THE ALLOSTATIC LOAD PROGRAMME
The Programme — An evolutionary medicine approach to the physiology of long-term stress, delivered through clinical nutrition and lifestyle medicine
Who this is for
You have been running on high alert for years, and you can no longer stand down.
Tired but wired. Sleep that doesn't restore you, however long it lasts. Energy that collapses at predictable points in the day. Digestion that worsens under load. Demands you used to absorb without noticing now landing much harder than they should.
And, often, results that came back normal.
This is for people whose physiology has been carrying sustained load for years, usually while continuing to perform at a high level. It is not stress management and it is not coaching.
Your stress response is not malfunctioning
That is the starting point, and it is not reassurance — it is the most useful clinical fact available.
Evolutionary medicine asks a question conventional practice rarely does: not only what has gone wrong, but why the body is built to respond this way at all. Applied to sustained stress, the answer reframes the whole picture.
Zebras, as Robert Sapolsky put it, don't get ulcers. A zebra's stressor is acute, physical, resolved in minutes — and then genuinely over. The human stress response evolved for the same shape of threat. What it meets now is different in kind: psychological and social demand that never fully resolves, deadlines that recede as you reach them, a working day with no boundary, light and information at all hours.
The system is doing exactly what it was designed to do. The environment simply no longer supplies what the design assumed.
Why the symptoms cluster the way they do
Organisms allocate limited energy between immediate survival and long-term maintenance. Under sustained threat, that allocation shifts — repair, digestion, immune surveillance and reproductive function are deprioritised or dysregulated in favour of meeting the next demand.
This is why sleep, gut function, immunity, hormonal regulation and cognition degrade together rather than separately. They are all maintenance, and maintenance is what gets deferred. Bruce McEwen and Eliot Stellar named the accumulated cost allostatic load: the price of staying adapted to conditions that were never meant to persist.
It is a measurable physiological state, not a mood — which is why "you're just stressed" is such an inadequate account of it.
Where the divergences actually are
My first degree is in biological anthropology, and that background points to something specific rather than general. Human physiology was calibrated under particular conditions: darkness that enforced recovery, movement embedded in daily subsistence, stable social groups, food arriving in a certain form and rhythm. Studies of contemporary populations living closer to those conditions — the Hadza, the Tsimane — show strikingly low rates of cardiovascular disease, and sleep that is no longer than ours but structured very differently, with insomnia almost absent.
That doesn't mean the past was healthier. It means the divergences are identifiable, and under sustained stress they concentrate in four places.
What we work with
Metabolic stability. Blood glucose regulation, meal timing, nutrient status. A system under load is expensive to run, and metabolic instability amplifies everything below it.
Circadian and sleep architecture. Light exposure, timing, and the structural conditions that determine whether sleep restores anything.
Breathing and respiratory chemistry. Chronic overbreathing can shift CO2 tolerance and the autonomic set-point. Assessed and retrained using the Buteyko method.
Autonomic regulation. Heart rate variability as an objective measure of adaptive capacity, with polyvagal-informed and HeartMath-based work to restore the recovery response.
These four are not separable in prolonged stress physiology, and few practitioners work across all of them. The intervention itself is nutrition and lifestyle medicine — diet, sleep, light, movement, breathing, nutrient status — delivered clinically, with an evidence-based rationale for every recommendation.
What we measure — all included
DUTCH Complete with Cortisol Awakening Response — diurnal cortisol pattern, adrenal metabolites, and catecholamine metabolites measured directly
Comprehensive blood panel — thyroid, liver, kidney, metabolic and immune markers
GI-MAP with zonulin — gastrointestinal function and barrier integrity
DNA Health panel — optional, discussed before ordering
Heart rate variability — tracked throughout
Measurement shows what state your physiology is actually in, rather than what it feels like — and gives us both an objective way to see whether anything is changing.
Programme includes
Clinical research — 6 hours dedicated case analysis including drug-nutrient and nutrient-nutrient interaction review
Full laboratory interpretation — evolutionary and functional correlations across all panels, used to inform nutritional and lifestyle recommendations
Personalised protocols — evidence-based nutrition plan, nutraceutical protocol, and lifestyle recommendations
Gastrointestinal support — functional medicine 5R nutritional plan where indicated
Breathing and nervous system — Buteyko respiratory assessment and Polyvagal Theory coaching
Maintenance protocol — provided on completion of the programme
Direct messenger support — Monday to Friday throughout the programme via Practice Better
All laboratory testing included · Payment plans available · 7 × 60-minute consultations over 4 months · Online via Zoom · International clients welcomed · Fees discussed on the discovery call · Maintenance protocol on completion.
Scope
This is a nutrition and lifestyle programme, delivered as educational and nutritional support. I do not diagnose or treat medical conditions, and nothing here replaces the care of your GP or specialist.
The DNA Health panel includes APOE, a gene associated with Alzheimer's and cardiovascular risk. I do not interpret it: APOE is an area of my own research in which I hold a declared interest. This is discussed fully before any testing is ordered, and the genetic panel is optional.
Post-programme clinical support
On completion of either programme, clients receive a maintenance protocol to sustain the work begun. Ongoing nutritional support is available for clients who have completed a programme and wish to continue working together. Fee discussed on enquiry.
Questions before getting started? Get in touch. All consultations conducted online. International clients welcomed.
Why evolution matters here
Most approaches to chronic ill health ask what has gone wrong and work to correct it. My training leads me to ask a further question first: why does the body work this way at all?
Human physiology was assembled over roughly two million years under conditions that no longer exist. Agriculture arrived around ten thousand years ago; industrial food, about a hundred and fifty. Sleep, light exposure, movement and social life have changed just as fast. Much of what we now treat as chronic disease sits in that gap.
That doesn't replace the usual questions about what is dysregulated and how to support it — it puts them in context, and often changes which factors look worth pursuing first.
