I’ve been thinking about bodies, weight, food, and lifestyle management since I was a child. I was counting calories by the time I was ten. I grew up "solid" and learned early that being "solid" was a problem. I internalised that belief and lived inside it for decades

I moved to the USA and married young at 22. Built a life that looked like progress. What it actually was, was a slow dismantling. The cycle ran the same way each time: I’d fall apart, climb back, find myself again — and the moment I did, that ground would be taken from me. I did that loop more times than I want to count.

The last time I climbed out, I held the line. He didn’t.

That taught me everything I need to know about what a nervous system carries, and what it takes to actually regulate it.

In August 2022, at 44, I couldn’t keep going the way I was. Burnout, perimenopause, and years of nervous-system dysregulation had pushed my body into constant threat. I wasn’t just overweight — I was insulin resistant, inflamed, breathless, and watching myself decline.

I had two options.
I chose to live.

I quietened the noise and stripped everything back.

The first thing I fixed wasn’t my diet or my training. It was my perspective. I got honest about who I was, what I actually valued, and what I believed about my body. When that shifted, everything else followed — not through force, but through alignment.

I stabilised my blood sugar. I trained for strength. I prioritised recovery. I built systems I could return to, even on the worst days.

Two and a half years of work. Unglamorous. Real.

Then, at 46, I became a widow.

The foundation I’d built held me through that. Without it, I wouldn’t have survived that year intact.

I’m 47 now. I’m studying lifestyle medicine.

I’m building Solace for women who are exhausted, dysregulated, and being told to try harder. They’re insulin resistant, inflamed, losing ground — and they’ve forgotten who they are.

Massage is where I start. Not because bodies are problems, but because the fastest path to a regulated nervous system is through the body. One session can give a woman the first real taste of parasympathetic rest she’s had in years.

That drop — that undeniable drop — changes everything.

Once she feels what regulation actually feels like, the real work begins.

This isn’t theory. This is what I’ve lived.

And I want nothing more than to see women live the rest of their lives from that place of strength and unshakeable self-possession.