About

I am 44, and a first-time mother to my daughter Neve, who I had at 39. The years around her arrival changed my life almost all at once. I had left London for Chester, moved in with Rob after a long time living on my own, and together we opened a patisserie, Sweet Elements. We closed it when Neve was five months old, four years ago now, and the upheaval did not stop there. A small baby, a business just behind us, and having to build something new ahead and figure things out. Each change on its own was manageable. Together, and over several years, they compounded, and slowly things started to change, mentally and physically.

For a long time my idea of looking after myself began and ended with food. I ate well, I cooked from scratch, and I assumed that was enough. It was only in the last year, as my body started to change and new health issues appeared, that I understood it was not. I began listening to podcasts and reading about women's health in our forties, and slowly it dawned on me how much I had not been doing, how little I had understood about being genuinely strong and about setting myself up for the decades ahead. So many of us believe that if we just eat well, whatever that even means to each of us, we have done the work. I believed it too. We have not.

That is when the way I look at my own health changed for good. I stopped taking things at face value and started reading the evidence for myself, testing it on my own body until I understand it or feel better. When a doctor cannot get to the bottom of something, I do my own research and often find my own answers, and sometimes I look for another doctor. I do not have to accept an answer I can see is wrong.

My standards did not come from nowhere. I am half Maltese, half Swedish, and I grew up in Greece, in a house where my mother cooked from scratch and held everything she made to a high standard. My parents owned a sportsware manufacturing business that was sourcing organic cotton thirty years ago, and supplied the likes of Wimbledon and St Andrews, so provenance and doing things properly were simply normal to me, long before either became fashionable. Later I spent a decade in marketing, which taught me the other side of it, how ordinary things get dressed up and sold as more than they are. Then I trained as a pastry chef at Le Cordon Bleu. All of it added up, over the years, into a set of standards that are entirely my own, and they are high.

Having Neve changed how I thought about food, first when I started feeding her, then when Rob and I sat down and thought properly about how we wanted to grow old. We want to reach old age still fully functioning, pain-free and off medication, here and well enough to watch Neve grow into a woman. We are doing that through how we train, how we eat, and the other parts of life that affect our health. I made a start earlier this year, and from my forty fourth birthday it moves into full gear.

I am not a doctor and I do not give medical advice. I am learning in the open, testing on myself, and telling you what actually works and what does not. The three parts of this site, The Table, The Body and The Story, are where it all goes: food and where it truly comes from, the whole person physical and mental, and the honest account of how a life gets better. If that is how you already think, the newsletter is where it goes deeper.