I still remember the plastic bags my clients would empty onto my desk, filled with all the medications and supplements they were currently taking.
It was one of the first things I looked at before offering any advice.
Not because there was necessarily anything wrong with what they were taking, but because those plastic bags told me quite a lot about their health history and what their body was already dealing with.
And that matters when we’re trying to understand why good health advice doesn’t always give us the results we expect.
We’re not all starting from the same place
Think about how differently your body might respond to something at 21 compared with 81.
You might still enjoy the same activities, but your body may have different needs, or take longer to recover from something that once seemed easy.
We tend to understand that.
But age isn’t the only thing that makes a difference.
Two people of the same age can have very different starting points. One might be enjoying good health, while the other is managing several health conditions, carrying extra weight, struggling with their eating habits or recovering from a difficult time in their life.
They might follow exactly the same health advice, but their bodies aren’t necessarily starting from the same place.
And that can influence the results they experience.
Looking at the bigger picture
When I worked with clients, I wanted to understand more than the particular symptom they’d come to see me about.
I wanted to know what else their body was dealing with.
Sometimes their body was already managing quite a lot, which could influence how it responded to something new.
But there was another reason I wanted to understand their starting point.
Sometimes one piece of advice could support more than one area of their health.
For example, something as simple as drinking enough water can support several areas of our health surprisingly well, and may be more useful than adding another remedy aimed at just one symptom.
It wasn’t always about doing more. Sometimes it was about finding what might be most helpful for the body as a whole.
Where is your body starting from?
When we want to improve our health, it’s natural to focus on the problem we want to solve.
We find advice that sounds promising, give it a try and hope to see a difference.
But how often do we stop to think about what our body was already dealing with before we began?
Perhaps you’ve been managing a long-standing health problem, your everyday habits haven’t been particularly supportive, or you’ve been through a difficult period.
None of these automatically means the advice won’t help.
But they may influence how your body responds, or suggest that a different kind of support might be more useful.
So if you’ve followed good advice but haven’t seen the results you expected, here’s another question worth asking:
Where was my body starting from when I began?
You might not know straight away whether your starting point influenced your results.
But it’s another piece of the picture worth considering.
And sometimes, looking at the bigger picture helps us see possibilities we hadn’t noticed before.
What if there’s more to your results than you realise?
This is just one of several reasons why you might not see the results you expected, even when you’re following good advice. Different reasons can come into play at different times, and sometimes more than one may be influencing your results.
Understanding what might be influencing your results can help take away some of the confusion and uncertainty about what to do next.
If you’d like my help, I’ve created the Make Self-Care Simple Method to help you navigate that uncertainty and find your next step, even when the answer isn’t clear.
And you can get started for free by discovering your Body Guidance Style — because we don’t all notice our body’s feedback in the same way.