We can spend years jumping from one general piece of advice we find online to another, from one doctor and supplement protocol to another, and from one restrictive diet to another, all while making minimal, if any, progress in our overall health.
In today’s internet culture, it’s remarkably easy to spend excessive amounts of time listening to health influencers and podcasters who offer generalized advice about how to improve our health, hoping that this next thing will finally be the thing that moves the needle for us with our bodies.
And when we’re trying so many things at once, it also becomes increasingly difficult to know what’s truly improving things, what’s a waste of our finite resources, and what might actually be making things worse. Sometimes it can seem like the most random thing we do is making a huge difference, but since we have no clear way to track, we’re often left chasing solutions with no real evidence, working in the dark.
This is the kind of path where we end up believing that our improved sleep is due to eating kiwis before bed, that our increased detox functions is due to eating broccoli sprouts, and that one week of easeful digestion was the digestive enzymes we’ve taken for a year, suddenly kicking in, only to stop working again after a week.
Maybe these things helped, but how do we know?? And what happens when they seem to suddenly stop “working” all of a sudden? Does this mean they never worked in the first place, or that they only worked under certain circumstances?
I know what working in the dark like this is like because I’ve been there with my own health.
And the truth is that if you go on this way for long enough, you eventually forget how inefficient and crazy-making this approach is, how much of your life is geared around trying to control symptoms that never seem to go away in the first place, and the fact that everyone in your family likely thinks your (very real) health issues are all some undiagnosed form of OCD.
I spent a good portion of my twenties and thirties putting enormous amounts of energy and resources into protocols and information that either didn’t apply to me because they were generalized from something I’d read online, or weren’t applicable to me because I was working with a practitioner who didn’t understand enough about the foundations of health — the foundations that I understand now.
Sometimes these approaches helped in one way while disrupting something else, and sometimes I simply had no reliable way of knowing whether something was working because I didn’t understand what I should be tracking in the first place!
Being able to track what we actually need and what’s moving us toward this becomes especially important when we’re dealing with things like individual mineral balance, hormonal cycles, metabolic stress, and the tendency to take health practices developed primarily around male physiology and applying them to our own unique female bodies.
If I’d understood then how to track my basic health metrics and read my body’s signs and symptoms throughout the month, I believe I would’ve had a tremendous amount of time and energy freed up in my life for other things.
I could’ve shifted my focus away from survival and toward growing and expansion — toward building my business earlier in life, toward focusing more on my trauma that I was too tied up with my health to even know I had, or toward developing intellectual pursuits and financial literacy.
This article isn’t about expressing regret or grievances for all of the missed opportunities that I experienced earlier in life as a result of chasing my own damn tail for so long with my health.
But since chasing our tail is an unfortunately common experience I see women having nowadays, it does feel worth including as a reminder here: 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 body’s communicating to us, and why.
I could’ve built out other others of my life instead of pulling all of my (limited) resources into working on my health, essentially in the dark. FOR YEARS.
This is one of the things I’ve come to appreciate most since becoming a practitioner myself: sometimes it can save an enormous amount of time, money, and emotional stress in the long run to slow down long enough to establish where we actually are, to create an individualized protocol based on the woman who’s actually in front of us, and to have some way of assessing whether what we’re doing is creating the changes we hoped it would.
And if it isn’t, we stop what we’re doing and we pivot.
With the guidance and accountability of someone who can help us interpret what we’re seeing, our health can begin to feel less like an endless search for the next answer and more like a process through which we gradually learn to understand ourselves and thus increase the agency we will live with moving forward.
The larger goal isn’t to become dependent on tracking, testing, or a practitioner forever.
In fact, I see the opposite as the goal: to understand our bodies well enough that many of the basic signs and signals we need are already available to us, so we have what we need for knowing when something deserves further attention. This doesn’t remove the need for doctors or other medical professionals, but it does put some of the basic maintenance of our own health back into our own hands, while making us less vulnerable to getting swept up in every new health trend that comes along (and there are SO MANY these days!)
So what does this actually look like in practice?
In my work, it generally begins with three things: establishing a meaningful baseline, implementing an individualized protocol while paying attention to the right signs and signals, and then reassessing so that we can learn from what actually happened.
In this approach, that last step is crucial because we need to look as neutrally as possible at what actually improved things in our health, rather than at what we hoped, assumed, or were told would happen.
Strategy #1: Establish a Meaningful Baseline Before Deciding What Your Body Needs
We’ve entered an interesting era when it comes to women taking their health into their own hands.
Many people have lost confidence in the idea that their doctors will necessarily be able to help them with their chronic symptoms. Many are looking more toward integrative and holistic approaches to nutrition, metabolic health, and the many frustrating issues in their health that may fall somewhere between being obviously diseased and feeling genuinely well.
The space between being obviously diseased and genuinely well grows wider for us every year as a culture!
Being a health practitioner myself, and also being one of those women who was forced, through necessity, to take my health into my own hands at a fairly young age, I understand how difficult this transition can be personally.
We went from a culture in which most people knew relatively little about what was happening inside their own bodies and relied heavily on doctors to interpret symptoms for them, into one in which an almost unimaginable amount of health information is available to the general public every day.
I believe there is a great deal of value in this transition away from such concentrated reliance on doctors.
I believe there is value in women learning about their own bodies and having access to information that once would’ve been difficult to find, and I’m also a health practitioner writing an article about health on the internet, so I’m aware that I’m participating in the very phenomenon I’m describing!
The problem isn’t simply that we have access to generalized information — the problem is that generalized information can only take us so far when we’re trying to make decisions about an individual body with a unique history, nutritional status, stress load, hormonal profile, personality, lifestyle, trauma history, and set of goals.
This is where I believe we need to distinguish between taking in information & knowing what our own bodies need.
Listening to a podcast may teach you something useful about progesterone, iron, thyroid function, minerals, blood sugar, or stress, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you what’s happening with your own body when it comes to progesterone, iron, thyroid function, mineral status, blood sugar, or stress response. It certainly doesn’t tell you how all of these things may be interacting with one another, or why they might need your attention in the first place.
Without a meaningful and individualized starting point, we can end up applying a perfectly reasonable piece of information to a body for which it isn’t particularly relevant.
For this reason, when I work with a woman, we take stock of her health through a combination of labs, full health history, nutritional assessment, current symptoms, lifestyle, and stated health goals. Depending on the individual, I may also incorporate a neurosomatic assessment, Big Five personality assessment, and ACE questionnaire to help me better understand her underlying patterns, personality traits, and stress history.
Being this thorough upfront helps me understand what kind of approach is actually likely to be sustainable for each woman.
None of these metrics exists in isolation; the point is to create a more complete picture of the woman I’m working with so that the protocol grows out of her actual needs rather than being applied to her because it happens to be popular or worked well for someone else.
From here, we create a protocol that we’ll implement over a three-to-six-month period. This gives us enough structure to know what we’re working toward while also giving us enough time to see how her body responds to each change.
This approach also allows us to make changes based on priorities rather than trying to correct everything at once, which makes tracking much harder.
If a woman has spent years piecing together advice from different sources, one of the first useful changes may simply be that she no longer has ten unrelated people telling her ten unrelated things about what she should be doing.
Some of the choices women make based on generalized health information include:
- Taking specific B vitamins that they’ve been told are at the root of almost all of their symptoms
- Avoiding retinol (the active form of vitamin A that our metabolism uses for several essential functions) because low-retinol diets get promoted by influencers who attribute vitamin A toxicity to a whole host of health issues
- Taking high doses of fish oil that are often inflammatory and expensive
- Taking random probiotics, without any gut test indicating what microbes may be high or low inside their guts
- Taking random digestive enzymes, without understanding IF their enzymes are low, which enzymes might be low, and what can be done to increase natural enzyme production
- Taking multivitamins with low-quality forms of nutrients that the body doesn’t use well, because it was promoted as some kind of insurance policy for an otherwise mediocre diet
- Taking random mineral supplements without any testing to know which minerals might be high, which ones might be low, and which ones aren’t being regulated well by the body
- Taking random herbal compounds for things like hormones and detox without any knowledge as to what’s driving hormone and detox symptoms
- Taking amino acid supplements to make up the difference of a low protein diet
- Taking superfoods that make unfounded claims about fixing all manner of health issues
- Collagen supplements that have no real solid data to prove that they actually convert into an increase in bodily collagen production
- Anti-aging compounds claiming to increase cellular turnover and turn back the clock, regardless of what else a person is doing or eating
I could literally keep going with this list!
I want to make it clear that I’m not mocking or blaming the women who follow generalized health advice in this way — I was one of these women myself for years, and the only thing I had on my side was a much more sparse media landscape to get sucked into!
I was an over-informed, disorganized hot mess for years, and I honestly thank G-d that I didn’t have Instagram and TikTok at my fingertips to scroll through during my own desperate moments where I was feeling helpless, looking for the next savior, the next magic bullet.
During my quest for answers in my twenties, I tried: acupuncture and Chinese medicine, several naturopathic doctors, hypnosis, countless forms of therapy, meditation and meditation retreats, live blood cell analysis and raw food diets, cleanses, veganism, vegetable juice, the master cleanse, Chiropractic, muscle testing, food allergy reversal (don’t ask me how this works because I don’t understand what she did!), carnivore, variations of paleo, keto, and endless amounts of supplements I either got from one of these many practitioners or ordered from someone random online.
I learned a lot about myself, and I had little improvements here and there during this time, but the biggest success I had came from the choice to add animal foods back into my diet after half a decade as a vegan — something the average person was already telling me when they looked at how depleted I was at the time!
Overall, I walked out of my twenties struggling with a lot of the same health issues I had walked into my twenties with, despite that long list of resources I cycled through.
I had more confidence in my health at this point due to the simple experience of time and through the simple act of going through stuff and coming out the other end.
Essentially; I survived and this alone counts for a lot!
But I also dropped thousands of dollars — on a nanny and doula’s salary, no less — on out-of-pocket supplements and expensive superfoods, while at the same time never getting any real education on my cycle, energy systems, mineral levels, stress physiology, trauma patterns, or what any of my labs MEANT for my overall health when I’d have them run.
I wish I could say that my story, as dramatic as it sounds, is unique. But as I’ve already conveyed, this is a very common story that I hear constantly from women who reach out to me for help with their health.
As a result of these exhausting years with my health, I stopped seeing all medical doctors and health practitioners for over half a decade, and I spent this time rebuilding trust in my own body, my own okay-ness. And even during this break, I still struggled without any kind of personalized baseline for how to approach my health on my own.
Establishing a personalized baseline also helps protect us from one of the easiest mistakes we can make when we’re working on our own health: giving credit to something because two things happened around the same time.
Human beings are pattern-matching creatures, and that capacity is enormously useful, but it also means we can easily decide that a supplement improved our sleep, a diet fixed our cycle, or a particular food caused a symptom when there were several other variables changing at the same time. The more things we add and remove at once without a clear framework, the harder it becomes to separate a meaningful pattern from a coincidence or even a side effect of something larger, like circumstance and 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 turning a few numbers in the “right” direction, but it gives us somewhere concrete to begin. Most of us need this.
Strategy #2: Learn Which Signs and Signals Are Actually Useful to Track
Once we have a clearer picture of where we’re starting, the next part of the process is implementing the protocol while developing a way to observe what actually changes and improves.
This is where I use tracking with my clients. I want to be precise about what I mean by tracking because I don’t believe every woman needs to spend her day entering twenty different metrics into an app or becoming hyper-focused on every fluctuation in her body to be able to track basic health improvements.
Depending on the woman, we may use:
- cycle tracking
- daily temperature and pulse readings
- journaling about feelings
- written meal records or apps such as Cronometer or MyFitnessPal
- observations around sleep or sleep tracking apps
- bowel movements
- observable changes in energy
- psycho-emotional patterns.
Which of these we use, how often we use them, and how much attention we place on them depends on the woman herself and what we’re trying to understand.
The purpose of this much tracking is to identify a small enough set of meaningful signals that we can begin seeing whether the changes we’re making are producing a pattern and improvements over time. The majority of the time, they do.
Understanding WHY we track is particularly important for women who already have a tendency toward anxiety, perfectionism, hypervigilance, or over-control around their health.
There’s nothing inherently healthy about tracking how we feel all the time and collecting more information. If paying close attention to food, symptoms, or physiological markers causes a woman to become more stressed and preoccupied with her body, then we have to take that into account as part of her health profile too.
Sometimes we track more; sometimes we deliberately track less, but part of my role as a hired coach is determining with each woman what level of attention gives us useful information without turning the whole process itself into yet another stressor.
This is also where working together over time gives us information that’s often difficult or even impossible to get from an isolated appointment or single lab panel. We have regular check-ins throughout the week between sessions, which allows us to look at what’s actually happening as a woman incorporates agreed-upon changes into her daily life.
A recommendation can look perfectly sensible on paper and still be unrealistic within someone’s schedule, family responsibilities, nervous system capacity, preferences, finances, or current level of stress.
If this becomes apparent, I don’t see the healthy answer to be forcing harder compliance with a theoretically perfect protocol; I want to understand what’s getting in the way and adjust the approach so that what we’re doing can actually become part of her life. And I do this while simultaneously holding her accountable to the goals, values, and outcomes she committed to uphold upfront when she hired me.
When deeper patterns emerge through that process, we can also incorporate somatic and cognitive tools to work with these during our sessions and as practices between sessions. This is an important 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 own health were easy, everyone would be a lot healthier! When we begin to address our symptoms, the reasons we have the symptoms and the ways that we’ve built our lives around the symptoms often come to the surface, sometimes acting as obstacles toward progress.
Sometimes a woman needs more information about nutrition or physiology, and our focus during a session or in our WhatsApp correspondence is educational. Other times, she already knows a remarkable amount about health, but there is a gap between what she intellectually understands and what she can consistently implement and feel safe changing.
Habit change can bring us directly into contact with patterns around stress, control, safety, trust, boundaries, perfectionism, worth, shame, helplessness, and our deeper relationship to our own bodies.
And these kinds of experiences don’t necessarily respond to being given another meal plan, supplement, or more didactic learning — this is where we often work with the emotional content of her experience while I continue to stand firm and hold her accountable to her choices as her coach.
Over time, the information we gather begins to give us a more nuanced understanding of what’s actually helping move the needle for her. Perhaps a woman notices that her sleep, temperature, bowel movements, cycle, mood, and energy begin shifting together, or that one improves, and others plateau. Perhaps one marker improves while another gets worse, which gives us reason to question whether something that initially seemed helpful is actually supporting her overall health.
Or perhaps something she assumed was causing a symptom turns out not to have much relationship to it at all, and she can loosen up a bit about a particular food or a lifestyle choice she deemed bad.
This is where tracking becomes valuable to me: not because I want women to monitor themselves indefinitely, but because it can teach them what their own bodies tend to do, which gives me more power to help them!
Eventually, many of these observations become familiar enough that they no longer require the same amount of conscious attention; they become a woman’s autonomic habits and intuition.
This is where a woman begins to recognize what it feels like when things are moving in a good direction, what tends to precede a problem, why certain symptoms show up at certain times in the month or the day, which signals are worth paying extra attention to, and what’s just the distracting noise of having a human body that doesn’t always feel great.
This kind of knowledge and wisdom is difficult for anyone else to give us because it develops through observing and being in our own body over time.
Strategy #3: Re-Test, and Use What We’ve Learned to Decide Next Steps
After roughly three to six months of implementing a personalized protocol and tracking the measures that make sense for a particular woman, we have an opportunity to reassess what’s happening with much more information than we had when we first began our work.
At this stage, I generally re-test her HTMA, and we can also revisit other labs she may like to use for assessing her progress — based on what’s appropriate and affordable for her, of course. The value of re-testing isn’t simply seeing whether numbers have moved; it’s being able to place those results alongside months of information about how she has actually been feeling and functioning.
It’s common and easy to chase improved numbers on a lab, but this isn’t very helpful if it doesn’t line up with the lived experience a woman has in her body!
And if a woman gets a new HTMA back and it wildly contradicts her embodied experience (this is incredibly rare in my experience, btw), then this is also important information about what might be happening inside of her on a deeper level that’s disrupting things and leading to higher stress, nutrient loss, or poor absorption than we were able to tell from previous data. But overall, we want to see an improvement in our lived experience even more than we want to see dramatic changes in lab metrics because our lived experience is what will be impacting our quality of life each day.
By this point, we’ve been following her patterns each day, week, and 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 appeared to increase stress and symptoms, what didn’t seem to make much of a difference at all, and where our original assumptions may need to change now based on new evidence. Sometimes the most valuable information is that something didn’t work the way we expected it to! That isn’t necessarily 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 to all of this is that we approach this topic as level-headed scientists might, conducting an n-of-1 study, and accepting the data we receive, even if there’s emotions wrapped up in it all for my clients (and there’s usually emotions wrapped up in this because it’s our health, after all!)
This is also the point where the work begins to shift more deliberately back into a woman’s own hands — where I ensure that she has agency over how she responds to how she feels and even, to some degree, how she feels.
If she’s spent several months learning how her body responds, understanding which metrics matter for her, and practicing the habits that we’ve implemented, she may decide that she has what she needs to continue without me. She can take the tools I’ve taught her, simplify the protocol into something that fits naturally into her daily life, and continue paying attention to the signs she now knows are meaningful for her.
Ideally, each woman is leaving our work together with considerably more than a list of health improvements; she has a framework for her own health she can continue using after our work together ends.
Other women decide to sign up for another round of coaching because there is more they want to address, potentially deeper patterns underlying the original symptoms she hired me to address. Sometimes, once a woman is no longer so consumed by the physical symptoms or survival stress states she had at outset, she can see patterns that were much harder to recognize before. She may want to go deeper into somatic work, psycho-emotional patterns, or aspects of her life that became more visible only as her health stabilized, as was the case with myself.
Personally, I knew that I’d had a rough childhood and that trauma was involved in some way… but I’d spent so long living with chronic symptoms that kept me stuck in survival states that I wasn’t truly able to understand, work with, or shift many of these trauma patterns until well into my thirties, once I was more stable physiologically.
In those cases where clients follow a similar trajectory to my own, the next phase of our work may look somewhat different from the first because we’re no longer starting from the same place or working with the same patterns. The work may become 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 continue indefinitely because someone once told us they were good for us — possibly for reasons we weren’t made aware of! With reassessment, we have the opportunity to ask whether what we’re doing still makes sense, and we can keep what has proven useful, change what hasn’t, and let go of things we no longer have a reason to do.
Many of the principles I base my work upon — bioenergetic principles — are evergreen and form the foundations that every other choice we make for our health will grow from.
This foundation will remain stable, even if some of the specifics get tweaked over time based on natural changes in our lifestyle, age, and goals.
“Isn’t This an Awful Lot of Tracking and Analyzing?”
You might be thinking that this sounds like too much tracking. Too much analyzing, too much to implement at once. And if so, I think that’s an important concern for to address.
The last thing I want to do with a woman who’s already exhausted and overwhelmed over her health is hand her an elaborate protocol that turns caring for herself into another full-time job! What sets my work apart from stringing together generalized pieces of advice from the internet—or from working with a practitioner who sees you for an hour every few months and bases your entire protocol on serum lab results alone—is that I go deeply enough into each client’s individual profile to assess what amount of tracking and change is likely to be sustainable for her.
We don’t have to plough forward with a protocol that’s too complicated, too demanding, and ultimately creates more stress than it resolves; the amount of tracking can change over time, and the things we pay attention to will inevitably change as we learn more.
For one woman, detailed observations may feel fascinating and reassuring; for another, the same amount of attention could increase hypervigilance and pull her further away from feeling at home in her own body. Those are not small differences — they’re part of the information I want to take seriously when deciding how we work together. This is what individualized care truly means.
You might also feel cautious because you’ve already tried so many protocols and none of them moved the needle in the way you had hoped.
I think this is a fair concern, and caution is a wise posture when you’re considering investing time, money, and hope into something as important as your health, particularly if you’ve already been disappointed. I spent years going from practitioner to practitioner, protocol to protocol, and diet to diet in my twenties, and with many of my own issues remaining unresolved.
After enough experiences like this, I also became cautious and, at times, cynical even.
My experience changed when I found the combination of bioenergetics, somatics, and mineral balancing work that I now incorporate into my own life and into my work with private clients.
I’m confident in the value of these approaches because of what I’ve seen in my practice, but I also don’t believe it would be responsible to promise that every woman will have the exact outcome she wants.
You may be an exception. There may be something happening within your body, your life, or your trauma history that falls outside my scope or requires a different kind of support. This is one of the reasons I offer free video chats before taking on a client: I want to learn enough about a woman and what she’s dealing with to have a reasonable sense that I’m someone who can support her at this particular juncture in her path.
There is also a component of healing that goes deeper than finding the perfect protocol, and sometimes requires us to change the way we feel about how we feel.
That is its own subject, and one I’ve written about elsewhere, but it’s worth mentioning here because no amount of health data can change the reality that we are whole human beings rather than collections of lab markers and symptoms. The longer our symptoms and health struggles go on, the more limiting beliefs and autonomic patterns we may have 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 having almost 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, carbohydrates, 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 developing the ability to distinguish what is relevant to us from what is merely interesting or distracting.
I’m sure you guys have heard of the concept of too many choices creating less certainty, not more. This is a real phenomenon that’s been studied and you can even read more about it in the book, The Paradox of Choice.
I don’t think the answer is to return to a model in which women know nothing about their own bodies and hand every decision over to someone else because they happen to have letters after their name.
Nor do I think the answer is to make ourselves responsible for becoming our own full-time doctors — this is making us crazy!
There’s a useful middle ground in which we can become educated enough about our own patterns to participate intelligently in our health, recognize changes, ask better questions, and know when something deserves professional attention from someone else.
This is what I wish I had during all those years when I was running from one approach to another without any real results except accumulating health anxiety, food fears, and a loss of trust in my own body. If I’d understood which signs were worth watching and had had a protocol specific enough that I could actually assess its effects, I believe I could’ve spent far less of my life thinking and talking about what’s wrong with my body all the time.
When women have an approach that’s integrated into their lives and simple enough to understand, they can stop devoting so much attention to influencers, protocols, supplements, and contradictory advice, thus placing that attention toward something else, possibly 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 is changing and respond proactively without immediately beginning another frantic search for information from people who know nothing about their individual bodies, temperaments, or financial constraints.
If you’re becoming more curious, or you’re already clear that you’d like to get off the general internet advice treadmill, stop chasing random trends, and re-build trust in your own body, I’m here to offer my support if it’s needed.
Feel free to check out what I offer on my website, check out my podcasts and other articles to get a sense of how I work and who I am, and, obviously, you can set up a free chat with me if you’d like to see if we’re a good fit for each other!
