You cannot build anything that lasts on ground you refuse to look at

Some things have to come down before you can see what was holding them up.

I drove past a building in St Albans this week that stopped me. It burned some weeks ago, I found out afterwards, and what is left of it is still standing there with the metal peeled away from the frame and hanging down in long torn sheets. The sky was clear and blue behind it and the whole thing looked strangely beautiful, which felt like an odd thing to think about somebody's business.

I took a photograph and I have been thinking about it since.

Last week I wrote about the seasons starting to turn and how the habits we build in summer get tested when it gets dark and cold. This picture takes the same idea a lot deeper. Sometimes things do not just get harder, sometimes they come down completely, and what you are left with is the frame and a decision about what to put back.

A large part of my work is not really about food at all, at least not at the start. It is about listening to somebody's story and hearing the rules they have built over the years without reflecting on who constructed them. "I can't eat that, my metabolism is slow, I have tried everything and nothing works". These opinions are not held lightly, they are structures, built slowly out of years of experience, environment, advice and disappointment, and by the time somebody sits down in front of me they are usually load bearing.

And underneath nearly all of them is the same belief. That their body has let them down. I totally resonate. When you are exhausted and nobody can tell you why, when your blood report come back "all normal" but you still cannot get through the afternoon without a coffee or a snack. You feel you're doing everything you see online, taking the "right" supplements but it's just not working. I get it, you feel you are left with a body that is non-functioning, genes that are destined to work against you - so what's the point?

But it is almost never what is happening, the part of my work that matters most is leaning into those stories and asking two questions about each one:

1. Is this actually true?

2. Is it serving me?

Nine times out of ten the answer to both is no, but the story has become an embedded part of how somebody understands themselves, and you cannot simply talk someone out of something like that. Sometimes the only way to break it down is to break through it.

What replaces it is much more interesting, because the body is not a thing that fails you. It is a thing that is constantly making decisions on your behalf, and most of those decisions are about keeping you alive. Here is one that I find remarkable every time I explain it. The calcium in your blood has to stay within a very narrow range, because your heart and your nerves cannot function properly without it. So if it starts to fall, your body will take calcium out of your bones to top it back up. It will take apart your own skeleton to keep your heart beating correctly, and it will do this without asking you, because staying alive today matters more than staying strong in twenty years.

That is not a system that has let you down. That is a system making hard choices every second.

The same thinking runs through low energy availability, which is something I see far more often than people expect, and not only in athletes. When the body does not have enough fuel coming in, it starts turning things down. Reproductive function, thyroid output, bone building, immune response, systems get deprioritised, not because anything is broken but because the body has decided that if this shortage continues, we need to do everything possible to survive it. The fatigue that people describe as their body failing them is very often their body succeeding at something else entirely.

Which changes what the symptoms are, it's the moment I see my clients gaze change slightly, like the penny has silently dropped and they stop seeing the faults to be corrected and start listening to those silent whispers from their body.

This is why I keep coming back to the same three words:

Lean in to the story you have been carrying, because it will not shift until you look at it properly.

Learn what your body is actually doing and why, because it is almost always more sophisticated than you have been led to believe.

And then level up, from that understanding rather than from somebody else's rules.

The building in the photograph will come down eventually and something else will go up in its place, and whatever that is will be built by people who know exactly what happened there. You cannot build anything that lasts on ground you refuse to look at.

If any of that sounded like your own story, that is usually where the work starts rather than where it ends. I offer a free 45 minute discovery call with no obligation. We talk about what has been going on and whether I am the right person to help. If I am not, I will tell you

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