There's a particular kind of tired that doesn't lift with sleep. You know the one when the eyes feel heavy by seven. The body wants the pillow before the day has even properly ended and underneath it...a flatness, a dimming of self. Like the lights are on but dialed down low. Not quiet a sadness exactly more like a hollowness, zero drive..a dullness where dopamine should be.
For so many women, this is simply low iron. And for so many of us it becomes our norm. Pathology results come back the same year after year, until it just registers as familiar. Until you go into a kind of autopilot around it... "it’s just how I am, it’s just the way that I function". Something you accept, because it’s always been there which is wild when you sit with it, but for so many of us this is simply how we feel.
Theres a chapter here that took me the longest to understand, even with years of study behind me: a body that sits for months for years in a low-grade, chronically depleted state of iron deficiency isn't just "a bit tired". It's a nervous system living in low level stress... continuously and quietly under the surface of an otherwise normal looking life. A nervous system that never gets to fully exhale doesn't just affect mood or energy. From a root cause lens, that sustained low hum of stress ripples outward into digestion, into hormones, into sleep architecture, into how well the body can even absorb and use the nutrients we do give it.
It becomes circular; the depletion feeds the stress state and the stress state deepens the depletion.
So when we talk about iron, or any nutrient sitting stubbornly low, I don't think we can only ask "what's missing?" I think we have to also ask, "what has this body been carrying, for how long, and what has that cost it?"
The more I read, the more I keep returning to one idea: we are not separate from nature ...we never have been. A vitamin isolated in a lab, stripped from its whole food matrix and pressed into a tablet is asking the body to do something it was never really designed to do, recognise and integrate a fragment. Whereas a plant, grown in soil, reaching for sunlight, doing the quiet daily work of photosynthesis... that's a whole system.
When we eat it, we're not just consuming a nutrient we're consuming light, converted into something we can absorb ...energy, transformed.
Take iron, heme iron the kind found in red meat, liver, organ meats - is absorbed by the body far more readily than the non-heme iron found in plants or in most supplements. Pair that with vitamin C, not a tablet but the vitamin C sitting inside citrus, berries, capsicum and absorption climbs again. Black strap molasses, rich in iron and copper both, is another quiet, ancient source ...old knowledge, dressed back up as science.
The other thing I keep coming back to: nothing in the body works in isolation, so why would we expect a nutrient to?
Iron needs copper to be properly utilised. It needs vitamin C to be absorbed. It needs a digestive system that isn't itself under stress, because bioavailability isn't fixed ...it shifts with the state of someone's gut, someone's nervous system, someone's whole internal terrain. Two women can eat the same iron rich meal and absorb entirely different amounts of it. This is why chasing a single number on a lab report in isolation, so often falls short. The body doesn't read in isolation it reads in relationship.
Isn’t life fascinating, we can be educated and I have been... again and again. Public health, Nutrition, Nursing, Integrative health, Functional medicine years of it. But I’ve also been my own guinea pig for a long time now ...trial and error through the depths of postnatal depression, years of chronic anemia and genuinely believing I had the resources and the knowledge because of everything I’d been taught. And still, life experience has asked me to unlearn and relearn ...to listen to intuition. To feel my way toward what actually aligns rather than simply reciting what I was trained to say. That’s what this is, a journal a place where I’m unpacking and sharing what’s shifting for me in real time not a place where I’ve landed on the right answer.
Maybe reading this creates a little expansion in you too. Maybe it shifts something, or just plants a seed for a different way of doing things than what you’ve heard before. I’m not saying any of it is right over wrong i’m just sharing it. So maybe the invitation isn’t just “what supplement fixes this.” Maybe it’s the slower question: what has my body been holding? What would it mean to feed this beautiful vessel of mine with whole foods naturally rich in what I’m depleted in and give that a real go, before reaching for the isolated version on the shelf?
— Jess, founder & integrative health practitioner