Helen Wright spends her working days helping leaders build teams that can run without them. Before that, she spent years in banking, working in credit and portfolio risk, a job built on spotting patterns before they cause damage. For most of that time, one pattern played out in her own day without her noticing: toast for breakfast, hungry again by ten, more toast or a snack by eleven, a sandwich at lunch, and a mid-afternoon slump she put down to the time of day.
"I'd just eat and not think about it," she says. "Then I'd be tired, and I'd think, well, it's that time of day. This always happens. I never really stopped to ask why."
What the late 40s felt like from the inside
Helen is in her late 40s, has young twins, and moved from an office job to working at home. The changes she noticed at this stage of life went beyond her body. "There's a lot of brain fog. There's a lot of doubting yourself. Things change in your head, not just in your body."
We hear versions of this from many of our members in midlife, and the usual explanations are age, hormones, stress, or being busy. All of those can play a part, and they feed into each other; sleep deprivation alone (Helen has twins) is enough to disrupt how the body handles food the next day. What Helen hadn't considered was that the way she ate might be one of the things she could change.
Seeing it on the curve
Once she was wearing a glucose sensor and watching her energy curve, Helen started matching how she felt against what her glucose was doing. Bread gave the clearest signal. It's mostly carbohydrate, which the body breaks down into glucose, and a fast rise is often followed by a fall. That fall is where many of our members report tiredness, irritability and the urge to eat again.
"It's not until you lower it and try to stop the spikes and crashes that you realise, no, this does impact my mood. It absolutely does."
The connection between glucose swings and how people feel varies a lot from person to person, and the research on it is still developing. What a sensor gives you is your own version of the answer. For Helen, it was consistent enough to change how she reads her day. "Now I can see it on a line: how it affects my mood, my brain fog, my energy, how much I want to do something at a particular time."
A different breakfast, a different morning
The first change was breakfast. Helen swapped toast for a protein-heavy breakfast, something she says she would never have eaten in the past. Protein breaks down into amino acids rather than glucose, so it doesn't produce the same fast rise and fall, and research consistently links higher-protein meals with feeling full for longer.
The effect she describes goes further than being less hungry. "I just don't even think about food anymore. It's not that I want food and I'm putting myself off. It stops me thinking about it." The pharmaceutical industry now has a name for that constant background preoccupation with eating: food noise. Helen turned hers down with eggs.
The afternoon changed too. Her old routine at the office was a sandwich or a sugar-heavy lunch, followed by a 3pm coffee to get through the next meeting. "I just thought, it's three o'clock, I'm tired, let's have a cup of tea. I didn't realise that was what was happening." Office culture made it harder: doughnuts brought in for the team, a quick lunch grabbed between meetings, and whatever the supermarket puts at eye level. "What's easy is what's put in front of you. It's not always the best thing for your brain, and it won't keep you going through the afternoon."
Weight, knees and patience
Helen has lost around 13 kilos. We see weight loss as a side effect of better metabolic health, and she talks about it the same way; the changes she mentions first are the ones she feels. She has a dodgy knee and can now do far more exercise. She's calmer with her children. "I'm a lot less ratty with the kids. I'm a bit more chilled out with them."
A way of eating she hasn't dropped
Helen has dieted before. Every attempt followed the same all-or-nothing logic, and she always hoped the right plan would bring a sudden change in mindset that finally stuck. It never came from a diet. It came from understanding what her food was doing.
"I'm not thinking, I'm on a diet now. This is just how I eat now. I'd never been able to get to that before."
That means the occasional treat no longer feels like failure. Her glucose still responds to it, and she knows it will, but it's one choice among many. Walking past the sugar stalls at Christmas, she knows what she'd be signing up for, and she can decide either way.
The question she asks now
Helen's work is about asking the right questions, and her first question has changed. If a new client told her they couldn't focus or were struggling at work, she'd now ask about nutrition early on. "I never would have brought nutrition into it in the past. Now I definitely would."
She has started the same conversation at home. When her children want sugar, she shows them her energy curve. "I say, look, this is me as a mum with a lot of energy. And when it crashes, I don't have the energy to play with you, and that's when I get grumpy." She's teaching them at primary school age what took her until her 40s to learn.
Helen spent a career assessing risk and another asking leaders what they'd overlooked. The pattern she'd missed was the one running through her own afternoons. If your 3pm feels the way hers used to, the clock is probably the least likely suspect.
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