First steps into metabolically balanced eating. A summary.

The role of your gut microbiome in your blood sugar response to food.

Why I watch my blood glucose as the standard upon which I base my dietary and lifestyle decisions today.

When you're sitting in a consulting room with a heavy diagnosis in front of you, it's hard to think, never mind ask good questions. I know. I've been there.

One thing truly helped me. Not a supplement, not a book. A question.

Instead of "What are my options?", I asked my doctor: "If you were in this situation, what would you do?"

Everything shifted. The list of options became a recommendation. The busy consultant became a person thinking about my case, not a case. And I walked out with something I could actually act on.

That question taught me something bigger: how much you get out of an appointment depends on what you bring into it. The folder with your results. The questions written down beforehand. The friend taking notes. And, every single time, the question nobody thinks to ask an oncologist: what should I be eating, and how can I support this treatment at home?

I've written it all up in a new blog post, plus a free one-page checklist you can take to your next appointment.

On the true benefits of eating mushrooms. Announcement of a new MKD cookbook, cook-booklet, The Mushroom Kitchen.

Analysing the content of a supermarket trolley in front of me, with no judgment, just observation and compassion.

Protein first or vegetables first? That is the question :)

Weightloss happens not how I thought.

Lately, I’ve realised that although I’m losing weight and doing resistance training, I keep hearing that I also need to make a conscious effort to eat more protein to avoid losing muscle mass. Why, and how much more? Have I been doing all the right things? Then I started paying attention to how I felt after meals, and protein turned out to be the quiet lever behind an awful lot of it. I wrote about protein before, here I’m just trying to find the answers to a few more questions that have come up along the way.

I left the house yesterday thinking I'd be gone an hour. Pop over to the dentist, sit through a ten-minute procedure, come home. That was the whole plan. But I've lived long enough inside this body of mine to know that plans are more like suggestions, so I did the thing I always do now: I showered, I dressed properly, I packed a good book and a bottle of water. Not because I expected the day to unravel, but because looking after myself, even in small ways, is the one thing I can always control.

The Italian Kitchen, Metabolically Balanced is officially in the shop: 120 recipes from the cuisine I love most, adapted gently and with enormous respect. Read the story behind the collection.

Here's the secret I learned writing it: Italian food barely needed rescuing. A bistecca with white beans and bitter greens, a pot of mussels, a slow Sunday ragù, much of Italy has been eating in beautiful balance for centuries. So the sauces stay faithful. The generosity stays. Only the platform beneath them changes: courgette ribbons under the carbonara, almonds where breadcrumbs stood, beans where the bread was.

Inside you'll find:
🍅 Eleven chapters, antipasti to dolci
🫒 A Why it works note with every single recipe — the thinking, in plain language
🍑 Desserts built on ricotta, mascarpone and dark chocolate, sweetness kept quiet
🚶 And a whole section on making room for pizza, focaccia and gelato, because life absolutely includes them

No counting. No foods to fear. Just meals built for steadier energy, and a growing curiosity about what works for yourbody.

Print it, splatter it, love it.

There's a version of healthy living that looks like a complete overhaul, new regime, new rules, shelves full of supplements. I've never seen it last, in my own kitchen or anyone else's.

What does last, in my experience, is smaller. Almost embarrassingly small. The habits that have shaped my health most aren't the dramatic ones; they're the quiet ones I barely notice doing any more. So today's diary entry is a collection of them: the little things that make eating well and feeling steadier simpler, on ordinary days, when motivation is nowhere to be found.

Food won't replace medicine. But it can quietly stand alongside it, supporting energy, recovery, and the body's own intelligence.

Where it all began.

A diary entry about cutting through the noise.

Protein is everywhere at the moment. Protein bars, protein powders, protein water, protein bread. If you believed the packaging, you'd think we were all one scoop away from falling apart. And somewhere in all that noise, a genuinely important question gets lost: how much protein does my body actually need, and what should it look like on my plate?

There's a pot of white tea on my counter most mornings. I brew it gently, drink my way through it, then simply top it up with hot water for a second - even third - pour. Soft, pale, barely there, but it keeps giving. 🍵

What I love: it's naturally low in caffeine, so I can sip from morning to afternoon without the buzz-and-crash I'd get from coffee. It carries an amino acid called L-theanine that's often linked to a calm, focused feeling, alongside those gentle plant compounds (catechins) I keep reading about. I don't drink it expecting it to fix anything - it's just a lovely, naturally sugar-free cup to fold into the day.

Six kilos down in four months, much of it lost while I was laid up with a broken foot. Turns out it was never about the exercise — it was about protein, fat and fibre on the plate. Here's the story behind the number.

My lunch looked wholesome — falafel, grains, vegetables — yet my glucose nearly doubled afterwards. The culprit wasn't one villain but a few small things stacking up. Here's what happened, and the gentle way I brought it back down.

It has happened to all of us: hungry, short on time, standing in front of a supermarket fridge with no plan. In this one I walk you through exactly how I read a typical grab-and-go shelf: the steady choices I reach for, how to make a sandwich work harder, and the ones I gently leave behind (and why). No rules, no guilt, no foods off-limit, just choosing that leaves you fed and steady, not wiped out an hour later.