Why I Started Looking at Food Completely Differently

I ate pretty well, or so I thought. Admittedly there was a lot of food ‘on the run’. Long days out filming meant that motorway service station sandwiches and pub lunches were a regular occurrence. And then there was the eating out when I got home. Nobody really tells you that no matter how fancy the restaurant might appear to be, what they cook their food in (mostly seed oils), and the quality of their produce, may not be top notch. The menus are created to read well and taste good, but ultimately to give them a good margin and provide you with a memorable dining experience. (Obviously there are excellent chefs out there cooking amazing food, of the highest quality, but that isn’t the general dining-out offering. And these plates are usually very expensive.)

So I ate plenty of veg, punctuated by lots of pasta, a few curries, and probably cooked from scratch twice a week max. (This was before kids too). Friday night was wine o’clock, and mid-week industry get togethers often involved spirits of both kinds. By most people’s standards I was healthy. But underneath that, something wasn’t quite right. I wasn’t keeping an eye on my nutrients, I don’t think I was eating enough fibre, and I was often tired in a way that sleep didn’t fix. My digestion was off. My energy would crash in the afternoons and I’d reach for something sweet to get me through. Every day. I just assumed that was life. That it was normal.

It wasn’t until a cancer diagnosis changed everything that I started asking different questions. Not “what disease do I have?” but “why does my body feel this way? And how can I use nutrition to help heal me?” I completely changed how I see food.

Root-cause medicine isn’t some fringe idea. It’s a growing movement in functional and integrative health that looks at the person, not just the diagnosis. It asks: what’s actually going on beneath the surface? Because what shows up as fatigue, brain fog, skin flare-ups, bloating or low mood is often a signal – your body waving a flag, asking for something.

Food is one of the most powerful flags of all.

Here’s something that stopped me in my tracks when I first heard it: most of us are eating in a way that creates low-level inflammation every single day, without realising it. Ultra-processed foods, refined sugar, seed oils, things that come in packets with ingredient lists you need a chemistry degree to decode – these aren’t just “not great for you”. They’re actively working against your body’s ability to function well. And the effects are quiet at first. A bit of bloat. Some brain fog. A few extra kilos that weren’t there before. Easy to brush off. Easy to blame on getting older.

But age isn’t always the culprit. Often, it’s what’s on your plate (and how you’re moving and sleeping).

When I started working with functional nutritionists and practitioners who look at the gut as the starting point for so much of our health, things began to make more sense. The gut is where we absorb nutrients, regulate mood (hello, gut-brain axis), produce a huge chunk of our serotonin, and manage a significant part of our immune response. If it’s not working well, nothing else works quite right either. And what we eat directly shapes how well it functions.

So what did I actually change?

I cut out refined sugar first. Not in a dramatic, overnight way – gradually, understanding why I was doing it rather than just white-knuckling through cravings. I swapped out the obvious culprits: the mid-morning biscuit, the sweet snack after lunch, the sugary yoghurt that I’d convinced myself was healthy because it said “low fat” on the label. (Low fat, by the way, almost always means high sugar. Don’t get me started.) The most radical part of all of this was that I stopped snacking in between meals entirely. So no cheeky dunking biscuits at 11am, and no late night popcorn with Maltesers on the sofa watching box sets.

I started eating more whole, real foods. Not in a worthy, joyless way – in a genuinely curious way. What does my body actually feel good on? I started noticing. More colour on the plate. More fibre. More fermented foods like kefir, kimchi, a good live yoghurt. Less of the beige, processed stuff that leaves you full but somehow still unsatisfied. And I stop eating at 7pm and don’t eat until the following morning, usually around 10am, to give my gut an overnight rest.

I also looked hard at alcohol. That was trickier. I enjoyed wine. I liked the ritual of it, the social side of it. But the honest truth is that alcohol is sugar and a poison – it disrupts sleep, it taxes the liver, and it’s inflammatory. I haven’t gone teetotal, but to give you an indication of my intake now – last year I had two glasses of wine. Period. I notice the difference in how I feel the next day, and the day after that. Cutting down/out alcohol also significantly reduces my chance of a breast cancer recurrence.

What surprised me most wasn’t how hard the changes were. It was how quickly things shifted once I made them. Within a few weeks, my energy was more consistent. The afternoon crashes became less dramatic. My gut settled down. My skin looked better. Small things, but they added up.

I’m not a nutritionist. I’m not a doctor. What I am is someone who spent a long time ignoring what my body was trying to tell me, and then decided to start listening. The science is there, and it’s compelling. But more than the science, there’s the lived experience – and that’s something no study can fully capture.

If you take one thing from this: your food is information. Every single meal is a message you’re sending to your body. It doesn’t have to be perfect – it just has to be intentional.

That shift in thinking? It might be the most important health hack I know. Before I pop something in my mouth now I ask myself ‘how is this feeding my health’? If it’s a naughty treat (once a month) I savour the moment and remind myself I will have this again. I’ve also made blueberries, dates and nut butters my new best-food-friends.