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16/10/2026

Mine ran three to four days behind. A reasonable Tuesday, and I'd pay for it on Saturday.

For years I thought Thursday was random. It wasn't random. It was late.

Somewhere in that I started calling myself unreliable, which is a very different word to delayed, and nobody had shown me there was a shape to it.

How far behind does yours run? Tell me below.

Steph

13/10/2026

No chopping, no decisions, and you're not standing up for long.

Because that's the loop. The week you're flattest is the week you've got the least in you to cook something decent.

Beef strips, a bag of baby spinach, a lemon, olive oil and salt. Hot pan, beef in for four minutes, spinach on top, lid on for two, lemon over the whole thing at the end.

The lemon isn't only there for flavour. Vitamin C alongside plant sources of iron improves how much of that iron you absorb, so it's doing a job.

Six minutes, one pan, and the only decision left was whether you could be bothered.

A good meal sits alongside whatever you're already taking and doing for this. It's a partner to it, never a swap.

Save this one for a flat day.

Leah - Clinical Nutritionist

12/10/2026

The infection you had once, that you've stopped mentioning.

Glandular fever at seventeen. A chest thing that took three months to shift. A bad gastro on a holiday you can still name. Something you got over, so it stopped being part of the story.

Part one set out two possibilities: something is still there, or the response forgot to switch off. Last week was something still there in the building. This one is something still there in you.

There are a few versions of that. An organism that hasn't fully cleared. Something dormant that has become active again. Or an immune system that stayed on alert after the original thing went, which is where this starts to overlap with part four.

Post-viral patterns have had a lot more attention in the last few years for obvious reasons, but the idea isn't new. It was being described long before any of us were talking about it every day.

Which is why we ask what you had, when, and what happened afterwards. Not to blame a virus from 2009. To work out whether what started it is still part of the picture.

Part 3 of 4.

What was yours? Tell me below.

Kate

12/10/2026

You stopped mentioning the migraines. They didn't stop.

They stopped being the interesting thing. When you're managing fatigue, an unpredictable gut and periods that take a week out of every month, headaches get filed under things I live with.

Which is a shame, because migraine has a habit of sitting in the same room as a few other things. There's an association described in the literature between migraine and endometriosis. There's an overlap described between mast cell activation and migraine. Endometriosis and mast cell patterns come up together as well.

None of that means one causes another. Associations aren't mechanisms, and plenty of people have one and none of the others.

But it does make the migraines worth putting back on the table rather than leaving them off it. When several things keep turning up together, the useful question stops being which one is the problem.

This is a newer area of interest for me and I'm reading a lot on it at the moment, so there'll be more.

What did you stop mentioning? Tell me below.

Steph

09/10/2026

Your antihistamine stopped working. That doesn't mean you got worse.

That's the conclusion most people jump to, and it's a miserable one. It worked, now it doesn't, so I must be deteriorating.

Histamine is one mediator. Mast cells can release a long list of other things alongside it, and an antihistamine is doing one specific job on one specific receptor. It was never covering the whole list.

So when the picture shifts and a medication seems to stop holding it, that can be less about getting worse and more about which mediators are doing the talking. Which is a different question, and it points at what might be driving the activation rather than at how much is being blocked.

To be clear, none of that is a reason to change or stop anything you've been prescribed. That's a conversation with whoever prescribed it. It's a reason to ask a second question alongside it.

Did yours stop holding? Tell me below.

Kate

07/10/2026

Better in the car. Worse in the bedroom. Fine at your mum's, for some reason.

Most people file that under having a bad day, because we're taught to read symptoms against what we did rather than against where we were.

Last post I said there were two possibilities: either something is still there, or the response forgot to switch off. This is the first one, and it's the version that lives outside your body.

Water damage in a building can change indoor air in ways some people respond to and others walk straight past. Where an exposure is ongoing, a protection response staying switched on isn't a malfunction. It's an accurate read of the room.

The pattern worth noticing isn't how tired you are on any given day. It's whether it tracks with place.

That's a question rather than an answer. Plenty of things can produce that pattern, and this is one to explore properly.

Part 2 of 4.

Is there a room you feel worse in? Tell me below.

Kate

Experience matters. So does staying current. Our team has worked with mould-related illness for over 15 years. The pati...
07/10/2026

Experience matters. So does staying current.

Our team has worked with mould-related illness for over 15 years. The patients we see now are more complex. They've often been searching for years, with mast cell or nervous system issues layered on top.

That's why our training keeps moving. Steph has just completed Mold Illness Mastery with and , a thorough, whole-person practitioner course that looks at mould illness from the building to the body. It means we now have more tools to support our most sensitive patients, especially when testing doesn't tell the whole story!

Together, our team brings deep, complementary expertise: Kate McCandless, a certified mould assessor and CIRS-literate practitioner; Dr Tania Ash, an MCAS-literate GP with 26 years in mould illness; Sam Van Dort, a naturopath focused on women's hormones and histamine Leah Hunt, an MCAS nutritionist; and Sarah Bakker, an MCAS-literate health coach.

And every one of us has lived with mould illness ourselves. We know the road.

Mould illness isn't a side interest for us. It's what our team does, day in, day out. If you suspect it's part of your picture, we'd love to help.

05/10/2026

Your immune system isn't overreacting. It's responding to something.

Overreacting makes it sound like a fault, like the system is broken and the job is to talk it down. But a protection response switching on is the system doing what it was built to do. The question worth asking is what it's switched on for.

There are broadly two answers. Either it's still on because something is still there that hasn't been identified. Or the thing that triggered it has gone and the response stayed on anyway.

Those are genuinely different situations and they usually call for different approaches. A nervous system responding to something real isn't being irrational, it's being accurate, which is part of why calming it on its own can only take you so far.

Part of why the question rarely gets asked is that it doesn't sit inside any one specialty. Everyone is answering the question in front of them, and nobody owns this one.

Over the next four posts we're going through both. What's still there, and what forgot to switch off.

Which of the two do you think you are? Tell me below.

Kate

02/10/2026

Flat. Breathless on the stairs. Freezing when nobody else is. And every result came back normal.

Here's the thing about a normal range. It isn't a target. It's a description of where most of a population sits, and most of that population isn't you on a bad week.

Take ferritin. It's the number everyone reaches for, and it does tell you something about iron stores. But ferritin is also an inflammatory protein. When there's inflammation going on, it can rise. So it can read as comfortable while the iron that's actually available to you isn't.

And iron being present isn't the same as iron being used. It has to be absorbed, carried, and put to work, and each of those steps can be the one that's struggling.

B12 has a similar problem. A serum B12 tells you what's circulating. It doesn't tell you much about what's happening inside the cell, which is where it actually does the job. There are other markers that get closer to that question.

So this isn't about a result being wrong. Those tests are answering the question they were built to answer. It's that tired is rarely one thing, and iron is rarely one number.

Which of your results came back normal? Tell me below.

01/10/2026

Cooking is the first thing that goes on a flat week.

And then reheating something that's been in the fridge for three days is often the thing that sets a reaction off.

So this one is built around being cooked once and frozen straight away. Chicken thighs cooked from raw rather than anything pre-cooked. Olive oil, salt, fresh ginger, spring onion, white rice, and a stock without added yeast extract. Beef instead of chicken if you want more iron in it. Zucchini and carrot in near the end so they don't collapse. Lid on, twenty five minutes.

Then the part that matters. Cool it quickly, portion it, and freeze it rather than leaving it in the fridge, because histamine can climb in cooked food as it sits.

Three meals where the only decision left is which container to pull out.

None of this replaces working out what's driving the reactivity. It just makes the week survivable while that's being addressed.

Save this one for a flat week.

Leah - Clinical Nutritionist

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