This is the seventh piece in The Wild Medicine, a weekly series about Lupus, the intelligence of the body, and the long spiral back to yourself. If you’re just arriving, start at the beginning with piece one, The Child Who Was Always Tired.

My antibody readings had crept up.

I had been following the protocol, mostly. Smoothies, clean food, early nights. But there is a gap between knowing what helps and actually doing it consistently, and I had been quietly widening that gap for a few months. Easy to do. Easier than you’d think. You tell yourself you’re doing everything you can, and then one morning you look at your blood results and your body tells you otherwise.

I had been listening to Dr Brooke Goldner again. Her Goodbye Lupus approach is built on flooding the body with greens and omega-3 fats, particularly from ground linseed, to shift the ratio of inflammatory to anti-inflammatory pathways in the body. The science behind it is straightforward: omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids compete for the same enzymes in the body. The more omega-6 in the system, the more those enzymes are tied up producing inflammatory compounds. The more omega-3, the more they produce anti-inflammatory ones instead. It is not complicated. It is chemistry.

I decided it was time to close the gap between what I knew and what I was actually doing.

That meant the smoothie had to become breakfast.

I want to be honest about how hard that was.

We have been so deeply programmed to believe that breakfast is essential. That you must eat in the morning. That going without is deprivation, even dangerous. And I carried something underneath that belief that was more personal, a quiet fear of starving that had followed me most of my life. I had always eaten at every opportunity. I was always hungry, and when my blood sugar dropped too low, my brain would stop working in a way that frightened me. A wave of nausea, then the inability to decide what to eat, a spiral that could take up to an hour to pull out of. I had lived around that fear for years.

The more I learned about metabolic health and blood sugar, the more I recognised what had actually been happening. My metabolism had been on a rollercoaster my whole life. The breakfast I craved was usually sweet, and it was spiking my blood sugar and sending it crashing again by mid-morning, which set off the whole cycle. The very thing I thought was keeping me safe was creating the problem.

Smoothies are sometimes criticised for spiking blood sugar, and that’s fair when they’re made with just fruit and no fat or fibre. But the smoothie I make is different. The linseed provides omega-3 fats and a dense load of soluble fibre. The green banana provides resistant starch. The whole lemon including peel adds pectin. In the early days I also added a whole avocado, which brought in enough healthy fat to slow the glucose response considerably and make the smoothie a genuinely complete meal. Paired with a coconut cream coffee, it became manageable. Not immediately comfortable, but manageable.

Day four was the crisis point.

I said to Nigel: I can’t do this.

Not calmly. With the particular desperation of someone whose gut biome had been running on things like toast and honey or cereal and fruit for fifty years and was now screaming for its usual supply. Looking back, that is almost certainly what was happening. The gut biome drives cravings more than most people realise. Sugar-loving microbes send chemical signals that feel exactly like hunger, exactly like need, exactly like a message from deep inside. And deep inside is precisely where the message seemed to be coming from.

Nigel looked at me and said: Let’s give it another week. You can do this.

That was all I needed. Not a lecture or a nutrition fact, or a reminder of why I was doing this. Just someone who believed I could, at the exact moment I had stopped believing it myself. Having someone cheerlead at that moment was enormous. It got me through and broke the cycle.

By day seven something had shifted.

Not a lightning bolt, just a quieting. The urgency around breakfast softened. I noticed I was reaching the smoothie hour without the sharp edge of desperation I had expected. By week two, I was getting through to midday without the blood sugar crash I had feared. By week three, my body had stopped asking for the old things with the same insistence.

This is the gut biome theory made real. It takes roughly three weeks to meaningfully shift the population of microbes in your gut. The sugar-craving microbes, starved of their usual supply, begin to lose ground. The fibre-loving ones, fed daily on linseed and green banana and bitter greens, begin to gain it. And as that shift happens, the cravings change with it. Not completely, not forever, and not without the occasional sharp pull toward a custard square. But the daily urgent noise quietens.

What I found, when I actually paid attention, was that the emotional attachment to certain foods was quite separate from genuine enjoyment of them. I thought I loved custard squares. I had loved them my whole life. But when I actually ate one, slowly, paying real attention, it was deeply disappointing. The love had never been in the food. It had been in the memory, the ritual, the warmth of a particular moment. Those things were still available. The custard square was just the vehicle I had mistaken for the destination.

The coconut coffee stayed.

It became its own ritual, rich and grounding, made properly with Nigel’s espresso machine and coconut cream with no emulsifiers. On mornings when my stomach felt delicate, I would make a raw cacao instead, a teaspoon of cacao and half a teaspoon of honey, steamed with coconut cream or heated gently on the stove. Both would carry me through to midday without the crash I had spent decades dreading.

As perimenopause arrived and my metabolism began to shift again, I moved the smoothie to lunchtime entirely and kept the coffee or cacao as my morning. My body was changing the requirements. I was learning to change with it.

That is the practice, I think. Not finding the perfect protocol and holding it forever. Finding what works now, staying curious, and adjusting as the terrain shifts beneath you.

Next week: the land as medicine, and what fourteen hectares of rewilded native forest does to a nervous system that has been living in the city for eighteen years.

You already know about the appointment. The form. The pen going down.

What I haven’t told you is what the room actually felt like, or what I was already carrying when I walked into it.

The rheumatologist’s office was in Whangarei. To get there from where I live on the west coast of Northland, you drive an hour and forty minutes across the country, from one coast to the other. I had a diagnosis. I had been reading. I had questions.

She was not interested in any of it.

I want to be precise about this because it matters to what comes next. She was not cruel in any dramatic sense. It was subtler and, in some ways, harder to forgive. She spoke to me the way you might speak to someone you had already decided was not worth the effort of a full explanation. At some point she mentioned my enzymes. I asked about them, I was thinking about gut health, about the threads I had already started pulling. I said something about gut enzymes.

She scoffed.

Not a correction. Not an explanation. A scoff. The small, dismissive sound of someone who has decided you are not equipped to be in this conversation.

She meant liver enzymes, of course. I had misunderstood. But I was a newly diagnosed patient trying to understand what was happening in my own body, and the appropriate response to a reasonable misunderstanding is not condescension. It is a sentence. Actually, I’m referring to liver enzymes, here’s why they matter. One sentence, and I would have learned something. Instead I learned something else: that in this room, my curiosity was a problem.

I had already found Terry Wahls and Brooke Goldner, two physicians who had taken serious diagnoses and refused the standard script, who had gone back to first principles and found their way through. I tried to mention them. I offered to send links.

She was not interested.

We drove home. An hour and forty minutes back across the country. And somewhere on that road, the hope I had arrived with turned into something more useful. Not defeat. Something quieter and more determined. If the answer wasn’t in that room, I would have to find it somewhere else.

I already had some ideas about where to look.

Later, I found the Goldman Sachs report. A 2018 analyst note asking, with genuine seriousness, whether curing patients was a sustainable business model. The answer, from a purely financial perspective, was no. A patient in remission generates no ongoing revenue. A patient on biologics, the class of drugs that methotrexate is typically a gateway to, generates somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000 per year, indefinitely.

Around the same time I came across the story of Dr Zach Bush, a triple board-certified physician who had spent years in academic cancer research developing a vitamin A compound that could disrupt cancer metabolism at the mitochondrial level. No poisoning the body. No scorched-earth approach. A way of working with the cell rather than against it. He was denied pharmaceutical funding because his compounds were competing with high-dollar drugs already on the market. He left academia.

I am not saying my rheumatologist was corrupt. I am saying she was trained within a system that has a financial architecture, and that architecture is not built around remission. Pharmaceutical companies in New Zealand make payments to doctors for speaking engagements, advisory board memberships, consultancies, conference travel. Until very recently there was no disclosure requirement at all. There is still no legislation. The system polices itself.

I am not saying any individual doctor is making prescribing decisions based on personal financial incentive. I am saying the incentives exist at a structural level, and that they point in one direction: toward long-term pharmaceutical management, not toward the question I was sitting there asking, which was whether healing was possible.

That question was, apparently, not on the agenda.

I have always loved a project. It is one of my more useful qualities, this ability to become genuinely absorbed in a problem, to follow a thread past the point where most people would stop. In another life it made me a good photographer, attuned to detail, patient with complexity. Now I turned it on myself.

I was not looking for reassurance. I was looking for evidence. And I had a working theory, drawn from everything I had already noticed about my own body over the years, that what I was dealing with was not a malfunction but a system responding intelligently to a set of conditions. If I could change the conditions, I might change the response.

The question was: had anyone else done this? And if so, how?

The answer arrived, as most good things did in those early months, in candlelit baths the forest dark outside, listening to podcast interview after interview, the research pulling me forward.

They were out there, these people, making the case quietly and rigorously from the edges of mainstream medicine, building bodies of work that the medical establishment had not yet caught up with. Mark Hyman had said something once that stopped me mid-podcast: that on average, new research takes around twelve years to travel from the scientific literature into mainstream clinical practice. Twelve years from proven to practised. Twelve years before the doctor sitting across from a patient begins routinely applying what a researcher has already established.

I did the maths. I was 52. I did not have twelve years to wait for my rheumatologist to read the memo.

So I decided not to. If the research existed and was accessible, there was no law requiring me to sit at the back of the queue. By keeping one eye on the cutting edge, I could be living the science a decade before it became standard advice. Not reckless. Not anti-medicine. Just refusing to outsource my timeline to an institution that runs on a different clock.

The first guide appeared as a memory from years before.

I cannot tell you his name. I have searched and cannot find him, which frustrates me because he deserves to be named. He was a journalist. He had given a TEDx talk. At some point before the talk, he had been in a catastrophic car accident, the kind that ends up with you in a nursing home, being told to manage your expectations. He had decided instead to treat his recovery as a project. Nothing was off the table. He researched, he experimented, he found practitioners and modalities that conventional medicine had not considered. Cranial osteopathy was one of the most powerful tools he found. He stood on the stage at the end of that talk on his own two feet.

His message was simple: no one has more invested in your recovery than you do. No one has more time to spend on it. No one has more skin in the game. So take charge.

I had found Dr Terry Wahls years before my diagnosis, filed away in the back of my mind as interesting but not yet relevant.

She was a physician with multiple sclerosis who had ended up in a tilt-recline wheelchair. She understood the system from the inside, the way only a doctor with her own serious illness can, and she had used that understanding to go back to first principles. What did her cells actually need to function? What was the mitochondrial research saying? She redesigned her diet entirely around the answers. She got back on a bicycle.

I had watched her TED talk years earlier and thought: I wonder if this translates to other autoimmune conditions. When I tried to share her work in that Whangarei office, I was met with a scoff. I went home and watched the talk again.

Dr Brooke Goldner had been diagnosed with lupus young. She had tried the script being offered and decided she was not interested. She built a protocol around an accidental discovery of a diet her husband, a personal trainer had put her on to get in shape for their wedding. Greens, omega-3s, and water, and she put her lupus into remission. She called it Goodbye Lupus. She meant it literally.

There was something about finding another woman who had sat where I was sitting, with the same diagnosis, and who had walked a different road and come out the other side, that I cannot fully describe. It was not just useful. It was a rearrangement of what I believed was possible.

Dr Mark Hyman I have already mentioned, but he deserves more than a passing reference. His framework, functional medicine, is built on a deceptively simple premise: instead of asking what disease do you have and what drug treats it, ask why. Why is this system dysregulated? What upstream conditions created this downstream problem? The body is not a collection of isolated parts to be treated by isolated specialists. It is an interconnected ecosystem, and when something goes wrong, the question worth asking is what changed in the environment.

He says the smartest doctor in the room is your own body, if you listen to it.

Dr Lara Briden wrote the book I wish someone had handed me twenty years earlier. It is called the Period Repair Manual, and it is exactly what the title suggests: a first-principles guide to understanding what is actually happening in the body across the menstrual cycle, and what the various symptoms so many people are told to simply endure are actually trying to say.

I had suffered painful periods for most of my adult life. Endometriosis was likely part of the picture, though never formally confirmed. What I noticed, long before I understood the mechanism, was that as my systemic inflammation dropped, so did the pain. Month by month, as the protocol took hold, the periods that had once floored me became manageable, then unremarkable.

The research, it turns out, supports exactly this. Endometriosis is now understood to be a systemic inflammatory condition with deep immune connections, not simply a localised reproductive problem. Women with endometriosis are significantly more likely to develop autoimmune diseases, and the relationship runs in both directions. The inflammation is not contained to one room. It moves through the whole house.

Briden gave me the language for what I had been living. That is not a small thing.

The last guide I want to name is my own GP, who I will not identify but who deserves enormous credit.

He was the rare thing: a doctor who enjoyed a good theory. When I came to him with the idea that my lupus flares might be connected to perimenopausal hormone fluctuations, he did not dismiss it. He leaned forward. He asked questions. He said there was not much clinical research to support it but that the mechanism made sense, and that it was worth exploring. We explored it together. The flares stopped.

He once told me I was more fun than his usual patients. I chose to take that as a compliment.

The difference between him and the rheumatologist in Whangarei was not intelligence or training. It was orientation. One of them was facing toward the patient. The other was facing somewhere else entirely.

None of the guides I found online knew I existed. They were not my doctors. They could not see my blood tests or examine my rash or adjust my protocol. What they gave me was something different and, in some ways, more valuable: proof of concept. Evidence that the question I was asking, can this body heal, was not naive. That others had asked it before me, had followed the threads with rigour and courage, and had found their way through.

I was not alone in the forest. I just had to know where to look.

The research was there. Twelve years ahead of the clinic, maybe. But there, available, waiting for anyone with enough stubbornness and enough love for their own life to go and find it.

I had both.

I used to miss bread. A base for things. Something to hold lunch together.

This bread gave it back to me.

It has no flour, no gluten, no grains at all except quinoa, and it holds together because of the gel that forms when psyllium husk and chia and linseed meet water. The result is dense and seedy and deeply satisfying and nourishing. Not a pale imitation of a sandwich. Something better.

I make two loaves at a time, slice both, and freeze them. They last us a couple of weeks. When we want lunch, we fry slices in coconut oil until they’re golden and crisp on both sides, then pile on whatever we have: avocado, tomato and basil, smoked salmon, a fried egg. In the photo above it is topped with a mix of shredded paprika chicken, home made garlic aoli and watercress. It becomes a proper meal.

The fennel seed is the secret. It lifts the whole thing.

Makes 2 loaves

Ingredients

• 2 cups raw quinoa, cooked

• ½ cup freshly ground linseed

• ½ cup chia seeds

• ½ cup pumpkin seeds

• ½ cup sunflower seeds

• ½ cup sesame seeds

• 6 tablespoons psyllium husk

• 2 teaspoons fennel seeds

• Dried thyme, a small handful (optional but good)

• 1½ teaspoons Himalayan salt

• 2 cups water

Method

Cook the quinoa according to packet instructions.

Preheat your oven to 170°C.

In a large bowl, combine the ground linseed, chia, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, psyllium husk, fennel seeds, thyme if using, and salt. Add the quinoa and the water and mix well. The psyllium husk and chia will absorb the water and bind everything together into a thick, press-able mixture. Give it a few minutes to come together fully.

Line two standard loaf tins with baking paper. Divide the mixture evenly between them, pressing it firmly into the tins so there are no air pockets and the surface is flat.

Bake for one hour. The loaves are ready when they feel firm and have pulled slightly from the sides of the tin. Turn out onto a rack and cool completely before slicing.

Slice into portions, wrap well, and freeze. Keeps for two to three weeks in the freezer.

To serve: fry slices in coconut oil over a medium heat, a couple of minutes each side until golden and crisp (this really brings out the toasted sesame seed aspect of the toast). Top with whatever calls to you.

Why this works

Every ingredient in this loaf is pulling its weight. Ground linseed brings omega-3s and acts as a binder. Chia does the same, swelling with water to create structure without eggs. Psyllium husk is the backbone, creating the fibrous, sliceable texture that makes this bread feel like bread. Quinoa brings complete protein and a light earthiness that holds all those seeds together.

Pumpkin, sunflower and sesame seeds each bring their own mineral payload: zinc, magnesium, selenium. Fennel seed is anti-inflammatory and carminative, meaning it eases digestion. Everything you eat carries information. This loaf carries a good message.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that has no bottom to it.

Not tiredness, which has an edge you can feel, a point at which sleep becomes possible and the body begins to recover. This was something else. A heaviness that started in the bones and worked outward, that made standing up from a chair feel like a negotiation, that turned the simplest sequence of tasks into something requiring planning and rationing and rest. And underneath all of it, something harder to name. A terrible feeling in my head that was not quite a headache and not quite dizziness but something of both, a sense of being perpetually off balance, of the world not quite resolving into certainty. I could not describe it accurately to anyone who asked. The closest I came was this: it felt as though my immune system had found its way inside my skull. As though the inflammation had crossed some threshold and was now working on the very organ I needed to make sense of what was happening to me. I later learned that lupus can affect the central nervous system, that neurological symptoms are not unusual. At the time I just knew that something was wrong in a way that went beyond what I had words for.

I was spending my mornings cleaning the three guest accommodations, the business having a life of its own that was not going to let me off the hook. I needed to keep showing up. This land, with its forest and its stream and its particular quality of stillness, felt like the place I needed to be to give myself the best chance I had to heal. I was not going to lose it. So I moved slowly through the rooms each morning, and then made it to bed for the afternoon. Half days horizontal. That was the rhythm for three months.

The brain fog was in some ways worse than the physical collapse. Words would disappear mid-sentence. I would reach for a familiar term and find nothing there, a gap where language should have been. Making sense of things in the moment became unreliable. I would sit in a doctor’s office and feel the conversation happening slightly outside my grasp, information arriving but not quite sticking. Nigel began coming to every appointment with me. The rheumatologist had a very thick accent, and together afterward we would piece together what had been said, confirming our understanding, making sure we hadn’t missed anything important. Having him there meant I could trust that between the two of us, we had it right.

The medical system, I was learning, does not see the whole person.

There was a dermatologist for the skin and a rheumatologist for the joints, each with their own territory, their own framework, their own theory of what was driving things. They did not always agree. What they did agree on, quietly and without quite saying it directly, was that the cause was not fully understood. The rheumatologist told me as much. They really just didn’t know. The treatments on offer were not cures. They were management. Suppression. The body’s intelligence turned down like a volume dial.

I lay in bed on those long afternoons with the bedroom door open, listening to the stream running through the property, breathing the cool forest air moving through the room. I was very aware, during those months, of how fortunate I was to have such a place to hold me while I felt so terrible. The forest asked nothing. It simply continued, the birds and the water and the light through the trees, indifferent in the best sense of the word. I would lie there and think: what if this is my life now? What if this is as good as it gets?

That question had a weight to it I hadn’t encountered before. Not panic, exactly. Something more like grief. The slow settling of a fear that this diminished version of living might be permanent.

Then the rheumatologist handed me a form.

She slid it across the desk and asked me to read it and then sign it. It was an informed consent document for methotrexate, a chemotherapy drug used at lower doses for autoimmune conditions. I read it carefully. Liver toxicity. Lung scarring. Bone marrow suppression. Increased infection risk. And there, toward the bottom, risk of death.

She mentioned, almost in passing, that my liver enzymes were not ideal for this medication. Not ideal, but she was putting me on it anyway.

I put down the pen.

I asked her: how sick am I, actually? Because I don’t feel this is serious enough to accept these risks, particularly when the medication isn’t well suited to my physiology.

She made another appointment. To talk me through it again. Then another appointment with the practice nurse. A second attempt, and then a third. Each time the message was the same: this is the standard of care, this is what we do, you should sign. I began to feel the particular discomfort of being managed rather than heard. Of a system that had a plan and needed me to comply with it.

I did not sign.

I want to be clear about what held me.

It was not bravado. It was not a casual dismissal of medical expertise. It was two women I had never met, whose work I had found in the months of research that had become my quiet parallel occupation alongside the medical appointments.

Terry Wahls had been a physician with multiple sclerosis, using a tilt-recline wheelchair, who had researched her way back to riding a bicycle through dietary and lifestyle intervention. Brooke Goldner had been diagnosed with lupus in her twenties, refused the standard script, and put her disease into remission. Both were medically trained. Both had understood the system from the inside and found it wanting. Both had done the thing I was being told could not be done.

If they had found a way through, I wanted to know what it was.

The rheumatologist was offering me a lifelong relationship with a drug my liver was already reluctant to process, with no ceiling and no exit. I was being invited not into healing but into management, a business contract in which my ongoing illness was the currency.

I stuck to my guns.

Outside the clinic, the fear was still there. But underneath it, quieter and more certain, something else had caught light. If the answer wasn’t in that room, I would have to find it somewhere else.

I already had some ideas about where to look.

• 1 whole squash (any variety)

• 2 onions, roughly chopped

• 4 rashers natural bacon, chopped

• 1 tablespoons coconut oil

• 1 teaspoons Himalayan pink salt

• 1 tablespoons hot curry powder

• 500 milliliters homemade chicken stock

• 1 garlic clove, raw

• 200 milliliters coconut cream (no emulsifiers)

Steps

1

Roast the squash: Place 1 whole squash (any variety) whole and uncut on a baking tray. Roast at 200°C for an hour until completely soft. Leave to cool, this can be done hours ahead or the day before.

2

Sauté the base: Melt 1 tablespoons coconut oil in a large pot over medium heat. Add 2 onions, roughly chopped and 4 rashers natural bacon, chopped with a good sprinkle of 1 teaspoons Himalayan pink salt. Sauté until the onion is soft and the bacon is beginning to colour.

3

Bloom the spice: Add 1 tablespoons hot curry powder and fry for a minute, stirring constantly, until fragrant. This step is important it wakes the spice up.

4

Add the stock: Pour in 500 milliliters homemade chicken stock and stir to combine, lifting any caramelised bits from the bottom of the pot.

5

Scoop and blend: Cut the cooled squash in half and scoop the pulp directly into a blender. Add the onion, bacon and stock mixture along with the raw 1 garlic clove, raw. Blend on high until completely smooth and silky. Adding the garlic raw at this stage gives it real punch without bitterness.

6

Simmer and finish: Return the blended soup to the pot. Add 200 milliliters coconut cream (no emulsifiers) and stir through. Simmer gently for 5 to 10 minutes 10:00 to let everything meld. Taste for salt. Serve as it is — it needs nothing else.

Notes

Why this works as medicine: Squash is rich in beta-carotene (a precursor to vitamin A, essential for immune regulation). Coconut cream carries fat-soluble nutrients and adds lauric acid. Raw garlic added at the blend stage preserves allicin, its most active anti-inflammatory compound. Homemade stock brings collagen and minerals. The whole thing is deeply anti-inflammatory and costs almost nothing.

Check your coconut cream label. Many contain emulsifiers (look for guar gum, carrageenan, or polysorbate). These weaken the gut lining. Brands with just coconut and water are worth tracking down.

The squash can be roasted a day ahead, it keeps beautifully in the fridge and makes this a 20-minute soup.

I had been paying attention to my body’s relationship with food for years before the diagnosis. Not in a systematic way, just a quiet ongoing suspicion that certain things were making me feel worse in ways I couldn’t quite pin down. Not allergic reactions, nothing dramatic, just a low hum of inflammation that seemed to rise and fall depending on what I’d eaten. I had begun to wonder whether multiple foods, each creating their own small amount of inflammation, might compound. Whether the hum was actually a chorus.

A friend who was on a similar journey recommended a clinical nutritionist who worked with hair samples to assess food triggers.

I looked up the science. It wasn’t well supported, not in the way I would normally require before trying something. But the recommendation came from someone I trusted who had walked a similar road, and I had already decided that nothing was off the table. I would try it. I would decide for myself whether it was useful.

The results came back. Dairy so strong it extended to beef. Gluten. Refined sugar. Soy. Artificial perfumes. Mould, which meant anything fermented, kombucha, functional mushrooms, coconut yoghurt. All out.

Interestingly, most of them were things I had already been quietly questioning.

The perfume sensitivity I had known about for years without naming it.

Walking along the street I would find myself scanning ahead, trying to read people, assessing how heavily perfumed they might be so I could hold my breath as they passed. I could smell strong synthetic fragrance from twenty metres away. It would hit me like a wave of nausea that could take hours to settle. I had always assumed this was just a quirk. Now I was beginning to understand it as information.

The coconut yoghurt confirmed something too. I had treated myself to a tub of it thinking it was safe, and ended up with a full body thrush outbreak so uncomfortable and so swift that the connection was impossible to ignore. My system was speaking clearly. I just needed to start listening at the right frequency.

The functional mushrooms were a disappointment. I had been following the trend with interest, they have genuine medicinal properties for many people, but when I tried them I felt nothing. Same with kombucha. These are the moments that remind you that health is not a universal prescription. What transforms one person’s system leaves another’s completely unmoved. The work is in finding what works for yours.

And then I stood in the supermarket and thought: what on earth can I eat?

I pushed my cart up and down the aisles and read labels and felt a rising frustration that tipped, somewhere around the third aisle, into something more useful. Anger, maybe. Or clarity.

What have we done to ourselves?

I began looking at the products around me through a different lens, the lens of my ancient ancestors, the humans who had evolved over hundreds of thousands of years eating real food from the ground and the sea and the forest. I looked at the ingredients lists, the emulsifiers that weaken the bonds in the stomach lining, the refined sugars now widely understood to drive inflammation across the entire population, the soy derivatives and artificial flavourings and compounds with names I couldn’t pronounce, and I thought: why on earth would I eat this? This isn’t food. This is a science experiment dressed up as food.

I turned the cart around and started again.

Mark Hyman talks about eating as many diverse plant species as you can across the year, hundreds of them, every fruit, vegetable, herb, and spice you can get your hands on, because every time you introduce something new you introduce new medicinal compounds, new information for your system. I found that idea liberating rather than overwhelming. Every unusual vegetable at the market was an opportunity. Every new herb in the garden was a small act of healing.

I found Paleo as my filter. It has an unfair reputation for being mainly meat, but that is not how I approached it. Paleo simply means eating as humans evolved to eat, before industrial food systems invented things our bodies have no template for processing. A Paleo framework, applied thoughtfully, is abundant and varied and deeply satisfying.

I made a list of everything I could eat. Not what I had lost, what I had. And it was extraordinary. The list went on and on.

I started a Pinterest board of safe recipes and felt, for the first time in months, inspired rather than deprived.

I found a source of wild meats. Venison and pork from animals living wild in the New Zealand bush, foraging on a broad range of native plants, their meat carrying none of the problems of industrial farming and all of the nutritional density of a life actually lived outdoors. The difference in quality is not subtle.

I invested in a Vitamix.

And I made a decision that I have held to ever since: I was not sacrificing anything. Every meal I created had to be more delicious than what it replaced. If I wanted takeaways I would roast pre-boiled potatoes in good olive oil and Himalayan salt until they were crispy and golden, serve them with wild venison burgers, mountains of slaw, and homemade garlic aioli. A thousand times better than anything from a takeaway window. For pudding, coconut ice cream with a salted caramel sauce made from coconut cream and dates and vanilla and salt.

When I felt uninspired I would open the recipe board and within minutes I would want to be in the kitchen.

This was not deprivation. This was an upgrade.

The green smoothie came early and became a daily ritual. Half a Vitamix jug of spray-free spinach, half a pineapple including the core for its enzymes, a whole lime or lemon including the peel if it was wax-free, two heaped teaspoons of spirulina, two thirds of a cup of whole linseed for omega 3, a whole green banana for resistant starch to feed the gut microbiome, and cold brewed green jasmine tea in place of water, drunk by the pot throughout the day for its antioxidants and because I genuinely enjoy it. If we were particularly busy I would add a whole avocado and it became a complete meal.

I went on a journey with them. For a while I was adding handfuls of weeds from the land, dandelion, purslane, things with real medicinal punch. But they became too much. I would have to hold my breath to get through the glass. And I had learned by then that sustainability requires pleasure. If I was going to drink one every single day then it needed to be something I genuinely looked forward to. I stripped it back to what was delicious. That was the right call.

The jigsaw had its first piece.

It was a good one.

Next week: the emotional attachment to custard squares, why your cravings aren’t yours, and how I rewired my metabolism one morning at a time.

They needed a piece of skin.

I had spent one night in Auckland Hospital, monitors and questions and a needle phobia and a slightly sheepish registrar, and then I had driven myself back north to the land. But a biopsy was needed to confirm the diagnosis, and that meant a return trip to the city.

When I got there they asked me to choose where. On the spot, in the room. I thought about it practically, the way I was beginning to approach everything. The back of the hip. One of the least sensitive spots, least exposed, least likely to matter if the scar stayed forever.

The nurse who came to examine me before the procedure was professional and kind. But when I took off my clothes her face did something she couldn’t quite control. A look of horror and empathy arriving at the same time. She composed herself quickly and said something gentle about hoping they could get this to calm down for me.

I had the feeling she hadn’t seen anything quite like it before.

I thought of something I had noticed on aeroplanes. How you can feel fine about turbulence until you look at the flight attendants. If they look rattled, you know to worry. If they are calm, you breathe. This nurse looked rattled. And she was trying very hard not to.

I noted that. Filed it away. And felt, for the first time, the full scale of what my body had been doing.

At least it hadn’t reached my kidneys.

That had been the fear on the long drive south, lupus nephritis, the complication that changes the picture considerably. Being told it wasn’t there was a specific kind of relief, the relief of a bullet that passed close enough to hear.

The hydroxychloroquine they prescribed is slow acting, an immune modulator that takes weeks to months to build in the system. There would be no overnight transformation. The rash was not going anywhere quickly. I would need to be patient, which has never been my strongest quality, and I would need to think carefully about what else I could do while I waited.

I was not someone who sat well with waiting.

I found the Lupus forums first. That is where most people go, and I understand why. You want to find your people. You want to know you are not alone in this.

But the forums were airless. Post after post written in the language of managed decline, of flares endured and medications adjusted and lives arranged carefully around a diagnosis that had become an identity. There was solidarity there, real and generous, but very little oxygen. Very little sense that the territory ahead might be anything other than what it had always been for everyone else.

I left quickly. I am not built for that kind of solidarity. I have never been drawn to the mainstream explanation when a first principles one might exist. I wanted to go back further, to ask not just what is happening but why, and more importantly, what might shift it.

Some years before the diagnosis I had watched a TEDx talk that had never quite left me.

A journalist had been in a horrendous car accident. The injuries were severe enough that he had been placed in a nursing home, in a wheelchair, with the kind of prognosis that closes doors. He decided to treat his recovery like a project. Nothing was off the table. He was adventurous about what he would try, willing to go into territory that many dismiss as unscientific or strange. Cranial osteopathy, among other things, turned out to be one of his most powerful tools.

By the time he stood on that stage you would never have known.

His message was simple and I had carried it without realising: take charge of your own healing. Nobody has more invested in it than you do. Nobody has more time to spend on it. Your doctors, even the best ones, have perhaps half an hour to think about your case. You have everything else.

I had filed that away too. And now I felt it resurface.

I had actually first found Dr Terry Wahls years before the diagnosis. She had been in a tilt-recline wheelchair with progressive MS, another autoimmune condition, another body turned against itself. She had been a physician, which meant she understood the system from the inside and had still ended up in that chair. She began researching mitochondrial health, redesigned her diet entirely around what her cells actually needed, and got back on a bicycle. Her talk had stayed with me in the way that certain ideas do, not urgently, just quietly present, a question I hadn’t yet found a reason to answer. I had wondered then whether what she had discovered for MS might translate to other autoimmune conditions. To something like Lupus. Now I had my reason.

Then a friend recommended Dr Mark Hyman, his podcasts, his functional medicine approach, his way of asking not what disease you have but what is driving it. And I found the Goodbye Lupus protocol by Dr Brooke Goldner, who had put her own Lupus into remission and written it down carefully for anyone who wanted to follow.

I didn’t launch immediately into any of it. I read. I listened. I absorbed. I let the ideas settle and began looking for the thread that would lead me in.

It took some searching to find that thread.

But I knew from the journalist in the wheelchair, from Terry Wahls on her bicycle, from everything I had ever understood about complex systems, that the answers existed. The human body is not a simple machine with a single fault to locate and fix. It is a system of extraordinary intelligence, in constant conversation with itself and its environment. It had taken me years to become this unwell. The ship would not turn overnight.

I thought of it as a jigsaw. Pieces of lifestyle, of environment, of nutrition, of mind and nervous system and light and soil, each one a piece I could pick up and examine. I didn’t need to solve it all at once. I just needed to find the next piece.

I figured if I kept picking up pieces, eventually the picture would start to show itself.

Next week: where I started, why I started there, and what happened when I did.

I had arrived on 14 hectares of rewilded native forest on the west coast of Northland with a 100 percent mortgage, a vision, and very little else. The homestead required running repairs that didn’t wait for daylight or dry weather. The guest cottage was a 110-year-old kauri bushman’s cottage, one self-contained end of the main homestead, and it needed a full renovation before it could earn its keep. I stripped it back to the bones, steaming off five layers of old wallpaper late into the evenings, breathing in decades of accumulated dust and mould. I didn’t think much of it at the time. I was too busy. Too determined.

The relationship I had brought with me onto the land was unravelling under the pressure.

I was holding a great deal.

And then, quietly at first, a rash appeared on my chest.

I went to my doctor. She prescribed antibiotics.

Something in me said no. Not loudly, just that same low signal I had learned to half-hear over the years, the one that said this isn’t right, this isn’t what this is. But I was tired and overwhelmed and she was the professional, so I took the antibiotics and waited.

The rash spread.

Back to the doctor. Different antibiotics. The rash kept spreading, angry and indifferent to everything we threw at it. I could feel it wasn’t just my skin. Something was shifting in my lungs. In my brain. In my chest. My body was not behaving like a body with an infection. It was behaving like a body at war with itself.

I had felt that war before. I just hadn’t had a name for it yet.

I sat down one afternoon, alone on the land, and decided to work it out myself.

I had always been good at research. I had always loved a project. And this, I decided, was simply a project I hadn’t yet solved. I opened my ipad and began to search methodically, following threads, ruling things out, narrowing the field.

And then I found it.

A photograph of a rash in the shape of old sunburn, spreading across the upper body, the neck, the arms. I looked at my screen. I looked at my skin. The recognition was immediate and total.

I knew I had found the key.

After years of low white blood counts and chronic back pain and unexplained exhaustion and a doctor who had told me it wasn’t autoimmune, I had a name. I had a shape. I had something to work with.

I rang my mum. My brother happened to be there, a surgeon, and I told him my theory. That I thought it was Lupus. That I could feel it in my brain and my lungs.

He didn’t hesitate. Get yourself to Auckland Hospital, he said. Don’t muck around.

I packed an overnight bag. I put in some food, because hospital food, and I got in the car and drove three hours to the city alone.

I was afraid. Lupus can affect the kidneys, lupus nephritis, and that changes the picture considerably. I wasn’t sure yet what was happening inside me and the uncertainty sat heavily in the passenger seat beside me the whole way south.

But underneath the fear there was something else. Something almost electric.

I had worked it out. After all those years of being dismissed and misread and told to wait and see, I had sat alone in a remote forest and diagnosed myself. Which meant I could understand it. Which meant I could begin, methodically and stubbornly and with great curiosity, to work out how to heal.

I drove through the dark with fear in one hand and excitement in the other.

At Auckland Hospital I walked into A&E and approached the reception desk.

The receptionist looked at me. Just one look, taking in the rash that had spread across my neck and arms and upper body, vivid and unmistakable.

I was straight through on the red line and into a bed with monitors all around me.

The room moved fast around me. Nurses and doctors in full emergency mode, monitors attached, questions fired and answered. A nurse arrived to take blood from the veins in my hand. She had a student nurse with her and asked if the student could do it.

I have a needle phobia, I said. I would rather she didn’t.

She told the student to go ahead anyway.

Something in me came completely undone. I started howling. Not crying. Howling, uncontrollable and primal. The phobia is intense and real, not something that responds to reason, and the student nurse was inexperienced. It was painful and I had no defences left.

The registrar came. I told him my theory. Lupus, I said. I think it’s in my brain and my lungs as well.

He looked at me with the particular patience of someone managing a difficult patient and told me I had been watching too much House.

I picked up my phone and showed him the rash in the shape of old sunburn.

He went away to consult with his colleagues.

When he came back his face was slightly sheepish.

Yes, he said. We think you have Lupus.

I had known for hours. I had known, in some quieter sense, for years.

But there it was at last. A name. A diagnosis. A door.

Not a life sentence. A door.

Next week: sitting with the diagnosis, the forums full of despair, and the moment I decided to treat this not as a verdict but as a research project.

Wild Medicine is a weekly series about Lupus, the intelligence of the body, and the long spiral back to yourself. If something in your own body has stopped making sense, you’re in the right place.

Not the tired that sleep fixes. The other kind, the kind that lives in your bones, that makes you look around at other children and wonder what they’re running on. At school I would watch them, brimming with irrepressible energy, and feel a quiet bewilderment. Where was that coming from? I had none of it. I was exhausted in a way I had no words for. And they had no words for it either, they just assumed I was lazy.

So I learned to carry it quietly. You do, when there’s no explanation. You learn to perform wellness, to keep up, to file the exhaustion somewhere it won’t inconvenience anyone. I got good at it. Good enough to build a life, a real one, full of motion and beauty and purpose. I became a documentary wedding photographer, freelance, chasing light and feeling. It was adrenaline that carried me through, giving me the energy I so craved. I was busy enough that the tiredness almost made sense.

Almost.

From my early twenties, my white blood count kept coming back low. Unusually low. Quietly, I started researching. Then one day my doctor rang to say it had dropped so far I should technically be hospitalised. I had almost no immunity. I happened to be on holiday. I came home, sat across from him, and asked: could this be autoimmune?

He said no.

I decided to think myself well instead. It sounds naïve now, but at the time it felt like the only available act of agency. I schooled myself in nutrition. I found the Paleo concept, eating as we’d evolved to eat, and felt genuinely better. Then, without a diagnosis to anchor me, without a reason that felt real enough to hold the line, I drifted back to my old habits. The improvement dissolved. I filed it away.

Years passed. My sister was diagnosed as coeliac. On a hunch, I went gluten-free. The chronic back pain I had carried for years disappeared. Not eased. Disappeared. The exhaustion lifted. I felt, for stretches, like a person who had enough energy to be alive.

But still no diagnosis. Still no name for it. Just a body that was clearly in conversation with something, and a medical system that kept declining to join in.

By the time the rash appeared I had left Auckland.

After eighteen years in the city I had fallen out of love with my job, with the concrete, with the sirens at all hours. Something older was pulling at me, a memory of growing up in the hill country of Taranaki, roaming freely through forests and farmland, belonging to land the way children do when no one tells them not to. I wanted something to be in service of. In Māori there is a word for this, kaitiaki. Guardian. Steward. The one who tends.

I found 14 hectares of rewilded native forest on the west coast of Northland, a homestead, a self-contained cottage, a converted shipping container, a yurt, all for the price of a studio apartment in Auckland. On paper it was impractical. On every other level it was obvious.

I went to see it in the middle of winter. It was depressing. The owner had gone away overnight and left his Labradors in the sitting room. It smelled like a kennel. The place was rundown in the particular way of somewhere that had stopped being cared for.

But then I walked up the track into the forest.

And on the way back down, alone, something happened that I don’t entirely know how to explain. An overwhelming sense of belonging. Not liking the place. Not thinking it had potential. Belonging to it. As if the land already knew me and was simply waiting for me to arrive.

When my father saw it he said: “It’s all the things you loved as a kid.”

He was right. I took out a 100 percent mortgage and made the leap.

I’m writing this for anyone who has sat in the early months of a diagnosis and felt the air go out of them.

The Lupus forums were full of that feeling. Post after post written in the language of defeat, of expensive suffering, of endless medication adjustments, of a life permanently diminished. In America, Lupus costs between $13,000 and $68,000 a year to manage. The diagnosis arrives wrapped in financial terror as well as medical uncertainty. People described it as a life sentence. An expensive one. Served without appeal.

I understood the despair. I just couldn’t afford to stay in it.

Something in me, a strong, deep intuition that I have learned over time to trust absolutely, refused to accept a story that didn’t fit. I decided to treat it like a research project. I have always loved a project. I would focus my full attention on this one until I worked it out. I didn’t know yet what I would find. I didn’t have a map or a protocol or a plan.

But I was certain, in my bones, that there were things within my power.

This is the story of finding them.

Wild Medicine is a weekly series about Lupus, the intelligence of the body, and the long spiral back to yourself. If something in your own body has stopped making sense, you’re in the right place.

Next week: the rash that covered my body, the long drive to A&E alone, and the registrar who told me I’d been watching too much House.