A woman came to me recently, desperate. She’d been in Bali for three months and was consuming barrels full of natural supplements coupled with an intense daily workout routine. Chat GPT assured her she should be feeling amazing! Instead, she felt bloated, anxious, and more exhausted than when she was working a punishing office job in England. She wanted to understand why.
The first question I ask when someone comes to me for a 1:1 consultation, is what kinds of supplements they’re already using. It can be equally important to understand where they found them, and how they’re being consumed.
Often the answer to their discomfort is not that the remedy itself is ineffective. Instead, the combination of things they’re taking might be having a contraindicative effect, one cancelling out another. Sometimes, they chose a product that would work, if the brand wasn’t flawed. Or perhaps the brand is fabulous, but because they weren’t professionally counselled on how to use it, they didn’t know what they needed to do to bring out its deeper effects.
For every wonderful remedy, there is a way to misuse it.
Every woman’s body is different. What works brilliantly for someone who’s suffering from horrible menstrual cramps but is otherwise healthy, might be the wrong answer, or even dangerous for a woman who also has a critical imbalance in their microbiome.
In my client’s particular case, she’d been taking sea moss, functional mushrooms, detox capsules, and Gotu Kola. That’s quite a list. Social media had her believing that if something was natural, expensive, or trending, it must be right for her body. But her nervous system didn’t care what was popular. Her gut didn’t care what worked for someone else. Her biochemistry, microbiome, mineral status, detox pathways, hormone balance, and stress load were entirely her own.
Take the seamoss, for example, a product found on wellness shelves all over Bali. A quick google search told her that it enhanced thyroid function, supported gut health, and boosted immunity. Shouldn’t every woman want this miraculous thing?
What the internet failed to reveal was that not all sea moss is created equal. Much of what is sold in the market is pool-grown or poorly sourced, often lacking the mineral complexity people believe they are getting. Low-quality sea moss can be exposed to contaminated water conditions or improper drying methods where mould can grow. She thought she was nourishing her body, instead she was unknowingly consuming a dangerous product that her gut could not properly tolerate or absorb because of the toxins the mould introduced and that created a new issue in her system.
Then there were the functional mushrooms, one of my favourite allies when used correctly.
She’d bought the functional mushroom powders and sprinkled them into her smoothies and coffee expecting all the miracles promised online. Each day she used them without fail, waiting patiently for the mind/body enhancement; the increased immunity and the decreased stress that would follow.
She didn’t realize that preparation changes everything. Chaga, for example, is not something to casually toss into a drink and hope for the best. It often requires a proper low simmer for up to twenty five minutes to access its deeper compounds, while some components can only be extracted by alcohol.
Cordyceps may support oxygen utilization and energy, but not every nervous system is ready for that level of stimulation if the body is already depleted. If you’re dangerously over-exerted, Cordyceps can cause nausea and low blood-sugar, among other things. In her case, they were actually causing harm because she’d transitioned to them too quickly after leaving her high stress life behind.
Even the Gotu Kola, a beautiful herb that grows abundantly in Bali and is used for mental clarity and nervous system restoration, is not for everyone in the same way. It is incredibly supportive for a woman experiencing post-burnout brain fog, overthinking, or nervous exhaustion, so in my client’s case, I recommended she continue using it.
If her symptoms were actually being driven by mould exposure, blood sugar instability, or any number of other issues, more specific targeting might have been required. One herb alone would likely fail to fix the real issue and she’d think that the Gotu Kola ‘was just not working’ when in reality, it was only that her problems went deeper than she knew.
Many women are unknowingly living with mould exposure in villas, AC systems, bathrooms, and humid environments. Add traffic pollution, burning waste, environmental toxins, disrupted sleep, and irregular eating, and you have the perfect storm for oxidative stress, inflammation, and nervous system dysregulation.
Before our consultation, there was no way for her to know any of this. She took on faith that what she’d googled was all that she needed and results must surely follow.
We adjusted her regimen together. I was able to direct her toward supplements that were freshly harvested and safe for her. More quickly than she expected, the way she felt on the inside began to reflect the beautiful environment she’d chosen when she came to Bali in the first place.
If you find yourself overloaded on supplements, worse off than when you began, it is all too easy to blame the natural remedies in question. More often than not, a consultation with an expert who takes your particular needs into account can expose the true culprit in the affair. It’s not you. It’s not the herbs either.
It just turns out that your health is not a one size fits all scenario.
There is no replacement for a translator, who has studied the language of herbs in depth, and can introduce your beautiful, unique body to the healing that it needs.
