Stepping into women’s health work in my early thirties was THE catalyst I needed to begin embracing my own identity as a woman.
Every pivot I’ve made in my business since then has mirrored that exploration, along with the struggles and triumphs I’ve had with my health and identity. Everything I share–in my articles, podcasts, social media, and private client sessions–reflects those experiences and a conviction that has only grown stronger over time: true healing happens when women reconnect with their own female agency.
As I see it, a big part of that agency is creating a safe home in our own female bodies: learning to listen to them, interpret their signals, and work with them to meet the needs those signals point to.
If you’ve spent years trying to “fix” your health, as so many of us have, you’ve probably been taught, consciously or not, to see your body as a collection of problems to be solved, usually by someone or something outside of yourself.
One symptom eventually leads to another reductive solution. One practitioner orders another test. A social media post recommends another supplement or another food to cut out. And we get yet another explanation for why our body isn’t doing what it’s “supposed” to do. Along the way, many women stop trusting themselves and their bodies, often early in life. Sometimes that lack of trust is even part of how the symptoms began, and it only gets reinforced by the diagnoses and treatments we’re then sold as solutions.
On this path, we can start to believe healing is hidden somewhere outside of us, that if we could just find the right protocol, lab, or expert, everything would finally click into place, as if vitality happens in a vacuum.
I’ve watched this happen hundreds of times, and I’ve played a starring role in it in my own life.
For a long time, I thought I was simply helping women improve their health by changing their nutrition. Today I know my work runs much deeper than what we eat. It’s about helping women reconnect with their bodies, understand the story their symptoms are telling, and reclaim the agency so many of us have unknowingly handed over to wellness consumerism.
Whether a woman is preparing for conception, going through pregnancy, living with chronic illness she longs to improve, or simply working to feel at home in her own body again, the journey always starts in the same place: self-nourishment.
This article tells the story of how that realization shaped both of my signature coaching programs, Nourishing the Mother and Nourishing Our Sanity (info only available upon request right now), and how it shaped my own relationship to health and fertility as a woman working toward motherhood herself.
My Work Has Grown Alongside My Life
Years before I became a women’s nutrition consultant and somatic trauma coach, I studied child development and worked in childcare and birth work as a doula.
I spent a decade and a half supporting women through pregnancy and early motherhood, which gave me a deep appreciation for those seasons of a woman’s life. But I didn’t yet understand my own health through this lens of being a woman, and I had no vision of myself as a mother, either. The dissociation, low self-worth, and lack of long-term planning that came with my trauma history had left me completely agnostic about motherhood for myself.
When I first launched my business, shortly before the pandemic, I wanted to help everyone.
Like many new practitioners, I thought casting a wide net would let me make a bigger impact. Instead, I felt scattered, my work felt shallow, and I lacked conviction in both my marketing and my approach to health. Some of that was simply inexperience, and my work would become more refined over time anyway. But everything changed when I committed to studying women’s health in depth.
While creating my women’s health course, Habitually Healthy, I immersed myself in the research on female metabolism, reproductive physiology, hormonal health, and nutrition, through a lens that centered women rather than treating us as smaller versions of men.
I was blown away by how much the differences between the sexes drive our health and basic functions, and just as blown away by how little solid research there actually is on women’s physiology. I could see a clear connection between that research gap, the lack of effective care that follows from it, and the number of women living with illnesses that our medical system, for all its brilliance in emergencies, has little understanding of or treatment for beyond band-aids.
As my understanding of women’s physiology grew, something unexpected happened. My business found its direction and began to grow quickly, and so did my understanding of the patterns women share with their bodies.
For the first time in my life, I began truly paying attention to my own female body, and I started tracking my cycle. As a lifelong tomboy with enough developmental trauma to have spent decades in chronic survival mode, I’d built a lifestyle that disregarded my physical limits as a woman, while suffering the consequences through a long list of chronic sensitivities and symptoms.
I began to see how stress had shaped my health and behavior for decades, and how that connected to my story as a woman in a culture that largely measures success by male standards.
And I discovered how deeply fertility reflects the health of the entire female body, not just the reproductive system.
Around the same time, another crucial chapter unfolded. A relationship that had inspired my desire for motherhood suddenly fell apart, and it brought many of my unresolved trauma patterns to the surface. At this point, I could no longer ignore the role chronic stress, developmental trauma, and attachment wounds had played in my health, and I began seeing similar patterns in the women I was coaching.
I kept meeting clients who were working incredibly hard, eating “perfectly,” taking the supplements, ordering the extra labs, and doing everything they’d been told, yet not seeing the progress they’d worked so hard for.
The deeper I looked, the clearer it became that nutrition alone wasn’t enough to shift the patterns they were stuck in. So in the fall of 2022, I pivoted my business and began training to work with complex developmental trauma and nervous system dysregulation. I completed four somatic training programs focused on the deeper patterns so many of my clients, and I, were living with, and I spent two years integrating somatic trauma coaching into my practice.
I rebranded my entire business, changing the name to Nourishing Our Sanity, to reflect the connection between nutrition, physiology, trauma, and mental health.
Then I came to another clear understanding: trauma work alone wasn’t enough either. Many women told me they were making progress with me that they hadn’t found in years of talk therapy, and I believe that’s because we weren’t working with only one piece of them.
Women’s health simply cannot be separated into isolated categories, because that’s not how we live, that’s not how we experience ourselves either.
Those years of somatic work with women’s trauma patterns also became the foundation for Nourishing Our Sanity, my coaching container that helps women understand the relationship between their stress physiology, metabolism, nutrition, capacity for embodiment, and emotional health, particularly women who know or suspect they have C-PTSD.
I learned a great deal in those years about my own patterns, how similarly they showed up in the women I worked with, and why personal agency is THE key ingredient for women finding success with their bodies.
But even that wasn’t the end of the story for my work. I came to see that trauma care wasn’t the end goal of my work, only one important tool for women like myself whose developmental trauma was a key feature of their illness and struggles in life. And I felt called to bring my early career working closely with mothers and babies back into my practice now that this was a step I wanted to take seriously in my own life.
The Real Turning Point For Me
As I moved into my late thirties, another realization quietly began reshaping my work: I wanted to become a mother before it was too late, and I needed to prepare for that, whether or not I found my baby’s father right away.
I knew motherhood began within my own body, mind, and behaviors.
For years, I’d dedicated myself to helping other women, studying physiology, understanding trauma, and supporting healing through the lens of the female experience. Now I found myself turning inward with new questions about my own fertility, my future family, and how years of accumulated stress had affected my body, my hormones, and even my trust in men.
That’s when I arrived at the idea that has become central to everything I teach: a woman’s fertility isn’t separate from her health; it reflects her health.
Whether or not a woman is trying to conceive today, tomorrow, or ever, her reproductive health tells us an extraordinary amount about her body’s overall resilience, vitality, and priorities. Healthy ovulation, balanced hormones, metabolic flexibility, thyroid function, immune strength, adrenal health, and nervous system regulation are all deeply connected, and fertility sits downstream of all of them during our reproductive years.
Fertility stopped being simply an outcome for me at this point. It became a lens for understanding the whole woman during her cycling years: beautifully distinct from men, and deserving of goals and care all her own. This is sacred work to me in a similar yet different way that trauma work is also sacred work.
This realization gave birth to Nourishing the Mother.
This is a container not only for women hoping to conceive now, but for women who want to prepare their bodies for motherhood someday, women navigating fertility challenges, women moving through pregnancy or postpartum, and women approaching perimenopause who want to understand what their bodies are asking of them, instead of accepting the narratives that metabolic decline is inevitable and natural motherhood is impossible after 40.
Before we mother anyone else, we have to learn to mother ourselves, our inner child, and even our own energy-demanding eggs. We can become the mothers we want to be long before a baby is on the way. That’s the calling I stepped into in my own health, and it paved the way for the fertility-focused work I offer today.
The Patterns I Couldn’t Ignore Anymore
After working with hundreds of women, I saw the same themes again and again. Most women weren’t falling short of their health and fertility goals because they lacked discipline or weren’t trying hard enough. They were struggling with accumulated exhaustion, depletion, and overwhelm, and their health had become yet another area where they had to try really hard to get right–an exhausting and stressful way of living in and of itself!
Many were chronically undernourished while believing the most important thing was to eat “healthy” or “clean.” That made them prime targets for marketing that taught them they needed an endless supply of labs and treatments to be truly well and fertile.
Many were living with the same unstable blood sugar, disrupted circadian rhythms, low thyroid function, chronic inflammation, excess stress, and mineral imbalances I’d lived with for so long, only now with far more noise around what it all meant than I’d faced a decade earlier.
I watched the foundations of true health get buried under treatments and products most of us could probably live without. So many women like me have spent years in chronic stress, pushing past their limits and basic needs, often while carrying developmental trauma, perfectionism, loneliness, people-pleasing, or relentless self-pressure. And it shows up in their cycles, their fertility, and even their appetites.
That vulnerability often gets leveraged by messages suggesting that expensive or invasive treatments are the only solution, that motherhood later in life is impossible, and that perimenopause is the cause of all our problems.
If so many of us are disconnected from our bodies because we were never taught how they work, we’re going to be more vulnerable to cultural messages and marketing that feed on that disconnection. I’m not describing a conspiracy, just a pattern I see among women my age who struggled with their health and fertility in their twenties and thirties, only to be told when they’re ready to conceive that the only solution is an intervention.
Meanwhile, many of our lifestyles keep us disconnected from pleasure, rest, our cyclical nature, and our intuition. From my own experience and from witnessing so many women in my practice, it’s clear to me that modern life teaches us to push harder, research more, optimize more, and supplement more, and to treat our health like a stressful project with a tight deadline. We do this with our fertility and conception goals, too.
What we aren’t taught is to ask ourselves a much more important question: What does my body actually need from me to be well, to feel safe, to be fertile, and to age gracefully?
That’s the question I’ve been asking myself these past few years. And I’ve learned that once we ask it, we have to be willing to listen to the answer, and to honor what it asks of us.
The work that answer calls us to, with our metabolism and fertility, our nervous system and pace of life, our relationships and lifestyle choices, is what I now support my clients through. I hold them accountable when they want to jump to the next health trend because they’re desperate for a quick fix, instead of being patient with the slower progress they’re making. And I support them emotionally as they grieve the ways they can no longer outsource their agency: to the wrong men, to relationship drama they can’t afford anymore, or to a limiting belief.
Why So Many Women Feel Stuck
The wellness industry often convinces us we’re one deficiency or treatment away from finally feeling well, and that if we just take this supplement or dial in this one metric, everything else will improve.
It’s effective marketing, because it speaks to our deep desire for a magic lever that moves the needle in ways slow, steady progress can’t. Don’t get me wrong: as a nutritionist, I know how important nutrients, and even supplements, can be! I know how much undernourishment contributes to symptoms, which is why I talk so much about depletion and undereating.
But wellness consumerism presents health as this reductive process, where one specific solution or consumption pattern will solve everything.
One more lab. One more supplement. One more protocol. One more course or expert. The message is almost always the same: something is wrong with you, but it’s your lucky day, because I have the solution that will change everything! To be clear, as a health-focused woman who’s navigated her share of symptoms, I’ve fallen for this over the years too.
Meanwhile, the foundations of true health get quietly neglected, because they’re less seductive to market and harder to implement on our own. Eating enough, sleeping consistently, experiencing daily pleasure, feeling safe, building meaningful relationships, living in line with our values, slowing down, and honoring our biological rhythms all tend to get far less attention. It’s simply easier to market a cure-all than a lifestyle and nervous system shift that happens gradually, through small, incremental changes over time.
Many women spend thousands of dollars on increasingly complicated solutions while overlooking the practices that restore the body’s sense of safety and nourishment, and with far less money spent.
Of course, my work isn’t anti-testing or anti-supplement. I use functional labs, HTMA interpretation, mineral balancing, nutrition, and targeted protocols every day. But my work will always rest on the bioenergetic foundations that make everything else we do more effective and sustainable. Tools like labs work best when they support the larger goal, not when they replace it.
The goal is never dependence on a protocol. The goal is to become a woman who understands herself.
A Different Way Forward For Us
Both of my coaching containers are built on the same philosophy: whether we’re preparing for motherhood or rebuilding health after years of chronic stress, we nourish the whole woman.
It’s the only approach that has worked for me. Looking back at how much I struggled in my twenties, I can see how many unmet needs I was trying to bypass by fixing my body. I went from naturopath to naturopath, spent thousands of dollars on labs, supplements, and appointments, and lived on a perpetual elimination diet, trying to fix my health while the rest of my life stayed unstable and unsustainable.
Now I offer women the support I wish I’d had back then.
Together, we look at the root causes of their patterns and address every area of their health at once, at a pace that’s sustainable for each woman’s body, mind, and soul.
Our work centers on four interconnected pillars, each one feeding into and complementing the others:
Nourished Body & Rhythms. We begin with physiology: a comprehensive nutrition workup, HTMA interpretation, mineral balancing, functional labs when appropriate, food tracking, circadian rhythm support, and fertility awareness. Rather than handing her health entirely to a practitioner, each woman learns to understand her own body in terms of patterns instead of isolated symptoms or diagnoses.
Nourished Mind & Emotions. Drawing on NARM, AEDP, Internal Family Systems, and somatic awareness, we explore the emotional patterns shaping a woman’s health, tracking emotions in her body and distortions in her thinking, and noticing how these patterns affect her symptoms, behaviors, and self-worth. This work moves more slowly, and it can change how a woman feels about how she feels.
Nourished Relationships. We look at attachment patterns, boundaries, community, family dynamics, and the relationships that support or drain a woman’s vitality. Connection affects women’s health profoundly (I explore why in my article on loneliness, oxytocin, and women’s health), and this pillar matters even more for women whose attachment trauma has shaped their physical symptoms, as mine has.
Nourished Soul. We make room for meaning, grief, and the parts of life that can’t be measured on a lab report: God, the soul, birth, death, aging, and the passage of time. This pillar matters more to some women than others, but I believe we all need some connection to the sacred to carry the temporary nature of health, life, and youth.
I go deeper into each pillar in my article on the Nourished Mother Method, here.
Each coaching container includes twelve one-hour Zoom sessions over three to six months, ongoing WhatsApp support between sessions, personalized protocols, lab interpretation, somatic coaching, and day-to-day guidance as you integrate meaningful change into your life.
One of the greatest privileges of this work is witnessing what becomes possible when women stop trying to fix themselves and start understanding themselves. Clients tell me they feel calmer, more resilient, more emotionally stable, and stronger in their bodies. They sleep better, and their libidos improve.
Many women have gone on to conceive naturally after preparing their bodies with more nourishment and regulation. And one of the most meaningful changes I’ve witnessed is that many women no longer feel afraid of food.
They understand their symptoms. They feel less alone. They know how to care for themselves with confidence. And instead of obsessing over every symptom, they start living again.
That, to me, is where real healing lies: trusting ourselves and our bodies enough that we can stop focusing so much on our health and go live our lives.
My Vision for Women’s Health
My hope is that the next decade looks very different for women, and that as a culture, we stop expecting women’s physiology to function exactly like men’s.
I hope more women feel safe eating enough to fuel the brilliance of their female bodies, and focus more on being well nourished than on looking good and staying small. I hope we stop believing every symptom requires another expensive intervention before we consider the rhythms of daily life. And most of all, I hope women remember that while teachers, practitioners, and coaches like me can offer guidance, the deepest possibilities for healing have always lived within them.
The goal isn’t to become dependent on experts. It’s to become deeply connected to ourselves, able to read and trust our own cues.
Because personal agency over how we feel changes everything.
If this story resonates with you, if you’re tired of chasing symptoms, overwhelmed by conflicting information, or longing for a more integrated approach to your health, I’d love to connect.
Whether you’re preparing for pregnancy, hoping to restore your metabolism, navigating chronic symptoms, or simply ready to feel at home in your body again, you don’t have to figure it out alone. Together, we’ll explore what your body has been communicating, identify what truly deserves your attention, and build a way of living that supports your health today and the woman you’re becoming.
If you’re curious about working together through Nourishing the Mother or Nourishing Our Sanity, or starting with an HTMA consultation, I invite you to schedule a free discovery call here so we can get to know each other.
I’d love to hear your story, and to support you however I can.
