Who could do with a little extra sleep, more energy and a buffer against the stress that life throws at you? I’m in. Are you?

While you can expect to see the biggest impact through making more strategic changes to what you eat (protein with every meal, lots of veggies, easy on the carbs), it’s true that some foods have special magic powers.

If you said yes to more sleep, more energy and greater resilience, I have some good news for you… There is a group of plants that can help with exactly this and much more. Adaptogens have been rocketed in popularity in recent years and for good reason. As the name suggests, they can help you to ‘adapt’ and thrive despite life’s inevitable ups and downs. Your busy modern lives demand a lot from you physically, mentally and emotionally and adaptogens can help to ease the burden and combat the side effects of stress.

What are adaptogens?

‘Adaptogens’ is the name for certain herbs and medicinal...

When it's hot, hot, hot, we often find ourselves reaching for more to drink. Makes sense, right. You're thirsty, so drink up? But the advice on the specific amounts can be a bit confusing. 

There are some really GREAT reasons why drinking more water is a good idea for health in general but also for weight loss. Ready? Here we go:

Water can help you burn more calories

In adults, studies show being well hydrated increased calorie burn by 24–30% within 10 minutes of drinking water and the effect lasts at least 60 minutes. Another study of overweight women looked at what happened when they upped their water intake to over 1 litre per day. Here's what: over the course of the year, this lead to an extra 2 kg (4.4 lbs) of weight loss. The effects were more marked when they drank cold water, given your body uses extra energy (or calories) warming the water to body temperature. And these women did nothing else to their diet and lifestyle but...

Most of us know how to eat well and to be well. You can probably think back to a time when you were ‘on fire’ with this whole eating business. Not literally, obviously, but what I mean is that whatever you were doing just WORKED and everything went just as you wanted it to.

And then, well, life starts to take over, things slip and slide and, before you know it, you’re back to eating crisps in the car.

‘How did things get like this?’ you ask despondently.

More importantly, it can feel really hard to even see how you can get yourself back on track because the work to do seems so monumental.

The answer? Find your tipping point and take action right there.

How can finding your tipping point help with weight loss?

In epidemiology, the tipping point is that moment when a small change tips the balance of a system and brings about a large change – this is what New York Times writer and author Malcolm Gladwell writes about. He’s talking about big...

Even though winter has a lot going for it – woolly hats, hot chocolate, curling up with a book, thick socks, a log fire and other things ‘hygge’ come to mind – something important is missing: light.

At this time of year, you go to work before sunrise and come home after sunset, with very little exposure to natural light in between. This lack of light over months on end causes serious problems for many people.

According to BUPA, the ‘winter blues’, or seasonal affective disorder (SAD), affects about 3% of the population. Occurring every autumn like clockwork, it comes with a variety of symptoms, including low mood, listlessness, an increased need for sleep and cravings for sweets and carbohydrates – and therefore weight gain. It affects women more often than men, and particularly people who are on the verge of depression already.

 How do you feel about your winter mood?

The exact cause of SAD is not yet properly understood, but it is...

I'm on a mission today that all my people start falling in love with the most famous vitamin of all; vitamin C... I'm going to be telling you why you really must have it, whether you should bother supplementing (spoiler alert: yes) and what you can do to increase your levels aside from supplements.

Flu fighter vitamin C

If there’s one vitamin most people have heard of, it’s vitamin C. Whose mum didn’t urge them to eat fruit – preferably oranges – to keep up their vitamin C levels? When you catch a cold, you drink hot water with lemon – because it contains vitamin C - and even people who are most sceptical of nutritional supplements pop the occasional vitamin C pill when they feel under the weather.

There is lots of research about the efficacy of vitamin C and its role in immunity, particularly in warding off colds and flu. As you head into the traditional season of colds and flu, it seemed a good time to have the vitamin C conversation. So today,...

I am a huge fan of food diaries when you are trying to eat well. No, scratch that. I am a huge fan of food diaries, period. I believe that everyone who eats food should keep some kind of journal for four very powerful reasons.

1 If you are tracking symptoms - let's say digestive problems or headaches - keeping a journal or diary may help you spot a common thread. Ate chocolate, got a headache. Had pasta, IBS symptoms flared up. Do you see?

2 Want to know how good you are at being 'healthy'? No matter how well you think you’re eating, a food tracker of some description will illuminate those little weaknesses everyone has. It may be that the biscuits will show up if you had some but also that you can spot areas where your diet looks weak - not enough veg or maybe even not enough food. With the actual data rather than what you suppose is the case, you can choose to keep some habits or change them.

3 Writing down what you eat warts and all (because what would...

After a long and busy day, it can feel like there is nothing better than a glass of wine, beer or other alcoholic drink to help you unwind. It's one of the go-to ‘rewards’ for grown up girls to relax, celebrate, commiserate, and so on. But are there times when a bit might be a bit much? If you've ever wondered "should I try cutting back?", this blog is for you...

Are you drinking too much (no judgement)?

Socially, drinking is one of the main ways we enjoy being with friends and trying to cut back can be difficult and often meets with disapproval from others. The trouble is it’s easy for those units to mount up and over time this can have a really detrimental effect on your health, mood, energy levels and weight.

The recommended guidelines for alcohol are no more than 14 units a week, with at least 2 alcohol-free days per week.

A typical bottle of wine will contain 10 units. It’s easy to get through a bottle with three generous glasses in a night!...

As the temperature starts to climb, so does our willingness to eat salad. A good salad can be an amazing addition to your healthy diet if you do it right. Want to lose weight this summer? Eat salad. But, for heaven’s sake, do it properly (and here’s why).

To be clear, it’s not like the police will show up if you make a false move but can I can give you some advice learned over years working as a personal nutritionist and health coach? 

[still here?]

Great. 

A couple of things go wrong when clients start making their own salads at home (and making them is something I implore you to do as it works out so much cheaper and often more nutritious than anything you can buy in the shops). 

The biggest barrier is that clients can’t think of what to put in a salad without it being painfully boring. Here, I’m thinking of the ham, cheese, tomato and radish salads my grandma used to force upon me. A salad is a celebration of loveliness....

A multi-gazillion £$£$£$ world has been created around wellness and wellbeing. We should all be ‘well’ beings. As a nutritionist and health coach, I am part of that drive to get folk to that mythical place, but there is a small problem. What is wellbeing* exactly? How do you know when you are ‘being well’ enough? How can you measure it? And does it much matter anyway (because we’re all busy these days)?

World Wellbeing Week starts tomorrow, so I thought it was worth giving this topic a bit of consideration so that this year, there’s a chance these next seven days might have an impact on your life.

It seems that the true definition, while a little vague, is not simply “not having a diagnosed disease”. According to the Collins Dictionary, your wellbeing is your “health and happiness”, and the Macmillian Dictionary goes one further with the suggestion that it is the “satisfactory state that someone or...

Most women I know – and certainly every single one of the women I work with in my nutrition clinic – have done countless diets. Some of these women have even been on what I consider good diets, eating the right kinds of things and enjoying some success, only to find themselves back to square one the following year. So what is happening?

It usually plays out a bit like this. You are propelled into action as a result of some immediate and urgent pain. One common scenario is you’ve been shopping for an event to discover that nothing you tried on in the entire shopping trip fitted or looked good. It's crushing and inspires you to start another diet.  

Women all over the world are motivated by this kind of pain so they set their goals, get results and - by doing that - they get out of that immediate and urgent pain.

But now that they are out of pain, the need and the urgency to do the work has gone and so has their motivation because their motivation was the pain....