Vitamin deficiencies: What is your body really telling you?

There comes a moment in life when most of us find ourselves sitting in a doctor's surgery, trying to remember why we actually booked the appointment in the first place. Maybe you're exhausted even after eight hours of sleep. Maybe your hair has started falling out in places you would quite like it to stay. Your nails have become so brittle they seem to break simply because someone looked at them the wrong way. Or perhaps you've noticed that climbing the stairs now feels suspiciously similar to preparing for an expedition up Mount Everest.

So your GP orders a few blood tests, you patiently wait for the results and, a few days later, your phone buzzes with a message.

"Your vitamin D is low."

"Your B12 is below the normal range."

"Your iron stores are depleted."

For a few seconds you feel relieved. Finally, there is an explanation. Then, almost immediately, another question appears.

Now what?

Most of us do exactly what any sensible person would do. We head straight for the supplement aisle, where we are greeted by shelves that somehow manage to look both reassuring and utterly overwhelming at the same time. There are capsules, sprays, liquids, gummies, powders and tablets. Some promise maximum absorption, others claim to be "professional strength", while a few seem to suggest they'll transform you into a completely new human being before next Tuesday. I'm fairly sure that if someone bottled "liquid motivation" and put a shiny gold label on it, half of us would probably buy that as well.

Sometimes those supplements make a huge difference, and that's brilliant. If your body genuinely lacks something, replacing it can be exactly what it needs. But many people notice something rather strange. Their blood results improve, yet they still don't feel quite right. The numbers look healthier, but the fatigue hasn't completely disappeared, their digestion is still unpredictable, or they simply don't have the energy they remember having a few years ago.

And that, in my opinion, is where the really interesting conversation begins.

You see, modern medicine is exceptionally good at telling us what is happening inside the body. Blood tests can reveal deficiencies long before we notice obvious symptoms, and they help doctors identify conditions that genuinely require treatment. We should never dismiss that. If your body is lacking vitamin B12, vitamin D or iron, it's important to understand why and to correct it properly. Ignoring significant deficiencies simply because someone on the internet told you "it's all emotional" is, quite frankly, not a particularly clever idea.

At the same time, I've always found myself wondering whether a deficiency is really the beginning of the story... or whether it's actually the final page of a much longer chapter.

Imagine opening your kitchen cupboard one morning and discovering there's no coffee left. You could say the problem is obvious: you've run out of coffee. Technically, that's true. But if we stop there, we've learned almost nothing. Did someone drink the last cup? Did you forget to buy more? Has life been so chaotic recently that shopping ended up somewhere near the bottom of your priority list? Or perhaps the supermarket delivery never arrived.

The empty jar isn't really the problem. It's simply the clue telling us that something happened earlier.

This is exactly how I tend to look at vitamin and mineral deficiencies. They're often not the first domino to fall; they're one of the last. By the time we see the result on a blood test, the body may have been adapting, compensating and quietly juggling its resources for weeks, months or even years.

And that's where things become fascinating, because different approaches to health start asking completely different questions. Modern medicine wants to know what the deficiency is and how to correct it. Traditional Chinese Medicine asks why the body's internal systems may no longer be transforming food into nourishment efficiently. Biodecoding and Recall Healing ask whether prolonged stress or unresolved biological conflicts could have changed the way the body functions in the first place.

Three completely different languages, three different maps and perhaps, just perhaps, all of them describing the same landscape from different angles.

So… Is It Really About the Vitamin?

This is probably the part where some people will disagree with me, and honestly, I'm perfectly fine with that. If there's one thing I've learned over the years, it's that the human body has very little interest in fitting into neat little boxes. We love simple answers because they make us feel safe. We like believing that if A happens, then B must be the reason. Unfortunately, biology has a rather mischievous sense of humour and rarely follows our beautifully organised flow charts.

If you've ever searched online for information about vitamin deficiencies, you've almost certainly come across one of those colourful diagrams that promise to explain everything in thirty seconds. They usually look wonderfully convincing. Low vitamin D means you don't feel supported. Low B12 means there's a family conflict. Magnesium deficiency means stress. Zinc deficiency means low confidence. It all sounds so neat, so logical and, perhaps most importantly, so easy to remember that it's hardly surprising these graphics get shared thousands of times.

The only difficulty is that the body doesn't actually work like that.

Imagine for a moment that your car starts making a strange noise every time you drive uphill. You take it to a mechanic, hoping for an answer, and before he's even lifted the bonnet he confidently announces, "Oh, that's because you drove through Manchester last Thursday." You'd probably look at him as if he'd completely lost the plot. After all, the same noise could be caused by worn brake pads, a loose exhaust, a failing gearbox or something as simple as a heat shield rattling underneath the car. The sound may be the same, but the reason behind it can be completely different.

Our bodies are remarkably similar.

Two people can have exactly the same blood result and arrive there by entirely different roads. One person's vitamin B12 might be low because they have coeliac disease and their intestine is no longer absorbing nutrients efficiently. Another person's deficiency may have developed because their stomach no longer produces enough intrinsic factor, making absorption almost impossible. Someone else may have followed a vegan diet for years without supplementation, while another has spent months living on coffee, grabbing sandwiches between meetings and sleeping five hours a night because life has simply become overwhelming.

On paper, they all appear to have the same deficiency. In reality, they're telling four completely different stories.

This is why I've never been completely comfortable with the idea that every vitamin should have its own emotional translation. It's a lovely idea because it's simple, but life rarely is. In fact, I don't think the body has emotions about vitamins at all. That might sound like a strange thing to say, especially in an article about Biodecoding, but bear with me because I think it's one of the most important ideas in the whole conversation.

The body doesn't wake up one morning and decide it no longer likes vitamin D, or that it's suddenly developed a personal grudge against magnesium. Vitamins aren't the body's problem. They're its tools. They're part of an incredibly complex system that allows every cell to repair itself, produce energy, communicate with its neighbours and keep us alive without us having to think about it. When one of those tools starts running low, it doesn't necessarily mean the tool itself is the root of the problem. Quite often it simply tells us that something further upstream has changed.

That's actually much closer to the way modern physiology looks at the body. A deficiency doesn't appear out of nowhere. Something usually happens first. Digestion changes, hormones change, stomach acid changes, the microbiome changes, sleep changes, appetite changes and the way we absorb nutrients changes. Sometimes our requirements increase dramatically because the body is under enormous pressure. By the time the blood test finally shows a low result, the body may already have been adapting for months without us noticing.

And here's where I think Biodecoding becomes really fascinating—not because it gives us magical answers, but because it encourages us to ask better questions. Instead of asking, "Which emotion belongs to vitamin B12?", perhaps a more useful question would be, "What has been happening in this person's life that might have changed the way their whole body has been functioning?"

Do you see the difference? One question searches for a label. The other searches for a story. Personally, I've always found stories far more interesting than labels, because stories allow for complexity. They leave room for childhood, relationships, grief, work, hormones, infections, diet, medication, sleep, trauma, genetics and all the countless little pieces that make each of us wonderfully different.

And perhaps that's where we should begin—not with the vitamin itself, but with the person sitting quietly behind the blood test.

Your Body Doesn't Have Emotions About Vitamins

One of the biggest misunderstandings I've come across over the years is the idea that every vitamin or mineral has its own emotional conflict. I completely understand where that idea comes from because, on the surface, it sounds logical. We naturally want clear answers. They make us feel as though we've finally cracked the code. The trouble is that the human body has evolved over millions of years into something far more sophisticated than a collection of simple cause-and-effect equations.

If we really stop and think about it, it would be rather odd if the brain suddenly developed an emotional relationship with vitamin D or magnesium. Our bodies don't sit around discussing nutrients the way we might discuss holiday destinations or what to cook for dinner. They don't decide that this week they'll have an argument with zinc and make friends with selenium instead. Biology simply doesn't work like that.

What the body does care about—passionately, relentlessly and every single second of every single day—is survival.

That one word changes everything.

Once you begin looking at health through the lens of survival rather than disease, many things start making far more sense. The body isn't asking itself, "How can I keep my vitamin B12 level in the middle of the laboratory reference range?" It's asking a much older and much more important question: "What do I need to do to keep this human alive today?"

Imagine you're running a busy restaurant. On a normal day everything ticks along beautifully. The chefs have plenty of ingredients, deliveries arrive on time, the waiting staff are smiling and customers leave happy. Now imagine that, overnight, the electricity fails, two members of staff call in sick, a water pipe bursts in the kitchen and someone accidentally sets fire to a tray of Yorkshire puddings.

At that moment, nobody is worrying about whether the parsley garnish is sitting at exactly the right angle. Everyone is simply trying to keep the restaurant functioning.

Our bodies behave in remarkably similar ways. When life is calm, digestion works efficiently, hormones communicate beautifully, repair processes tick away quietly in the background and nutrients are absorbed, transported and stored with astonishing precision. It's an elegant system, and most of the time we don't even notice it because it's doing exactly what it was designed to do.

But life isn't always calm. Sometimes stress arrives for a weekend and politely leaves. Sometimes it moves in, claims your favourite chair, eats all the biscuits and refuses to pay rent for the next three years.

That kind of stress changes things. Not because your body is broken, not because it's punishing you, but because it begins making decisions based on one priority: survival.

This is where modern physiology and Biodecoding actually become far more compatible than many people realise. Medicine explains that prolonged activation of the stress response can influence stomach acid production, digestive enzymes, intestinal permeability, the gut microbiome, sleep quality, hormone balance and inflammation. None of this is controversial; it's simply how the body adapts when it believes resources need to be redirected.

Biodecoding approaches the same situation from a different direction. Rather than asking only what has changed inside the body, it also asks why the nervous system may have remained in that state for so long. What happened that convinced the brain life was no longer safe? Which unresolved situation kept the alarm switched on long after the original danger had disappeared?

Whether you agree with every aspect of that approach or not, I think it's a fascinating question because it shifts the focus away from the vitamin itself and back towards the person.

After all, vitamins don't experience heartbreak. People do. Magnesium doesn't worry about paying the mortgage. People do. Iron doesn't lie awake at three o'clock in the morning replaying the same conversation over and over again. People do.

And yet those very human experiences have the power to change sleep, appetite, digestion, hormones and the way the nervous system behaves. Over time, those physiological changes may influence the way nutrients are absorbed, stored or used. Suddenly, the blood test starts looking very different—but the story didn't begin in the laboratory. It began weeks, months or sometimes even years earlier, in the ordinary moments of someone's life.

We become so fascinated by the numbers that we forget there's a human being attached to them. We celebrate when vitamin D climbs from 18 to 45, but never ask whether the person has finally left the relationship that kept them permanently anxious. We notice ferritin improving after supplementation, but don't stop to wonder whether sleeping through the night for the first time in years has also played a part. We talk endlessly about magnesium, yet hardly ever ask why someone's nervous system has been behaving as though they're running away from danger for the last decade.

Perhaps that's because numbers are wonderfully tidy. People rarely are. And personally... I think that's a good thing.

If there is one lesson both medicine and psychology have taught me, it's that every blood result belongs to someone with a unique story. Two people may have identical laboratory reports, yet the road that brought them there may have been completely different. One may have arrived through illness, another through poor diet, another through medication, another through grief, another through chronic stress, and quite often through a combination of several factors woven together over many years.

That's why I've become increasingly cautious whenever someone tells me they've found the emotional meaning of a particular vitamin. Biology is rarely interested in shortcuts. It much prefers stories. And if we take the time to listen carefully enough, our bodies are usually telling one.

The Body Thinks in Functions, Not in Vitamin Names

I think one of the biggest turning points in my own journey happened when I stopped looking at vitamins as separate little heroes running around the body with their own individual jobs. At first, that's exactly how I saw them. Vitamin D was responsible for bones, vitamin C looked after collagen, magnesium calmed the nervous system, iron carried oxygen... neat little boxes that made everything seem wonderfully organised.

The more I learned, however, the more I realised that the body has absolutely no interest in organising itself according to the chapters of a nutrition textbook.

That might sound like an odd thing to say, but stay with me for a moment.

We like categories because they make life easier. We divide food into proteins, fats and carbohydrates. We divide nutrients into vitamins and minerals. We divide organs into the digestive system, the nervous system and the immune system. It's a brilliant way of teaching anatomy because otherwise most of us would probably give up halfway through the first lesson.

The body, though, doesn't seem to care very much about any of that. It doesn't wake up in the morning wondering whether today's priority should be vitamin D or magnesium. It isn't sitting somewhere inside us holding an emergency meeting because zinc levels have dropped by three percent since Tuesday. Instead, it asks a much simpler question over and over again.

What needs to happen today to keep this human alive?

Everything else comes after that.

Once I understood this, so many things suddenly started making sense.

Take your bones, for example. If we look at them through the lens of nutrition, it's tempting to think they're all about calcium. Spend five minutes in a pharmacy and you'll probably find an entire shelf trying to convince you of exactly that. Add a little vitamin D, perhaps some vitamin K2, and you're done.

Except... you're not.

Because bones don't build themselves using calcium alone. They need protein, phosphorus, magnesium, hormones that are working properly, movement, healthy digestion so those nutrients can actually be absorbed, kidneys that activate vitamin D, a liver that's doing its job and an intestine capable of bringing all those building blocks into the body in the first place.

Suddenly the picture becomes a lot bigger than one vitamin.

Or think about vitamin C. Most of us immediately associate it with oranges, winter colds and someone in the family insisting that "you need more vitamin C" every time you sneeze. Poor vitamin C has been reduced to little more than the mascot of the immune system.

In reality, it's involved in producing collagen, repairing tissues, supporting blood vessels, helping wounds heal and taking part in hundreds of biochemical reactions every single day. The body isn't interested in vitamin C because it has a sentimental attachment to oranges. It's interested in repairing tissues. Vitamin C simply happens to be one of the tools it uses to get that job done.

That's the difference, and it's the point where I think many conversations about Biodecoding accidentally take a wrong turn. Somewhere along the way, we started asking what a vitamin means emotionally instead of asking what biological function the body has been struggling to perform.

Those are two completely different questions.

Imagine you've invited a builder to renovate your kitchen. Halfway through the job he walks in, looking slightly stressed, and says, "I'm running out of screws." Now imagine looking him straight in the eye and replying, "Tell me about your emotional relationship with screws." He'd probably think you'd completely lost it.

The screws aren't the problem. They're simply one of the tools needed to finish the work. If the builder is using more screws than expected, perhaps the original plans changed, perhaps one wall turned out to be unstable, perhaps half the kitchen had to be rebuilt from scratch, or perhaps the previous owner had done such a spectacular DIY job that nothing underneath was where it was supposed to be.

Whatever the reason, the conversation isn't really about screws. It's about the work that suddenly became much more demanding.

Personally, I think vitamins and minerals deserve the same kind of curiosity.

When magnesium levels begin to fall, I don't immediately ask, "What does magnesium symbolise?" Instead, I find myself wondering what has been asking so much of this person's body. Have their muscles been permanently tense for months? Has their nervous system forgotten what relaxation feels like? Is chronic inflammation quietly increasing the demand for nutrients? Has poor sleep been pushing the body to compensate night after night? Or has digestion become so compromised that even the healthiest diet in the world simply isn't being used efficiently?

Notice how different those questions feel. They're no longer trying to squeeze a complex human being into a single sentence. Instead, they invite us to become curious, and curiosity, in my experience, almost always leads us somewhere more interesting than certainty.

This is probably why I've become a little cautious whenever someone confidently tells me they've found the emotional meaning of a particular vitamin. Biology has a habit of humbling us whenever we think we've finally worked everything out. Just when we're convinced we've found the answer, the body quietly reminds us that there are another ten questions we hadn't even thought to ask.

Perhaps that's why I still find it endlessly fascinating.

The body rarely speaks in headlines. It tells stories. Sometimes they're short, sometimes they're complicated, and sometimes they only make perfect sense when we look back months later and realise that the blood test wasn't the beginning of the story at all.

It was simply the moment we finally started listening.

The Day I Stopped Looking for "The Conflict"

There was a time when I believed, just like many people do at the beginning of their Biodecoding journey, that every symptom had a specific emotional conflict hiding behind it. I was convinced that somewhere there had to be a map, almost like a dictionary, where you could look up a symptom, find the matching conflict and finally understand what your body had been trying to tell you all along.

I have to admit... there was something very comforting about that idea.

After all, life is complicated enough. If someone offered you a simple explanation for why your body wasn't behaving the way you wanted it to, wouldn't you be tempted to believe it? I certainly was.

Then real life happened.

I started working with people, and with time I began noticing something that made those neat explanations much harder to hold on to. Blood tests could look almost identical, while the context around them was completely different. Sometimes there were digestive issues. Sometimes there was medication. Sometimes there had been surgery, restrictive eating, years of poor sleep, chronic inflammation, long-term stress or simply a combination of several things slowly building up in the background.

If you'd looked only at the laboratory results, you might have assumed those people all shared the same story. They didn't. Not even close.

That was probably the moment I stopped asking, "What's the conflict?" and started asking a much more useful question.

"What has this person's body been trying to adapt to?"

It's a subtle change, but I honestly think it transforms the entire conversation.

The word conflict can sometimes make people feel as though they're expected to hunt for one dramatic event that explains everything. They start searching their memory for the biggest argument, the worst heartbreak or the most traumatic experience, almost as if the body keeps a filing cabinet labelled, "Reason for low magnesium."

Life is rarely that tidy. Sometimes the body is responding to one major event, but sometimes it's responding to ten years of tiny things that never felt important on their own. None of those experiences fit neatly into a single sentence, yet every one of them may ask something of the body. Sometimes a little. Sometimes a great deal.

And the remarkable thing is that the body doesn't really care whether the stress comes from a lion chasing you across the savannah or from an inbox with two hundred unread emails. It isn't judging the source of the danger. It's responding to the way your nervous system interprets it.

I often think that's one of the reasons health can become so confusing. We spend years looking for one cause because one cause feels manageable. If there's one answer, there must also be one solution.

Real biology is usually far less interested in tidy endings. It's interested in adaptation.

That's why I don't like telling someone that their vitamin D is "about support" or their B12 is "about family". Could those themes become relevant during a consultation? Absolutely. Sometimes they do. But not because the vitamin itself somehow carries that emotional meaning. They become relevant because, while we're exploring someone's story, we begin to notice patterns in the way they've been living, coping, worrying, grieving or surviving.

There's a world of difference between those two approaches. One starts with a conclusion and tries to fit the person into it. The other starts with the person and allows the story to unfold naturally. For me, only one of those approaches feels genuinely respectful.

Perhaps that's why, when someone asks me, "Aga, what conflict causes low magnesium?", my first instinct isn't to search for an answer. It's to become curious. I want to know what their days look like, whether they sleep, whether they eat in peace or standing over the kitchen sink because they haven't had five minutes to themselves all day. I want to know whether they've laughed recently, whether they've been carrying responsibilities that were never really theirs, and whether their body has been whispering for months before it finally decided to speak a little louder through a blood test.

Because that's the thing about the human body. It rarely starts by shouting. First, it whispers. Then it nudges. Then it complains. Only when we keep ignoring it does it begin banging on the door.

And perhaps that's why I no longer spend my time looking for the conflict. I'd much rather listen to the story, because stories, unlike dictionaries, have room for real people.

When the Body Struggles to Build

If you've ever watched a house being built from the ground up, you'll know that bricks alone don't make a home. You need foundations before you need walls. You need timber before you need a roof. You need electricians, plumbers, insulation, windows, someone to pour the concrete and, ideally, someone who knows which end of the hammer to hold. If even one part of that process is missing, the whole project slows down.

Our bodies are surprisingly similar.

When we hear words like calcium or vitamin D, it's easy to imagine them working alone, almost like superheroes arriving just in time to save the day. In reality, they spend their lives working as part of an enormous team, and like any good team, they're only as strong as the communication between them.

Take bones as an example. Most people have been told since childhood that strong bones are all about calcium. Drink your milk, eat your yoghurt and everything will be fine. It isn't terrible advice, but it is rather like saying a football team only needs a goalkeeper to win the league. The goalkeeper is important, of course, but asking them to play every position on the pitch would end in complete chaos.

Bones don't simply collect calcium and become stronger overnight. They're constantly breaking down old tissue and building new tissue. It's a living process that never really stops. Every day tiny teams of cells are quietly removing damaged bone while others lay down fresh, healthy structure in its place. To do that well they need far more than calcium. They need vitamin D to help absorb it, vitamin K2 to guide it to the right place, magnesium to support countless biochemical reactions, phosphorus to form part of the mineral structure and enough protein to create the framework that holds everything together.

Even then, that's still only part of the story, because before any of those nutrients can help build bone, they first have to arrive there.

That means your stomach needs to digest your food properly. Your intestines need to absorb those nutrients efficiently. Your liver has to process them. Your kidneys have to activate vitamin D. Hormones such as parathyroid hormone and oestrogen have to stay in delicate balance. Muscles need to place healthy stress on bones through movement, because bones respond to being used. A skeleton that spends months without movement slowly starts receiving a very different biological message.

Can you see what's happening? The further we zoom out, the less this becomes a story about one vitamin. It becomes a story about cooperation, and I think there's something rather beautiful about that.

We often expect the body to fix itself with a single supplement, rather like hoping one enthusiastic decorator can finish an entire house over the weekend. Sometimes a supplement is exactly what's needed. If someone has a genuine vitamin D deficiency, replacing it may make a tremendous difference. But expecting that one capsule to solve every problem without asking why the deficiency appeared in the first place is a bit like repainting a wall while ignoring the damp that's quietly spreading underneath.

The fresh coat of paint might look wonderful for a while. The wall, however, still knows there's a leak.

This is one of the places where modern medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine and Biodecoding become surprisingly interesting together. Modern medicine asks whether enough building materials are available and whether the body can absorb and use them properly. Traditional Chinese Medicine asks a different question. It wonders whether the Spleen has enough Qi to transform food into nourishment in the first place. In TCM, digestion isn't simply about the stomach; it's about the body's ability to extract energy and substance from everything we eat. If that system becomes weak, the body may struggle to produce Blood, nourish muscles and maintain strong tissues, no matter how carefully someone plans their meals.

Biodecoding, meanwhile, invites us to step back even further. Rather than asking only what the body is building, it asks why the organism might have shifted into a state where maintaining or rebuilding tissue has become more difficult. Has the nervous system spent months prioritising survival over repair? Has chronic stress quietly redirected resources elsewhere? Has the body decided that, for now, staying alive matters more than investing in long-term maintenance?

Notice something important here. None of these approaches is necessarily cancelling the others out. They're simply looking at different layers of the same process.

It's a little like standing in front of a cathedral. One person admires the stained-glass windows. Another notices the engineering that keeps the roof standing. Someone else is fascinated by the history of the people who built it hundreds of years ago.

Who's right?

Probably all of them.

They're simply looking through different windows. And perhaps that's exactly how we should approach the body. Not by asking which system owns the truth, but by asking what each system helps us see that the others might miss.

So... Where Did All Those Emotional Meanings Come From?

At this point you might be thinking, "Well... if vitamins don't each have their own emotional conflict, where did all those interpretations come from?"

It's a fair question, and I think the answer is actually much more interesting than the interpretations themselves.

Let's take vitamin D as an example, because it's probably the one I'm asked about most often. If you've spent any time reading about Biodecoding or Total Biology online, you've almost certainly come across the idea that low vitamin D reflects a lack of support, feeling disconnected from your family or not having a solid foundation in life. I've seen that explanation so many times that I'm fairly sure it's travelled around the internet more than I have.

The interesting part is that I don't think someone simply woke up one morning and invented it. There is actually a line of thinking behind it. It just became... oversimplified.

In modern physiology, vitamin D plays an essential role in bone health. Without enough of it, absorbing calcium becomes much more difficult and, over time, bones may become weaker.

Now let's move across to Biodecoding. Bones have never been viewed as "just bones". They represent structure, support, stability and the ability to stand upright in the world. In many schools of Biodecoding and Recall Healing, conflicts involving bone tissue are often explored through themes of self-worth, identity, support, or the strength to face life's challenges.

Can you see what happened? Someone looked at the biological role of bones, then at the symbolic themes often associated with bones, and finally connected vitamin D to those same themes. It's actually quite an understandable leap.

The problem is that somewhere along the way, the nuance quietly disappeared. Instead of saying, "If the body is struggling with bone metabolism, these themes may be worth exploring alongside medical assessment...", the message slowly became, "Low vitamin D equals lack of support."

They're not the same statement.

Not even close.

Exactly the same thing has happened with many other nutrients. Take vitamin C. The body uses it to help build collagen, repair tissues and maintain healthy blood vessels. Over time, some people began connecting those biological functions with ideas of healing, integrity, holding ourselves together or recovering after emotional wounds.

Again, can those ideas sometimes be relevant? Absolutely. Do they explain every person with low vitamin C? Not a chance.

The same pattern appears with magnesium. Magnesium helps muscles relax, supports nerve function and takes part in hundreds of biochemical reactions involved in producing energy. It's hardly surprising that people began associating it with stress. After all, prolonged stress really can increase the body's demand for magnesium, while at the same time affecting digestion, sleep and the way nutrients are utilised.

That's where physiology and lived experience meet. But notice something important. Stress isn't the emotional meaning of magnesium. Stress is one of many factors that may change the body's relationship with magnesium, and that's a completely different conversation.

Perhaps the simplest way to explain it is this. Imagine you've walked into a bakery and noticed that every loaf of bread on the shelves has sold out. One explanation is that the bakery has become incredibly popular. Another is that the delivery of flour never arrived. Another is that there was a power cut overnight. Another is that someone accidentally burnt the morning batch.

The empty shelves tell you something has happened. They don't automatically tell you what happened.

Blood tests are very similar. They're wonderfully informative. They're just not the whole detective story.

Looking Through Three Different Windows

This is probably the point where people expect me to tell them which approach I believe is the "correct" one: medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine or Biodecoding.

Honestly? I don't think that's the most useful question.

Imagine standing outside a beautiful old house. One person walks around the back and notices that the roof needs repairing. Another walks through the front door and immediately spots that the plumbing has seen better days. A third person is fascinated by the architecture and starts telling you about the family who built the house a hundred years ago.

Now imagine those three people arguing. "The roof is the only thing that matters." "No, it's obviously the plumbing." "You're both wrong. It's all about the history." It sounds slightly ridiculous because they're all looking at the same house. They're simply standing in different places.

I sometimes think health has become a bit like that.

Modern medicine gives us extraordinary tools. Blood tests, scans, physiology, endocrinology, immunology... they're invaluable, and I genuinely wouldn't want to practise without that knowledge.

Traditional Chinese Medicine asks questions that Western medicine often doesn't. Is the body's energy being produced efficiently? Is Blood nourishing the tissues? Is there enough Yin to cool and moisten the body, or enough Yang to provide warmth and movement? It's a completely different language, but one that has helped practitioners observe patterns for thousands of years.

Biodecoding asks yet another question. Not, "What's wrong with this organ?" But rather, "What has this organism been adapting to?"

When I stopped trying to make these three systems compete with one another and started letting them have a conversation instead, something rather unexpected happened. The picture became clearer, not because I suddenly had all the answers—quite the opposite—but because I started asking better questions.

And if there's one thing I've learned from working with people over the years, it's this: the quality of the answers you find will almost always depend on the quality of the questions you're willing to ask.

When the Body Runs Out of Energy

If building is a luxury, then producing energy is an absolute necessity.

Your body can postpone redecorating the house for a while. It can delay repairing a crack in the wall or replacing a few roof tiles. It doesn't like doing that, but if it has no choice, it'll cope for a while.

What it can't postpone is keeping you alive.

Your heart still has to beat. Your lungs still have to breathe. Your brain still needs an astonishing amount of energy just to keep you conscious, even when you're doing absolutely nothing. Every blink, every step, every thought, every heartbeat and every conversation you're having right now depends on millions upon millions of tiny chemical reactions taking place inside your cells.

We rarely stop to think about it because the body makes it all look effortless. In reality, it's running what is probably the most sophisticated energy-producing factory on the planet, and like every factory, it needs raw materials.

When we think about energy, most of us immediately think about food. We assume that if we've eaten enough calories, then we should naturally feel energetic. Sometimes that's true. Sometimes it really isn't.

Have you ever met someone who eats well, sleeps reasonably well, has perfectly adequate blood sugar and still wakes up every morning feeling as though they've already worked a full day before even getting out of bed?

I have. Quite a few, actually.

Some of them arrive with low vitamin B12. Others have depleted iron stores. Some have very low magnesium. Others are deficient in folate or vitamin B1. And here's the interesting part: although those nutrients all have different jobs, they're all deeply involved in one thing—helping your cells produce energy.

It's a little like trying to bake a cake. Flour, eggs, butter and baking powder all have different roles. If you're missing any one of them, the cake may still end up in the oven, but it probably won't look anything like the picture in the recipe book.

The same thing happens inside the body. Vitamin B12 helps produce healthy red blood cells and supports the nervous system. Iron allows those red blood cells to carry oxygen. Magnesium takes part in hundreds of enzymatic reactions involved in making ATP, the tiny energy molecules every cell depends on. Vitamin B1 helps convert carbohydrates into usable energy, while folate works closely alongside B12 in cell division and DNA synthesis.

Different nutrients, different jobs, one shared purpose: keeping the lights on.

That's one of the reasons I don't particularly like separating these nutrients into individual little boxes. The body certainly doesn't. It recruits them as a team because producing energy is simply too important to leave to one player alone.

Imagine trying to run a busy airport. You have pilots, engineers, baggage handlers, air traffic controllers, cleaners, security staff and cabin crew. If one group goes on strike, the airport might continue operating for a while, but sooner or later delays begin to appear. Add a second problem, then a third, and before long flights are being cancelled altogether.

Our cells work in remarkably similar ways. They are incredibly resilient. They'll compensate, adapt and find alternative routes wherever they can, but compensation always comes at a cost.

And this is where I think many people unintentionally become frustrated. They start taking one supplement after another, hoping to recharge their batteries, yet never stop to ask why the battery has been draining so quickly in the first place.

Because here's the uncomfortable truth. Sometimes the problem isn't that your body can't produce energy. Sometimes it's that it's spending extraordinary amounts of energy simply trying to cope.

This is something I wish more people talked about. Stress isn't only emotionally exhausting; it's biologically expensive. Keeping muscles permanently tense costs energy. Sleeping badly costs energy. Living with chronic inflammation costs energy. Recovering from surgery costs energy. Healing after an infection costs energy. Even constantly suppressing emotions, pretending everything is fine when it clearly isn't, or carrying responsibility for everyone around you has a biological price. Whether we describe that through psychology, neuroscience or Biodecoding, the body is still doing extra work.

Imagine leaving every tap running in your house. You could keep ordering more water. Eventually, though, someone has to ask why the taps are still open.

I often think energy works in exactly the same way.

This is one of the places where Traditional Chinese Medicine offers a perspective I find beautifully intuitive. In TCM, energy doesn't simply appear because you've eaten lunch. Food has to be transformed. Qi has to be produced. Blood has to nourish the tissues. The Kidneys contribute Jing, the body's deepest reserve of vitality, while the Spleen is responsible for extracting nourishment from food.

Whether or not you use that language yourself, there's something profoundly sensible about the idea that energy production depends on far more than calories.

Most of us have experienced this without realising it. We've all gone through periods where we ate well yet still felt exhausted. Or we've gone on holiday, slept longer, laughed more, spent time outdoors and somehow found ourselves waking up with energy we hadn't felt for months.

The food didn't suddenly become magical. The body simply stopped spending so much of its energy surviving.

And this is probably where Biodecoding asks one of its most interesting questions. Not, "Why is this person's B12 low?" but rather, "What has required so much adaptation that the body has been running in emergency mode for such a long time?"

Notice the difference again. It's subtle, but it changes everything. One question searches for blame. The other searches for understanding.

And if you ask me, understanding has always been far more healing than blame.

When the Body Can't Repair Itself

Have you ever noticed how children seem almost impossible to break? They fall off bicycles, climb trees that are far too high, run around barefoot, scrape their knees every other weekend and somehow, a few days later, it's as though nothing ever happened. A plaster, a cuddle, perhaps an ice cream if they're lucky, and off they go again as though their little bodies had quietly pressed a reset button overnight.

Then adulthood arrives.

One day you sleep in a slightly awkward position and spend the next four days wondering whether you'll ever be able to turn your head again. I'm fairly sure that's one of life's least amusing jokes.

The truth is that our bodies never stop repairing themselves. Even now, while you're reading these words, old cells are being replaced, tiny blood vessels are being repaired, proteins are being built, damaged DNA is being corrected and your immune system is quietly patrolling every corner of your body looking for anything that doesn't belong there.

Repair isn't something the body does occasionally. It's one of its full-time jobs.

The problem is that repair is expensive. Very expensive. It requires energy, nutrients, good circulation, sleep, communication between hormones, the nervous system and the immune system, and perhaps most importantly of all, it requires time.

That's something we don't often think about. We happily accept that renovating a house takes weeks or months, yet somehow expect our own bodies to recover from years of stress, poor sleep, nutritional deficiencies and inflammation after taking supplements for a fortnight.

If only biology worked that quickly. Life would certainly be much easier.

This is where nutrients like vitamin C, zinc, protein and copper quietly become the unsung heroes of the story. They rarely receive the attention given to vitamin D or iron, yet without them the body struggles to produce collagen, heal wounds, maintain healthy skin, repair blood vessels, rebuild connective tissue and support a well-functioning immune system.

It's rather like running a city where the emergency services suddenly disappear. The roads are still there. The buildings are still standing. Life carries on... for a while. But gradually small problems stop being repaired. A pothole becomes a larger pothole. A leaking roof begins damaging the ceiling below. A cracked window lets water inside. Nothing dramatic happens overnight. It's simply that maintenance slowly falls behind.

Our bodies can look remarkably similar. Healing becomes slower. Cuts take longer to close. Bruises linger. The skin becomes drier. Hair loses its shine. The gums become more sensitive. Muscles take longer to recover after exercise.

None of these signs, on their own, proves that someone has a vitamin deficiency, nor do they automatically point towards an emotional conflict. They simply remind us that repairing a living body is an astonishingly demanding job.

One of the biggest misconceptions I come across is the idea that repair only begins once we've solved the original problem. Biology doesn't have that luxury. Imagine a city waiting until every single road was perfect before repairing the next one. Nothing would ever get done.

The body repairs continuously, even while dealing with inflammation, emotional stress, infections or chronic illness. It never says, "Come back when life is less busy." It simply does the best it can with the resources available that day.

I've always found something deeply comforting about that. Our bodies aren't lazy. They're incredibly resourceful. Even when they seem to be struggling, they're usually working unimaginably hard behind the scenes. Perhaps they simply don't have enough builders, or enough bricks, or enough daylight left before the next storm arrives.

Traditional Chinese Medicine has always described this beautifully, although it uses a completely different vocabulary. In TCM, healthy repair depends on the quality of Blood, the nourishment of Yin and the smooth movement of Qi throughout the body. If Blood is insufficient, tissues may not receive the nourishment they need. If Qi becomes stagnant, resources may not reach the places where they're needed most. If Yin is depleted, the body may lose some of its ability to cool, moisten and regenerate.

It's a poetic language, but beneath that poetry lies an observation that feels surprisingly familiar. A body that's poorly nourished struggles to repair itself. Modern medicine might describe that through collagen synthesis, inflammatory pathways and micronutrients. TCM describes it through Blood, Qi and Yin.

Different words, remarkably similar observation.

Biodecoding adds yet another layer to the conversation. Instead of asking only whether the body has enough building materials, it invites us to wonder whether the organism has been living in a state where repair keeps being postponed.

Not consciously, of course. Biologically.

Think about what happens after a serious accident. Your body immediately redirects resources towards keeping you alive. Repair comes next; survival comes first.

Now imagine a nervous system that has quietly believed life to be unsafe for months or even years. Not because you're being chased by a tiger, but because you're grieving, constantly worrying or living in an environment where your body never quite receives the message that it's finally safe to relax.

Could that influence healing? Modern science would say yes. Not because thoughts magically change collagen, but because chronic activation of the stress response changes hormones, immune function, inflammation, circulation and sleep—all of which are deeply involved in tissue repair.

That's a very different explanation from saying, "Your body isn't healing because you have unresolved emotions." One is biology. The other is an oversimplification. And I think those two are far too often confused.

Perhaps that's the biggest lesson this chapter has taught me. Healing isn't an event. It's an environment. The body repairs best when it has enough nutrients, enough energy, enough rest and enough safety to invest in tomorrow instead of spending everything on getting through today.

Maybe that's why real healing so rarely comes from one capsule, one diet or one clever technique. More often, it happens when lots of small things begin moving in the same direction: better sleep, better nourishment, gentler movement, less inflammation, a calmer nervous system and a little more kindness towards ourselves.

None of them is particularly dramatic.

Together... they can change everything.

When the Body Starts Protecting Instead of Thriving

If you've ever managed a household budget, you'll probably recognise this situation immediately. Imagine that, one month, something unexpected happens. The washing machine breaks down. The car needs repairing. The dog decides that eating half a tennis ball was an excellent life choice and ends up at the vet. Suddenly, money that would normally go towards holidays, decorating the house or replacing the old sofa has to be spent elsewhere.

Life doesn't stop. It simply changes its priorities.

Most of us have done exactly the same thing at some point. We postpone buying something we'd like because something else has suddenly become far more important.

Oddly enough, the body works in a very similar way. It has its own priorities, although they don't involve washing machines or veterinary bills.

Every single day it quietly decides where today's resources need to go. Does the immune system need extra support? Is there damaged tissue that has to be repaired? Is an infection demanding attention? Has the nervous system been on high alert for so long that it now requires enormous amounts of energy just to keep functioning?

None of those decisions are random. They're all part of an extraordinary balancing act that takes place every second of our lives.

This is one of the reasons I've become increasingly uncomfortable with the phrase "the body is attacking itself." Whether we're talking about inflammation, autoimmune conditions or chronic illness, I find that expression strangely unfair.

Bodies don't wake up one morning plotting revenge. They're not vindictive. They're not lazy. And they're certainly not stupid. More often than not, they're trying to solve a problem using the only tools they have available.

Sometimes those solutions become unhelpful. Sometimes they overshoot. Sometimes they continue long after the original danger has disappeared. But that's very different from saying the body has simply gone wrong.

One of the things I admire most about modern physiology is that it's beginning to describe just how deeply connected our systems really are. For years medicine tended to study organs separately. The heart belonged to cardiology, the gut belonged to gastroenterology, hormones belonged to endocrinology and the immune system seemed to live in a department of its own.

The more research appears, however, the clearer it becomes that none of these systems enjoys working in isolation. The gut influences the immune system, the immune system influences the brain, the brain changes hormones, hormones affect the gut, sleep changes inflammation, inflammation changes metabolism and metabolism influences the way nutrients are used. Round and round it goes, in an endless conversation that never really stops.

Sometimes I picture it as a huge orchestra tuning up before a concert. There isn't one instrument making the music; there are hundreds. If the violins begin playing faster, the cellos have to respond. If the percussion suddenly becomes louder, everyone else adjusts. The audience hears one piece of music, but backstage an astonishing amount of communication is happening every second.

The body is exactly the same.

This is probably why I've never liked the idea of blaming one vitamin, one hormone or one organ for everything. It reminds me of blaming the violin because the symphony didn't sound quite right. Perhaps the violin really was out of tune, but perhaps the conductor couldn't hear properly, perhaps the lighting failed halfway through the performance, or perhaps half the orchestra had been playing for six hours without a break.

Context matters.

Actually... context changes everything.

Traditional Chinese Medicine has recognised this interconnectedness for thousands of years. It doesn't really separate digestion from emotions, or sleep from the Liver, or energy from the Spleen, because, in its eyes, they were never separate to begin with. Everything influences everything else.

Modern physiology is increasingly discovering much the same thing, although it explains those relationships through hormones, neurotransmitters, cytokines, microbiota and signalling pathways rather than Qi and Blood.

Different vocabulary. The same fascination with connection.

And perhaps that's why I feel surprisingly at home sitting somewhere in the middle. I don't believe we need to choose one language and reject all the others. I think we simply need to remember which question each language is trying to answer.

Medicine asks, "What is happening?" TCM often asks, "How is the whole system functioning?" Biodecoding asks, "What has this organism been adapting to?"

For me, none of those questions feels unnecessary. Together, they create a conversation that's richer than any of them could have alone.

There's one more thing I'd like to leave you with before we finish.

Over the years I've met people who blamed themselves for almost everything. If they developed eczema, they assumed they'd failed to resolve the right conflict. If they became anaemic, they wondered what emotion they'd missed. If their vitamin D was low, they searched desperately for the one event that had supposedly caused it.

Honestly... that makes me a little sad.

Not because emotions don't matter. They absolutely do. Not because stress can't affect physiology. We know it can. But because I don't believe the purpose of Biodecoding—or any healing approach—is to make people feel guilty for being human.

Life is wonderfully messy. People lose loved ones, go through divorce, work night shifts, develop autoimmune diseases, have children who don't sleep, care for ageing parents, worry about money, laugh, grieve and heal—sometimes all in the same year. No single diagram could ever hold all of that.

Perhaps the greatest gift we can give ourselves isn't another list of emotional meanings. Perhaps it's permission to become curious instead of judgemental. To ask better questions. To look at our blood tests with interest rather than fear. To see our symptoms not as enemies, but as part of a conversation our bodies have been trying to start for quite some time.

Because, at least in my experience, the body has never been trying to punish us. It's been trying to protect us all along.

And maybe, just maybe, that's the most important thing it has ever been trying to say.

What I'll Never Tell a Client

Over the years, I've realised that there are certain sentences you'll probably never hear me say during a consultation. Not because I don't believe emotions matter. Far from it. If anything, I've become more convinced than ever that our emotional world and our physical health are deeply connected. Grief changes the body. Chronic stress changes the body. Trauma changes the body. Joy changes the body too, although we don't seem to talk about that nearly as often.

What I've stopped believing in are simple answers to complex questions.

So no, I'll probably never look at your blood test and tell you that your vitamin D is low because you don't feel supported. I won't tell you that low magnesium automatically means you're stressed. I won't tell you that your ferritin is low because you've never dealt with a particular relationship.

Not because those themes could never become part of the conversation. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they become incredibly important. But I don't think it's fair to begin there.

You deserve better than that.

You deserve someone who's willing to be curious before they're certain. Someone who's prepared to ask another question instead of rushing towards the first explanation that sounds convincing.

Because the truth is, your body has lived every single day of your life with you. It knows things I don't know. It knows whether you've spent years sleeping badly because you were worrying about someone you love. It knows whether your digestion quietly changed after surgery. It knows about the medication you've been taking, the infections you've recovered from, the meals you've eaten standing up because life felt too busy to sit down. It remembers the grief you thought you'd hidden so well. It also remembers the holidays where you laughed until your stomach hurt. It remembers the years you felt safe, and the years you didn't.

How could I possibly pretend that one sentence explains all of that?

I can't. And honestly... I don't want to.

One of the greatest lessons the human body has taught me is humility. Every time I think I've found a beautifully simple explanation, someone walks into my clinic and reminds me that biology is far more creative than I imagined.

Two people arrive with almost identical symptoms. Their stories are completely different. One improves by changing their diet. Another finally receives treatment for an undiagnosed digestive condition. Someone else begins sleeping properly for the first time in years. Another starts grieving instead of pretending they're "fine." The body responds differently every single time, not because it's unpredictable, but because people are.

Perhaps that's something we don't celebrate enough. We're wonderfully, gloriously different, and our biology reflects that.

If there's one thing I hope you'll take away from this article, it isn't the emotional meaning of vitamin D or the symbolic message behind magnesium. In fact, I'd be quite happy if you forgot most of the individual examples. What I hope stays with you is something much simpler.

The next time you look at a blood test, try resisting the temptation to ask, "What's wrong with me?" Or even, "Which conflict caused this?" Instead, try asking, "What has my body been trying to adapt to? What has it been spending so much energy on? What might it have needed from me that it never quite received?"

Those questions don't promise instant answers. They probably never will. But they're kinder, they're more curious and, in my experience, they're much more likely to lead somewhere meaningful.

People sometimes ask me whether I believe more in medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine or Biodecoding. The honest answer? I don't think I have to choose.

When I need to understand what's happening inside the body, I'm grateful for modern medicine. When I want to step back and look at patterns rather than isolated symptoms, Traditional Chinese Medicine has taught me an extraordinary amount. When I want to explore how someone's life story may have influenced the way their nervous system and body have adapted over time, Biodecoding often asks questions that are worth asking.

Do I think any of them has every answer? No. And strangely enough... I find that incredibly reassuring.

Because the moment someone tells me they've discovered the single explanation for every illness, every deficiency or every symptom, I stop listening.

The human body has survived millions of years by being adaptable, flexible and endlessly creative. Why would its explanations be any simpler?

So perhaps the next time someone confidently tells you that one vitamin equals one emotion, smile politely. Then stay curious. Read the research. Listen to your doctor. Take your supplements if you genuinely need them. Look after your sleep. Move your body. Spend time in the sunshine when Britain generously allows it. Take care of your relationships. Pay attention to your stress levels. Feed your microbiome.

And if you decide to explore the emotional side of your health as well, do it with curiosity rather than fear. Not because you're looking for someone to blame, especially not yourself, but because understanding your story may help you understand your body a little better.

And if there's one thing I've learned after all these years, it's this: your body has never been your enemy.

It has never been trying to punish you. It has never been waking up in the morning thinking about ways to make your life more difficult. It has been doing the very best it could with the information, the resources and the circumstances it had at that particular moment.

Sometimes it got things right. Sometimes it overreacted. Sometimes it held on to survival strategies long after they were no longer needed.

Haven't we all?

Perhaps that's why I find the human body so endlessly fascinating. It's not a machine. It's not a collection of laboratory numbers. It's not a list of symptoms waiting to be labelled. It's the living story of a human being who has spent every day, often without even realising it, trying to survive, adapt, heal and keep moving forward.

Maybe that's why I no longer see a vitamin deficiency as the end of the conversation.

For me... it's usually the beginning.

Disclaimer: This information is for educational purposes only and should not be considered medical advice. Please consult with a qualified healthcare professional for any health concerns.