About

First, I have set out my career path and, below that, bared my soul to share my own health journey with you. Then, follow the next step at the bottom to start learning about gluten illness.

This is me, taken from a newspaper column I used to have. Yes, I need a new picture!

My Natural Health Career Journey

I am an experienced UK-based natural medicine researcher and consultant (over 23+ years, now, eek!)

I worked for a long time for Holland & Barrett, the UK health food store chain managing shops and later in head office as a sort of shop trouble-shooter, communications officer, PR, customer service manager and general dogsbody. It was fantastic training: if a store needed an answer for a customer, I had to find it. Great fun!

I wanted to run my own show, though, so in 1992 I left and qualified as a clinical aromatherapist because I love touch and smell (and it gave me lots of excuses to buy towels my partner, Philip, says, and he is probably right…).

As time went on, I wanted to learn more to help my clients with back problems etc so I trained then as a remedial massage and manipulation specialist. And, yes, my hands are now shot.

Whilst being a massage therapist, I used to hear incredibly sad health stories and vowed to try and help. My own health by then was also not that brilliant (severe IBS) so I thought it wouldn’t hurt to learn more. I am a strong believer that we are indeed what we eat and absorb so I started training in nutritional medicine with Prof Lawrence Plaskett in 1998 by distance learning and attendance at the University of Westminster in London. There was no degree course available at that time in this subject (and actually I still think the training I received is far superior to some of the degree courses now around).

I chose to train with Plaskett because he offered a rare approach: a way of applying naturopathic medical principles to nutrition. In other words, most nutritionists will assess whether someone is deficient in something or has an excess of something else, whereas this training gave me a whole medical framework and philosophy to build my practice around. Simply put, because of that I believe over time I have got more people well, which, let’s face it, is why we train.

I qualified with a Diploma in Alternative Nutrition in 2001 then gained the full practitioner qualification, with distinction, in Nutritional Medicine in 2002.

In 2000, I founded Purehealth Clinic, a multi-disciplinary naturopathic clinic near Manchester with lots of other lovely therapists and partnered by Philip, who had joined me in the quest and become a clinical hypnotherapist. From then on, I managed the clinic and practiced myself as a naturopathic medical nutritionist. I love writing and passing on knowledge and later became a freelance columnist, features writer and taught many health programmes too.

Over the years I have specialised in back to health programmes, allergy and intolerance, special diets, bowel and gut problems (I am obsessed with these!)  and non-toxic lifestyle issues.

The clinic was a real success, not least because of all the lovely therapists we worked with, people we met every day and the health turn-arounds we witnessed. During this time, between us, we have conducted almost 5000 consultations (and counting). Personally, I have done over 3,500. I have also written loads of articles, factsheets, newspaper and magazine columns, tips and ebooks, been editor for a couple of publications, spoken at loads of events and taught back-to-health programmes for the NHS and privately. I’ve been writing patient newsletters and blogs for several years and there is now a real wealth of info for you to access free from those. Fun!

The lease on our northern premises ran out so sadly we closed it in 2008, moved back to my home town of Warwick and I continued a home and virtual clinic so I could concentrate on writing, speaking and patient care instead of managing a busy clinic. Philip always wanted to be a voiceover artist (he used to be a radio news presenter) and has now branched out into that (he has a gorgeous deep voice and is really good at it!)

Four months ago, I stopped seeing new patients so that I could concentrate on research and developing resources for people like you.

My Own Health Journey

I have struggled with my health my whole life. I had a really rubbish start in life (2 months premature, 4th child of a very young alcoholic chain-smoking mother and mal-nourished before being taken into care) and this has to have had a hand in it. As a youngster, I remember having terrible headaches, stomach aches and bone pain. All put down to the trauma of my childhood and attention-seeking. Some of it may well have been.

Later, I developed agonising period pain and other womany issues and it took years to diagnose me with PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome). At the same time, I was diagnosed with IBS which I struggled with for many years. I also struggled with what I now call pre- ME – complete crushing tiredness, inability to focus etc. I worked very hard and ignored it as much as I could. No-one seemed to be able to help; they just told me to eat and exercise. I did and it helped somewhat. I went in and out of that phase for a decade.

Food Intolerance

When I trained as a nutritionist, I learned about food intolerance. I removed the wheat and dairy and miraculously improved within a couple of weeks. I hadn’t been eating a lot of it anyway, being ‘healthy’ or so I thought, so it was a real eye-opener that even that tiny bit had been perpetuating the problems. My periods returned after having stopped for 5 years. I thought I was cured. I was stunned. From then on that informed the way I looked at patient cases. True to form, most people got well when I simply detoxed the body and removed the most common allergens (seeThe Gut Plan on this site).

However, over time, I started to get other symptoms which seemed to come when I was eating other foods. Restless legs, eczema, fluid in my ears (I was deaf half the noughties!), muscle pain which stopped the massaging and too many others to mention. And then the chronic fatigue hit again after we closed the clinic and moved. Most likely the stress of it all.  This time I really couldn’t do stuff, even standing up was difficult. I checked my iron and realised it was very low. I took iron. It didn’t help. I checked my other mineral levels, B12 etc. All low. I took them. A bit of change but no real joy. Cutting a very long story short, I realised I wasn’t absorbing. Could I be coeliac?

I did a standard coeliac test. Negative. I identified what little gluten I was eating anyway (I tended to steer clear of it anyway because of avoiding wheat) which may have been partly why the test was negative, of course. I stopped eating it (barley malt in rice pops, tamari etc, that sort of thing). I felt much better. After a few months, I re-checked my mineral levels: still not absorbing. What the heck was going on? I started to research reasons why coeliacs might not get well. And BOOM, what a revelation. I found most coeliacs actually don’t repair their villi completely and the reason given for this is that they must be still eating gluten. I knew I wasn’t. So what else was going on?

The Epiphany

During this time, I had been developing a gum problem. I woke up one morning to find a hole in the middle of my bottom front gum which, alarmingly, grew bigger during the day. Panic! I felt like my gum was being eaten away and my teeth were becoming really loose. And then the most excruciating pain I have ever had started. I cannot describe how painful it was. Suffice to say, I wanted someone to put me out of my misery. Dentists and doctors prescribed really strong antibiotics and even morphine.  I swabbed it with teatree and every other natural substance I could think of. Nothing touched it. I was actually getting beside myself with the pain and was really scared. I lived on ibuprofen and antibiotics for 5 months. Nada.

During my coeliac research, I had discovered the rather hidden fact that all grains contain gluten. What? A nutritionist and consultant for years and I didn’t know this! I was shocked. It may not be beyond the realms of possibility that someone like me could be having a problem with all glutens then, rather than just the gliadin traditional ones (wheat, rye, barley, oats). I continued my research. I discovered a condition existed called Non-Coeliac Gluten Sensitivity. I realised the folly of relying on traditional gluten/coeliac testing methods and searched for a more reliable way to check myself. I found the gluten gene test. And was positive for both Coeliac and NCGS genes. Bingo.

I removed all grains. Within a week, the gum ‘infection’ had gone.

I have been truly gluten free (ie grain free) now for about 14 months. I kept rice in mistakenly for the first few months but then later found I was reacting to it, hence it is not as long off all grains as I would like to say! Where I would have scored myself a 10 (feeling awful most of the time), I now score myself about 2. Not out of the woods yet by any means, but what a difference! I wanted to shout it from the rooftops – and set up the TrulyGlutenFree site to do just that. I researched and wrote down everything I could find.

Changing Negative To Positive

But, I got rather fed up of having to avoid foods myself and getting everyone else to avoid foods. The problem was that the sensitivity wasn’t just to grains and obvious foods. Most of us had loads of allergies/intolerances. I researched why that might be. In short, gluten causes zonulin increase which makes your body barriers leaky and anything can get through where it shouldn’t, setting up either an immune reaction, inflammation, cross-reactivity and eventually auto-immunity.

I swapped my clinical viewpoint more towards how we could repair the damage done by gluten (and other foods can do the same thing) and how we could strengthen the body barriers (not just the gut, zonulin affects all barriers like skin, blood-brain etc), lower inflammation, stop the cross-reactivity and prevent/lower auto-immunity. Not an easy task. Especially when most of the supplements we desperately need contain the very grains and starches that cause the problem.

Cutting a very long story short, the result is the Barrier Plan you find here on this site, which I and my patients have been doing now for a while, to good effect. I still have symptoms. I know within 2 hours if I have been ‘glutened’ when a migraine starts, my blood sugar nose-dives and I become starving hungry, and I become very fatigued. It lasts about 2 days now where it lasted 4-5 days before. It scores about a 4 on severity where it was sometimes a 12! I get other symptoms related to other foods. The rate of new foods becoming a problem has drastically reduced but hasn’t stopped. Yet. I am confident it will, but in these terms it is relatively early days. Some experts say just removing the offending foods like gluten will take 6 months to 2 years minimum. The Barrier Plan Protocol I have designed is hopefully our chance of speeding that process up.

The Barrier Plan will continue to evolve. The research in this area of medicine is just exploding at the moment, but at least we have somewhere to start now. My own aim is to stop developing any more sensitivities, start absorbing better and prevent future serious illness like osteoporosis and auto-immunity. It’ll take time; this is not an easy task and there is no magic pill to get us better. But there is hope now, thank goodness. A handful of experts across the world are now looking at gluten illness in this way – I seem to be the UK one. There’s got to be a reason for all that suffering!

What’s your aim? You are welcome to download my Plan for free and come on the journey with me. Click on Next and we will make a start.