The reason
Ambã exists.

I’m Shannon, and I came to functional nutrition the way most people in this work do — through the body. I ate the “healthy” diet by the book. The kale, the smoothies, the cold-pressed everything. I followed the lists, religiously, and my body broke quietly underneath it.

There were two miscarriages I won’t write about here. There was an autoimmune diagnosis my GP couldn’t explain. There was an exhaustion that had nothing to do with sleep. I assumed I was doing it wrong. I tried harder.

The turn came slowly. I stopped reading nutrition books and started reading nutrition research. What I found was that almost every “healthy eating” list I’d been following was built on population averages — averages that quietly excluded women in fertility, in pregnancy, in postpartum, in perimenopause. The lists weren’t wrong. They just weren’t built for the stage I was in.

I wasn’t doing it wrong. I was doing it thoroughly— and the thing I was doing thoroughly was the wrong list.

I retrained as a Functional Nutrition Counsellor through the Functional Nutrition Alliance, and built Ambã around the question my own body had been asking: what does this body, in this stage, need? Not the average woman. This one.

Ambã is small on purpose. I work with women 1-on-1, alongside whichever care team they already have — fertility specialists, obstetricians, GPs, midwives, doulas. I don’t replace any of them. I do the work next to them, the work most of them don’t have time to do: bloodwork-led, body-specific, stage-specific food.

That’s the whole practice. Nourish the stage you’re in.