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There’s a sentence I hear in consults so often now that I can almost predict it. I’ll ask a client what’s stopping them from exercising, from prepping food, from doing anything at all for herself, and the answer is never really “I can’t be bothered.”

It’s some version of: “There’s nothing stopping me, really. It’s just being organised and planning that, I guess, isn’t it?”

Not “I don’t want to.” But “I don’t know where the time is.”

And that’s not a motivation problem. It’s a design problem. And design problems have design solutions.

You are not lazy. You are time poor.

Before I was a naturopath, I worked in child protection social work for over a decade. But I was also committed to my health journey. That job doesn’t let you coast on motivation. You’re constantly pulled between crises, paperwork, and people who need you now. If I’d relied on feeling inspired to get through my week, nothing would have got done.

What got me through was time blocking. Not vaguely “I’ll fit it in somewhere”, but actually deciding, in advance, this hour is for this. I still do it now, in my own business, with two children of my own.

The reason I bring my clients through the same thinking isn’t because I read it in a book. It’s because I lived it, in a job with genuinely relentless demands, and it’s the only thing that ever actually worked.

So when I sit down with clients and go through the actual shape of their week, what time they get up, when they leave the house, which days look different from the others, I’m not being nosy. I’m looking for the pockets of time that already exist. Because they usually do. Nobody had ever asked them to go looking. I am also not the practitioner that gives someone unrealistic plans to someone.

More often than not, it’s something small: a thirty minute window that already exists somewhere in the week but is currently being lost to nothing in particular. That’s not a big ask. That’s not “get up at 5am.” That’s just noticing what’s already there and deciding, ahead of time, what goes in it.

The plan isn’t more willpower. It’s fewer decisions. If you have to decide every single day whether you’re going to exercise, eat well, or do something for yourself, you will lose momentum some days, because you’re tired, because life is loud, because deciding is exhausting when you’re already stretched thin. Routine takes the decision away. You don’t decide on a Tuesday morning whether to move your body. You decided that weeks ago, when you set up the routine. Tuesday, you just have to show up.

Willpower is expensive. Your environment is free.

My confession is that, if there’s chocolate in my house, I will eat ALL of it. I’m not exaggerating or self depractating, I mean it as fact. I will eat the chocolate no matter who it belongs to! In my head, it basically has my name on it.

I tell clients my stories because I think we do ourselves a disservice pretending that willpower is a personality trait some people have and others don’t. It isn’t. It’s a finite resource, and it runs out faster than you think, especially if you’re already managing a job, a household, bad health and small children on interrupted sleep.

So instead of fighting your willpower, change what it has to fight against.

If the thing that always gets you is chocolate, put it in a tin. Put that tin inside another tin. Put it somewhere high up, somewhere you have to actually want it enough to go and get the step stool. That tiny bit of friction is often the whole intervention. Not because you’ve suddenly developed superhuman self control, but because you’ve made the impulsive version of the decision slightly harder to act on than the considered one.

The same goes for wine. If it’s always in the house because that’s just what you do when people come round, ask where it’s stored. Out of sight isn’t about hiding from yourself, it’s about not making a tired brain, at the end of a long day, have to overrule a bottle sitting right there on the counter.

This isn’t about eliminating anything forever. It’s about giving your future self, on the day she’s running on empty, a slightly easier decision to make.

What this actually looks like

• Pick a day each week, even 20 minutes, to look at what’s coming and decide, in advance, where movement, meals, and downtime are going to sit. Not vaguely. Specifically: this slot, this day.

• Find the pockets that already exist in your week before you try to create new ones. They’re usually there.

• Notice your own “if it’s in the house, I’ll eat it” moment. Everyone has one. Don’t fight it head-on, just add friction and distance from it. Move it, wrap it, put it somewhere less convenient.

• Stop treating a bad day as a character failure. It’s usually an environment failure. Change the environment, not the verdict on yourself.

None of this requires more discipline than you already have. It just stops asking your discipline to do a job that planning should be doing instead.

Strategies and support like this, is how I get results with my clients. If you want to book a free 30 minute discovery call, email me hello@rachaeljanehealth.com.

This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Speak with a qualified practitioner before starting any supplement protocol.

In Health,

Rachael Jane

We hand it to doctors, trained to manage disease, not to ask why it started. Ten minute appointments aren’t made for investigations into the root causes of your health issues. They are built to match a prescription to a symptom.

We hand our health to marketing, which sells us a certain body, a certain glow, a certain morning routine — as if buying the right thing means we’re finally going to look the way we want!

We hand it to supplement companies, who sell certainty in a bottle. Except your body doesn’t work according to a shelved product, it runs off your minerals, your gut, your hormones, all talking to each other in ways a generic supplement or protocol can’t see.

AND we hand it to genetics, treating DNA like a verdict instead of a starting point. “It runs in the family” isn’t the end of the sentence, it’s the beginning of where you start to try and improve your health now.

Here’s what I’ve learned in clinic: none of these own your health. They can inform it and support it, but the decision to investigate, to keep asking why, to keep going when the process feels hard, that is what you own!

That’s the part nobody sells: showing up for yourself, consistently, even when nobody’s watching.

Here’s what that’s looked like for a few of the people I’ve worked with:

“I’d been told for years my bloods were ‘normal’ and just needed to manage my stress better. This was the first time someone looked at why my gut and my hormones were fighting each other.”

“I nearly didn’t book the call — I’d spent so much on supplements that did nothing. The difference was having a plan built around my own results, not a generic protocol.”

Health isn’t something that happens to you. It’s something you take back.

If you’re ready to start investigating instead of just coping, get in touch.

I work with a small number of clients at a time, which is why my results are personalised. If you want to have an honest conversation about how I can help, book a 30 minute discovery call. Message me on the button below…

In Health,

Rachael Jane x

This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Speak with a qualified practitioner before starting any supplement protocol.

What I do!

There’s a moment I hear about constantly from the people I work with. It’s not the moment they feel better, it is earlier than that. It is the moment they stopped feeling like they were making it up.

Because that’s what years of unresolved symptoms do. It’s not just the fatigue, the bloating, the immune system that keeps letting you down, it’s the slow erosion of trusting yourself, when you’ve been told repeatedly that everything looks fine.

One client put it plainly: “I thought I was going crazy or overthinking it all.” Blood tests three or four times. Personal trainers. Every diet going. She kept getting ill. She kept hitting walls. Nobody could tell her why. BUT she wasn’t overthinking it. She just hadn’t been asked the right questions and had continuity of support.

The problem isn’t you. It’s the system.

Standard blood tests are designed to find disease. They’re not designed to find what’s happening before disease such as, the nutrient gaps, the gut disruption, the hormonal patterns, the early signals that the body is struggling.

So people fall through. Results come back normal. And without anything diagnosable, there is no conclusion, explanation or support. Doctors or health practitioners might tell you that it must be a lifestyle or mindset problem or something to manage long term.

Although lifestyle and mindset play a huge role in mental and physical health, they aren’t an explanation. Most of the time, the reason people don’t have answers or understand their body is because of the questions being asked of them and because they don’t have continuous support.

What actually changes things

It’s not a stricter protocol. It is not more willpower. It is an understanding of your body.

When someone genuinely knows why their body is doing what it’s doing, why their energy crashes before their period, why they catch every illness going, why the bloating keeps coming back, then things can change. They stop fighting their body and start working with it.

“It removes the guesswork and shows exactly what your body is deficient in, rather than blindly taking supplements you may not need” — that’s a client describing her hair tissue mineral analysis results. That’s what real investigation and support look like.

The outcomes I get with people are steady and real. Energy returning. Immune system stabilising. One client with rheumatoid arthritis, who described her life as constantly moving from one cold to the next, went into remission.

Something my clients often say

“I wish I’d done this years ago.”

If you’ve tried everything and still don’t feel well, that’s not a “you” problem. Your symptoms aren’t random. They’re information. And you deserve someone who takes the time to actually read them.

I work with people experiencing unresolved gut, hormonal, and immune health concerns through personalised naturopathic nutrition programmes. If this resonates, you can find out more at rachaeljanehealth.com

This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Speak with a qualified practitioner before starting any supplement protocol.

Work with me

“Perimenopause” has become a much more widely discussed term in recent years, which is a genuinely good thing. Women are getting better at naming and communicating what they’re experiencing in their 40s, and often their late 30s, and that is important.

But there’s a pattern I see frequently in practice that I want to address, because it’s causing some confusion: many symptoms experienced during perimenopause may be influenced by a relative imbalance between oestrogen and progesterone, sometimes referred to as "oestrogen dominance".

What is oestrogen dominance?

The term "oestrogen dominance" is commonly used in functional and integrative medicine to describe a situation where the effects of oestrogen are relatively greater than those of progesterone. This imbalance can happen because:

• Oestrogen levels are genuinely elevated

• Progesterone levels are low

• Oestrogen is being poorly metabolised and recirculated rather than cleared

The symptoms overlap substantially with perimenopause: bloating (especially cyclical), heavy or painful periods, PMS symptoms including irritability and mood changes, fatigue, and breast tenderness. This is exactly why they get confused.

But perimenopause, strictly speaking, involves the gradual decline of ovarian function, which means both oestrogen and progesterone are fluctuating and, over time, declining. The picture is different, even if the symptoms sound similar.

The gut-hormone connection

One of the less-discussed aspects of oestrogen dominance is the role the gut plays in it.

Oestrogen, once used by the body, is packaged up in the liver and sent to the gut to be excreted. In a healthy gut environment, this happens smoothly. However, alterations in the gut microbiome may influence the activity of enzymes such as beta-glucuronidase, which can “unpackage” that oestrogen and allow it to be reabsorbed back into the body.

The result: Increased beta-glucuronidase activity may contribute to greater reabsorption of oestrogen metabolites, potentially influencing overall oestrogen exposure.

Calcium D-glucarate is sometimes used in functional medicine to support glucuronidation pathways involved in hormone metabolism.

Methylation and hormone clearance

Another piece of this puzzle is a process called methylation — specifically, an enzyme pathway called COMT (catechol-O-methyltransferase), which is involved in breaking down oestrogen metabolites.

Adequate levels of nutrients such as folate, vitamin B12 and magnesium help support methylation pathways involved in hormone metabolism. While many factors influence these pathways, nutrient insufficiencies may affect their efficiency.

This is one reason why supporting methylation is often considered alongside direct hormone support in clinical practice.

What this means in practice

If you have symptoms that feel hormonal, particularly cyclical bloating, mood shifts before your period, fatigue, and heavy periods, it’s worth exploring whether oestrogen dominance is part of the picture, rather than assuming perimenopause is the only explanation.

Hormone testing may be helpful in selected cases, particularly when symptoms are unclear or other conditions need to be ruled out. Hormone levels can fluctuate considerably during perimenopause, so test results should always be interpreted alongside symptoms and clinical history.

This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Speak with a qualified practitioner before starting any supplement protocol.

I want to be careful here, because I believe in GPs and the NHS. We are so lucky to have this healthcare system. They operate under enormous resource constraints, with appointment times that make thorough investigation difficult, and with referral pathways that are rightly prioritised for acute and emergency care.

But there is a cohort of people, and I see them every week, who have been managing a cluster of chronic symptoms for years, have attended their GP repeatedly, and have been told some version of: “Your results are normal. You’ll just have to manage it.”

Sometimes they’ve been given a label like IBS, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia. These describe their experience but don’t explain it, and people are left with no actionable next step.

That’s not a failure of care. It’s a limitation of the testing and referral pathways currently available within a standard NHS consultation.

What functional testing can add

Functional health tests - gut microbiome analysis (such as the GI Map), hair tissue mineral analysis (HTMA), full thyroid panels, comprehensive hormone panels, and specific stool markers like calprotectin — look at the body in more granular detail than standard bloods. They’re asking different questions.

A standard blood panel will check your inflammation markers, your TSH, your iron. That’s genuinely useful, and if something is flagged, that’s important. But it won’t tell you:

• Whether your gut bacteria composition is contributing to your symptoms

• Whether you have sub clinical thyroid patterns.

• Whether you have low digestive enzyme activity that’s driving bloating and poor absorption

• Whether your calprotectin level (a marker of gut inflammation) is elevated, and if so, by how much

• Whether you have H. pylori present at a low level that hasn’t triggered a standard test

• Whether specific bacteria in your gut are in ratios associated with IBS

Have a look at my offers if you want further testing

These are answerable questions. They’re just not routinely asked within standard care.

What to do if you feel like you’ve hit a wall

First: don’t abandon conventional medicine. If functional testing reveals something like significantly elevated calprotectin, the right next step is to bring that information back to your GP and request appropriate follow-up investigations, such as a colonoscopy. Functional testing is a complement to conventional care, not a replacement for it.

Second: document everything. Symptoms. Dates. Photos. Previous test results. The more organised your history, the easier it is for any practitioner (functional or conventional) to work with.

Third: if you’re considering functional testing, work with a qualified practitioner who will interpret the results alongside your full clinical history. Raw test data without clinical context can be confusing and, sometimes, misleading. if you’re unsure who is qualified, contact me.

The deeper point

People who feel unheard by their healthcare system often feel that way because their symptoms are real, persistent, and affecting their quality of life, but they don’t show up clearly on the tests that standard care prioritises.

That’s not a sign that nothing is wrong. Sometimes it means you’re asking the wrong questions with the wrong tools, so you don’t have the full story.

Functional testing is one way to ask different questions. It won’t always have all the answers. But for many people, it’s the first time they’ve seen something on paper that makes sense of what they’ve been experiencing. That matters more than I can explain, clinically, but also emotionally.

This article is for educational purposes only. Functional testing should be interpreted by a qualified practitioner. If you are experiencing significant or worsening symptoms, please consult your GP.

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