You’re done with the quick fixes, the guesswork, and the feeling that you’re a broken machine that needs constant maintenance.
Personalised nutrition and functional medicine support for midlife women whose low mood and anxiety still feel unexplained.
Beyond the Low Mood
A Clarity Call is a 30-minute conversation to talk through whether this is the right next step for you.
Your GP may have mentioned medication, and you’ve probably wondered whether you just need to try harder, be more disciplined or find the one thing that finally works.
But if no one has ever helped you understand why you feel the way you do, how are you supposed to know what will actually help?
Low mood and anxiety in midlife rarely have a single cause. Your biology, your nervous system and your history can all be part of the picture, and for a long time you may not have had the right translator.
We aren’t going to ‘reset’ you. We are going to map what is specifically going on for you, so you can finally stop surviving your midlife and start living it.
Beyond the Low Mood can work alongside your GP, psychiatrist or prescriber and does not replace their care. If you are taking, or thinking about changing, any medication, those decisions are always made with them.
You’ve tried the diets and the supplements that promised to fix your focus, your energy and your patience. You’ve sat through enough therapy to know the theory, and you are still waking up feeling like a stranger in your own body.
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Who I work with
You’re in your 40s or 50s, and something has shifted in a way that doesn’t quite make sense. On paper, in your blood work and in your daily life you’ve spent years looking “fine”, and yet your mood, your energy and your focus feel like they are slipping through your fingers.
Maybe you’ve lived with low mood or anxiety for a long time and perimenopause has made it harder to manage, and you suspect there is more to the story than “it’s your hormones”. Maybe you’ve simply reached the point where you’re tired of living with it and want to finally do something about it. Or maybe you’re taking antidepressants and you still feel there is more to understand.
You don’t need more advice from people who haven’t looked at your whole picture. You need someone to help you make sense of what your body is actually doing, and why you may be feeling the way you do.
If you are ready to stop managing your symptoms and start translating them, we’ll do our best work together.
About Nicola
Why I do this work:
I was the woman who looked confident in the boardroom while secretly being afraid to be alone. I was the woman who hit a wall at 27 and was handed a prescription for antidepressants that I instinctively knew wasn’t the answer, not because I was against medicine, but because I knew my own story wasn’t just a chemical imbalance.
I had also grown up watching my mother struggle for decades with what she was told was chemical depression, and I remember the quiet realisation that if I followed the standard path without anyone ever asking why, I could end up exactly where she was.
So I went looking for a different language.
For the last sixteen years I’ve combined my background in nutritional therapy, functional medicine and mindset work to create the bridge I wish I’d had back then. I’m a nutritional therapist and functional medicine practitioner, and a Fellow of BANT. I don’t treat you like a symptom list or a file to be processed. I listen to your whole story, because your biology has been trying to talk to you for years.
If you want to hear how I think about this, and how I move from the clinical data to the human reality, you can listen to my conversation on RNZ Sunday Morning.
I work with women who have spent years looking fine on the outside. If that sounds like you, you aren’t too complex and you haven’t run out of options, you have simply been looking for an answer in a system that rarely has the time to hear your whole story.
I don't work from a set protocol or assume that there's one explanation for why you feel the way you do.
My role is to help you understand your own health picture.
We'll bring together what you already know about yourself, your symptoms, health history and life experiences, with what we can learn from your nutrition, lifestyle, blood results and functional testing where appropriate.
Then I'll help you translate all of that information into something useful: what might be influencing how you feel, where we can make changes, and what deserves our attention first.
We're not trying to overhaul your life. We'll work with the foundations: food, sleep, stress, hormones, gut health and your nervous system, making changes that are realistic enough to become part of everyday life.
There are six areas we'll explore together:
1. Nutrition & blood sugar
What and how you eat can influence your energy, concentration and mood. We’ll look at your current nutrition, eating patterns and blood sugar, and at the nutrients your brain relies on, including those involved in methylation such as folate and B12, to identify where relatively small changes could help support more stable energy and mental wellbeing
2. Sleep & your body clock
Sleep and mental health are closely connected, but knowing you need more sleep doesn't necessarily help when you're lying awake at 3am. We'll look beyond generic sleep advice to understand what may be disrupting your sleep and what we can realistically do to support it.
3. Stress & your nervous system
If you've spent a long time feeling stressed, anxious or on high alert, that becomes an important part of the picture. We'll look at the demands on your nervous system and find practical ways of supporting it that fit into your life rather than giving you another list of things you “should” be doing.
4. Hormones & midlife
For many women, changes in mood, anxiety, sleep and concentration appear or become more noticeable during perimenopause and menopause. We'll consider where changing hormones may fit into your wider health picture and what nutritional and lifestyle support may be helpful.
5. Your gut & brain
Your digestive health doesn't sit separately from your mental wellbeing. We'll explore your digestion, gut health and nutrition, and where appropriate use functional testing to investigate whether factors such as the gut microbiome may be relevant to how you're feeling.
6. Your history & the patterns we notice
Your health didn't begin with the symptoms you're experiencing today. We'll also consider your wider history: periods of stress, previous health problems, medication, significant life events and patterns that have developed over time.
This isn't about looking backwards for something to blame. It's about recognising the connections that can help us understand why your health picture looks the way it does now.
Because when you understand your own health better, the changes we make together start to make much more sense.
Making sense of your whole health picture
"Patients no longer need to suffer from the limitations and inadequacies of traditional one-size-fits-all approaches… Lasting recovery is possible." – James Greenblatt, MD
It starts with a conversation
Beyond the Low Mood is a six-month programme, so we begin with a 30-minute Clarity Call to talk about what’s been going on, what you’re hoping to achieve and whether the programme feels like the right fit for you, and you’ll leave knowing what your next step could look like.
Beyond the Low Mood is a six-month programme built around you, not around a set protocol. We bring together your symptoms and health history with your nutrition, lifestyle and individual biochemistry, so that we can understand what may be influencing how you feel and build a plan that fits your life.
01 - Clarity Call
We start with a 30-minute Clarity Call. This gives us time to talk about what's been going on, what you're hoping to achieve and whether Beyond the Low Mood feels like the right fit for you.
02 - In-depth assessment
We begin the programme with a 90-minute session where we'll explore your health history, current symptoms, nutrition, lifestyle, medication, sleep, stress and anything else that may be relevant to how you're feeling. We'll start joining the dots and identify our initial priorities.
03 - Your personalised plan
After your first session, you'll receive clear, practical recommendations based on what we've discussed. These may include nutrition, lifestyle and supplement recommendations, with functional testing considered where appropriate. We'll introduce changes gradually so they're realistic and manageable.
04 - Support between sessions
You'll have regular check-ins and voice-note support between appointments, giving you somewhere to ask questions, share what's changing and get guidance when you need it, rather than having to wait until your next session.
05 - Five follow-up sessions
We'll meet for five 45-minute follow-up sessions across the six months. These give us time to review how you're getting on, discuss what's changing, make sense of any new information or test results and adapt your recommendations as we learn more about you.
By the end of the six months, you’ll have a clearer understanding of what has been influencing how you feel, a personalised plan that fits into your everyday life, and the confidence to keep supporting yourself long after our sessions finish.
Your programme may also include
Functional testing
Where it could provide useful additional information or influence our recommendations, we may discuss functional testing with you. Testing costs are additional to the programme fee and will always be discussed with you first.
Supplement Guidance
Where supplements are appropriate, I'll explain what I'm recommending, why I've chosen it and how to take it. Supplements are purchased separately, with a 10% discount on products recommended through the programme.
Communication with your medical team
Where helpful and with your permission, I can write to your GP, psychiatrist or other healthcare professional so they understand the nutritional and functional medicine support we're putting in place.
The six-month Beyond the Low Mood programme is £2,250.
Pay in full or in six monthly payments of £375.
How Beyond The Low Mood works
An important note on medication
This programme does not replace medical care. I do not prescribe, start, stop or change your medication, including antidepressants.
Any decisions about starting, tapering or adjusting medication are made between you and your prescribing doctor or psychiatrist, ideally with a gradual, collaborative plan in place.
With your consent, I can write to your prescriber and share relevant information, so we are all working together as a team. The focus of this programme is to support your body and mind through nutrition, lifestyle and functional medicine so that, whatever you decide about medication, you feel more supported, more informed and more resilient.
"Nicola knows her stuff, and she knows yours too. Only you don't know it, yet. Make an appointment. Because she can't keep it to herself, can she?"
Fiona, East London
