before bed, our improved detox came from broccoli sprouts, or a week of easy digestion meant the enzymes we’ve taken for a year finally kicked in, until they seem to stop working a week later.
Maybe those things helped. But how do we know? And when something suddenly stops “working,” does that mean it never worked, or only worked under certain circumstances?
I know what working in the dark is like, because I’ve been there.
If you live this way long enough, you forget how inefficient and crazy-making it is, how much of your life revolves around controlling symptoms that never go away, and how your family has probably started to wonder whether your very real health issues are all in your head.
I spent much of my twenties and thirties pouring enormous energy and resources into protocols and information that didn’t apply to me, either because they were generalized from something I’d read online, or because I was working with practitioners who didn’t understand the foundations of health that I understand now.
Sometimes an approach helped one thing while disrupting another. Sometimes I simply had no reliable way of knowing whether something was working, because I didn’t know what to track in the first place!
Knowing what to track becomes especially important when we’re dealing with individual mineral balance, hormonal cycles, metabolic stress, and health practices developed mainly around male physiology that we try to apply to our female bodies.
If I’d understood back then how to track my basic health markers and read my body’s signs throughout the month, I believe it would have freed up a tremendous amount of time and energy. I could have shifted my focus from survival toward growth: building my business earlier, working on the trauma I was too consumed by my health to even see, or developing intellectual pursuits and financial literacy.
This article isn’t about regret for what I missed while chasing my own damn tail for so many years. But since so many women are chasing theirs right now, it’s worth saying: instead of working so hard to apply one thing after another without knowing what’s actually moving us forward, we could be developing a much clearer understanding of what our own bodies are telling us, and why.
That’s one of the things I’ve come to appreciate most as a practitioner. It can save an enormous amount of time, money, and stress to slow down long enough to establish where we actually are, build a protocol for the woman who’s actually in front of us, and have some way to assess whether what we’re doing is creating the changes we hoped for.
And if it isn’t, we stop and pivot.
With guidance and accountability from someone who can help interpret what we’re seeing, our health can start to feel less like an endless search for the next answer, and more like a process of gradually understanding ourselves, which gives us more agency going forward.
The goal isn’t to become dependent on tracking, testing, or a practitioner forever. It’s the opposite: to understand our bodies well enough that the basic signs we need are already available to us, so we know when something deserves more attention. That doesn’t replace doctors or other medical professionals, but it does put basic maintenance of our health back in our own hands, and it makes us less likely to get swept up in every new health trend (and there are SO many these days!).
So what does this look like in practice?
In my work, it comes down to three steps: establishing a meaningful baseline, following an individualized protocol while paying attention to the right signals, and reassessing so we can learn from what actually happened.
That last step is crucial, because it asks us to look as neutrally as possible at what actually improved, rather than at what we hoped, assumed, or were told would happen.
Step 1: Establish a Meaningful Baseline Before Deciding What Your Body Needs
We’ve entered an interesting era for women taking their health into their own hands.
Many people have lost confidence that their doctors can help with their chronic symptoms, and they’re turning to integrative and holistic approaches for the many frustrating issues that fall somewhere between obvious disease and feeling genuinely well. And that gap between diseased and well seems to grow wider every year!
As a practitioner, and as a woman who was forced to take her health into her own hands at a fairly young age, I understand how difficult this transition can be.
We’ve gone from a culture in which most people knew very little about their own bodies and relied on doctors to interpret their symptoms, to one with an almost unimaginable amount of health information available every day.
I believe there’s real value in moving away from such heavy reliance on doctors, and in women having access to information that was once hard to find. (I’m also a practitioner writing about health on the internet, so I’m aware I’m part of the very phenomenon I’m describing!)
The problem isn’t that we have access to generalized information. It’s that generalized information can only take us so far when we’re making decisions about an individual body, with its own history, nutritional status, stress load, hormonal profile, personality, lifestyle, trauma history, and goals.
That’s why we need to distinguish between taking in information and knowing what our own bodies need.
A podcast may teach you something useful about progesterone, iron, thyroid function, minerals, blood sugar, or stress. But it can’t tell you what’s happening with your progesterone, iron, thyroid, minerals, blood sugar, or stress response, how they’re interacting with one another, or whether they need your attention at all.
Without an individualized starting point, we can end up applying perfectly reasonable information to a body it isn’t relevant to.
So when I work with a woman, we take stock of her health through a combination of labs, a full health history, a nutritional assessment, her current symptoms, her lifestyle, and her goals. Depending on the woman, I may also use a neurosomatic assessment, a Big Five personality assessment, or an ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) questionnaire to better understand her underlying patterns, personality, and stress history.
Being this thorough upfront helps me understand what kind of approach is likely to be sustainable for her. None of these pieces exists in isolation. The point is a complete enough picture that her protocol grows out of her actual needs, rather than being applied because it’s popular or worked for someone else.
From there, we create a protocol to follow over three to six months. That’s enough structure to know what we’re working toward, and enough time to see how her body responds to each change. It also lets us make changes in order of priority rather than trying to fix everything at once, which makes tracking much harder.
If a woman has spent years piecing together advice from different sources, one of the first helpful changes may simply be that she no longer has ten unrelated people telling her ten unrelated things.
Here are some of the choices I commonly see women make based on generalized health information:
- Taking specific B vitamins they’ve been told are at the root of nearly all their symptoms
- Avoiding retinol (preformed vitamin A, which the body uses for several essential functions) because influencers blame vitamin A for a whole host of health issues
- Taking high doses of fish oil, which is expensive and which I have real concerns about
- Taking random probiotics without any gut testing to show which microbes may be high or low
- Taking digestive enzymes without knowing whether their enzymes are actually low, which ones, or how to support natural enzyme production
- Taking multivitamins with poorly absorbed forms of nutrients, as an “insurance policy” for a mediocre diet
- Taking mineral supplements without testing to know which minerals are high, which are low, and which aren’t being regulated well
- Taking herbal compounds for hormones or detox without knowing what’s driving the symptoms
- Taking amino acid supplements to make up for a low-protein diet
- Taking superfoods that make unfounded claims about fixing all kinds of health issues
- Taking collagen supplements despite limited evidence that they meaningfully increase the body’s own collagen
- Taking anti-aging compounds that claim to turn back the clock, regardless of what else a person is eating or doing
I could keep going!
I’m not mocking or blaming women who follow generalized advice this way. I was one of them for years, and the only thing I had going for me was a much sparser media landscape to get sucked into. I was an over-informed, disorganized hot mess, and I honestly thank G-d I didn’t have Instagram and TikTok at my fingertips in my most desperate, helpless moments, looking for the next savior or magic bullet.
In my twenties, I tried acupuncture and Chinese medicine, several naturopaths, hypnosis, countless forms of therapy, meditation and meditation retreats, live blood cell analysis, raw food diets, cleanses, veganism, vegetable juicing, the Master Cleanse, chiropractic, muscle testing, food allergy reversal (don’t ask me how that one works, because I still don’t understand what she did!), carnivore, variations of paleo, keto, and endless supplements, some from those practitioners and some ordered from random people online.
I learned a lot about myself and had small improvements here and there. But my biggest success came from adding animal foods back into my diet after half a decade as a vegan, something the average person was already telling me when they saw how depleted I looked.
Overall, I walked out of my twenties struggling with many of the same health issues I’d walked in with, despite that long list. I had more confidence in my health by then, simply from time and the experience of going through things and coming out the other side. Essentially, I survived, and that alone counts for a lot!
But I’d also spent thousands of dollars, on a nanny’s and doula’s income, no less, on supplements and superfoods, without ever getting any real education about my cycle, my energy systems, my mineral levels, my stress physiology, my trauma patterns, or what my labs actually meant for my health.
I wish I could say my story was unique, but it’s incredibly common. I hear versions of it constantly from women who reach out to me.
After those exhausting years, I stopped seeing doctors and health practitioners altogether for over half a decade, and spent that time rebuilding trust in my body and in my own okayness. But even then, I struggled without any personalized baseline for approaching my health on my own. I share more of this story in my article on why clean eating failed us, you can read here.
A personalized baseline also protects us from one of the easiest mistakes to make when working on our own health: giving credit to something just because two things happened around the same time.
Humans are pattern-matching creatures. That’s enormously useful, but it also means we can easily decide a supplement improved our sleep, a diet fixed our cycle, or a food caused a symptom when several other things were changing at the same time. The more we add and remove at once without a clear framework, the harder it becomes to tell a meaningful pattern from coincidence, or from the side effects of something bigger, like life circumstances or trauma.
A good baseline gives us something to compare against and a place to build from. It doesn’t tell us everything, and health is obviously more complicated than nudging a few numbers in the “right” direction. But it gives us somewhere concrete to begin, and most of us need that.
Step 2: Learn Which Signs and Signals Are Actually Worth Tracking
Once we have a clear picture of where we’re starting, the next step is following the protocol while observing what actually changes.
This is where tracking comes in, and I want to be precise about what I mean. I don’t believe every woman needs to enter twenty metrics into an app every day or hyper-focus on every fluctuation in her body. Depending on the woman, we might use:
- Cycle tracking
- Daily temperature and pulse readings
- Journaling about feelings
- Written meal records, or apps like Cronometer or MyFitnessPal
- Sleep observations or sleep-tracking apps
- Bowel movements
- Changes in energy
- Emotional patterns
Which of these we use, how often, and how much attention we give them depends on the woman and what we’re trying to understand.
The purpose of tracking is to identify a small set of meaningful signals, so we can see whether the changes we’re making are producing patterns and improvements over time. In my experience, most of the time they are.
Understanding WHY we track matters especially for women prone to anxiety, perfectionism, hypervigilance, or over-control around their health.
There’s nothing inherently healthy about constantly monitoring how we feel. If close attention to food, symptoms, or physical markers makes a woman more stressed and preoccupied with her body, that becomes part of her health picture too. Sometimes we track more; sometimes we deliberately track less. Part of my role is working out, with each woman, what level of attention gives us useful information without turning the process into yet another stressor.
This is also where working together over time gives us information that’s hard or impossible to get from an isolated appointment or a single lab panel. We check in regularly between sessions, which lets us see what actually happens as she brings the changes we’ve agreed on into her daily life.
A recommendation can look perfectly sensible on paper and still be unrealistic given someone’s schedule, family responsibilities, nervous system capacity, preferences, finances, or stress level.
When that happens, I don’t think the healthy answer is forcing harder compliance with a theoretically perfect protocol. I want to understand what’s getting in the way and adjust the approach so it can actually become part of her life, while still holding her accountable to the goals and values she committed to when we started.
When deeper patterns emerge, we can bring in somatic and cognitive tools, both in our sessions and as practices between them. That’s a big part of why I combine nutrition consulting with trauma-informed somatic health coaching. This is intimate work, and it can be confronting.
If changing habits and addressing our health were easy, everyone would be a lot healthier! When we start working on our symptoms, the reasons behind them, and the ways we’ve built our lives around them, often come to the surface, and sometimes they become obstacles.
Sometimes a woman needs more information about nutrition or physiology, and our focus in a session or over WhatsApp is educational. Other times, she already knows a remarkable amount, but there’s a gap between what she understands intellectually and what she can consistently do and feel safe changing.
Changing habits can bring us face to face with patterns around stress, control, safety, trust, boundaries, perfectionism, worth, shame, helplessness, and our deeper relationship with our bodies. Those experiences don’t respond to another meal plan, supplement, or lesson. This is where we work with the emotional side of her experience, while I continue to hold her accountable to her choices as her coach.
Over time, the information we gather gives us a more nuanced understanding of what’s actually helping. Maybe her sleep, temperature, bowel movements, cycle, mood, and energy start shifting together. Maybe one improves while others plateau. Maybe one marker improves while another gets worse, which gives us reason to question whether something that seemed helpful is truly supporting her overall health.
Or maybe something she assumed was causing a symptom turns out to have little to do with it, and she can relax about a food or habit she’d labeled bad.
This is where tracking becomes truly valuable: not because I want women to monitor themselves forever, but because it teaches them what their bodies tend to do, and gives us much more to work with together.
Eventually, many of these observations become so familiar that they no longer take conscious effort. They become part of a woman’s habits and intuition. She starts to recognize what it feels like when things are moving in a good direction, what tends to come before a problem, why certain symptoms show up at certain times of the month or day, which signals deserve extra attention, and what’s just the ordinary noise of having a human body that doesn’t always feel great.
That kind of wisdom is hard for anyone else to give us, because it grows from observing and living in our own bodies over time.
Step 3: Retest, and Use What We’ve Learned to Decide What’s Next
After three to six months of following a personalized protocol and tracking what makes sense for her, we can reassess with far more information than we had at the start.
At this stage, I usually retest her HTMA, and we may revisit other labs she’d like to use to measure progress, based on what’s appropriate and affordable for her. The value of retesting isn’t just seeing whether numbers moved. It’s placing those results alongside months of information about how she’s actually been feeling and functioning.
It’s easy to chase better numbers on a lab, but that isn’t very helpful if they don’t line up with how a woman feels in her body!
If a new HTMA wildly contradicts her lived experience (which is incredibly rare in my experience), that’s also important information. It may point to something deeper that’s driving up stress, nutrient loss, or poor absorption, something we couldn’t see in the earlier data. Overall, though, we want to see improvement in her lived experience even more than dramatic changes in her labs, because her lived experience is what shapes her quality of life each day.
By this point, we’ve followed her patterns day to day, week to week, and month to month, to whatever degree has been useful and psychologically healthy for her, and we’ve learned a lot.
We can look at what improved her markers and how she felt, what increased stress and symptoms, what made little difference, and where our original assumptions need to change based on new evidence. Sometimes the most valuable finding is that something didn’t work the way we expected! That isn’t a failure of the process. It’s information we didn’t have before, and it gives us a more accurate basis for deciding what to do next.
The point is to approach this the way a level-headed scientist would, running an n-of-1 study (an experiment with a single participant) and accepting the data we get, even when emotions are wrapped up in it. And there usually are, because it’s our health, after all!
This is also where the work starts shifting more deliberately back into her hands, where I make sure she has agency over how she responds to how she feels, and even, to some degree, over how she feels.
If she’s spent several months learning how her body responds, understanding which markers matter for her, and practicing the habits we’ve built, she may decide she has what she needs to continue on her own. She can take the tools I’ve taught her, simplify her protocol into something that fits naturally into her daily life, and keep paying attention to the signs she now knows are meaningful.
Ideally, every woman leaves our work together with much more than a list of health improvements. She leaves with a framework she can keep using long after we’re done.
Other women choose another round of coaching because there’s more they want to address, often the deeper patterns underneath the symptoms that first brought them to me. Once a woman is no longer consumed by physical symptoms or survival-mode stress, she can often see patterns that were much harder to recognize before. She may want to go deeper into somatic work, emotional patterns, or parts of her life that only became visible once her health stabilized.
That was true for me. I knew I’d had a rough childhood and that trauma was involved in some way, but I’d lived with chronic symptoms for so long, stuck in survival mode, that I couldn’t truly understand or shift many of those trauma patterns until well into my thirties, once I was more stable physically.
When clients follow a similar trajectory, the next phase of our work looks different, because we’re no longer starting from the same place or working with the same patterns. The work often becomes slower and deeper.
This is one of the reasons I care so much about reassessment. Without it, a health protocol can easily become another set of habits we keep up indefinitely because someone once told us they were good for us, possibly for reasons we never understood. With reassessment, we can ask whether what we’re doing still makes sense, keep what’s proven useful, change what hasn’t, and let go of what we no longer have a reason to do.
The bioenergetic principles at the heart of my work are evergreen. They form the foundation that every other health choice grows from, and that foundation stays stable even as the specifics shift over time with changes in lifestyle, age, and goals.
“Isn’t This an Awful Lot of Tracking and Analyzing?”
You might be thinking this sounds like too much tracking, too much analyzing, and too much to implement at once. That’s an important concern.
The last thing I want to do with a woman who’s already exhausted and overwhelmed is hand her an elaborate protocol that turns caring for herself into a full-time job! What sets my work apart from stringing together internet advice, or from working with a practitioner who sees you for an hour every few months and bases everything on serum labs, is that I go deep enough into each client’s profile to assess how much tracking and change is actually sustainable for her.
We don’t have to plow ahead with a protocol that’s too complicated or demanding and ends up creating more stress than it resolves. The amount of tracking can change over time, and what we pay attention to will naturally evolve as we learn more.
For one woman, detailed observation feels fascinating and reassuring. For another, the same level of attention could increase hypervigilance and pull her further from feeling at home in her body. Those aren’t small differences. They’re part of the information I take seriously when deciding how we’ll work together. That’s what individualized care truly means.
You might also feel cautious because you’ve already tried so many protocols that didn’t move the needle.
That’s fair, and caution is wise when you’re considering investing time, money, and hope into something as important as your health, especially after being disappointed before. I spent years going from practitioner to practitioner, protocol to protocol, and diet to diet, with many of my issues left unresolved. After enough of that, I became cautious, and at times even cynical.
What changed things for me was finding the combination of bioenergetics, somatics, and mineral balancing that I now use in my own life and with my clients.
I’m confident in these approaches because of what I’ve seen in my practice, but it wouldn’t be responsible to promise that every woman will get the exact outcome she wants. You may be an exception. There may be something happening in your body, your life, or your trauma history that falls outside my scope or requires a different kind of support. That’s one of the reasons I offer free video chats before taking on a client: I want to learn enough about you and what you’re dealing with to feel reasonably confident I’m the right person to support you right now.
There’s also a part of healing that goes deeper than finding the perfect protocol, and sometimes it requires changing how we feel about how we feel. That’s its own subject, and one I’ve written about elsewhere. But it’s worth mentioning here, because no amount of health data changes the fact that we’re whole human beings, not collections of lab markers and symptoms. The longer our health struggles go on, the more limiting beliefs and automatic patterns we tend to develop about what our symptoms mean, what’s possible for us, and how to be well.
The Point Is to Need Less Information, Not More
One of the stranger consequences of nearly unlimited access to health information is that it can leave us feeling less certain rather than more confident.
We can know what dozens of people think about seed oils, fasting, carbs, minerals, cold plunges, supplements, exercise, hormones, gut health, or morning sunlight, and still have very little idea what’s happening inside our own bodies, or why we keep sabotaging our own progress. We can spend years accumulating knowledge without learning to tell what’s relevant to us from what’s merely interesting or distracting.
You’ve probably heard the idea that too many choices can leave us less certain, not more. Psychologist Barry Schwartz explores it in his book The Paradox of Choice, and it applies to health information as much as anything else.
I don’t think the answer is returning to a model where women know nothing about their bodies and hand every decision to someone with letters after their name. Nor do I think the answer is making ourselves our own full-time doctors. That approach is making us crazy!
There’s a useful middle ground, where we become educated enough about our own patterns to participate intelligently in our health, recognize changes, ask better questions, and know when something needs professional attention.
That’s what I wish I’d had during all those years of running from one approach to the next, with nothing to show for it but health anxiety, food fears, and a loss of trust in my own body. If I’d known which signs were worth watching, and had a protocol specific enough to actually assess, I believe I could have spent far less of my life thinking and talking about what was wrong with my body.
When women have an approach that’s integrated into their lives and simple enough to understand, they can stop pouring so much attention into influencers, protocols, supplements, and contradictory advice, and turn it toward something bigger: intellectual and spiritual pursuits, building a family, building a career, relationships, creative work, exploring the world, becoming a superhero, or whatever gives their lives meaning.
They can notice when something in their health changes and respond proactively, without launching into another frantic search for advice from people who know nothing about their bodies, temperaments, or budgets.
If you’re curious, or you already know you want to get off the internet-advice treadmill, stop chasing trends, and rebuild trust in your own body, I’m here to support you.
Explore my website, listen to my podcast, and read my other articles to get a sense of how I work and who I am. And of course, you can always book a free chat with me to see whether we’re a good fit for each other.
