I changed my mind. And my body didn’t collapse when I did.

A reflection on health autonomy, intuition and stepping out of old stories.

This is a share about unlearning, about the courage to question what I once believed and about coming home to my own authority. Here, B12 is simply the doorway. The real conversation is about health autonomy and that powerful stage of life when women come home to themselves.

Making sense of what we think we know can feel unsettling.

Peeling back layers to unveil a new truth is rarely comfortable. It’s scary, challenging and sometimes lonely.

How do you know that what you know is actually true?

How often do we challenge the status quo, ask questions, or listen to the quiet voice inside instead of the noise outside? 

Most of us were never taught how to pause long enough to feel our own answer.

My work is about reflection, not fixing. It's about learning to see the body as a mirror and to trust the intelligence already moving through us. And yet, despite this being my intention, I can see now that for a long time I was still outsourcing parts of my own authority.

B12 became the doorway through which I began to question much more than a vitamin.

Just to be clear, this isn’t a war on B12, supplements, or food. It’s simply me questioning the story I was handed.

As someone who was told they had to have B12, I really am no longer interested in it anymore.

In fact, I am leaning further and further away from believing there is any truth in the existence of that isolated vitamin, or any other vitamins for that matter.

Most vitamins were identified by studying breakdown. Symptoms appeared, a compound was isolated and the story became that something was missing. It’s a very reductionist approach - shrinking a whole, living terrain down to a single ingredient. That’s just not how I see the body.

I’m less interested in adding things in and more interested in removing what’s in the way.

Remove interference. Restore flow. Support the system.

For me, it’s the difference between supplementation and restoration.

And even if vitamins do exist, how do we know we’ve named them all? Why would it stop at thirteen?

I mean, how is it possible to know that what’s been isolated is “a vitamin” and solely responsible for eliminating a so-called deficiency? A laboratory can extract something from an apple and label it vitamin C, but who decided that fragment tells the whole story? What does vitamin C even look like on its own? And what about the rest of the apple, the parts that can’t be separated or measured so neatly? We accept so much as truth, but how often do we actually question it?

A lot has shifted for me over these past five years. At the start of the Covid-lock down period I was heavily invested in consuming high doses of supplements to bolster my health, not realising what I see now that, despite being an advocate of health autonomy and cheering people on to trust their bodies, I wasn’t fully doing that myself.

I thought I was awake then. Roll on the next few years, entering so much change, especially uncharted pre- menopause waters, a journey that peeled me back far more than I expected and awakened me to a new, deeper truth.

Menopause, for me, has never been decline. It’s been awakening. It’s about waking up the truth in us, stepping into our uniqueness, becoming more of who we really are. Those feel like the real movements of this stage of life.

And in that process we wake up not just to ourselves, but to life. We start seeing differently, feeling differently. That can be tender, even painful at times, because once your lens changes, everything changes. When we don’t own that truth, we struggle.

Yet the mainstream story often frames this transition as failure rather than transformation. I even received a challenging message about my views, which showed me how hard it can be to step outside that story.

That shift changed how I saw everything, including my health.

I don’t see the body as something that needs constant adding to. I see it more like soil: create the right conditions and life does the rest. The vitamin model takes that relational, dynamic process and turns it into a thing. A pill. A number.

It’s easy to get caught up trying to manage health from the outside and miss the quiet intelligence already working within.

For me, B12 became one of those moments of pause. Through what I’ve learned from Natural Hygiene advocates, books like The Enigma of Vitamin B12, years of observing people’s terrain through live blood analysis, and deep conversations with my peers, what makes sense to me now is much simpler.

Health isn’t something we have to micromanage or manufacture. It’s what happens when we get out of the way. When we remember we’re part of nature, not separate from it. And nature doesn’t make mistakes.

Yet we’re constantly handed stories that tell us otherwise. That we’re lacking. That something is missing. That we need this pill or that supplement or we’ll fall apart. I hear the same fear around B12, around food, around menopause, around almost every stage of life. The message is always the same: you can’t trust your body.

I just don’t believe that anymore.

And then there’s the story we’re often told, that B12 only comes from meat. For me, that’s just another example of how health gets reduced to single nutrients and simple formulas.

Whether you eat meat or plants really isn’t the point here. I’m not interested in labels or sides, only in understanding the body more deeply and making choices from awareness.

So I’ve stopped interpreting those numbers as needs or deficiencies, and started seeing them as reflections of the wider terrain.

I’ve been supplements-free for over a year and nothing has fallen apart. No collapse. No degeneration. No failure. I’m almost 50, I take no medications and my body is not broken. 

I’ve simply stepped out of the frame that makes B12 and other isolated vitamins feel central. It’s just not something I organise my thinking around anymore.

It makes me wonder how many of the questions we carry about our health were never really ours to begin with. How many were handed to us.

Which reminds me of that familiar question I’m often asked about my diet:"Where do you get your protein from?"

These days I’m more interested in a different question:

Can I trust my own body?