Weight gain, anxiety, sadness, insomnia and/or struggling with sleep.
It all sounds like a sleep problem.
More and more women today are prescribed anti-depressants for sleep and mood. And for many, it does help.
A number of women going through menopause or after menopause find reprieve with HRT.
But the weight doesn’t shift.
Women that never struggled with weight, suddenly do.
Meet Jasmin
This was what happened for Jasmin when we met her.
As a teen, she struggled with her anxiety. She had been on medications, but was able to come off in her twenties and managed through prayer and exercise.
Once she passed 50, her anxiety and sadness came back. She reluctantly went back on anti-depressants to help.
She was starting to struggle with new symptoms though. The anti-depressants took the edge off of her anxiety, but now she was starting to notice shifts in her:
- Sleep
- Weight gain
- Concentration and execution at work
She had put on 10kgs over the last two years. Even her mum commented on how unusual that was for her. She was a clean eater and super careful because early on in life, she had realised food would trigger her anxiety.
What nobody had told Jasmin was that some women carry genetic variants that change how their body processes medications, meaning standard doses can behave differently in their system. For her, this wasn’t a character flaw or a lack of trying. Her body was simply wired differently.
She came to us at a loss. What she knew would work, stopped working. And the weight just made her start isolating from her life and made her feel broken.
What Jasmin’s Blood Work Revealed
The very first thing we looked at with Jasmin was her blood work. She was edging closer and closer to menopause. She hadn’t had a period for six months, and over the last 18 months, her periods were coming between three and six month windows.
At first, Jasmin thought her menopause and possibly hormones were causing the problem. But this familiarity of anxiety was what made her self-aware enough to know hormones may have re-activated something — but to make a real change, she needed to go further.
Jasmin’s blood biochemistry told us some really key things. Over the last 12 months her:
- Liver enzymes had increased by 50%
- Cholesterol had increased by 1 point
- HbA1c had increased by 0.2 points
- TSH had increased by 0.8 points
- Homocysteine was 14.6 (ideally 6-8)
Her thyroid was within a good reference range, but the TSH increase suggested a challenge with her Free T3 conversion, especially given the rise in her liver enzymes and cholesterol.
Jasmin felt like the last year she was battling. Her family had faced mental health challenges and she just wanted answers.
Three Days, Ten Years of Relief
We first started Jasmin on a few supplements to help with her methylation and detoxification. We also made slight changes to decrease her insulin resistance.
Within 3 days, before her supplements had even arrived, Jasmin messaged that she hadn’t slept or felt this good mentally for 10+ years. It had only been 3 days of changing how she ate, not what she ate.
Going Deeper — The Tests That Changed Everything
Jasmin chose to do two additional tests:
- A genetic test to understand how to correct her mood and anxiety long term
- A mineral and micronutrient test to check her levels and potential bone risks as she got close to menopause
Her mineral and micronutrient results were fascinating:
- Vitamin D absorption was around 30%, even though her blood levels showed it higher
- B9 and B12 ratio confirmed she was struggling with methylation
- Magnesium was extremely low — and this matters more than most people realise, because magnesium is essential for over 300 enzymatic reactions, including the ones that produce serotonin and regulate sleep
- Lithium was extremely low. While most people associate lithium with high-dose psychiatric medication, at trace levels it plays a quiet but critical role in mood stability and protecting neurons
- Vitamin K was low
The Gene That Was Running the Show
Jasmin’s biggest trouble-making genetic factor was her MTHFR gene. This gene governs the conversion of folate into its active, usable form — and that one process is required for:
- DNA repair
- Neurotransmitter production (serotonin and dopamine)
- Detoxification
- Cardiovascular health
- Gene expression
When it isn’t working properly, almost everything downstream feels the drag.
Her BDNF gene, the one responsible for brain-derived neurotrophic factor — essentially the brain’s own fertiliser for mood and memory — was running below where it should be. This was quietly driving her anxiety and low mood in the background, long before menopause entered the picture.
Her COMT gene showed impaired detoxification of both oestrogen and neurotransmitters, a combination that becomes particularly problematic as oestrogen declines, because oestrogen had been doing a lot of the compensating work all along.
Why Sleep Was Never Just a Sleep Problem
The same methylation pathways that govern mood also govern how deeply and restoratively you sleep. Jasmin wasn’t just struggling to fall asleep — her sleep architecture, the quality of the deep restorative cycles, was being disrupted from multiple directions at once:
- Low BDNF reduces deep sleep
- Elevated inflammatory markers fragment it further
- A racing mind from COMT variants keeps the brain activated at night
No single supplement was ever going to fix that. It needed to be approached as a system.
The Bigger Picture She Didn’t Know to Look For
Whilst Jasmin’s presenting concern was mood, poor sleep, and weight gain, the bigger long-term underlying factors were her immune system and her bone density — something we quietly began supporting alongside everything else.
Poor methylation was the root-level dysfunction amplifying almost every other genetic risk in her report. Supporting it was like finding the first domino.
Her high homocysteine alone signalled the need for methylation assistance, and correcting that one pathway had a cascading effect across:
- Vitamin D absorption
- Neurotransmitter function
- Serotonin, melatonin and dopamine regulation
- Liver detoxification and hormone clearance
- Blood sugar regulation
- Vitamin K absorption
- Blood vessel health and elevated blood pressure
Jasmin, interestingly, didn’t need a fasting or inflammation-reducing protocol. She actually ran a risk of low blood sugar triggering her anxiety, so her plan was built around stabilising, not restricting.
Four Months Later
We asked Jasmin to follow her food plan and adjust her supplementation for two months. The changes over four months were remarkable.
Anxiety: gone. Within the first 3 days of changing how she ate, Jasmin’s anxiety dropped to zero. The best she had felt mentally in 10 years. And it stayed that way across the full five months with us.
She lost 12kgs. Her metabolism had always been strong, but her methylation was creating insulin resistance and abdominal weight gain. Poor detoxification meant she was also bloated, puffy, and holding onto fluid that her body simply couldn’t clear.
Sleeping through the night, waking rested. Her energy and motivation had been at their lowest lows when she arrived. She had been getting some sleep, but waking flat. That flatness through the day lifted.
This Isn’t One-Size-Fits-All
Methylation is such a massive part of how the brain, metabolism, and mood interact. For Jasmin, her methylation, neurotransmitter, immune, and detoxification pathways were all tightly tied together — and addressing them together is what made the difference.
Traditional fasting protocols or standard menopause food plans weren’t going to work for her. They weren’t built for her biology.
We see so many women arrive with a combination of:
- Challenges sleeping
- Anxiety or sadness
- Executive function struggles
- Energy dips
- Weight gain they can’t explain
Looking underneath what is actually happening matters. Because your body is relying on you to support it, now that oestrogen and progesterone are no longer quietly supporting your neuropathways, your metabolic function, your cardiovascular system, and your immune system the way they once were.
If you would like to learn more, watch our brand new webcast on The Long Term Genetic Impact of Menopause.
If you would like our support, you can organise a Free Introductory Consultation here.
