Health Is a Relationship, Not a Battle
I've had a lot of new clients tell me some version of the same thing lately. "I don't know who to believe anymore." And honestly, I get it. There's more health information floating around right now than at any point in human history, and somehow people feel more lost than ever. Everybody online is selling you the one true answer. Keto is the answer. No wait, it's vegan. No carbs, or actually, fruit is the key to everything. There's a new superfood or a new study or a new miracle supplement every single week, each one promising to finally fix whatever's wrong with you. It's a lot. It's exhausting to try to keep up with, and it quietly makes people feel like they're failing at something nobody ever clearly explained the rules to.
So here's the truth. You're probably not going to hear me say a lot of the things you've heard from other health professionals. Not because I think they're wrong and I'm right. I just see health through a different lens, and I want to explain why, because I think it changes everything about how I work with people.
My training is in naturopathic medicine and acupuncture, but my curiosity has never stayed inside those lines. I love reading research. I get genuinely excited about newer things like peptides. And in that same breath, I have enormous respect for Traditional Chinese Medicine, herbalism, seasonal living, and the kind of wisdom people have carried for generations just from paying close attention to nature and to each other. I don't think of those as opposites fighting for territory. I think of them as different parts of the same conversation. That's shaped how I practice, how I teach, and honestly how I live my own life. If my recommendations ever feel different from what you're used to hearing, this is probably the best explanation I've got. If I had to boil the whole thing down to one sentence, it would be this: health is a relationship, not a battle.
Your Body Is Not the Enemy
One of the most heartbreaking things I hear, especially from women, is some version of "I just want them to take my uterus out" or "my body is betraying me." Sometimes it comes out of frustration after years of brutal periods. Sometimes it's endometriosis, fibroids, infertility, autoimmune disease, or something else that's left someone exhausted and defeated. I understand the feeling. I've had my own moments of wishing my body would just cooperate instead of making everything so hard. When you're hurting, it's natural to feel angry at the thing that hurts.
But I still don't believe your body is your enemy.
Your body is doing its absolute damnedest to keep you alive with whatever information and resources it has on hand. That little belly pooch a lot of women carry isn't a flaw. A lot of the time your body is protecting the organs sitting right behind it. The extra weight that shows up on hips and thighs after menopause isn't a failure of willpower either. If you fall, your body wants that padding there to protect your bones. None of that means every response is ideal, and it definitely doesn't mean you should just accept suffering as the price of admission. It means I start from curiosity instead of blame. Instead of only asking "how do we shut this symptom up," I'm also asking "what is your body trying to tell you, and how do we actually support that."
That's a very different conversation. It also means I care just as much about your story as I do about your diagnosis. What changed right before symptoms started. What season of life you're in. How you've been sleeping, how you've been eating, what you've been quietly carrying that nobody else can see. A diagnosis tells me what's happening. Your story tells me why, and that's usually where the real work actually starts.
It's also why I'll sometimes ask a question that catches people completely off guard. If someone's had a hysterectomy, a gallbladder removed, an ovary removed, part of their bowel taken out, I'll ask, "did you ever actually take time to grieve that." The answer is almost always silence.
Not because the surgery was wrong. Most of the time it was exactly the right call. If something is functioning incorrectly and it's threatening your life or your health, please, remove it. I am not anti surgery and I am not anti life saving medicine, not even a little bit. But that doesn't cancel out the fact that a literal piece of you got removed and thrown away like garbage. Those two things can both be true at once. It was the right decision, and it's still a loss. We don't leave much room for that in modern healthcare. We take out the organ, close the incision, and move on to the next appointment. But our bodies were never just a collection of interchangeable parts. They're tangled up in our identity and our history and the way we move through the world, and I think it's okay to grieve a piece of that even while you're grateful it's gone.
When I sit down with someone, I'm not only thinking about what they want to accomplish. I'm also asking what their body actually needs, because when was the last time any of us stopped and asked our own body that question directly. Do you need water. Do you need a nap. Do you need movement, or maybe you just need to be listened to for once. What you want and what your body needs aren't always the same thing, and that gap is exactly where I come in. If you don't know how to hear what your body is telling you yet, that's what tools like acupuncture and herbs and flower essences and homeopathy are for. They let me have a conversation with your body directly, alongside the conversation I'm having with you. You might desperately want to lose weight before a trip, while your body is asking for sleep and a real chance to recover from months of chronic stress. My job isn't to ignore what you want. It's to help close the gap between what you're hoping for and what your body is actually asking for, because real long term health comes from working with your body instead of trying to muscle your way past it.
I Care More About Your Health Than Your Weight
This is probably the part people find most surprising, so let me just say it straight. I don't care about the number on your scale. I don't care about your BMI. Not unless you care about it. What I actually care about is your energy, your sleep, your digestion, your strength, your labs, your pain, whether you can live the life you're trying to live. Weight might be part of that conversation sometimes. It is never the whole story, and it is never a measure of what you're worth.
Sometimes weight loss is a real, legitimate goal, and I will absolutely help someone work toward it, especially when it's tied to something concrete, like qualifying for a surgery that's going to give them their quality of life back. But sometimes it's not the priority at all, and pretending otherwise does real damage. If someone comes to me in the middle of grieving a spouse, I'm not bringing up their weight. That would be ridiculous. What they need in that season is permission to eat enough and just get through the day. We shame women constantly for gaining weight, and we shame them constantly for getting older, and honestly I'm tired of both. I'd rather know if you're strong enough to carry your own groceries, whether you're sleeping through the night, whether you have the energy to actually do the things you want to do with your one life. That tells me a lot more than a scale ever could.
Aging Isn't a Disease
That same philosophy is probably why you'll never hear me say aging is something to fight.
Don't get me wrong, I like feeling good in my body as much as the next person. I get my eyelashes done because it makes me feel more like myself. It's basically my one indulgence since I don't wear much makeup otherwise. I love that I have thick hair, and if it got thin, I'd probably be sad about it. I think cosmetic acupuncture is a great option for the right person, and I find the research on red light therapy genuinely fascinating. There are so many good tools available now for skin, for healing, for feeling like yourself as you age, and I have zero problem with someone using them because it makes them feel good and confident.
Where I start to have a problem is when the conversation shifts from caring for yourself to fearing yourself.
Somewhere along the way, especially as women, we got taught that every wrinkle is a problem, every gray hair is a failure, and every birthday after forty is something to hide. Whole industries got built on convincing us that looking older is the worst thing that could ever happen to us, and we spend a fortune trying to erase every sign we've actually lived a full life, all while wishing for the privilege of growing old in the first place. Those two things don't sit well together. I want to be a wise old crone someday. Gray hair, wrinkles, all of it. I think that's something worth looking forward to instead of dreading.
I'd rather talk about longevity than anti aging. People use those words like they mean the same thing and they really don't. Anti aging asks "how do I look younger." Longevity asks "how do I stay healthy enough to actually enjoy the years I have." That second question is the one that gets me excited. I want people hiking in their seventies, gardening in their eighties, traveling after retirement, picking up their grandkids without pain, still learning new things well into old age. If your skin happens to look healthier along the way, great. But that was never the actual goal. It's just a nice side effect of living well.
Menopause is probably the clearest example of this whole thing. Menopause is not a disease. Just like Puberty isn't a disease either. They're both normal transitions a healthy body is built to move through. That doesn't mean they're easy, and it doesn't mean you should just white knuckle it. If you're dealing with debilitating hot flashes, brain fog, insomnia, painful sex, anxiety, joint pain, those symptoms absolutely deserve real treatment. HRT has changed the game for so many women, and I'm genuinely grateful we have it. When it's my turn, I fully expect I'll use it too, partly because we're living under a completely different kind of stress than our ancestors were, and I want us living longer and actually feeling good while we do it.
Treating the symptoms is not the same thing as treating the transition itself like it's a malfunction. That distinction matters a lot to me. I don't want women thinking their body broke just because they entered a new chapter of life. I want them to understand what's happening, get real support for whatever's making it hard, and move through that season with as much strength and dignity as they can. Every season of life asks something different of you. Menopause isn't the end of vitality. It's just a different season, and like every season, it deserves respect instead of fear.
Health Isn't One Size Fits All
If you've worked with me, you've probably noticed my recommendations change. Sometimes a lot. That's not because I flip flop or chase whatever's trending. It's because the person in front of me changed, and so did the season they're living in.
What I tell someone who's grieving is never going to be what I tell someone training for a marathon. What I recommend for a college kid trying to survive finals week looks completely different from what I recommend for someone recovering from surgery. Someone in the middle of perimenopause has different needs than a teenager just starting her cycle. Someone trying to qualify for a knee replacement might need a real conversation about intentional weight loss, while someone sitting across from me after losing their spouse just needs permission to eat enough food and get through the day. Context changes everything.
This is part of why I love Traditional Chinese Medicine so much. It teaches you to think in seasons, and not just the seasons outside your window, though those matter too. The seasons of your life. There are seasons for growth and seasons for rest. Seasons for grief and seasons for celebration. Seasons where your body wants to push forward and seasons where it wants you to slow all the way down. We'd never expect a tree to bloom in the middle of winter, and yet we expect ourselves to show up with the exact same energy and capacity every single day of the year. Nature doesn't work that way. Neither do we.
When I talk about seasonal living, I'm not asking you to romanticize things or spend your weekends foraging in the woods. I'm just asking you to notice the patterns that are already there. Maybe your body craves warming food in the winter and lighter meals in the summer. Maybe your energy shifts across your cycle. Maybe your workouts need to look different in a season of burnout than they did six months ago. None of that is failure. It's just paying attention, and paying attention might be one of the most underrated health skills there is.
This is also where I think a lot about neurodivergence, since I strongly suspect I'm AuDHD myself, and it's changed how I practice more than almost anything else has. Recommendations have to account for actual capacity, not just what would be ideal on paper. Executive function matters. Sensory stuff matters. Money and time matter. There's no point handing someone the "perfect" protocol if they don't have the bandwidth to follow it, because that just becomes one more thing to feel like they failed at. I'd rather build something someone can actually keep doing, even if it looks smaller than the textbook version.
Sometimes that means celebrating that someone remembered their supplements three or four days this week instead of scolding them for the days they missed. Sometimes it means saying, flat out, that gluten free chicken nuggets are a perfectly good meal. I keep a brand in my own freezer for exactly this reason. They're consistent, they never mess with my stomach, and on the days I truly cannot stomach cooking, they're something I know I can eat. Add a little low sugar ketchup for your vegetable base and some protein, and that's a real meal, not a failure. Same goes for the freezer meals a lot of us lean on because there just isn't capacity left in the day to cook from scratch. I wish there was less plastic packaging in the world, I really do. But the real choice most days isn't homemade food versus a freezer meal. It's a freezer meal versus not eating, or a freezer meal versus fast food eaten in the car. Eat food. Drink water. Sleep. Connect with other humans. Those foundations matter more than whether dinner came from your own stove.
One Plus One Doesn't Always Equal Two
There's a concept I love that natural medicine understands in a way conventional medicine often doesn't, and that's synergy. In Chinese herbology there's often a "driver" herb in a formula, one ingredient whose job is basically to steer everything else where it needs to go so the whole formula works better than any single herb would on its own. That's synergy. One plus one doesn't equal two. Sometimes it equals three, or ten, because the pieces are working together instead of in isolation.
I think about the body the same way. Fiber doesn't just lower cholesterol. It feeds your microbiome. It supports your bowel habits. It helps your body metabolize estrogen properly. It supports blood sugar. It affects inflammation throughout your whole system. One change ripples out into a dozen others, because your body was never actually separate systems duct taped together in the first place. That's why you're rarely going to leave a session with just one recommendation. You might walk out with an herb, a food tweak, a movement suggestion, a lifestyle change, maybe a supplement, because I'm not just trying to move one number on one lab. I'm trying to support the whole web that number is tangled up in.
Conventional medicine tends to work differently, and I want to be really clear that I respect what it does well. Emergency medicine, trauma care, imaging, antibiotics, cancer screening, life saving surgery, these are genuinely incredible. I will never stop telling people to go get their mammogram, their DEXA scan, their pap smear, their colonoscopy. Go get checked. If you're in a car accident, go to the ER, that is exactly what it's for. Natural medicine was never meant to replace any of that. It's just asking a different question. Conventional medicine's job is mostly to keep you alive. My job is to help you actually live well. Those aren't competing goals, they're two different, necessary pieces of the same bigger picture. I do wish conventional medicine leaned into synergy more, though. Too often, when one blood pressure medication doesn't fully work, the answer is just to add a second one, then a third, then a fourth, instead of stepping back and asking why the first one wasn't enough to begin with. I'd rather go back to the root and ask that question before we reach for another prescription.
My Role
I'm not here to force your body into submission, and I'm not here to help you win a fight against it. I'm here to help you understand it. Sometimes what you want and what your body needs are different things, and my job is helping those two things move a little closer together, one honest conversation and one small adjustment at a time.
I don't think I'm right and everyone else is wrong. I just think about health differently than a lot of the voices you've probably heard, and I wanted you to understand why. Ancient wisdom and modern science aren't opposites competing for your attention. I think they're in conversation with each other, each one filling in what the other misses. Your body isn't something to fix or defeat. I think it's something to listen to. And there isn't one right way to be healthy that applies to everybody in every season of their life. I think health has to be as flexible and as alive as you are.
If any of this sounds like you, I think we'd get along. I believe health is a relationship, not a battle. My goal was never to help you fight your body or chase some impossible version of perfect. It's to help you understand yourself, feel better, and build something sustainable in the season you're actually living in right now, not the season you think you're supposed to be in.n develop.
