I have news I’m not particularly happy about, but as I’m rubbish at beating around the bush, here we are.

My new foundational group program, Groundwork, was meant to open this September. It isn’t going to. I’m writing between daily back and forth trips from my parents’ mostly-moved house and their new one, and my body is still sorting itself out after the year I’ve had with the miscarriage, burying our baby, shingles and then a delightful histamine flare which could only result from such a depleted body and the load that comes from wildfire smoke, and other exciting worldly toxic exposures.

The course I was hoping to launch mid September to run over Thanksgiving (intentionally) is close but not finished. I could rush it and announce the date I picked ages ago and hand you something three-quarters built… or you know, beat myself ragged getting there in time. A younger, more impetuous version of me might have done just that. But, as a practitioner, it would be an odd thing to spend eight weeks teaching women (and their families) to stop rushing their bodies and start listening to them, only to rush the very thing I built to teach them grace for themselves and listening to their bodies.

So Groundwork will wait until January. Rather than end with the grace of letting your body feast through a holiday with joy and fun and a good old fashioned debrief… and I do love a good debrief… it may possibly begin with it.

I will not pretend I’m not a wee bit heartbroken about it, because I wanted to share it this autumn, as for the first time in years, I’ll have a couple of kids in school and just my third and fourth at home. On the bright side, the new year may be the better season for it, so “start with your foundations, not another cleanse” lands maybe more lovingly and peacefully in the cold morning light of January than it does in the rush of back to school and the festive season.

Here’s the part that matters if you’re ready now and don’t fancy waiting.

I’m opening a small handful of spots this autumn to work with me one to one. For those not ready to leap into a whole six month engagement, I will be doing a few standalone Groundline sessions, which is the the private time where I assess your particular terrain, your health history, your labs if you’ve got them, the way your body actually behaves through a day, and where your particular foundations are yelling the loudest, mapped to the real body in front of me. What you pay for that session credits toward a continuing one to one program (these are very limited), or toward your seat in Groundwork come January. Nothing is wasted, and you walk into the new year a good way along the road.

The idea is that where I had to cap Groundwork at ten seats for the Autumn, I can do those ten sessions in the next three months at a slower pace and still have room for ten more seats in January. If it stays small, even better, but it allows me to expand a bit without losing the precious one to one, which is my favorite part of nutritional therapy. (To be clear, this is a hybrid group cohort with individual attention and practitioner + peer accountability rather than a self paced group program with no one to help sort things out when they get rough.)

If this is something you have been waiting for, reply and tell me, or you can find the details at brennamay.com/programs. If it isn’t your season, that’s okay as well. Rest where you are. I’ll be here in January with the whole thing built properly. Until then.

With love,
Brenna

Share

Subscribe now

I’ve had requests to do it properly, in order, in a context where I am walking alongside. That is the thing I have been building.

It is called Groundwork. Twelve weeks, a small group of ten, and the five foundations taught in the order I actually work them rather than in some random order the internet shouts about. Every woman in it gets one session with me on her own, where we look at where her body is asking for help and work out where she starts and how fast she moves, because the teaching is the same for everyone and the sequencing is often different. That personal piece is the part a newsletter cannot do for you, and it is the reason the group is small.

The name comes from horsemanship, and from the garden, which is essentially my childhood and adolescence in a nutshell. In horsemanship, groundwork is everything you do with a horse from the ground before you ever ask to ride, and you do not get on until it is done. In the garden it is breaking ground and feeding the soil before a single thing goes in, as not much you plant will outgrow the quality of ground you planted it in. I learned both of those with my hands and my whole heart long before I learned any of it clinically, so my language keeps coming back to soil and animals, and now you know why.

Why it runs straight through Thanksgiving

This bit is on purpose, and it is the part I am most pleased about.

The main thing in most diet and health programs is restriction, and restriction is not my game. Restriction is a tool for allergies and reactions, used carefully and for a short stretch, and it was never meant to be a way of life. It’s one I do use, but what I teach foundationally is in many ways the opposite: fuel the body well and the body will treat you well, and that means food and protein and light and getting outdoors and all the rest of it. Fix the foundations, so that everything else can hold.

So I built the course to run through the holiday rather than to finish tidily before it, because I want to be right there in the middle of it with you. I want to hand out grace at the table in a way no dietitian ever handed it to me, and then I want us to sit down afterward and talk honestly about how it went. A real holiday, walked through together and debriefed, is worth more than a completion certificate collected in November but untried in real life.

A word about when

You know some of this already, as I told you in the spring. The fallout from the miscarriage has gone on longer than I expected, and I have been unwell in ways that have taken a good long while to figure out, and I am still working some of it out now.

So here is where that leaves us. Groundwork starts this autumn if my body cooperates, and in January if it does not, and I will tell you which by the first week of September rather than leaving you guessing. I am not going to push through a flare to launch a course about not pushing through, as that would be a strange way to begin.

What I would ask, if this is for you, is that you tell me you are interested. That is all for now, no payment and no commitment, just a note so I know who is waiting and can write to you first when the date is set. [Groundwork interest link here.]

The subscribers and founders will hear before anyone else, and the latter gets first pick of the ten seats. That tier is currently being reworked, so stay tuned for those changes.
A first access door has always been the point of founders, and with a group this small it is worth more than any discount I could offer.

More soon, and thank you for walking the eight weeks with me.

— Brenna

Subscribe now

Let me be clear that I’m not against any of it. I use targeted work in my practice constantly. There’s a time for the blood labs and stool test and the hormone panel, for the binders and the specific protocols, for chasing down the mold or the H. pylori, that’s a common gut bacteria, or the heavy metals. That work is real, and for the right person at the right time it can be the thing that finally turns a corner. I’m not romanticizing the basics to avoid the hard stuff. I go there all the time.

But here’s what I see, over and over. Someone starts at the end. They come in wanting the advanced protocol on day one, before they’re eating enough, before their minerals are anywhere near where they should be, before digestion works, while their blood sugar is a rollercoaster and they’re sleeping five broken hours and living in a body that hasn’t felt safe in years. And the fancy protocol lands on that terrain and does almost nothing, or worse, makes them feel dreadful, because you cannot detox a body that isn’t eliminating well, you cannot rebuild hormones without the raw materials, and you cannot ask a depleted, braced nervous system to take on an aggressive intervention it has no resources for. The protocol wasn’t necessarily wrong but the timing blatantly was.

This is the whole reason for the order. Everything we’ve done these eight weeks, food, minerals, digestion, blood sugar, light and sleep, the nervous system, wasn’t the boring prelude before the real medicine. It was the thing that makes the medicine work at all. Foundations aren’t what you do instead of the advanced work. They’re what lets the advanced work land, and land gently, on a body that can actually use it. A well-fed, mineral-rich, well-digesting, steady, rested, regulated body responds to a targeted protocol the way good soil responds to a seed. The same seed in dust just sits there.

If there’s one thing I’d want you to carry out of these eight weeks, it’s this: when something isn’t working, resist the pull to reach for something fancier, and check the foundation under it first. Almost every time I get stuck with a complicated case, my own included, the way through isn’t a cleverer protocol. It’s going back to see which basic foundation fell out of place while I was looking at something more interesting. The basics are where I return when the complex stuff stalls, not where I start because I can’t handle the complex stuff.

And here, at the end, is the part that matters most to me. I am not trying to turn you into a person whose whole life is a health project. That’s the opposite of the goal. The point of getting the foundations solid isn’t so you can optimize forever, it’s so you can stop thinking about it, and go live. Eat the good food, get the morning light, sleep in the dark, love your people, drink the coffee while it’s hot, and let your body do what a well-tended body was always designed to do. Health was never meant to be the point. It’s meant to be the thing that gets quiet and solid enough that you can get on with the actual point, which is your one good life.

That’s the series. Thank you for walking it with me. If you started in the wrong place once, so did I, so did nearly all of us. It’s never too late to go back to the beginning and build it properly this time.

— Brenna

A quick word on the lock below, as I’d rather be plain than coy. Everything above is free and stays free, the teaching and the why, all eight weeks of it. What sits past the lock is the doing: how to know when you’re actually ready for targeted work, how to tell a foundation problem from something that truly needs more, how this shifts for your husband and your children, and a one-page tool that pulls the whole series together. That part is for the readers who want to take it further, and whose support is what kept this teaching free for everyone else all along. You’ve lost nothing either way, as the lesson above stands whole on its own.

Read more

Here’s the pattern: someone has read all the right things, they know about cortisol and the vagus nerve, that’s the long nerve that helps carry the body from stress back into calm, and they’ve collected the breathing techniques and the cold plunges and the meditation apps, and they’re doing regulation the way they do everything else: as a project, with effort, checking the box. And they’re still exhausted, still wired, still not sleeping, still bracing. Because you cannot force a nervous system to feel safe by adding one more thing to the to-do list. Effort is the very opposite of the message you’re trying to send.

The nervous system has, very roughly, two gears. One is the state where you’re alert, driving, doing, handling the threat, and the other is the state where you rest, digest, repair, and rebuild. Both are good and both are necessary. The trouble is that modern life keeps a great many people stuck in the first gear almost all the time, running on alertness and urgency and cortisol, and a body stuck in that gear will not properly digest, will not deeply sleep, will not fully heal, no matter how clean the diet, because it doesn’t believe it’s safe enough to spend resources on repair. It’s saving everything for the emergency it thinks is coming.

One caveat here, because I may be one of the worst at this of anyone I know, save my own mother, who is a beautiful force to be reckoned with. I can almost hear the near-crazed laughter of mothers the world over, especially here in the United States, where we are decidedly careless about a mother’s nervous system while worshipping our image of the Pioneer Woman. If you’ve ever walked the halls of Oregon’s End of the Trail museum and read the diaries of the women who took that trail, it’s no wonder they either died young along the way or lived to a robust old age and earned the title of crone. They were something else, and I mean that with real admiration and a little sadness both, because the ideal is so worked into our roots that we still expect mothers to hold everything, on shoulders that were never broad enough for the weight.

And we’ve added to it. We live in a world of endless input and expectation coming from every direction, a thousand what I’d call micro-stresses, the teeny cracks a couch takes from children jumping on it day after day until the afternoon it simply breaks in half. We’ve lost the plot so thoroughly that many of us no longer know how to breathe without an app to tell us.

I was once called a butterfly on the mission field, for my inability to hold still more than a few moments. A European pace was good for me, and though I still almost certainly do too much, I’ve at least learned to sit long enough to drink my espresso while it’s hot. It isn’t much. But moments where it’s genuinely alright to do nothing are actually quite reparative. It’s one reason you’ll never hear me, as a nutritional therapist, villainize coffee or wine. I’ll preach moderation, but I also believe this life is a precursor to the next, which takes the pressure off, and I don’t believe the body is all there is, or that we’re meant to optimize it until we’ve squeezed the joy clean out of being alive.

This is why regulation can’t be one more performance. You can’t achieve your way into safety, because the achieving is itself the signal that something’s still wrong. The nervous system doesn’t read your intentions, it reads your inputs, and the inputs that tell a body it’s safe are mostly unglamorous and slow: being fed, being warm, being rested, being outside, being still without your phone, being with people who are safe, being allowed to do nothing at all for a moment without earning it.

So the reframe for this week is gentler than most, and it might be the most important one in the series. If you’ve been trying and trying and nothing’s landing, the answer may not be to try harder. It may be that your body hasn’t yet been given enough evidence that it’s safe to let its guard down, and everything you’ve done these past six weeks has been building exactly that evidence underneath. This is also why the fancy stuff comes last, which is where we’re headed next week: a body still braced for threat can’t make use of the advanced work anyway.

This week’s small thing is the smallest of all, and possibly the hardest: do one thing that tells your body it’s safe, and do it on purpose, without turning it into a task. A slow meal you actually taste. A walk with no podcast. Ten minutes outside doing nothing. Not to optimize anything. Just to let your body notice it isn’t under attack.

Next week, the last one, the fancy stuff, and why it only works once everything underneath it is real.

— Brenna

A quick word on the lock below, as I’d rather be plain than coy. Everything above is free and stays free, the teaching and the why, every week. What sits past the lock is the doing: what actually signals safety to the body, how to tell overwhelm from genuine capacity, how this shifts for your husband and your children, an honest word on when this needs more than a newsletter, and a one-page tool to work from. That part is for the readers who want to take it further, and whose support is what keeps the teaching free for everyone else. You’ve lost nothing either way, as the lesson above stands whole on its own.

Read more

You’ve been told to get more sleep your whole life, and like drink more water, it’s true and it’s also… half the picture. Because sleep isn’t only about hours logged, it’s about whether your body actually knows what time it is, and for most of us living indoors under artificial light, eating breakfast in a dim kitchen and scrolling a bright phone at 11pm, it genuinely doesn’t.

Here’s the piece almost no one tells you: light isn’t just a vitamin-D errand you run on your lunch break, it’s information. Real, whole-body information, and your body is built to read it constantly. Your eyes take in morning light and use it to set your internal clock, the one that decides when cortisol should rise to wake you and when melatonin should signal to bring you down. That’s the part most people have heard. What’s missed is that your skin reads light too. It carries its own light receptors, so sunlight on bare skin isn’t only about vitamin D, it’s a second channel of the same conversation, your body gathering information about where it is and what time of day this is through more than one door at once.

The two channels talk to each other. The signal your eyes take in even shapes how your skin responds to sun. Light also feeds directly into how your body manages hunger and energy across the day, so a blood sugar problem that won’t resolve no matter how well you eat is sometimes, in part, a light problem in disguise, a body that’s never quite sure what time it is and so never quite settles.

Put simply: when the signal is clear, bright in the morning, properly dark at night, a great deal downstream gets easier. When the signal is scrambled, dim grey mornings, glowing screens all evening, you can do everything else in this series exactly right and still hit a wall you can’t explain.

Here's the part I'd sit with. Your morning light does more than wake you up, it starts a clock: melatonin, the thing that finally lets you sleep, rises roughly fourteen hours after your body catches that first real light of the day. So the bright morning and the dark night aren't two separate habits, they're two ends of the same signal. Get outside early and the timer starts on schedule; protect the dark at night and the melatonin it earned actually gets to do its work. Miss either end and the whole thing drifts. You can't supplement your way around it, because melatonin in a bottle was never the same as the melatonin your own morning set in motion.

This week’s small thing is the plainest one yet: get outside within the first hour of waking, even for a few minutes, even in the grey, and dim the lights and the screens for the hour before bed. That’s the whole assignment. We’ll get into how this shifts for the bodies in your house, and what real dark actually requires, below.

Next week, the nervous system, and whether your body can even tolerate the next step yet.

— Brenna

A quick word on the lock below, as I’d rather be plain than coy. Everything above is free and stays free, the teaching and the why, every week. What sits past the lock is the doing: what real morning and evening light actually require, a word on grounding, how this shifts for your husband and your children, the cautions worth knowing, and a one-page tool to work from. That part is for the readers who want to take it further, and whose support is what keeps the teaching free for everyone else. You’ve lost nothing either way, as the lesson above stands whole on its own.

Read more

Here’s the pattern: someone tells me they have no willpower around sugar, that they know better, that they’ve tried to just stop and it never sticks, and they say it like a character flaw. But nearly every time, when I look at the actual day, breakfast was thin, lacking in sustaining protain or skipped, lunch was rushed or forgotten, and by three in the afternoon their blood sugar has fallen off a cliff they built themselves that morning. The 3pm cookie isn’t a discipline failure but a body in genuine distress, sending out an emergency flare for fuel, and reaching for the fastest thing in the building. You would too and you probably have.

Blood sugar isn’t only a metabolic story, it’s a nervous-system one. When blood sugar drops too far, the body reads it as a real bona-fide threat, and it responds the way it responds to any threat: cortisol rises, adrenaline rises, and you’re suddenly wired and shaky and irritable and starving all at once, which is exactly why a blood sugar crash and a panic spiral can feel nearly identical from the inside. Your body doesn’t know the difference between low fuel and a genuine emergency. It reacts to both the same way.

This is also why “just use more willpower” was never going to work. You cannot think your way past a stress response, because a stress response isn’t happening in the part of your brain that makes decisions. It’s happening lower down, faster, and first. By the time you’re standing in front of the pantry sweating a decision about cookies, the crash already won. The real fix happens hours earlier, at breakfast, not at 3pm in a standoff with yourself.

So the reframe is this. If your energy and your cravings swing wildly through the day, the question isn’t “how can I be more disciplined,” it’s “how do I stop putting my body in a position where it needs an emergency flare in the first place.” Steady blood sugar isn’t about eating less sugar so much as it’s about never running the tank down far enough that sugar becomes the only thing that feels like rescue.

This week’s small thing is as simple as always, and it’s the same one we started with: eat a real breakfast, with protein, and don’t let more than a few hours pass without something in your system. I’m not talking about snacking*, because that can carry it’s own issues, but sustaining, regular meals. We’ll get into what steadies blood sugar in practice, and how it shifts for the bodies in your house, below.

Next week, sleep and light, and why your body may not know what time it is.

— Brenna

*Some people with blood sugar issues DO need snacks, but we have to balance that with letting your digestion have a genuine rest… so the heart of it is to make sure your meals have the fuel you need in the first place.

A quick word on the lock below, as I’d rather be plain than coy. Everything above is free and stays free, the teaching and the why, every week. What sits past the lock is the doing: what actually steadies blood sugar through the day, how this shifts for your husband and your children, a word on movement’s role here, the cautions worth knowing, and a one-page tool to work from. That part is for the readers who want to take it further, and whose support is what keeps the teaching free for everyone else. You’ve lost nothing either way, as the lesson above stands whole on its own.

Read more

Here’s the pattern: someone comes to me eating well, genuinely well, good protein, real food, no shortage of effort, and they’re still bloated, still bugged by whatever they eat, still tired and puzzled, so we start layering on more foundational foods and better supplements and nothing quite lands. And more often than people expect, the trouble isn’t what’s on the plate at all. It’s what happens to it after the fork.

Digestion starts further back than most of us think, further back than the stomach, further back than the first bite. It starts in the brain. The moment you see food, smell it, or simply think about the meal ahead, your body gets the signal and starts preparing, your mouth begins to water, and that saliva already carries the first enzymes meant to start breaking food down before it’s even reached your stomach. That’s not a small detail. It’s the beginning of the whole chain, which is why eating on the run, distracted, mid-scroll, or too stressed to notice your food at all skips a step your body was counting on. And it’s why chewing thoroughly matters more than most people realize, because chewing isn’t just about smaller bites, it helps signal the stomach to produce the acid the rest of digestion depends on.

That acid, the one your stomach makes to start breaking down protein, is supposed to be genuinely strong, strong enough to be a little alarming if you saw the number. But stress, age, some medications, years of eating on the run, and never quite giving your body the mouth-and-mind signal it was waiting for, can all turn that acid down, and low stomach acid gets almost everything backward from what people assume. Heartburn, for instance, is often too little acid struggling to do its job, not too much, which is the opposite of what the antacid aisle would have you believe. Here's why: it's strong acid that signals the valve between your stomach and your esophagus, that's your lower esophageal sphincter, to close properly and keep everything where it belongs. Weak acid doesn't send that signal clearly, the valve doesn't get the message to shut, and stomach contents find their way back up. So reaching for something that lowers your acid further can quiet the burn for an hour while making the actual mechanism worse.

Get the acid right, though, and you've only cleared the first hurdle. Bile has to show up next, that’s the fluid your liver makes and your gallbladder stores and releases, and it’s what actually breaks down fat, so a body low on bile flow can eat beautiful healthy fats and barely use them, and can feel rough, greasy, or off after a meal that should have felt good. Enzymes have to be present too, to finish the job the acid and bile started, and the whole chain has to run in order, top to bottom, or the food that should have built you up instead just... passes through, half used.

So the reframe for this week is simple. If you’re eating well and still don’t feel like it’s landing, the question isn’t always what to add to your plate, it’s whether your body can actually process what’s already on it. Fixing digestion isn’t glamorous, and there’s no clever protocol here either, mostly it’s a handful of boring habits that ask you to slow down at the exact moment modern life is telling you to speed up.

This week’s small thing is almost insultingly simple: sit down to eat, chew properly, and stop eating while you’re driving, scrolling, or standing at the counter. Digestion begins in the mouth and in a nervous system that believes it’s safe enough to digest, and neither of those things happens at seventy miles an hour.

Next week, blood sugar, and why your afternoon crash is a nervous-system matter more than a discipline one.

— Brenna

A quick word on the lock below, as I’d rather be plain than coy. Everything above is free and stays free, the teaching and the why, every week. What sits past the lock is the doing: the signals worth watching for, simple ways to support digestion before reaching for anything, how this shifts for your husband and your children, the cautions worth knowing, and a one-page tool to work from. That part is for the readers who want to take it further, and whose support is what keeps the teaching free for everyone else. You’ve lost nothing either way, as the lesson above stands whole on its own.

Read more

You’ve been told to drink more water your whole life, and it isn’t wrong exactly, but it’s half a sentence. Water on its own, especially the stripped-clean filtered or reverse osmosis (RO) kind, can leave you more parched than you started, because plain water without minerals doesn’t stay where you put it. It runs straight through. The body can’t hold onto water it has no minerals to hold it with, so you can drink glass after glass and still wake up tired, still cramp in the night, still hit that wall at three in the afternoon, and wonder why all that dutiful hydrating never seemed to take.

Here is the part nobody puts on the water bottle: hydration isn’t water, it’s water and minerals and the body’s ability to keep hold of both. Sodium, potassium, magnesium, and the trace minerals are what let the water actually do its work, carry the signals, fire the muscles, steady the energy, settle the sleep. Without them you’re not hydrating so much as rinsing.

Somewhere along the way salt became the villain of the story, which has left a great many people under-salting real, home-cooked food while getting flooded with it in packaged food, and those are not the same thing at all. Real salt on real food isn’t the problem it was made out to be, and for a lot of you, a body that’s tired and wired and crampy and crashing is a body that’s been rinsing itself out for years while carefully avoiding the very mineral it was thirsty for.

None of this is fancy. That’s rather the point. Before the magnesium powders and the mineral drops and the coloured electrolyte sachets, the first move is food and real salt, because most people can go a remarkable distance on salting their food properly and eating things that carry minerals in the first place. The fancy stuff has its place, and we’ll get to where. But keep it simple: the boring basics here are load-bearing, and they hold up an astonishing amount of what sits above them.

Salt needs vary wildly from person to person, and mine, for a season, were genuinely strange. There was a stretch when I was sure I was having panic attacks, my heart racing out of nowhere, until a trip to the ER and a bag of IV saline settled it and pointed at what was actually happening: I wasn't anxious, I was running dangerously low on sodium, and what I'd read as panic was tachycardia. The next time that racing feeling came on, I stirred pink salt into a glass of water, drank it down, and felt my heart slow to steady. But here's the part that matters most, and the part that was particular to me: the low sodium wasn't the deeper story either. It was a symptom. My minerals were being drained by a parasitic infection I'd picked up years earlier on the mission field, and the salt only ever held the line while we chased the thing underneath. None of this means anxiety isn't real, because it surely is, only that the body can counterfeit it, and mine did. And a racing heart belongs with a doctor, not a newsletter, so if that's you, go get looked at properly.

This week’s small thing is almost too plain to say out loud: salt your food, and stop drowning yourself in empty water. We’ll get into what real hydration looks like, and how it shifts for the bodies in your house, below.

Next week, digestion, and why the finest food in the world does nothing if you can’t break it down.

— Brenna

A quick word on the lock below, as I’d rather be plain than coy. Everything above is free and stays free, the teaching and the why, every week. What sits past the lock is the doing: how to actually remineralize without turning it into a science project, the mineral-rich foods worth leaning on, how this shifts for your husband and your children, the cautions that genuinely matter, and a one-page tool to work from. That part is for the readers who want to take it further, and whose support is what keeps the teaching free for everyone else. You’ve lost nothing either way, as the lesson above stands whole on its own.

Read more

Here is the pattern I see more than any other: someone comes to me tired, wired, sleeping badly, hair thinning, cold in the hands and feet, cycles gone awry, energy falling out from under them by mid-morning, and they’re sure it’s their hormones or thyroid or some hidden thing that needs a test and a clever, focused protocol. Sometimes it really is. But a great deal of the time, when I actually look at what’s going into them across a day, the body simply isn’t being given enough fuel to run on. Not enough food, not often enough, and not early enough in the day. You cannot balance hormones out of raw material the body was never handed.

We don’t say under-eating out loud as a culture much, because we’ve spent a few decades being taught that eating less is a virtue and that wanting food is a weakness to be managed. So under-eating doesn’t read as a problem. A lot of folks, women especially, read it as discipline. It wears workout clothes, skips breakfast, calls black coffee a morning routine, and gets praised for all of it. And then we wonder why a body running on fumes starts flashing warning lights. This was ABSOLUTELY me for quite a few years, by the way, and while Intermittent Fasting was fantastic at keeping inflammation down in a body that was fighting with autoimmunity… after a while my hormones just didn’t have much to work with. Remember that thing I said about raw materials? Your body is built from protein and runs on it too, to repair and rebuild and keep the whole thing going. And your hormones need cholesterol. Yes. Cholesterol. It's the raw material your body reaches for to build hormones in the first place. Let that sit a minute… and think about what our bodies were trying to work with during the low fat craze.

It helps to know where some of this came from. The numbers a lot of us still treat as targets, the official recommended amounts, were drawn up the better part of a century ago as floors, the least a person needed to stave off outright deficiency. They were shaped in wartime, when this country sent the best of its food, the beef and the pork and the butter and the lard, off to feed soldiers and allies, women and children among them. It was a remarkable thing to do, and it saved a great many lives. But we never quite shifted back. We kept eating in that lean, make-do way long after the war was over, and somewhere along the line we swapped real butter for industrial oils that were meant for machines and margarine, which there’s good reason to think interferes with how the body uses its own fats. A floor built to prevent starvation became, in the cultural imagination, a ceiling to stay under. Which is exactly backward.

So here is the reframe. A great many of you don’t need more restriction, you need more building blocks. When the body keeps getting less than it needs to run on, it interprets that as a threat, and a body that believes it’s in a famine braces and holds on and slows down, which is the precise opposite of healing. You can’t starve a body calm. You can’t restrict your way to repair. And “enough” isn’t one number, it’s almost always more than the internet has trained you to expect, and it shifts with the body and the season. A woman building muscle, a woman nursing, a woman simply carrying a hard stretch of life, needs more than any recent chart would guess, and the honest range between two healthy people is far wider than you’d think.

I should say plainly that I’m not a weight-loss coach, and this isn’t a weight-loss letter. My work is to take the assaults off the body, give it the right materials, and let it sort itself out. Weight often shifts as that happens, but it shifts as a side effect, not a goal, and sometimes what looks like extra is the body doing protective work I’d rather not interrupt too soon. What I’m after is a person who is well and glad to be in their own skin. The number on a scale isn’t the best indicator of whether someone is either.

So before we touch a single supplement, before minerals, before any of the interesting work, the first question is the least glamorous one in all of wellness: are you actually eating enough to have anything to work with? Keep it simple, sister. This week’s whole assignment is almost embarrassingly plain. Eat enough, and eat it sooner. We’ll get into what “enough” looks like in practice, and how it shifts for the different bodies in your house, below.

Next week, minerals, and why plain water has been letting you down.

— Brenna

A quick word on the lock below, as I’d rather be plain than coy. Everything above is free and stays free, the teaching and the why, every week. What sits past the lock is the doing: how to tell if you’re actually under-fueling, how to start without it becoming one more rule to obey, how this same thing shifts for your husband and your children, and a one-page tool to work from. That part is for the readers who want to take it further, and whose support is what keeps the teaching free for everyone else. You’ve lost nothing either way, as the lesson above stands whole on its own.

Read more

I’ll meet with someone who has tried fifteen things, the adaptogen and the hormone protocol and the gut cleanse and the expensive powder some podcast swore by, and none of it held, not because those things are worthless, but because the body trying to hold these things never had what it needed to use them in the first place. You cannot build the second floor on a foundation that was never poured.

This is what I keep coming back to after years of this work, and it’s what grief reminded me of recently, that some things have an order and you cannot skip it simply by wanting to. The body heals in a sequence: food before fine-tuning, minerals before mobilizing anything, digestion before blaming food, blood sugar regulation and sleep before heading off hunting for something exotic or particularly trendy in this moment in time. The fancy stuff does work, but mostly once the boring stuff is already in place. And much of my work is in the boring stuff, frankly.

So this is the start of something. Eight weeks, one foundation at a time, in the order I’d actually walk a client through if they’ve not already been there, and I’ll say plainly that it isn’t a protocol to follow off a screen, because I can’t sequence and triage your particular body or issues from over here. But by the end you’ll understand the order, you’ll know roughly where you’re standing in it, and you’ll stop spending money on the sixth step when your trouble has been sitting at the second or first all along.

This week is only the map, so here is the whole of it, the eight weeks laid out in the order I’d actually walk them:

1. Why the order matters more than the protocol — this week. The map.

2. Eat enough before you troubleshoot anything — the building blocks, and everything under-eating likes to hide behind.

3. The boring minerals doing the heavy lifting — why plain water isn’t hydration.

4. Your body has to break food down first — digestion as the gateway.

5. Your afternoon crash isn’t a willpower problem — blood sugar, and why it’s a nervous-system matter more than a discipline one.

6. Your body doesn’t know what time it is — sleep, morning light, and real dark at night.

7. Regulation isn’t another thing to perform — the nervous system, and whether the body can even tolerate the next step yet.

8. Why starting with the fancy stuff stalls you — the targeted work, and the reason it comes last and not first.

Next week we begin where I always do, which is whether you’re eating enough to have anything to work with at all.

— Brenna

One honest word before the line below, as Substack drops a little lock there and I'd rather you understand it than wonder about it. Everything you've just read is free, and it stays free for as long as I write this, the teaching and the why and the map, all of it. What sits past the lock is the doing: how to find your own first floor this week, how the same map shifts for your husband and your children and the bodies in your house that aren't yours, and a one-page tool you can print and work straight from. That part is for the readers who want to take it further, and whose support is honestly what lets me keep the teaching free for everyone else. Either way you've lost nothing, because the lesson above stands whole on its own.

Read more

Read more

Some seasons are not for thriving. Some are simply for tending.

We recently lost a baby and although I am not fully ready to write publicly about that yet, I did touch on it elsewhere in an essay about marriage, grief, and modern resentment culture. The truth though is that grief does not politely stay in one category of life. It changes the texture of everything. Your marriage. Your parenting. Your energy levels. Your appetite. Your capacity. Your nervous system. Your priorities. Your body. Your soul and spirit, especially.

And because I work in wellness, I have found myself thinking quite a lot lately about what foundational health actually looks like when life becomes genuinely painful.

Not aesthetic wellness or productivity disguised as wellness. Not hyper-optimised routines from people who have never sat in the grass holding their crying children while trying to explain why the baby is not coming home for the Christmas season.

Just ordinary human care.

For me lately, that has looked like gardening in the mornings and getting sunlight on my face before reaching for coffee. Sometimes it has meant having the coffee before the sunlight just so I can face it. It has looked like morning protein even when I am not especially hungry, baking homemade grain free sourdough bread, and making sure I am still getting enough fatty acids in the form of thick slices of grass fed butter shaved off with a cheese slicer like the Scandinavian grandmother I apparently am.

It has looked like simmering fresh ginger on the stove and sipping it throughout the day because my body seems to want warmth more than stimulation right now.

It has looked like letting myself nap instead of forcing more caffeine and pretending exhaustion is a discipline problem. Cleaning one small space at a time instead of trying to conquer the entire house in a fit of stressed productivity. Putting pauses on things that genuinely need to pause.

It has also looked like a great many tears, and not especially hidden ones either. We spent the better part of a week in a pile together, or tangled up in a hammock in the sun, crying and talking and praying and trying to make sense of something that does not make very much sense at all.

Children grieve so differently than adults. More openly. More honestly. There is less performance to it. Less pretending.

My ten year old wrote a song for the baby with the line, “you budded in mum’s womb and now you’re flowering in heaven,” and then after singing it she screamed.

Honestly, I think there is something deeply healthy about the rawness of that. Heartbreaking, obviously, but honest. Children have not yet fully learned the adult habit of distancing themselves from pain with irony, productivity, or performance. They simply feel it.

And honestly, it has looked like hugging my spouse more than ever because he is grieving too. I think people sometimes forget that men grieve pregnancy loss as well, often more silently and with far fewer places to put it. One of us has to carry the family financially, after all. To pick up the pieces the rest of us are dropping. He still has to show up to do that. He is beyond beautiful in that way that the very best of men are. But he still has to grieve too. One of the easiest things to do in grief is retreat into separate islands of pain while technically still living beside each other. We have tried very consciously not to do that.

I have also become far more aware lately of the difference between words and actions. Between “let me know if you need anything” and the friends who simply arrived. The ones who came to hold me while I cried. Who prayed with me. Who brought food. Who sat in the discomfort instead of trying to explain it away or rush us through it. Who sent a song when words failed or an audio prayer when they didn’t.

That sort of love costs something. Time. Discomfort. Emotional energy. But I suspect most meaningful love always has.

And perhaps strangely, all of this has made me think differently about health too. Modern wellness culture often speaks as though the goal is to override reality at all times. Push through. Stay disciplined. Stay productive. Stay positive. Maintain momentum.

But bodies are not machines and grief is not a weakness. Sometimes exhaustion is not dysfunction. Sometimes your body is responding honestly to pain, stress, hormones, heartbreak, uncertainty, and the sheer weight of being human.

Sometimes health looks less like conquering and more like tending small steady things for a while. Nourishing meals. Minerals. Water. Sunlight. Sleep. Prayer. One clean corner of the house. A walk around the block. A nervous system that feels safe enough to exhale.

The writing here may be slower for a little while, particularly for newer subscribers who arrived just as life became unexpectedly heavy in our household. But I am still here.

Just moving a little more gently than usual.

Somewhere along the way it got turned into a strange little pageant of moral purification. Cut everything out. Buy seventeen powders. Declare war on joy. Convince yourself that feeling vaguely miserable is proof that your body is doing something noble and detox-y.

I am not especially interested in that version.

When I think about a spring reset, I think about reducing friction. Lightening the load a bit. Clearing out what has gone stale over winter, whether that is in the pantry, the schedule, the sleep routine, or the general state of one’s nervous system.

Most people don’t need a cleanse. They need a few steadier inputs and not so much working against them all at once.

That usually starts with food, because food is daily and therefore bossy. Not in a “be perfect now” sort of way, but in a “let’s stop making this harder than it needs to be” way. A spring reset, in real life, might look like simpler meals, more protein, more colour, fewer random snacky bits masquerading as lunch, and a little less sugar and caffeine chaos. It might look like meals that are more recognizably food and less the nutritional equivalent of meh.

It also usually helps to look at what has crept in unnoticed. More takeout than feels good. More grazing. More caffeine. Less water. Less daylight. Later nights. Less structure. More “I’ll sort it out next week,” which, as we know, means almost never.

A reset can simply mean noticing that and choosing a different rhythm.

I would also care quite a lot about digestion before I started talking dramatically about detox. If you are not digesting well, not stooling well, not hydrated, not sleeping, and not eating enough protein, then launching into some heroic cleansing protocol because the weather changed is, in my opinion, unwise. The body tends to do better when supported than when ambushed.

That means basics. Hydration. Minerals. Actual meals. Bitter foods if they suit you. Enough fibre from real food. Enough movement to remind your lymphatic system that you are, in fact, alive. Enough rest that your body does not feel like it is trying to regulate itself in the middle of a house fire.

This is also where I think people get tangled in all-or-nothing thinking. They imagine a reset has to be an overhaul or it does not count. But usually the things that help most are smaller and less glamorous. Opening the windows. Getting outside in the morning. Going back to breakfasts with protein instead of coffee and cupcakes… or nothing. Cooking a few easier dinners. Buying less nonsense. Going to bed before you become emotionally attached to the idea of revenge-snacking.

That is a reset too.

Spring is also a good time to reduce inputs where you can. Not in a panicked “everything is toxic” spiral, but in a practical way. If there are products you already know do not serve you, change them. If the pantry is full of things that leave everyone hungrier and more feral an hour later, replace some of them. If the house feels stale, open it up. If your skin, sleep, digestion, or energy has been a bit off, look at the ordinary things first before you decide you need an exotic solution.

I realize this is less thrilling than the internet would like. There is no dramatic reveal here. No mystical protocol. No special tea that will redeem March. Just the deeply unsexy truth that bodies often respond well when life becomes a little less chaotic and a little more supportive.

If I were doing a gentler spring reset for myself, I would probably choose three anchors and leave it there.

One food anchor.

One rhythm anchor.

One environment anchor.

For example:

• eat protein at breakfast and build simpler meals for the week

• get outside early and go to bed a bit earlier

• clean out one cupboard, one shelf, or one category of products that is no longer earning its keep

That is enough to change the feel of a week without turning it into a project.

And if you are in a season where even that sounds ambitious, fair enough. Then your reset may simply be drinking more water, eating lunch before 3 p.m., and standing in the sun for ten minutes like a houseplant with bills. That still counts as adulting.

If you are a paid subscriber, this is the sort of practical support the library is there for. The kitchen tools, guides, and starter resources were built to make this kind of thing feel less mentally arduous and more doable in ordinary life.

You can find the library here.

If you are in Founders, your fuller vault is here.

And if you are not in either place yet, you can join here or below.

Brenna

It is also one of those topics the internet has managed to make both louder and less useful at the same time. On one side you have people acting as though every blood sugar wobble is a personal moral collapse. On the other, you have the sort of breezy reassurance that tells people everything is fine while they are exhausted, hungry all the time, not sleeping properly, crashing in the afternoon, and living on coffee and cortisol.

Neither end of that spectrum is especially helpful.

Metabolic health is not just about weight. It is not just about whether you can wear the same jeans you wore before children, stress, illness, perimenopause, or life generally got handsy. It is not just your fasting glucose or whether someone on the internet thinks fruit is a gateway drug.

At its most basic, metabolic health is about how well your body makes, uses, stores, and responds to energy. It is about fuel. It is about stability. It is about whether your system can handle food, stress, sleep disruption, hormones, movement, and ordinary life without acting like every day is an emergency.

When metabolic health is struggling, it often does not announce itself with one dramatic moment. It shows up as the sort of things people gradually normalize. Feeling shaky if you forget to eat or are intermittent fasting. Falling apart by 3 p.m. or wanting sugar after every meal. Running on caffeine and then wondering why sleep is rubbish. Getting “hangry” enough to become a lesser version of yourself in a parking lot or the pick up line. Crashing after a carb-heavy breakfast. Waking at 3 a.m. like your liver or bladder has scheduled a meeting. Feeling inflamed, foggy, puffy, wired, tired, and generally not especially resilient.

That does not mean every one of those things is purely metabolic. Bodies are layered; interconnected systems. But metabolic health sits under a lot more than people think.

It affects energy, blood sugar steadiness, appetite signaling, stress resilience, inflammation, sleep quality, hormone balance, and how your body handles the ordinary demands of being alive. Which is why I find it mildly maddening when the conversation gets reduced into “just lose weight” or “just stop eating carbs” or some other half-baked bit of internet theatre.

Most people do not need more theatrics. They need foundations.

That usually means starting with things that are almost offensively unsexy. Eating enough protein. Eating regularly enough that your body does not think famine has come to town. Building meals that actually hold you steady. Getting decent sleep more often than not. Supporting mineral intake. Walking. Getting daylight in your eyes. Not flooding your body with sugar, caffeine, and stress while wondering why your energy feels unstable. Not under-eating all day and then eating like a raccoon in the pantry at night. I love raccoons, really.

It also means understanding that metabolic health is not a contest in perfection. You do not need flawless habits and a continuous glucose monitor attached to your soul. You need patterns that move things in a steadier direction.

A lot of people get tripped up here because they are looking for one magic fix. The perfect supplement. The one forbidden food. The exact macro ratio. The definitive answer. And while those details can matter, especially in certain contexts, they are often less important than people want them to be. If your blood sugar is chaotic, your meals are inconsistent, your sleep is poor, your stress is high, your digestion is off, and your nervous system thinks every inconvenience is a saber-toothed tiger, metabolic health is probably not going to improve because you found a clever snack recipe on Instagram.

It usually improves because your body starts getting more of what it needs and less of what keeps pushing it off balance.

That also means it is not especially helpful to think of metabolic health as something only “sick” people need to worry about. Or only people with obvious blood sugar issues. Or only people trying to lose weight. It matters if you want better energy. It matters if you are trying to support hormones. It matters if you are inflamed, exhausted, foggy, anxious, or constantly hungry. It matters if you are trying to age with some grace and not feel like your body is staging a coup every afternoon.

And, because I know how the internet works, no, this is not a call to fear every carb. That conversation has become so stupid I barely know where to begin. Carbs are not inherently the villain. Context matters. Meal structure matters. Protein matters. What else is happening in your body matters. A bowl of sweetened cereal eaten standing up at 7 a.m. while your nervous system is already in flames lands differently than potatoes eaten with beef, butter, and a roasted veg.

Annoying, but also true.

If you want a simple place to start, I would look at your meals before I looked for anything exotic. Are you eating enough protein? Are your meals built to last more than an hour? Are you relying on caffeine to bridge the gap between underfed and over-stimulated? Are you skipping meals and then overeating later? Are you getting enough sleep to make basic regulation possible? Are you giving your body enough minerals, enough daylight, enough movement, and enough rhythm that it does not feel like it is being managed by the feral toddler committee?

That is where the needle usually moves.

This is also why I tend to care more about daily structure than dramatic interventions. The internet loves a dramatic intervention. Real bodies, on the whole, do better with steadiness. A breakfast with actual protein. A lunch that is not the cut-off crust of your kid’s pb&j. A dinner that is not scraped off the back of the fridge but is rounded and built to preserve your sleep. Enough good protein and fat to feel fed. Fewer blood sugar roller coasters. Fewer weird little self-created emergencies.

If you are reading this and thinking, yes, that all sounds lovely, but I am tired and the whole thing feels like one more thing to manage, fair enough. That is often exactly when you need simpler systems, not stricter rules. The point is not to become perfect. The point is to make your body’s job less chaotic.

This is also part of why I have been putting so much energy into building better behind-the-scenes tools and resources. I am in a bit of a rebuilding season over here, quietly tightening things up, protecting what needs protecting, and getting the next version of several resources ready in a way that is actually more useful long term.

So if you have been around for a bit and notice that some links have disappeared or a few things are shifting, that is why. It is not chaos. It is me finally stopping mid-build and doing some proper scaffolding before I hand people the wrong doors.

There is more coming. Better structure, better support, and a much cleaner way into the things I actually want to offer.

For now, start with the foundations. More protein. Better meal structure. Less accidental chaos. A little more steadiness wherever you can get it.

That moves the needle more than most people think.

Brenna

Next week, I’ll circle back to the spring reset question and talk about what I would actually focus on if I wanted to feel better this season without making it weird.

After my practitioner certification I attended a summit for health entrepreneurs, and one of the sessions was on how people were using AI in business, as a virtual assistant, answering phones, helping them write, sorting backend tasks, and doing all sorts of things I had not really considered yet, because frankly I wasn’t even sure how I would find the time for my practice yet, and I was honestly mind blown because I knew pretty quickly that with the life I have, this was not going to be some sort of optional extra. I am a mother of four, I homeschool, I work with autoimmune clients, which is not casual work even if the client load looks light on paper, and outside of meetings I have maybe 2 to 4 hours a week to actually serve clients. That is not much room for leisurely deep work and beautiful strategic planning sessions with a notebook and a candle. That was for my former life as a deeply introverted young single woman on the mission field sorting out the whys and wherefores of why it was I never used emotional language in conversation and teaching. I colleague once reflected that to me, and I promptly found an emotional language worksheet, bought a journal (and a candle) and for the next year journaled my highlight and lowlight of the day and painstakingly found my closest emotional language match from that folded up worksheet and wrote it in the journal. I read Emotional Intelligence alongside it and although that it is a whole other story, it both changed my life and is something I will likely not again have the time for until I’m sixty. Frankly, I do not have a notebook and candle life. I have a toddler-will-turn-that-notebook-into-confetti life. So I knew I had to learn it if I wanted to serve clients well, and still serve my family.

I still have not fully figured out how to use AI in exactly the way I want, and my final writing pieces are still often riddled with imperfections, but a lot of my writing process is a complete and utter ADHD verbal dump and then I use AI to help organise it into something coherent because my mind jumps all over the place at a million miles an hour. Back when I was in school doing investigative journalism and political science and English and all the rest of it, my editing process used to take me days. Literally days. Now I can go back and forth and get through that same part in a few hours, which still feels slightly absurd to me, but I still have not perfected the output, so usually I take the finished version back out and do another edit over it myself because I do not particularly want my brain dump, or worse, my careful verbal dictation, turned into a hilariously repetitive thesaurus of Instagram or Twitter wellness girlie mic drops. I always hated short form, so there you are.

And this is part of why all the anti-AI discourse cracks me up a bit. Not because there are no valid concerns. There absolutely are. I lie awake thinking about the ethical implications and how to build and use these tools in ways that protect clients and practitioners and other users, and how to write prompts with guardrails, and how not to accidentally hand over your discernment to a predictive text engine with delusions of grandeur. But it does make me laugh when people complain about “AI writing” as though Grammarly has not been widely accepted for years. ChatGPT and Claude are infinitely better at this than Grammarly ever was, but the difference is they are also often wrong. They lie. They make things up. They source things badly unless you are paying attention. They will say things with the confidence of a mediocre politician and the factual accuracy of a sleep-deprived mediocre politician.

I taught my son to use it and he started making lists of what to feed his gecko, and my daughter used it in planning for a bird habitat, and there were contradictions all over the place because this thing is really just a predictive engine pulling from every crazy on the internet as well as reputable sources, and if you do not know enough to catch it when it gets slippery then you are in trouble. Sorry, cockatiels are lactose intolerant according to the Smithsonian, but AI will happily tell you to feed them cheese, and that right there is the problem. You have to feed it the right information, and you have to know enough to catch it when it starts making a mess. That is why some of the criticism around practitioners using AI bothers me so much. I am a practitioner, yes, but I was a writer first, and I know how difficult it is to get these tools to actually behave, both when it comes to nutrition and medical information and when it comes to producing something coherent without sounding like it was washed in motivational vanilla extract. Some of my favourite physicians and clinicians have all of the hallmarks of AI writing all over their work, and frankly I don’t care. I subscribe and I read them because I have been wrestling with this dumb and yet almost sentient machine-intern for the last year. I know when to trust the content and when not to. I will tell you now, these people do not have time to sit down with a candle either and leisurely type out a two thousand word essay on GLP-1s and then find all the sources of that pubmed research they read a week or a year or five years ago. They can verbal-diarrhea that into the machine-intern and say find me this particular human study from what’s her name and genuinely, scholar-ai will find it in 30 seconds flat. Gosh… that just saved like 6 hours right there… so do you want the free info or not? Especially when that brilliant functional doctor or naturopath or even (shock) regular old MD or midwife who just really cares is literally doing this on her tea break or her loo break before she wipes and goes back in there to only have 10 minutes to prepare for the next really-freaking difficult autoimmune case? Folks. I was that really difficult autoimmune case. I want her brain downloaded onto my tiny screen ASAP.

What has been far more interesting to me over the last year, though, is that I have used AI much more to build tools and systems than as a writing editor, and when I look back my whole life weirdly built toward this in a way I did not see coming. I was an admin through all of my university years, then I went onto the mission field, then I came back and was an admin for several more years, so really my early adulthood was a bit of a missions-admin sandwich. Then layered into that, while I was sick with autoimmune issues and trying to save money for my practitioner education, I sold clean skincare and essential oils and all the rest of it for about five or six years, while homeschooling, which meant I learned the ins and outs of toxins, ingredient labels, greenwashing, talking to people at farmers markets, and how to communicate my nerdy nerdy nerdiness to real people in a way they could actually understand rather than just stare at me politely while backing away.

That ended up shaping one of the AI tools I built because people used to send me screenshots and photos of their shampoo bottles or skincare and ask, “Is this clean?” as if I could answer that in thirty seconds, but because chemical compound names change constantly to escape notice and allow for greenwashing, that innocent-looking text or photo could sometimes take me two hours to research properly. And the truth is, a lot of these companies are greenwashing. Another truth is that even the ones who are not are often punished for their honesty. And another truth is that production realities mean nothing is ever truly, pristinely, perfectly clean anyway. Everything is a compromise somewhere. So I built a GPT that works more like my actual brain does. It is not as sweet and tidy-looking as the EWG because frankly there are things that are EWG verified that are absolutely on par with things rated a 3, and sometimes the only meaningful difference is that one company was wealthy enough to pay for every stage of their process to be lab-verified and another one was not. My tool contains the buckets for different toxic substance families, naming variations, red flags, and the contextual stuff I actually care about, so even if a name changes it still gets flagged. And it also accounts for things like a damaged skin barrier, because you can have something that appears clean on paper but still be a terrible fit for someone whose skin is already struggling because it is absolutely loaded with actives. That one single tool has probably given me back 3 to 4 hours in my day.

And honestly that is the thread through all of this. AI did not make me smarter. It made it possible for me to use what I already knew in a life where I do not have endless uninterrupted hours to sit there marinating in my own expertise-constipation-cycle.

It also helps me do the kinds of complicated maths and admin work that have always been a sticking point for me. I have created a GPT that walks a practitioner through a complete workflow and pricing audit with prompts that include debt, childcare, mortgage payments, retirement savings, travel, and what kind of life they are actually trying to build, because those are real numbers in a real life. I built those prompts because I needed them myself. I had signed up for leadership courses before (I have led them too) where the assumption was that I would sit down with a lovely notebook and a candle and map out my business in peace, and that is just not how my life works. I have four very wild children. My toddler is basically a tiny, feral, half naked raccoon with very strong opinions who cannot for the love of all that is holy, sleep by herself. So instead I built a system that lets me think while moving, while voice-noting, while living an actual life.

I have used AI to help me get through taxes and quickly build spreadsheets of all of my business expenses. I have used it to help me move through the very confusing process of registering a copyright and a trademark while, again, my toddler was controlling the speed on my walking pad. I got through each of those in about 10 to 15 minutes, whereas before AI they would have felt so overwhelming that I probably would have left them undone indefinitely and been happy enough, honestly, for someone to steal my intellectual property simply because I could not freaking find the time to protect it. That is not because I did not care. It is because motherhood and admin overload create a very specific kind of paralysis where the task just sits there radiating friction until it dies on the list.

And this matters because mothers especially are overwhelmed, and we are also living in an economy where many households genuinely need two full-time incomes to survive without slowly drowning. That is a hard truth. There are scary things about AI, yes. There are ethical things to wrestle with, absolutely. There are ways it can be sloppy or harmful or dehumanising if used badly. But if you learn how to use it intelligently, and if you build the necessary guardrails into your process, it can absolutely serve you. For me it has been the best tool I have found for a neurodivergent mother. It is the difference between me being able to get my processes and systems and ideas out my head in those micro-moments of silence such as sitting on the loo, standing in the shower for 30 seconds before my toddler climbs in, or at 5am finally sitting down to sip my coffee before she realizes her heating pad has disappeared and comes toddling out with her beautiful face and wild hair. It helps me get them from my brain and into my practice and then into the world in a form that can actually serve people. It is the difference between the idea springing to life or simply not getting there at all. An aborted process, I do not want.

Because before this, even with all the background I had, I was often just scrambling. Scrambling to get through a client’s food and mood journal before a meeting. Scrambling inside the two hours I could afford to pay a babysitter for a one-hour client session. Scrambling to do the things I was actually trained and gifted to do while drowning in all the surrounding things that were not really my skill set, or were my skill set but took too much energy in their raw form. Being able to outsource the friction, in a contained and smart way, is not some luxury but an essential. Folks, I was booked solid straight out of practitioner therapy school not because I’m some sort of genius, but because I had thoughtfully served people through health coaching with an inferior nutrition certification, through responding, also thoughtfully, to those “is this clean texts,” and for taking the time to have moms into my own backyard so we could dig down on these things and I could lay out the real situation… all to very little benefit to myself or my family. Not that it wasn’t there, but the hours of work added up to a pittance if I were to audit that time. So when I was booked out before I felt my practice structure was truly ready… I started scrambling hard. I took that same energy I had used to get through my certification and I found all the ins and outs of how I could build both the offline spreadsheets I was comfortable with inputting client values to, as well as AI tools to give me back all my time. I built them under a sleeping, nursing toddler, in the bathtub at 4am because that’s when I could finally wash my hair without my sweet girl climbing in and filling the bath with wee, I built them in five or ten minute moments between walks, on walks, between lessons or dishes or laundry or while doing laundry.

So back to the point.

I also use AI to do the writing-adjacent heavy lifting on my website, and that is another place where I am completely fine with the final result looking much more AI-polished than anything I would write on Substack. I used to have what was basically a fermenting food blog for about eight years, and a lot of it got wiped out in the Cloudflare crash last year. When I recovered one of the old backups, everything was basically smashed together into one giant run-on sentence from the internet underworld, recipe instructions buried in the rubble, no proper formatting, just absolute chaos. So I have been extracting those posts one at a time and feeding them into AI and then using the prompts and GPTs I built to restructure them into the principal recipe posts I actually want on my site now. That system is still being refined, but I finalised a lot of it recently, and it also optimises for SEO, which means the writing on my website looks nothing like the writing I would put on Substack. But it pulls in Google searches in a way I was never able to achieve in eight years of food blogging, so I am fine with that. Truly. I am fine with that looking AI-assisted because it is still my original thought, my original writing, my original recipes, my original work, just cut into a shape the internet can actually find. And if people can find it, then the content can serve them and maybe help them heal.

The funny thing is that this has all ended up circling back to the kinds of work I have always done. When I was an admin I was constantly building systems for other people and trying to make businesses run more smoothly. AI can code spreadsheet formulas far faster than I can as long as I give it the right inputs. It can help me build prompts that are actually useful. It can help me create frameworks that walk a practitioner through the deeper architecture of her business when she is overwhelmed and does not have the bandwidth to reinvent everything from scratch. And before and between the admin years I spent years in leadership and discipleship work in the Christian missions world, helping people identify their gifting, their skills, the places they were stuck, and how to move forward in life with some clarity and direction. So in some ways this all feels like an extension of what I have always done, just translated into a new medium.

And because this is also part of the story, this morning I was supposed to wake up at 5 AM and go for a run because my naturopathic doctor finally gave me the go-ahead to start running again after mold illness and a difficult pregnancy, which honestly felt like a minor resurrection moment to me, but instead I ended up talking to my husband for two hours and nearly made him late. He reflected back to me that I keep talking as though I am just an NTP using a few tools on the side, and he said, no, what you are actually doing is building software. He said, you will always be an NTP, but you need to come to terms with the fact that you are also basically a software engineer now using AI to do the kind of work that would have taken you a year or even two in one of your admin jobs twenty years ago. That hit me like a ton of bricks because that was never the plan, but I also knew he was right.

And part of why this works for me at all is because I am neurodivergent, and I have finally stopped trying to force myself into systems made for people whose brains do not work like mine. I was diagnosed ADD when I was about nine, secretly, before they even changed that diagnosis, and a very compassionate clinician basically told me I was brilliant, that I could be a rocket scientist if I wanted to, meaning if I could just care enough (read — if I only just gave a flying shit), and that my IQ was fully there but my interest varied wildly. Which, rude but not incorrect. It is why I could get exactly 9 words right on a spelling test when there were actually meant to be 10, because I had simply lost interest or drifted off for a moment. Why I could get an A+ and extra credit on one project and then a D in a subject I did not care about or where the assessment was measuring dead facts in isolation. Why I constantly set the curve in English class because pattern recognition, reading between the lines and imagery were always my strengths, and why my Physics teacher was driven absolutely nuts by the fact that I would write the correct answer, arrived at almost intuitively, and then retroactively solve (reverse engineer) the problem. Why I could tell you the entire arc of a historical event as a story but not remember the exact dates on command.

And the language thing is similar. My American-British-Aussie fusion of vernacular, spelling, and grammar is confused, but I like it. My brother used to email me when I lived in the UK and basically yell, “You’re American. Stop writing like you’re British!” Well. I grew up reading C.S. Lewis and Jane Austen as much as Hemingway, I lived in the UK for half of my adult life, and then I married an Aussie-Brit, so now my brain is a transatlantic formatting issue. People ask me my kids’ birthdays and my mind will genuinely blue-screen for a moment while I work out which country I am mentally standing in before I reorder the date and calm down. These days I tend to say it like “seventh of March, 2020.” Not one of my kids’ birthdays, but you get the idea.

The same thing applies to writing. My editing pass used to be long and exhausting and endless, but now that part is faster, and rather than agonising over every line the way I used to, I have also absolutely succumbed to doing my final pass at speed while I am on my walking pad and my toddler is trying to control the buttons and yelling at me to be all-done. So at this point I often leave some of my errors in. Honestly that still makes me cringe a bit because the old version of me would have hated that, but I also know those little imperfections give a piece a kind of realness, so I leave them. Mostly. Then sometimes I come back a week later and quietly fix them once it has sat there long enough for me to stop twitching.

I used to send my regular practitioner posts to my mother or in college to my uncle, who are both editors, and my mother in particular has always been brilliant at this because she is a dissertation writing coach and a university professor and once held a nursing degree as well, which is a very unfair amount of competence for one woman to have, but she is also busy and sometimes it would take weeks to get something back. She has about 80 plus assignments to grade right now, for example. Now I can get that same kind of back-and-forth in a few hours, and if the draft is decent, even less. Somewhere in the middle of my morning I realised I had already basically started dictating this article long before I ever formally got on my walking-pad to write it. That is usually how I write anything anyway. It starts as voice notes, phone notes, stream-of-consciousness scraps, verbal dumping into my phone or straight into AI and using it as an editor while I think out loud. So yes, this article has been building… happening. I was just writing it in the most me way possible, that is, in the margins of motherhood.

So no, I did not start using AI because I wanted my work to sound polished or because I was dazzled by tech. I started using it because I needed help bridging the gap between my actual responsibilities and my actual capacity, and because I knew I was sitting on years of knowledge and systems and ideas that were never going to make it into the world if every single step had to be done the hard way by hand in perfect silence.

I am writing this, quite literally, as a verbal dump from my loo to the kitchen to get my espresso to my backyard, setting my phone down on a table and hitting send into an AI so I can go spend my morning in the sun and play Duck Duck Goose with my toddler on the trampoline rather than sitting in my office pretending I have the kind of life where deep work arrives gift-wrapped.

And for the record, she fell asleep in the hammock with her big sister, which is why this final edit exists at all.

It has given me back literal hours of my life.

Update, August 2026

I’m adding this at the bottom rather than editing what’s above, as the article was true when I wrote it and ought to stay as it was.

What’s changed since March: quite a lot. I lost a baby, and then came shingles, and then a histamine flare I am still working out, and alongside all of it I’ve been rebuilding every tool I use so that no protected health information ever passes through them. What writing capacity I had went to keeping this newsletter alive. So I dictate more than I did in March, and I hand over more of the shaping than I did, and much of what you’ve read this summer was batched in good hours between bad ones.

What hasn’t changed is the thinking. The clinical reasoning, the order I work things in, the opinions, the arguments I’m willing to have, the cautions and the judgment about what is safe to say to a stranger’s body. Those are mine and they always will be.

And here is the part that tells you the line held, because it cost me something. When I could no longer write the personal pieces myself, I didn’t hand them to a machine. I stopped publishing them. There are something like ten outlines sitting in my drafts that never got written this year, and they will get written by me or they won’t get written. Faith, grief, my children, my marriage. Those are mine to put on a page or leave off it.

Substack added an AI detector in July, which this post predates, and which I’d fail cheerfully if it could reach it. Those tools read polish. They can’t see whose thoughts these are.

— B.

You get the email. You open the PDF or the app. Something is red. Something else is bold. Something says normal even though you feel like a damp figment of your former self. And now you are left trying to decide whether to ignore it, panic, or begin an ill-advised midnight search that ends with you convinced you either need magnesium, a liver transplant, or both.

I would not recommend that route.

One of the biggest problems with labs is not that they are useless. It is that most people are handed numbers without any framework for thinking about them. So they do what people tend to do when information arrives without context: they either catastrophise, dismiss it, or latch onto one marker like it contains the entire plot when usually it doesn’t.

Labs are data. Useful data, sometimes very useful, but still data. They are not a moral report card. They are not a prophecy. They are not a complete summary of your health, your effort, your nervous system, your mineral status, your hormone story, and your worth as a person, all in one tidy spreadsheet.

They are one part of the picture.

That means a better question is not, “Is this one number bad?” but rather, “What pattern is this suggesting, and does it actually line up with what is happening in my body?”

That is a much more useful place to start.

One of the most common mistakes people make is obsessing over one flagged marker in isolation. One slightly high result and suddenly it is the main character. Meanwhile the rest of the panel is sitting there quietly trying to provide context and being ignored. Patterns matter more than one dramatic little outlier.

Another common problem is the opposite one: the portal says normal, so people assume all is well, even when they are exhausted, cold, inflamed, constipated, anxious, foggy, not sleeping well, or running on fumes and coffee. “Normal” is not always the same thing as optimal. It often just means you have not crossed the line at which the lab company starts sounding an alarm. And what they don’t always mention is that you’re sharing that thyroid marker range with your 85 year old grandma.

That may be useful for acute pathology. It is not always especially useful for understanding why you feel off.

Then there is the tendency to treat labs like a scavenger hunt for the one answer. The ferritin explains everything. No wait, it’s vitamin D. No wait, it’s thyroid. No wait, it’s inflammation. And so on. Sometimes a single marker is very revealing, but more often the clearer story is in the pattern between markers, symptoms, history, stress load, diet, and timing.

Bodies are so very inconveniently layered like that. Lol. I jest.

So what is a better way to look at bloodwork?

First, look for patterns, not just flags. Are several things pointing in the same direction? Is there a stress pattern? A blood sugar pattern? An inflammatory pattern? A mineral depletion pattern? A thyroid pattern? A protein or digestion issue showing up indirectly? Labs often whisper in clusters long before they shout in one obvious place.

Second, compare the numbers to your actual lived experience. If something is technically normal but your symptoms are still loud, that does not automatically mean the symptoms are imaginary. It may mean the current interpretation is too shallow, the reference range is too broad, the issue is still developing, or the labs are only showing part of the story.

Third, look over time when you can. Trends matter. A number moving in the wrong direction over several blood draws can matter even if each individual result still falls inside the lab’s polite yet overly broad little box. One snapshot is useful but a sequence is often much more useful.

Fourth, keep your feet on the ground. Labs are part of the picture, but so are food, sleep, blood sugar stability, digestion, mineral intake, stress load, medications, cycle phase, illness, timing, and whether you were fighting for your life in the school pickup line the morning your blood was drawn. Context matters. Annoying, but true.

And fifth, do not hand your whole nervous system over to a portal.

That part is worth saying again. A portal is good at giving you numbers. It is terrible at giving you perspective.

This is also why I am not a fan of the two extremes people tend to bounce between. One extreme is panic. The other is false reassurance. “Everything is fine.” “Everything is terrible.” Usually the truth is somewhere less theatrical and more useful.

Something like: there may be a pattern here, it deserves context, and this is information I can use wisely rather than emotionally.

That is the posture that tends to help.

If you are someone who likes practical anchors, here are a few very basic examples of what I mean when I say “normal” and “optimal” are not always the same thing.

Take TSH as an example. A lot of labs will give you something like 0.45 to 4.5 as a normal range. So technically, you could be sitting at 3.8, be exhausted, cold, constipated, losing hair, and still be told everything looks fine. A lot of practitioners, though, are watching more closely when that number drifts outside of roughly the 1 to 2 range, especially when symptoms line up.

Ferritin is another one. You might see a “normal” range that goes as low as 15. And yes, that might keep you out of the danger zone medically. It does not always feel great to live there. Many practitioners are thinking more along the lines of 50 to 100, with context, especially if energy, hair, or recovery are struggling.

Vitamin D is similar. A result just above 30 may technically pass, but a lot of people do not feel their best there. You will often see a more supportive range closer to 50 to 80 discussed in practice.

And fasting glucose can sit comfortably inside the lab range while the broader blood sugar story still looks messy once you factor in energy dips, cravings, stress, and the rest of the panel.

That is not a diagnosis chart and it is not me telling you to self-treat based on one row in a table. It is just a simple example of why a portal saying “in range” does not always settle the question in a useful way.

I’m also working on a paid subscriber dashboard with more educational tools, guides, and practical ways to help people understand this sort of information without turning every blood draw into a minor existential event. It is still being built, so I’m not going to pretend it is all polished and sitting there with a bow on it yet, but that is where this is heading.

If you want the deeper subscriber library and the tools as they roll out, you can subscribe below.

And if this is the sort of post you know a slightly overwhelmed friend would appreciate after receiving her labs back with a red exclamation mark and a minor identity crisis, feel free to send it to her.

Share

Next week, I’ll circle back to the other poll thread and write about metabolic health in real life, which is less sexy than the internet likes make you believe and yet, much more important.

Brenna

P.S. Part of the reason I built the deeper LabLens practitioner framework was very practical: I do not want to hold every marker relationship, pattern, and interpretation pathway in my head at once whilst holding a screaming toddler. That is enough to scramble anyone’s brain. If you’re a practitioner and want to explore the deeper system, you can start here: May Practice Frameworks™. Or subscribe to my practitioners section if you only fancy dipping your toes.

If you spend enough time in practitioner spaces online, you eventually notice the same two archetypes over and over again. There is the Ozempic practitioner, all glossy before-and-afters, and then there is the twenty-year-old fitness girlie explaining cortisol on Instagram as if she personally discovered stress last week and it shook her to her core. To be fair, it may have. Sometimes I sit here, 45 this month, perimenopausal, nursing a co-sleeping toddler, running a business, homeschooling children, trying to do decent work in the edges of the day, praying I can one day retire my beautifully empathetic husband so he can go get his clinical counseling degree and think: oh, honey. I have read the sleep books, the blood sugar books, the carnivore books, the vegan books, paleo books, the keto books, the fasting books, the mitochondrial energy books and most of all the Nutritional Therapy and Anatomy textbooks and read the studies. I know the science. I agree with the science. I also live in a female body with a history, and that turns out to matter rather a lot more than the internet would like to acknowledge.

The internet loves to talk about bodies as if they sprang fresh from a test-tube. Untraumatized. Uninflamed. Well slept. Properly nourished. Hormones humming along like a lovely spring-time string quartet in the park. No pregnancies. No losses. No autoimmune flares. No gut dysbiosis. No parasites from an exchange trip or the mission field or that camping trip eight years ago. 👀

No years of under-eating and overtraining because the culture called that virtue. No nursing toddler attached to your ribcage like a barnacle (or a clamp-on koala as we call it in our home) while you try to answer emails with one hand and remember where you left your espresso, or your tea for those far more virtuous than me. Just a clean little metabolism waiting to obey a ring light and a caption about discipline. Charming. Entirely fictional, but charming.

Before we get into physiology, which we will, because I am still a practitioner and cannot help myself, we probably need to talk about how some of us were raised. Because “trauma” is a funny word now. It gets used for everything from genuine horror to someone being served the wrong milk alternative. But some childhoods do shape a body, a nervous system, and a threat response in ways that remain long after the original scene has passed. I came from a bit of a military family on one side and an artistic, intellectual, academic and slightly military family on the other. I mean nearly every fit young man went off to the second world war. It was a delightful mix, genuinely, but it did mean that at about three years old I was taught how to take out a man’s eyeball. Not as a hobby but as self-defense. The lesson, as given by my father and his brother, was punch him in the nuts first, then put your thumb between the bridge of the nose and the eyeball, hook it, grip it, pull hard, and run. This was presented to me with complete calm and absolute sincerity by men whose central thought was not violence but protection. They looked at my sweet little face and thought, I do not want the world to hurt you. This was loving fatherhood in the mid-80s. It was FAFO culture at its finest. This didn’t really help me on the examination table at 11 in a room with what I realized much later was a very pervy (read - paedophile) doctor during a school sports screening, but that’s a whole separate story. That was his shame, not mine. The vigilance my father and uncle gifted to me helped me a whole lot all the rest of my life and that was I think the point.

Then there was the farm. People hear “natural horsemanship” and imagine a linen shirt, soft sunlight, maybe some emotionally healing music from Enya while a traumatized horse learns trust. And yes, sometimes. But sometimes natural horsemanship also means knowing the exact point on a horse, just behind the shoulder, where from twenty yards away you can drive the animal forward or backward, because horses are prey animals and pressure matters and movement matters and, if you know what you’re doing, you can redirect a great deal of power without ever touching them. I knew exactly how to head off a herd. That was not abstract knowledge. That was practical knowledge, and it was learned in the sort of environment where mistakes had consequences. One day my younger brother came out to feed horses with me. I told him to stay close. He was feeling stubborn that day and wouldn’t. The horses spooked and there was nothing I could do in time. They trampled him and broke his arm. So when I say some of us learned early to assess movement, pressure, danger, and outcomes, I do mean early.

I also grew up with three brothers, and our idea of fun occasionally, or rather often, resembled fight club. My father got so tired of bloody noses that he eventually bought all of us boxing gloves and headgear, which in hindsight feels both unhinged and strangely practical. It explains why, when the Marines came to school for recruitment and started running the boys through pushup contests, I could crack out more than most, sometimes in a skirt, and enjoyed myself far more than was probably ladylike. It also explains why, the day a boy grabbed my butt in the hallway, it took about half a second for me to turn, launch over three children, and retaliate so violently that he barely had time to register his own stupidity. I am not recommending this as a universal conflict-resolution strategy. I am simply saying that some girls were raised to be decorative (not that they were meant to be), and some of us were raised in what was apparently a low-budget military-farm hybrid with horses. It explains why, when I showed up to my first day of lacrosse practice in high school, bent down to tie my cleats, and got smacked straight in the mouth with a lacrosse ball the moment I stood up, it did not faze me nearly as much as perhaps it should have. I just carried on. I played for the next six years until I fractured my foot in college, from a horse, not lacrosse, played on that same fractured foot for six months because the ER missed it, and then ended up needing somewhat reconstructive surgery. My podiatrist recommended ballroom dancing afterwards, which at the time I found a little bit laughable. Dearest reader, he was right. I gave it a go, had a brilliant time, and eventually taught it. Bodies adapt. Stories keep unfolding. That is part of the point here.

And then there were the boys. Or rather, the poor, unsuspecting boys. Whenever I “brought a boy home,” my mother had an almost supernatural sense of timing. That would be the precise moment she would decide that one of the mares needed breeding. So whatever very innocent, very platonic little teenage fun I thought I had planned (I was still pretty naive being surrounded by brothers) was immediately postponed while I went to get the stallion ready. There those boys would stand, suburban horror in their eyes, watching me back down a stallion I loved very dearly in a way that would terrify most grown men. Not cruelly but commandingly. There is a difference. If you have never handled a stallion around a mare, let me save you the soft-focus horse-girl image nonsense. The goal is to get close enough to the mare, manage the stallion, stay out of the direct line of any wildly hormonal decisions, and avoid being kicked in the face by a mare who may very much enjoy mating and still be perfectly willing to launch a hoof at someone in the process. You do not want to get in between that. I have a permanently dented butt cheek to prove it. No, I will not show you. Well, maybe I will at a girls weekend after a scotch. So yes, I learned force, timing, body awareness, pressure points, and how to throw my weight around with intent. This may explain why the boys at school were terrified of me for more than one reason, and why a wrestler in college who once decided to challenge me soon discovered that confidence and outcome are not always the same thing. (This one still baffles me… I mean, what on earth was he trying to prove? He was obviously very confident he would win but I still can’t figure out why he thought that would have been a good idea either??) I do think my mother was very wise, in retrospect. Canny, in fact. Now that i am a mother myself i realize just what a stroke of brilliance it was.

Circling back a bit, I had moved from country girl Springfield to the East Coast for two years, moved back, albeit north, walked into my new fancy pants middle school and then out 2.5 years later after a fight with my principal. I homeschooled myself for two years, then walked into high school as a sophomore looking at all the social manoeuvring and female fawning, aggression, and weird performative flirtation like I had accidentally wandered into a nature documentary. Add to that the fact that I was waking up at 5 a.m. to clean stalls, feed horses, and let them out before school, which meant I quite often arrived with manure on my shoe and smelt not-so-faintly of barn. This did not make me an obvious cultural match for affluent 90s school dynamics, where girls were expected to be tiny, polished, decorative, and socially lethal in a very lip-glossed sort of way. Many of those girls and their mothers were absolutely lovely, to be clear. That is not the point. The point is that the 90s were more than a bit of a fever dream for female body image, and I found the whole mean-girl ecosystem almost funny in its predictability. After horses, it was not even that subtle. Dominance displays. Insecurity. Mimicry. Pack behaviour. Mating rituals. Hierarchy. Frankly, half the time those kids looked like animals to me, and I do not mean that cruelly. I mean it literally. I could read it because I already knew something about herd dynamics. It genuinely felt like that scene from Mean Girls (the original, far superior one, IMO).

This is where the body-image conversation gets more complicated than most of the wellness industry can tolerate. Because yes, there were seasons when I was extremely fit. There were also seasons when I was fluffy enough that you could have lost a dime in my navel. There were running years after three babies where I got back to that bounce-a-quarter-off-my-abs sort of body because I was training for a triathlon, fun, by the way, and considerably more so than my asthma-attack-filled half marathon in Nottingham years earlier when I was outrun by a ninety-year-old man. There were also years when I was around 190 pounds, very muscular, very inflamed, carrying gut issues and inflammation and later autoimmune terrain whether I fully understood it yet or not. In college I had already started putting on inflammation and weight, had gut dysbiosis from parasites on an exchange trip, became thoroughly reactive to gluten without realizing it, reacted to sugar, and was training at the University of Oregon’s Moshofsky Center under the weights coach for the football players. On the first day none of my lacrosse girls showed up, so I got thrown in with the rugby girls, and you can probably guess how that went. That was my brief Miss Trunchbull era. I say that both with affection and humour. It was not the look the early 2000s wanted from a young woman, but my body has never once in its life been built for frail and decorative even at its fittest and slimmest. My mother takes after her father and probably could have become a bodybuilder without even trying. She has forearms like Popeye. My father used to say, “I want your body,” and what he meant was not anything creepy but rather, good Lord, it would be nice to be built like you.

So when I watch women, including practitioners, get eaten alive by body comparison in wellness spaces, I want to take the internet by the shoulders and shake it. Some of you are comparing entirely different biological realities. A twenty-two-year-old fitness influencer with no pregnancies, no autoimmune history, no nursing toddler, no perimenopause, no gut dysbiosis, no stress-conditioned hypervigilance, and no serious inflammatory burden is not living in the same endocrine country as a midlife woman with a body full of her beautiful biography. That is not bitterness but pure unadulterated physiology. Those are different hormonal landscapes, safety signals, metabolic priorities and very different immune conversations. Bless her sweet heart, truly, but the dear girl hasn’t been through the wringer yet. And honestly my heart hurts for her. I feel protective of her but know she has to go through her story too as we all have had to. Saying that, I know plenty of women in their forties and up who have, and yet still look svelt and gorgeous, so more power to them. They get a pass. But I’ll be honest, as they’re from the same era as I am… there is probably still some level of debilitating critical voice in there somewhere too. But to my point.

Because here is what actually happens when a body perceives stress, threat, scarcity, sleep deprivation, inflammation, blood sugar instability, unresolved trauma, chronic overexertion, or insufficient nourishment, it does not sit down and ask itself how to look better in high-waisted leggings, or worse, low-waisted ones. It starts making survival calculations. Cortisol goes up. Blood sugar regulation gets twitchier. Thyroid output can shift. Hunger cues can get louder or weirder. The body starts conserving where it can, mobilizing where it must, and making emergency adjustments. If glucose is needed, the liver is more than happy to produce some by gluconeogenesis, which is a wonderful and frankly rude little process whereby your body says, no worries, I can make fuel out of almost anything if things are getting bleak. This is a marvellous design if you are crossing a mountain range, surviving winter or the potato famine, recovering from illness, making milk for a toddler, or trying to keep a household alive under stress. It is less marvellous if your benchmark for success is whether your lower stomach looks like someone’s sponsored post.

Add autoimmune terrain to the mix, because that is where this all gets really fun. Once the immune system joins the conversation, the body is no longer merely dealing with calories in and calories out, as if human beings are Bunsen burners in a school lab. Now you have inflammatory cascades, cytokine signaling, histamine issues, food reactivity, gut barrier concerns and maybe microbial imbalances. Maybe even cross-reactive foods. Maybe a system that no longer experiences gluten, or dairy, or too much sugar, or a run of bad sleep as neutral but as insults or attack. It responds accordingly. So the same culture that once told women to starve themselves into runway chic now repackages the same nonsense in prettier social language and acts shocked when midlife women with complex histories do not simply “optimize.” Optimize what, exactly? The inflamed bowel? The broken sleep? The nursing hormones? The stress chemistry? The body that has spent four decades learning how to survive what came at it?

I say all this as someone who has been all over the map. I have had seasons where I looked wildly fit and seasons where I looked puffy and inflamed and felt like my body belonged to someone else. I have had seasons where I could probably take down half the men in the room and seasons where autoimmune changed the rules so dramatically I had to accept that strength now meant something less glorious and more honest. Like squatting down to pick up a toy my infant dropped after a really hard pregnancy and then, shock, getting back up again whilst having to hold on to the countertop. I have had seasons of visible abs and seasons where I needed to quit treating my body like a machine I could bully into performance. And I think this matters for practitioners because we are not immune to the industry we work in. In some ways we are more vulnerable to it, because we know just enough science to become sophisticated in our self-contempt if we are not careful. We can dress comparison up in lab markers and macros and protocols and call it responsibility when half the time it is just fear. It is okay to slow down and rest. To send signals to your body that it is okay today not to push out that HIIT workout. Maybe a few squats and a lovely slow walk with a toddler are fine. Bonus points if the sun is out.

There is also this, and I think more women need to say it out loud: some of us have old body-image wounds even if we have largely made peace with ourselves. You can know your worth is not in your jeans size and still feel the sting of cultural nonsense when the algorithm starts serving polished little torsos and smug little captions about what happens when you “finally commit.” Commit to what, Karen? A life without children? An untouched nervous system? Twenty-year-old ovaries? A personal chef? Eight uninterrupted hours of sleep? A digestive tract that has never seen a parasite? A housecleaner? Okay, a resounding yes to that one. If only. There is a particular madness in taking advice from people whose chief qualification is that life has not yet happened to them very much.

And that is where the humour comes in for me, because if I do not laugh I will eventually become intolerable. And that would be well, intolerable. Laughter really is good medicine. And I love it. My body was never designed to be skeletal. It was designed to drag things, lift things, run hard, recover, milk-feed babies, stay alert, head off a herd, survive stress, and apparently at one point terrify teenage boys by making them stand around while I managed horse breeding logistics. It was built from people who survived hard winters, lean times, migration, strain, and all manner of ridiculousness. Of course that sort of body is going to hear “move more, eat less” with a certain historical suspicion. (Read — absolute cackling laughter) Of course it is going to say, ah yes, famine again. I shall crank up the cortisol, conserve the energy, and make some emergency glucose while we’re at it. That is not a moral failure and it is certainly not laziness. It is, however, a body doing exactly what bodies are meant to do when the environment feels unsafe, underfed, inflamed, or unstable.

This is not an argument against fitness, discipline, or getting stronger. I am very much in favour of all three. I was an athlete my entire life up until mold illness, and my favourite part of exercise is the feeling of flow on a run, endorphins moving, the sense of power in my legs and sunshine, and truly it is pure joy and wonderful for mental health. It is also not an argument for resignation. I do not think women should just throw up their hands, buy six oversized cardigans, and declare the war lost. It is an argument against stupidity masquerading as wellness. It is an argument against pretending all bodies have the same inputs, the same histories, the same thresholds, the same hormonal realities, and the same margin for error. It is an argument against the sort of advice that takes no account of motherhood, age, inflammation, immunity, trauma, culture, biography, or actual life. It is an argument for reality, which is less photogenic, admittedly, but much more useful.

The reality is that stories affect us. They affect our tissues, our reflexes, our appetite, our inflammation, our sense of safety, our hormones, our stamina, the foods we tolerate, the way we train, the way we rest, the way we push too hard, and the way we finally learn, if we are fortunate, to stop punishing ourselves for being shaped by what we have lived through. Bodies carry biography. That doesn’t mean they’re broken. The body keeps the score, yes, but it is also flipping resilient.

So no, I am not interested in becoming the Ozempic practitioner. Not that it does not have its purpose. I have seen it help people with diabetes and obesity in amazing and undeniable ways, though we do need to watch the muscle wasting in the process. I certainly think it needs to be watched with suspicion in terms of its mental health effects and I’m currently diving down a COMT rabbit hole on this one. (That’s a dopamine related SNP for those who are interested in methylation) I have seen it used with micro-dosing (nano-dosing) to calm inflammation, resolve PCOS, bring back hair and more, in autoimmune bodies. What I am not interested in is being lectured by the wellness girlie with visible abs and no life mileage yet who may just be driving herself into an adrenal crash. I am not interested in pretending my body is a blank slate or that yours is. I am interested in what is true. I am interested in bodies as they actually are: adaptive, intelligent, irritating, resilient, inflamed, protective, scarred, hormonally inconvenient, often hilarious, and far more meaningful than whatever nonsense the culture is currently selling. I used to have a perfect, hard little bubble butt when I was you know, still a pubescent. A literal legal child for those folks in the back who are confused about “young women”. You could set a glass on that thing. Of course you could. I was a varsity captain in both swimming and lacrosse and spent my summers throwing hay-bales and my winters hauling hundreds of pounds of horse poo through two feet deep pasture length stretches of muck. Also I don’t think it ever quite recovered from my collegiate days of 600lb leg presses, 300lb weighted squats, 170lb cleans combined with gluten intolerance. For those of you in the fitness world, don’t judge. I’ve always had a twitchy back since an injury in PE as a kid doing the long jump and had to stay within my limits or surrender to a world of hurt. I see the inconsistencies there. Then you know… four pregnancies and gaining and losing 50lbs a pop… except that one pregnancy when I ate more magnum ice creams than i could count and drove an RV through the night… that one I only gained 40, hilariously. So now I have a motherly bum. A “fun bum” as my husband calls it.

And if, at 45 this month, perimenopausal and nursing a toddler and trying to do my best work when the house is finally quiet, my face looks a bit older than it did three years ago when I was carrying this little one in my tum instead of chasing her all over creation, well. The wrinkles are worth it. Annoying, but worth it.

So please for the love of all that is holy and beautiful, love your body, my dears. If you don’t, your clients will never feel that they can love theirs. They will also not feel that they can tell you the truth about what is really going on in their lives… or in their mouths and what they’re living with… and then how can you help them heal?

Peace out.

Brenna

PS: It’s my birthday month, and I firmly believe in celebrating with a good laugh… Somewhere between motherhood, perimenopause, and simply having seen enough nonsense, many women develop a very specific reflex to it. This oldie-but-goodie documented this phenomenon rather well. Be warned: there are more than a few enthusiastic swears involved, so if you have toddlers nearby who enjoy repeating things at full volume, you may want to grab some headphones.

A message from women everywhere – BBC

I do not think meal planning needs to become a hobby, an aesthetic, or a minor religion. It just needs to make life easier, which is a perfectly respectable standard.

A lot of the stress around food is not even cooking so much as decision fatigue. What can I make. Do I have what I need. Will this feed everyone properly. Is it going to blow the budget. Will I be hungry again in ninety minutes. Is this an actual meal or just beige survival food with a health halo. By the time you’ve run that internal committee meeting, you are already tired and someone is asking for a snack they absolutely do not need.

That is usually where people either overcomplicate everything or give up and cobble together something weird, and neither option is especially satisfying.

What tends to work better is a simpler structure. You do not need seven original dinners and a new sauce every week. You need a few meals that hold. A handful of proteins. A handful of vegetables your family will actually eat. A starch or two if that works for your household. Meals you can repeat without feeling like you’ve entered some low-budget nutritional time loop.

When meal planning is working, it often looks fairly boring from the outside, and that is actually not failure. (It is winning. The word is winning.)

The easiest way to make dinner less annoying is to start with protein and build from there. Not because every meal needs to look like a bodybuilder made it, but because protein is usually the difference between a satiating meal and toast with delusions of grandeur. Once that is sorted, the rest gets easier. Add vegetables. Add a clean fat, or whatever good fat makes sense for your people, whether that is olive oil, butter, avocado, tallow, coconut milk, olives, or a handful of something that gives the meal a bit more staying power. Add a starch if that works for your household and move on with your life.

It also helps to let meals overlap. Most households do not need completely different dinners every night. If you roast extra chicken, use it again. If you brown a lot of beef, split it into two meals. If you make a tray of vegetables, let them show up twice. You are feeding people, not striving for culinary sainthood.

Budget matters too, and pretending it doesn’t is irritating. A lot of wellness food advice still assumes unlimited grocery money, a calm kitchen, and several uninterrupted hours to prep things into matching containers. Lovely for whoever lives that life. For the rest of us, meal planning works better when it starts with reality. What is already in the house. What needs using up. What proteins are affordable this week. What shortcuts are worth taking and which ones just create cognitive dissonance because now dinner is “healthy” but everyone is still hungry and annoyed.

That is also why pantry and fridge awareness matters more than perfection. Quite often the fastest way to a better week is not a full reset but simply using what you already have with a bit more structure. Ground beef, eggs, rice, carrots, potatoes, Greek yogurt, frozen berries, broth, and one slightly suspect zucchini can still become a decent week of meals if someone sits down and thinks in patterns instead of panic.

That is part of why I’ve been slowly building out more practical support for this kind of thing behind the scenes. Not because the world needs one more shiny system, but because sometimes it genuinely helps to have something that reduces the mental load a bit. Budget, household size, what is already in the fridge, what needs using up, what is actually realistic this week. Not glamorous, but very useful.

Quite a lot of this has been built whilst nap-trapped under a sleeping toddler. In a different season that chunk of time might have gone to Pilates or a run. Instead, my softer mum bod has produced practitioner and meal-planning tools. Yay.

If dinner feels like a repeated ambush right now, I would make it simpler before I made it stricter. Pick a few reliable meals. Repeat proteins. Let leftovers help. Aim for enough protein, enough clean fat, and a little more steadiness so no one is prowling the kitchen an hour later like a raccoon.

If you want an easy place to start, pick three dinners and repeat them more often than your inner food snob thinks is spiritually acceptable. Something like: one beef meal, one chicken meal, one eggs-or-leftovers night. Add one breakfast that holds, one lunch you can repeat without resentment, and enough basics in the house to patch the gaps. That alone solves more chaos than most people expect.

A very ordinary dinner formula is often enough: protein, a vegetable, a fat that makes it satisfying, and a starch if that works for your people. Mince and rice bowls. Roast chicken and potatoes. Burgers and veg. Eggs and sourdough with fruit and sausage if dinner has collapsed into breakfast, which frankly is sometimes a public service.

And if even planning feels like too much this week, I get it. It’s not a personal failure, rather, it’s precisely when having a bit of structure helps most.

If you’re a paid subscriber, the library includes the Clean Eating Starter Guide, meal plans, and foundational resources built for this sort of real-life support. I’m also in the process of upgrading the member experience behind the scenes, so some of the older tool-style access is being retired as I build something cleaner and more secure. The library is here.

If you’re in Founders, you also have access to a fuller layer of support, including the 28-Day Paleo Meal Plan, bonus resources, deeper protocols, and early access to the upgraded Founders dashboard as it rolls out. That next phase is meant to be a cleaner home for the kind of support that actually helps in real life: meal-planning help, practical wellness tools, clean living guidance, educational resources, and bonus tools that make things feel less scattered and less mentally expensive.

And if you’re not in either place yet, you can subscribe below for access to the library and future member updates as this continues to grow.

Next week, I’ll circle back to the other thing a lot of you asked for: labs.

xo,

Brenna

Which sounds a touch dramatic until you look at how many parts of a practice are currently being held together by tabs, vaguely remembered systems, a notes graveyard and the quiet hope that you will be able to find that one thing again when you need it.

Not a critique, per se, but more of a census.

A lot of practitioners are doing very good work on top of wobbly infrastructure. They know how to think, how to spot patterns, and how to support clients well, but behind the scenes a surprising amount of the work is still being held together by mental bookmarks, repeated reconstruction, and low-grade compensation.

You know the ferritin range you prefer, but you still have to go find it. You know how you think about ingredient safety, but you still end up reopening the same five tabs. You know your pricing needs attention, your workflows are clunky, your boundaries are a bit too porous, and your offers have quietly outgrown the structure around them. You also have a life, which means the fixing of all that gets pushed to “later,” one of the busiest fake dates on the calendar.

That was the point at which I started building systems, not because I became a naturally ordered person overnight, let’s stay grounded, but because I ran out of margin. Also, for the record, I used to be an incredibly organized person before four children, which now feels like folklore.

To be clear, this was not because I had never thought structurally before. My original academic work was in investigative journalism before I finished a degree in political science, which I still regard with a certain amount of annoyance because it was the fastest route to graduation while I was constantly ill, not because it was the great love of my intellectual life. After that I spent years in administrative work, first in collegiate athletics and athletics foundations, then in nonprofits. Later I worked overseas in leadership development, discipline and character formation, helping people identify strengths and translate them into actual work. I led schools, wrote curriculum, trained teams, handled briefing and debriefing, and occasionally the less fun task of helping someone realise they were in the wrong role and needed a different direction. So I do not come to systems work as someone who has never touched a spreadsheet or had an organized thought.

I also once enrolled in a business course for health practitioners and paid a lofty amount for it, only to discover that while I appreciated the ideas, the format was built for a completely different species of woman. If you have a screaming baby on your hip, three other children needing something, a dog that still expects a walk, and you are functioning on interrupted sleep, the instruction to light a candle, gather your journaling materials, find the special workbook, and lovingly map out your dream business in five colours is not especially helpful. It is almost performance art.

One day I may make some of my tools in analog form for the lovely menopausal practitioners or the pre-children ones who still know where their pens are. But for my life, and frankly for a lot of practitioners, I needed something faster, cleaner, and nearly voice-dictatable. Something I could build and use in scraps of time without first creating the conditions for a Victorian study retreat.

I have four children. I homeschool. I work in scraps of time. If something requires me to mentally reconstruct it every single time I need it, it becomes obvious quite quickly that the problem is not my dedication or my seriousness but the process.

So I started formalizing the things I was reaching for over and over again. Not fluffy “content” but actual working tools.

What exists on the practitioner side now falls into a few main lanes.

LabLens is the lab interpretation side. Functional and terrain-based. Not just high, low, and move along, but how markers relate, how patterns cluster, and how to stop pretending isolated-marker thinking is enough once you have looked at enough bloodwork to know it is not.

The Practitioner Intelligence Suite is the broader clinical intelligence layer. Clean living analyzers, homeopathy pattern tools, and the systems that help you move faster through the recurring interpretive work that sits around client care but still affects it. The things practitioners keep answering, checking, cross-referencing, or mentally re-running because they matter, but do not need to be rebuilt from scratch every single time.

Practice Architecture is the business and operations side. Pricing, offers, workflow compression, unpaid labour, policies, scope drift, visibility alignment, all the bits practitioners tend to leave alone until they are irritated enough to admit the structure is costing them. It is not the glamorous part of practice, but it is often the difference between a practice that feels solid and one that quietly drains the life out of you.

Kitchen Ops is the implementation side for food, but not in the simplistic “look, it writes recipes too” sense. I am a very good cook. I wrote a cookbook in another life, did years of food blogging, recipe development, fermentation, and all the rest of it. Kitchen Ops started because I am absurdly specific about what I want a recipe card to do, how I want printable recipes to function, what I want visible on the page, and how much I loathe clunky tools that make simple things worse. From there it grew into recipe formatting, cost modelling, macro and mineral support, meal architecture, plan audits, and publishing support, because practitioners do not only need to know what they want a client eating. They need to be able to turn that thinking into something clear, usable, and not annoying.

Then there is a lighter preview layer. A few starter tools so practitioners can get a feel for how I think before stepping into the deeper systems. Not the full machine, more like the front porch.

And then there is a bundle for the people who do not want to buy one wrench at a time.

I built it this way because clinical work does not only break down where knowledge is missing. It breaks down where retrieval is clumsy, where structure is weak, and where the same thought process has to be rebuilt over and over again as though that is somehow a virtue.

It breaks down when your brain is being used as a filing cabinet.

It breaks down when implementation takes longer than interpretation.

It breaks down when pricing still feels vague enough that you apologise while saying it.

It breaks down when every answer takes too many steps to retrieve.

It breaks down when your clinical reasoning is sound but everything around it still feels improvised.

That is the layer I have been building for.

Not because every practitioner needs a sprawling empire of tools, but because some people need one thing that removes a repetitive drag point, gives them back an hour of their life, and steadies the ground under the work. If tools can help make the whole week feel less held together with string, that matters too.

If the friction is mostly labs, start with LabLens. If it is broader clinical support work, clean living analysis, or the recurring interpretive bits that keep eating time, start with the Practitioner Intelligence Suite. If it is mostly business structure, start with Practice Architecture. If it is mostly food implementation, planning, formatting, or turning recommendations into something a normal human can actually use, start with Kitchen Ops. If your current issue is more vague, as in “something about this is leaking and I am too tired to identify where,” start with the Practice Health Check and go from there.

If you want to look around, the practitioner access page is here:

https://brennamay.com/practitioners/access/

I do use an access form there, and that is intentional. Part of it is simple intellectual property protection. Part of it is also that these tools were built for practitioners, and I am not interested in tossing NTP-rooted frameworks into the wide blue yonder where they can be picked up by random health coaches and self-appointed wellness experts who want to cosplay clinical depth without the training or the responsibility. That is not good for practitioners, and it is certainly not good for clients.

If you are still holding half your practice together with memory and tabs, you are not uniquely broken. You are probably just overdue for better scaffolding.

I built these because I needed them.

Now they exist for the practitioners who are tired of rebuilding the same thought process every week and assuming that is just part of the job.

— Brenna

P.S. If you already know me and are trying to figure out where to start, you can always reach out. I am not allergic to human conversation.

A lot of these started because I got tired of wasting good brain on repetitive nonsense. Looking up the same kinds of ingredients. Reworking the same kinds of meal structures. Re-answering the same kinds of questions. Not because I don’t love thinking. I do. I love the thinking part. I just don’t think my best hours should be burned up on admin drag, decision fatigue, or research spirals that could have been turned into tools.

So the library is fuller now. And more useful.

If you’re a paid subscriber, the Holistic Wellness Resource Library now includes a stronger mix of practical wellness tools, kitchen support, and a few starter resources all housed in one place. If you’re in the Founders Circle, your vault has grown too, with the extra layers, bonus tools, and protocol support that belong there.

For anyone not inside yet, I wanted to give you one small taster.

A free one to poke at

I made Clean Living Intelligence™ GPT public, because it’s a good entry point into how I think about products and ingredient decisions without handing over the whole kitchen sink.

It’s a broad clean-living tool for checking things like skincare, baby products, household products, and everyday cleaner swaps when you want a second set of eyes that is not easily seduced by beige packaging and the word natural.

You can access it here:

Clean Living Intelligence™ GPT

That one is public. The rest of the newer additions live inside the membership.

What’s new in the Holistic Wellness Resource Library

I added:

Skincare Intelligence™

This is the more skincare-specific tool. It helps you sort through ingredient lists, barrier support, irritation risk, sunscreen logic, and cleaner alternatives without disappearing into an ingredient rabbit hole for forty minutes and resurfacing annoyed.

Kitchen Ops™ | Home Recipe Helper

This helps you build or adjust recipes in a way that is more supportive, more practical, and less fake-healthy nonsense.

Kitchen Ops™ | Home Meal Builder

This is for the people who want a little more structure around meals without needing to become a full-time prep goblin.

I also cleaned up the library itself so the tools and downloads are easier to find and not scattered like loose socks in a hallway.

If you’re a paid subscriber, you can find everything here:

Holistic Wellness Resource Library

What’s in the Founders Circle now

If you’re in Founders, you get everything in the regular library plus the deeper layer.

That includes the vault, the protocol library, and the bonus tools that land there first.

I also added:

Kitchen Ops™ | Recipe Publisher

This one is for turning structured recipes into cleaner formats for blog posts, Substack, email, print, and similar things without needing to wrestle the formatting to the ground yourself.

And of course Founders still has the protocol side of things, which is really the point of that tier. It’s meant to be the richer layer, not just the same shelf with a fancier label stuck on it.

If you’re already a Founder, your vault is here:

Founders Circle Vault

Quietly, this is becoming what I hoped it would be

Not a content dump. Not a giant pile of PDFs no one ever opens. Not another membership that sounds good in theory and then just sits there being decorative.

A real library. A useful one. Something you can actually return to when you need a little clarity, a little structure, or a little help making decisions without reinventing the wheel every time.

This is still just the tip of my nerdy iceberg, which feels both promising and slightly threatening.

If you’re already inside, go poke around.

If you’re not and this sounds useful, you can subscribe here and get access to the library.

And if you’re already in Founders, thank you for being the people who said yes early. You’re helping me build this in real time, and I don’t take that lightly.

xo,

Brenna