Sometimes your body is asking for something. You just haven’t learnt its language yet.

She came in for what was meant to be an ordinary check-up, just to understand what was going on in her body. Mornings were hard, her head felt foggy and forgetful, and long study days and night shifts left her with very little energy.

We went through her blood tests together, line by line, so she understood what each number measures. One thing nobody had explained to her: ferritin, the marker of the body’s iron stores, isn’t part of a standard check-up — and haemoglobin can look perfectly normal while those stores run low.

I put the whole picture together around food and everyday habits: quality protein at every meal, iron-rich foods and what helps the body absorb them, glycine-rich foods like rich meat and bone broth, and far less sugar. I explained the reason behind every step, and supported her through the months that followed.

She now understands her own results, and why each part of her plan is there. She summed the whole experience up as “life before and after”.

She wanted to finally understand what was happening in her body — a few things had been bothering her for a long time. But the most important thing lay ahead: she was preparing for pregnancy, and wanted to go into it with her nutrition in good order.

We went through her test results together so she understood what they meant. I wrote her a personal nutrition plan for the months of preparing, explained which nutrients matter at this stage and why, and gave her a recipe collection so cooking well felt easy — even enjoyable — every day.

Within a couple of weeks the new way of eating had become simply how she ate. And, in her own words, it felt special to have someone beside her helping her understand her own body.

For five years the same problem had kept coming and going, and the fear that it would come back never left her. She lived permanently on guard. And alongside it ran so much more — anxiety, tiredness, low mood, stomach cramps at the smallest stress, and sugar cravings she just couldn’t rein in.

I looked at her as a whole person. Her medical treatment stayed with her doctor, as it should. My part was a calm, detailed plan: how to eat, how to support herself day to day, what to do about stress, and which everyday habits around intimacy and hygiene were worth changing — with the reason behind each one, so she understood it rather than simply followed it.

She understood her own body far better — much of it, she said, the complete opposite of what she’d believed. She wrote to tell me that for the first time in a long while she felt calm, and that even her dreams had turned vivid, like little stories.