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Nobody looked at the ground
Your body is built for a world that stopped existing long before you were even born. Nutrition and lifestyle coaching for when doctors don’t know what’s wrong, and an honest account of what that involves.
Go down
The whole of it, not the ten minute version
Nobody has ever asked you for all of it.
The sequence matters, and we do go through it properly: what happened and when, what you were given, what changed afterwards. Your family’s history too.
But so does everything that sequence has cost you. Your body, your thinking, your moods, the people you’ve stopped seeing, and whatever it is you believe in.
There’s usually grief somewhere in here. For your health, for the future you’d planned on, and for your trust, in your own judgement, in your body, sometimes in the people closest to you.
And then the question nobody asks at all: what do you want your life to look like, if this gets better?
What you actually eat, in numbers
You log your food and I run it through software that returns your real vitamin, mineral, protein, and omega status. Not an opinion about whether you eat well. Numbers.
What counts as healthy turns out to be far more nuanced than most of us were ever taught. The log won’t measure oxalates, histamine, tyramine or salicylates directly, but it gets close enough to show whether any of them is worth following.
The results they called normal
If you’ve got results you’d like a second pair of eyes on, I’m interested. All of them, including the ones you were told were fine.
In range means you sit inside a population, and that population is not well. We have quietly agreed that exhaustion, low mood, foggy thinking and a slow slide into medication are simply what modern life looks like. The guidelines are writing cheques your body can’t cash.
The interesting results are usually the ones that were technically acceptable and nobody looked at twice.
What was already down there
Something set this off, and that part is real.
But it landed on ground that was already prepared, and causes don’t stack politely on top of one another. They tangle, and they multiply, so the whole comes to far more than the sum of it.
Which is why this so rarely arrives as a steady decline. Usually there’s a long stretch of being below par and coping, and then something quite small tips the whole thing over at once.
If that’s roughly the shape of your story, it’s not because you’re dramatic or unlucky.
Where we start digging
Then we work, in whatever order your body dictates rather than the order a curriculum suggests. Gut and nervous system, food, movement, sleep, what’s in your house, and the harder business of trusting your own signals again.
Nothing gets done to you. We decide together what’s worth trying next, then look at what actually happened and adjust. Tolerance often shifts as things settle, and when it does we go back to what was off the table before.
Your pace. Yours to stop.
Start at the roots
You already know more about your own history than anyone who has treated you. The first session is where we start putting it in order.
Three hours, give or take. Bring a drink. Not the alcoholic kind, although you may be tempted.
We start with your history, and I do mean all of it: what happened and when, what you were handed, what changed afterwards, and what you were told each time. Your family’s history too, because a surprising amount of this runs in families who were simply informed they were unlucky.
Then we go through whatever you’ve sent me. The food log, which comes back with numbers attached rather than a verdict on your character. Any results you have, including, particularly, the ones somebody glanced at and pronounced fine.
You’ll finish with somewhere to start: written down, in an order, with the reasoning attached, so you know what each thing is for and what you’re watching for. How long that list runs depends entirely on what turns up, and I’d be lying if I promised you a tidy little three.
How we work, and how often
About three hours each, fortnightly to begin with. Fortnightly because that’s close enough to catch a problem while it’s still a problem, rather than after it’s had a month to bed in.
Plenty of people stretch them out once we’re past the first few. Your call, made together.
You book your own slots, and you can move one when a bad day lands on it. Give me 24 hours if you possibly can: the Reschedule or Cancel link in your confirmation email, the link in any reminder, or just email me.
Inside 24 hours it’s half the fee, waived if I manage to fill the slot. A session missed with no word at all is charged in full.
Sudden illness and genuine emergencies are exempt, obviously. Tell me when you’re able.
None of which is a moral position. A three-hour slot is just miserably hard to rehome at short notice.
What it costs, and what you’re NOT signing up to
£220 a session, paid when you book.
No minimum number of sessions, no fixed term, no package you’re obliged to finish, no notice to give if you’d rather stop. Come once, decide I’m not for you, and that’s the end of it.
I’d sooner you were free to walk away than stuck paying down a commitment to justify the first instalment. Nobody has ever got well out of sunk-cost reasoning.
When the full programme is finished it’ll move to one price for the lot. Session by session, for now, means you aren’t betting on a number before you know whether I’m any use to you.
What you get for £220
A full history and intake, through your own portal and in the sessions themselves
Dietary analysis with the real numbers: vitamins, minerals, protein, omega fats
A read of any test results you send me
The session itself, around three hours
Written notes afterwards, so none of it has to rest on your memory, which is unlikely to be at its best
Quick questions by email between sessions. Anything genuinely knotty gets the time it deserves at the next one, and you can bring that forward if there’s a slot going
The portal and its workbooks
Review as we go: what you tried, what shifted, what’s become possible that wasn’t before
And a Partridge in a Pear Tree...
Tolerance moves, and hardly anybody warns you about that. Foods and activities that were flatly out of the question in month one are often back on the table by month four, so we go looking for them rather than waiting to stumble over them.
What’s built, and what isn’t
Ancient Body, Modern World is the structure behind the work. Eight areas, roughly six months.
Two of the eight are built out in your portal. So is a longer piece on ATTRACT, which is my account of why the symptoms cluster the way they do and why the bloods keep coming back normal while you feel like you’re dying. The remaining six exist as a detailed map and a great many notes, and I’m writing them up as we go.
None of which changes what we cover. The material is mine. It lives in my head, my notes and my research, and you get the parts you need when you need them. The portal is for going back over things later, once you’ve slept and stand a chance of absorbing them.
It sets out what I’m committing to, what I’ll need from you, precisely what happens to your data, and what I will and won’t do. It states plainly that I work as a nutrition and lifestyle coach rather than as your doctor, and that I don’t diagnose or treat.
Read it. Properly. You’ve had quite enough forms pushed at you without explanation.
Can you actually get better?
Three questions come up every time. Is recovery possible? Have I recovered? Have my clients?
I’m considerably better than I was. Better in oh so many ways than before the scan that set this off in 2016, which is an odd thing to be able to say out loud. My connective tissue is in better condition than hEDS has any business allowing.
Cured, though? No. The diet stays strict, the supplements continue, exposures stay low, I get outside, and I broadly practise what I teach. Things have loosened over the years, but nobody would mistake what I eat for a typical modern diet, and that’s rather the point: the “normal” modern diet is a substantial part of what’s making people ill. Oxalate dumping still happens. It can still write off a week. And I still push it too far occasionally, because apparently I never learn.
Among my clients, many improve. Almost none improve in a straight line. Some improve a great deal.
And some I haven’t worked out how to help. A few turn out more stubborn than I expected, or take a rockier road than either of us hoped for. If you’re committed to a plant-based diet, I’m probably not your huckleberry, and I’d rather say so now than take your money.
It also needs a proper college try. Several months, genuinely all in, before either of us can judge it fairly. At your own pace, though, and you can stop whenever you like.
In the patient survey I co-authored, those who improved most credited time, diet, supplements, lifestyle changes and chelation. That’s what they told us, and it’s worth knowing. It still isn’t a promise about you.
Two clients, in their own words
“She showed me sources of nutrients I’d never even heard of, and manageable changes week to week that I incorporated at my own pace.”
Caoimhe
“I really liked seeing what nutrients are actually in our foods, and having a manageable plan to work on.”
Jenny
Who do I usually end up working with?
People medicine has run out of ideas for.
A good many were harmed by gadolinium contrast, since that’s the work I’m best known for, the advocacy I’m part of and the research I’ve published. They’re representative rather than the whole picture. Others arrive through other doors: a course of antibiotics that rearranged everything, a decade of a diet that looked exemplary on paper, hypermobility nobody joined up, or the slow silt of a succession of small insults, not one of which would have mattered on its own.
What they share isn’t a diagnosis. It tends to be mitochondria running on fumes, a stack of toxic exposures nobody thought to count, and a system pushed until something perturbed it hard enough to set the whole ATTRACT cascade running.
And grief. Nearly always grief, usually unrecognised and rarely named, for the health and the plans and the trust that went with them.
Plus one more thing they have in common: they’ve been told their results are normal often enough to start doubting their own judgement.
What can nutrition actually do when doctors don’t know what’s wrong?
It can’t diagnose, and I won’t pretend it can. But when the bloods are normal, the scans are clear, and nobody’s offering anything beyond “come back if it gets worse,” there’s a great deal that food, supplements, and the way you live can shift.
Most of the people I work with have mitochondria running on fumes, a gut that’s been quietly wrecked, and a toxic load nobody thought to count. None of that shows up on the tests your GP runs. All of it responds to what you eat.
That’s not a promise. It’s an observation from decades of watching what food does to sick people, first in paediatrics and then in my own practice, and from a patient survey of over 300 people who reported the same thing: diet, supplements, and lifestyle changes were what helped most. Not a cure. A direction.
The exemplary diet problem
Worth saying that one of those doors was mine. My diet was the sort that gets praised: plants, nuts, seeds, greens by the bowl. I’d arrived there honestly, having worked out that food was doing things to me no dermatologist would admit (the Lent that started it). What nobody counted, including me, was the oxalate going in year after year, and what a single green smoothie can cost (the St Patrick’s Day smoothie).
Professor Brent Wagner’s team is now looking at oxalate and gadolinium together, and if that’s a route into your own picture, it’s one we can follow. Slowly. Dropping intake too fast is its own kind of trouble, as I found out at some length. Your body will tell us how fast it’s willing to go, and it doesn’t negotiate.
How a former paediatrician ended up coaching people medicine gave up on
Preclinical medicine at Cambridge, clinical training back home in Northern Ireland. A practising doctor from 1999 to 2016, consultant paediatrician from 2010, in district general hospitals.
I started seeing inborn errors of metabolism six months into paediatrics and never stopped. Sixteen years of it, at every grade, plus community paediatrics and neurology as a registrar, both of which are metabolic disorders wearing a different hat.
What changes as you climb is who you get to ask. The junior asks the registrar. The registrar asks the consultant. The consultant has the textbooks, the internet, and whichever colleague isn’t on call.
Then that runs out too, and it’s you and a very sick child at three in the morning.
Which is roughly where you’ve been with your own health, and it’s why I recognise the position. It’s also what I’ve had to MacGyver my own way out of, and help a good many clients do the same.
I never completed a metabolic subspecialty. But I read further into it than the job required because I liked it, and being tiresomely detail-oriented, I occasionally caught things more senior people had let pass.
Then I left. I don’t practise medicine now; I don’t prescribe, and I don’t diagnose. Nutrition and lifestyle coaching is a deliberate pivot, not a consolation prize.
Very little of what I know came out of my training. It came from the literature; from patient groups and advocates who had things worked out years before anyone got round to publishing them; from science obsessives like Susan Owens on oxalates; from the mavericks who follow the evidence rather than the consensus and who actually watch what happens to their patients rather than claiming to; from Professor Brent Wagner’s team, where I’m the patient advocate; and from my clients, who between them have run more careful experiments on themselves than most trials I could name.
In 2025 I co-authored the most comprehensive patient-led survey to date on symptoms following gadolinium contrast agents. In 2026, I was one of the team behind a peer-reviewed case report on gadolinium retention and persistent symptoms after MRI in a patient with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, published in Frontiers in Toxicology. It’s open access, so you can check it without asking me. Here’s what it found, why it took so long, and a link to the paper itself.
How do you book?
You already know more about your own history than anyone who has treated you. The first session is where we start putting it in order.
That button books the first paid consultation: £220, around three hours. If you’ve never had the free comprehensive health assessment, take that one first instead. Ninety minutes, no charge, and no obligation to book anything afterwards.
Or email me first, if you’d rather ask something before you commit.
