I was doing everything I had been taught to do and my body was getting worse.

I had been in health and fitness for most of my adult life. I was a personal trainer for close to 20 years, I had taken just about every nutrition certification I could find, and I really believed I had the answers.

Then in my 40s my own health started getting worse. PCOS, endometriosis, POTS symptoms, inflammation, severe fatigue and brain fog. There were days I was so tired I was relying on caffeine pills just to get through the day.

The frustrating part was that I was trying really hard. I was eating very clean, tracking my food, getting my steps in, and doing exactly what I had been taught a healthy, disciplined woman was supposed to do.

I wanted more answers for myself, and I wanted to be better at helping my clients, so I went back to school for food and nutrition with the intention of becoming a dietitian. I thought that would be where I finally found whatever I was missing. While I was in school studying nutrition, I gained about 50 pounds.

At first I did what most of us are taught to do. I tried harder. Maybe I needed to eat less, exercise more, be stricter, be more disciplined. Eventually I had to stop and ask myself a different question.

I left the traditional dietetic path and went to another school, where I spent the next year studying holistic nutrition and became a Nutrition Therapy Practitioner. That year gave me a much deeper understanding of digestion, blood sugar, stress, nourishment, and how the body works as a whole.

Then I kept going. Over the next year I took more courses and studied circadian biology, light, sleep, recovery, environment, movement, and the way modern life affects our biology. That is when everything really started to come together for me, because I could finally see that food and exercise were only part of the picture.

So I changed the way I ate, trained, slept, recovered, managed stress, and interacted with my environment. Within about 12 weeks things started changing quickly.

I lost the 50 pounds I had gained, and honestly, weight loss became one of the easiest parts once I understood what was actually influencing my body. My energy came back and I no longer needed caffeine pills to get through the day. My PCOS resolved, the endometriosis symptoms I had been dealing with stopped, and I learned how to manage my POTS symptoms much more effectively.

For the first time in years, I felt like I understood what was happening in my body. That is where The Modern Life Gap™ and later The Primal Signal Method™ came from. There was a much bigger picture than food and exercise alone.

Women were eating well, exercising, trying to sleep more, and still dealing with weight changes, low energy, brain fog, disrupted hormones, cravings, and poor recovery. That is when I began to see the bigger picture.

Our bodies still respond to the signals they have always relied on, light and darkness, nourishment, movement, stress, and recovery. Modern life changed the signals. Our biology did not change nearly as fast. I call that mismatch The Modern Life Gap™.

And The Primal Signal Method™ became the way I help women identify which of those five signals may need their attention first. That is the work I had been trying to understand for myself and eventually realized so many other women needed too.