She’s telling me about her fatigue, her bloating, the brain fog that’s been creeping in for months. I let her get all the way through it – every detail matters, and she needs to say it. Then, once she’s finished, I ask her something that isn’t on her list.
“When did you last feel like yourself?”
She blinks. Goes quiet for a second. And then something shifts in her face, because she’s actually thinking about it, properly, maybe for the first time.
“…Actually – it was after I had the flu. Or maybe before that, when Mum got sick. I don’t know, it’s all a bit blurry.”
That pause is the whole reason I ask the question.
Why I don’t start where everyone else starts
Most consultations start with the symptom list. What’s wrong, how long, how bad. I understand why – it’s efficient, it’s measurable, it fits neatly into a ten-minute appointment.
But by the time a client is sitting in front of me, her body has usually been compensating for a great deal longer than the symptom list suggests. The fatigue she mentions first is rarely where this started. It’s where it finally became loud enough to notice.
So instead of starting with what’s wrong now, I start with when things were last right – and then we walk backwards together. What changed around then? What was asked of her body, her nervous system, her hormones, in the months either side of that.
From there, the questions keep going – her stress levels day to day, what her life actually looks like, when the symptoms started and what was happening at the time, whether this has ever happened before, and what else has been going on that she might not think to mention…
Nine times out of ten, there’s a thread. A house move nobody thought to mention. Coming off the pill. A gastro bug she “never quite bounced back from.” A year that was simply too much, for too long.
None of that shows up if you only ask what hurts today. And it matters more than most people realise – many health conditions have been quietly building for six to twelve months before they’re ever diagnosed. By the time there’s a name for it, the body’s usually been trying to tell someone for a while.
What happens when nobody asks it
Here’s what I see far too often. A woman goes to her GP with fatigue. She’s told her bloods are normal, and to keep an eye on it. She adjusts her diet, cuts caffeine, tries to sleep more, and feels a bit better for a while – because she’s addressing the symptom, not what’s underneath it.
Then it comes back. Maybe as fatigue again. Maybe as something else entirely – the bloating starts, or the sleep goes, or the brain fog arrives. And she starts to believe this is just her life now. A rotation of symptoms she manages, one at a time, forever.
That’s the band-aid approach. It’s not wrong, exactly – it’s just incomplete. It treats what’s visible instead of finding what’s actually driving it. And whatever’s driving it doesn’t go away because the label on top of it changed.
Why knowing the question isn’t the same as knowing the answer
Here’s what I want to be honest with you about, because I know how this reads. You might be thinking right now, “I can ask myself that.” And you can – but I’d gently warn you about what tends to happen next.
I had a client answer this question perfectly on her own, months before she ever saw me. She knew exactly when things changed – the year her marriage ended. So she did what most people do: she assumed it was stress, pushed through, waited for it to settle.
Eighteen months later, still exhausted, still foggy, she came to see me. The timeline she’d already worked out was exactly right. But “it was a stressful year” wasn’t the answer – it was the doorway.
What had actually happened was that a year of poor sleep and skipped meals had quietly worn down her blood sugar regulation and left her adrenals running on empty, and neither of those things fix themselves just because the stressful year ends.
That’s the part self-reflection can’t do. Knowing when your body changed course doesn’t tell you what changed in it, physiologically – and guessing wrong here doesn’t cost you nothing. It costs you another eighteen months of managing symptoms that were never going to resolve on their own.
Why this is the difference that matters
I’m a naturopath and a biochemist – I trained in both, deliberately, because I wanted to be able to do exactly what that question sets up: find the actual starting point in someone’s physiology, not just manage what’s loudest today.
Nearly thirty years in, “when did you last feel like yourself” has cracked open more cases than any test result ever has, because it gives me a timeline instead of a snapshot. And a timeline is where the real answers live.
Two women can have identical fatigue, identical bloating, identical brain fog – and completely different starting points. One traces back to a hormonal shift. Another to a gut that never recovered from an illness years ago. Another to a nervous system that’s been running on high alert since a specific, nameable year. Same symptoms. Different story. Which is exactly why a generic protocol was never going to be the answer for either of them.
Where to go from here
If you read this and a moment already surfaced for you – a “when did I last feel like myself” answer sitting just under the surface – please don’t do what my client did. Don’t spend the next year and a half testing your own theory about what it means while your body keeps compensating in the background.
That question is only the opening move. What actually changes things is what happens next – tracing that moment through to what it actually did to your hormones, your gut, your blood sugar, your nervous system, and building a plan around the real answer instead of a guess. That’s something I’d love to help you work through properly, rather than you having to piece it together on your own.
Teressa,
Naturopath | Clinical Nutritionist | Biochemist
