The Full Story

My Full Story / Journey:

As a child a remember being strong, fit and always up to mischief building dens, playing in the nearby quarry’s and doing and loving lots of sports. I loved to be outside, in the garden, drawing random stuff and walking long distances to visit friends. I excelled at school, one because I was already suffering from insomnia, so I could study a lot of the night and two because I was always trying to prove myself to myself and everyone else around me!

After school I dabbled in a few things, I went to art college (hoping to be a graphic designer) but couldn’t hack the criticism (mainly from myself) of my work and ideas. So, I did some work-based qualifications in care and worked with vulnerable people. In between these I studied law and then sociology and had designs on being a social worker for a while. I worked as a warden in various sheltered housing complexes and then eventually ended up as a Human Resources Manager for many years.

Since my teens I had suffered with severe depression, anxiety, OCD and eating disorders (probably bought on by child abuse suffered at the hands of a family friend on and off, over some years). I was also partying very hard to escape me reality as often as possible with booze and party drugs. I had IBS, food intolerances, backpain, headaches and was often fatigued and ‘catching’ every illness around me. I just generally felt rubbish most of the time.

When I met my husband-to-be, we travelled to India where I became seriously unwell with Salmonella poisoning for the whole trip and in fact for many months afterwards too (when I was travelling Sri-Lanka). After I returned to the UK, my husband-to-be and I both got glandular fever. He was better after a few weeks, I never got better.

My weak health just got weaker and weaker and over a period of about 2 years I saw every public and private doctor/specialist we could find, to find out what was going on. I was on a lot of different medications for many different symptoms, that made me feel even more of a zombie, I was not sleeping and was often housebound.

Specialists kept telling me I had CFS/ME/Fibro, but I did not want to believe this as I thought there was no cure for it. I kept trying different specialists and they kept saying the same things. After 2 years I resigned myself to my ‘fate’ and got much worse, much quicker, often being bedbound and in constant pain and depression.

One day, about 4 years in I came across the book, Way of The Peaceful Warrior, by Dan Millman and I realised what I was doing to myself with my thoughts. So, I started a new ‘battle’ with my brain, one where I did my best to stop believing what it was telling me all the time and tried to create a new reality. This was not easy and there were many hurdles, but I started using Tapping/Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), which helped me so much to break habits of thinking, clear blockages and honour my crazy mind, but also to move through its unhelpful beliefs and sabotages. The tapping also helped regulate my nervous system (although I did not know this at the time).

I then came across another amazing book called the Miracle Man, by Morris E Goodman that showed me once more the power of the mind and how he had rebuilt his life from being disabled from the neck down (from a terrible flying accident) to living a full and beautiful (walking) life again with the power of visualisation. So, I started this every day too, I did powerful vivid visualizations of walking on Scottish mountains (I was now living back in Scotland where I had been born) and also visualised walking the Camino de Santiago too (I’d watched the film The Way and was inspired that one day I too would walk The Way).

As well as daily Tapping and Visualisation I had also done many detoxes (some which helped and some which hindered). I was now eating a lot of fermented foods and drinks, had ditched all the medications and by then most of the expensive supplements everyone tells you to take to recover from CFS, which seems to make many of us worse. I had moved away from being raw vegan, to just vegan, to vegetarian and then to the occasional pescatarian instead. I had become vegetarian at 9 years of age and had slowly got stricter and stricter over the years thinking this would help me (and the planet), I had even considered fruitarian and breatharian, that’s how desperate I had got!

I noticed I was about 80% recovered about 5 years in, but I could not seem to get better than that. Then a realised I was still very anxious and as I worked on this the final 20% disappeared.

That was early 2013 when I realised, I was fully well. In June of 2013 I walked my first Scottish mountain (Munro) with friends and I ‘suffered’ less than my ‘healthy’ friends whilst walking and afterwards too. This confirmed to me my full health, in case I had any doubts.

I had started blogging and sharing my journey and ended up winning a self-publishing deal with HayHouse for their sister company Balboa Press to publish the first edition of my first book, Living a Life Less Toxic. My grasp of the English language has always been somewhat fragile, I was dyslexic but also embarrassed with write or speak (both needed to be an author it seems) so this amazing win came with some new challenges to work through (with tapping and nervous system regulating techniques too).

In 2014 Living a Life Less Toxic was published. This included recipes for meals, fermenting, making your own skin and homecare items and meditation, tapping and so much more, basically many things I thought had helped my health.

During this time, I had been studying in everything I thought had helped me heal and I was collecting qualifications at am almost alarming rate ha (I was well and making the most of it). Listed below are my qualifications and my published books for you to understand a little more about the journey, what I share and why I feel somewhat and somehow qualified to share it.

I’d started coaching others by now, it was never my intention, it just unfolded by itself and I enjoyed doing it. I was also running workshops and posting YouTube videos regularly, all of which seemed crazy to me after all my years of hiding away.

In 2016 I decided it was time to realise my other visualisation from all those days in bed. By now I was regularly(most weeks) walking Scottish mountains and other longer trails, but I upped this to get fit and strong enough to walk the Santiago de Compostela, a 500mile / 800km pilgrimage starting in Southern France, walking through Spain to Santiago. I started this journey in early 2016 but after 9 days of walking I was injured and had to drop out. I’d met some amazing people on The Way, many of whom I am still in contact with, and I felt it changed me deeply. So, in September of the same year I started walking it again, again meeting wonderful people, seeing wonderful things and just spending every day thinking of nothing but putting one foot in front of the other. I completed my 500mile pilgrimage in 24days, the last day walking 52km (the image at the top of this page is a photo taken along The Way). I can safely say this journey changed my life forever, I was a different person when I came home and I dream of one day walking this route again, or maybe the Portuguese route from my front door.

Not long after this my husband and I went our separate ways and I decided I did not want to stay living in an expensive and busy city (Edinburgh) and wanted to live somewhere cheaper, freer and more natural. I bought a campervan, sold 90% of my belongings and my dog and I ended up in central rural Portugal living off-grid.

After a year of living in Portugal I found out I was pregnant and then went on to lose the baby, after a lifetime of thinking I could not have children! This effected me more deeply than I could have imagined, not only because my hormones were screwed up but it made we realise I had no idea about what it meant to be a woman. I was so disconnected from my feminine nature, so this sent me down a very deep rabbit hole, for a very long time (still now with the Doula training I am currently doing) of learning more about my body, babies, being a woman, hormones and so much more.

I’ve moved around in a lot in the last 7 odd years of being here and been part of setting up many off-grid places, I’ve learnt a heap of new skills and in this time ended up with a host of new health conditions. A few years back I started collapsing and was rushed through hospital tests. It was found that I had a couple of heart conditions, an auto-immune condition and my thyroid was seriously screwed. After much research I realised my vegetarian life of over 30 years was the reason. Even though I had taken all the supplements and shipped in all the superfoods I believed I was lacking in many things like cholesterol, amino acids and more. I started eating good quality organ and red meat and within a year felt A LOT better. The heart conditions were gone (much to the surprise of the consultant) and the auto-immune condition almost completely gone. Even though I had never taken an meds for any of this, only changed my diet.

After about another year I started with some pretty intense peri-menopausal symptoms. So, I decided to start to eat animal protein with every meal instead of every day. Within 2 months ALL peri-menopausal symptoms were also gone.

I was still on a quest however to heal the thyroid completely. I was taking desiccated (cow) thyroid supplements and not the doctors meds (which actually shrink your thyroid by the way) but I wanted to get to the root cause and address that so I could come off the supplements altogether. So, due to this I was still doing a lot of research (and experiments on myself).

I came across an interview with Sally K Norton and Dr Anthony Chaffee about oxalates and realised from my many years of veggie/vegan/raw vegan diet I had been consuming something like 200x the recommended allowance of oxalates and was still consuming a lot thinking these foods were healthy for me to have along side animal protein. Within 7 days of giving up high oxalate foods I felt like superwoman (high energy all the time, on less sleep and my brain feeling really switched on, even though I’d been feeling pretty good anyway)! I have reduced my thyroid supplements, and this seems to be slowly improving with each month and I am convinced that by the end of this year I won’t be on these supplements at all.

Whilst going through the most recent part of my healing journey I found out I have a MTFRH gene mutation which can make you more susceptible to all the illnesses I have mentioned and more. So, even though many of us have this gene mutation it shows that better diet and lifestyle chooses can override the genes we are dealt and we can all lead a happy and healthy life.

I have noticed with my own journey and that of my clients that although we may always be searching for the next thing to ‘fix’ us, health (and happiness) in comes from returning to our true nature as human beings and not moving further away from it with pills, potions, gadgets and weird and wonderful therapies.

I have trained extensively in recent years in many areas of trauma and nervous system regulation and what I have taken away from all of that is the importance of connecting to your body, community and nature. And simplify it all!

If we all live more natural, nourishing, seasonal, local, traditional and ancestral lives then we wouldn’t be so unwell with some many things. We wouldn’t have food intolerances, auto-immune conditions and sleep issues, etc.

I don’t believe a certain diet, or program helps everyone, but what I do believe is that everyone should be living seasonally, locally and ancestrally to thrive. We can survive in in our boxes, looking at our screens and eating the same foods every day of every season, but we will never thrive. So, what I teach is not any particular way to eat or live but just to encourage clients to move closer to our natural way of being, where we remember we are part of nature and should live with natures and our own cycles so we can more easily find health.

That’s why I moved to Portugal, to live a more natural, traditional life. One where I live in unison with the animals and the land around me. Understanding that without farm animals there is no topsoil and not fertilizer for growing plants etc, and eventually no eco system. To understand our own microbiome evolves with the seasons and the location we are in and the age we are. Life is easier and healthier when we try not to go against the flow of what comes naturally and just be who we came here to be.

I teach workshops in things like fermenting, off-grid-ing, nutrition, nervous system regulation, returning to our true nature, flower essences, making your own less-toxic products, chickens, fatigue, and much more. I see clients 1-2-1 and in groups, in-person and online. I specialise in CFS/ME, general fatigue, Fibro, long covid, auto-immune conditions, IBS, food intolerances & hormones (periods – pregnancy – menopause & more). I feel very passionately about working with vegetarians and vegans too to reduce the likelihood of them becoming ill like I did, because it’s very hard to undo an auto-immune, heart and thyroid issues once you have them and a lot easier to prevent them happening in the first place. As such I am offering some free resources to vegetarian’s and vegan’s and if you have any questions about this topic please reach out.

I also have a market stall where I make homegrown, homemade fermented foods and wild fermented soda’s, which I love to do and share!

I have a lot less in my life than I used to, yet it feels way more abundant than it ever has. I’ve had so many great teachers a long the way, but the best of all of them has been my own body. Life has been a crazy-ass journey, and I am so blessed to be on it!

My published books

Living a Life Less Toxic (first edition) – 2014

Cleanse – The Holistic Detox for Mind, Body & Soul – 2016

Loving Yourself Inside & Out – 2017

Living a Life Less Toxic (second edition) – 2018

Freedom – Feeling Your Way Through Chronic Fatigue Syndrome – 2020

Fermental – The Art of and Obsession with Fermented Foods & Drinks – 2022

Living, Simply & Seasonally – Coming the end of 2025

Returning to Our True Nature – 2026

My eBooks

Raising Happy & Healthy Chickens – 2024

Trauma, Tension & Nervous System Regulation – 2024