Chris McAtomney

Chris McAtomney Chris McAtomney

Clinical Naturopath (BHSc)
Self Mastery Coach

Evidence-Based Naturopathic Medicine for High-Agency Individuals.

24/09/2026

Two things make a diet great. Neither is complicated.

One: eat more micronutrient-dense whole foods. Nuts, seeds, berries, veg, quality meat.

Two: cut back hard on the pro-inflammatory ultra-processed stuff.

Most people who walk into my clinic tired, foggy, flat, dealing with a flaky scalp, only want to do the first one. Add the good stuff, ignore the rest. It feels productive.

Here’s the catch. You can eat all the berries and greens in the world, but if you’re still putting away a tub of ice cream or a stack of pastries every day, the symptoms that brought you in probably aren’t going anywhere.

24/09/2026

Not all tiredness is the same.

Both kinds of tiredness involve a buildup of adenosine throughout the day, but the kind of tiredness resulting from poor sleep also brings with it a dysregulation of several hormones and neurotransmitters, and it’s this dysregulation that leads to the ‘hungry ghost’ feeling, that predisposes you to the kind of impulsivity that leads to another poor sleep.

22/09/2026

All hail ODOUROUS FLATUS.

If your farts are abundant and smell like rotten eggs, it’s often the result of excess protein making its way to parts of the digestive tract that it normally wouldn’t. Once it’s there, it gets putrefied by the microbes that live there. Unless you provide their preferred substrate- fermentable fibre.

Two fixes- best deployed concurrently. Reduce protein intake to a sensible volume, and increase fibre intake (gradually).

Fermentation of fibres like resistant starch still produce gas, particularly if you introduce too much too fast. But it is far less ODOUROUS 🏛️

**Firstly, if you’re on a prescribed SSRI, do not cease taking it. SSRIs do help some people, but not simply by ‘elevati...
04/09/2026

**Firstly, if you’re on a prescribed SSRI, do not cease taking it. SSRIs do help some people, but not simply by ‘elevating’ serotonin. It’s what happens downstream of reuptake inhibition over weeks that bring about the benefits**

The idea that supplementing with a precursor to raise serotonin will lead to elevated mood is one of the most persistent oversimplifications in consumer neuroscience.

No neurotransmitter works alone. Each is held in check by the others.


17/08/2026

The post-lunch dip is a circadian phenomenon, not a pathology.

Core body temperature and subjective alertness both fall in a predictable trough roughly seven to nine hours after waking, independent of what you ate. It was present in adolescence too but it was simply masked by higher baseline arousal.

Low-stimulation, sedentary tasks remove that masking, which is why the same physiology becomes conspicuous in your thirties.

Bright light exposure, movement, or a really short nap address it more reliably than additional caffeine.

Collagen is technically a protein. It’s just not the type that does the things that most people are counting protein for...
15/08/2026

Collagen is technically a protein. It’s just not the type that does the things that most people are counting protein for. 

If a significant share of your daily intake is collagen, your logged protein and your usable protein have diverged, and your tracking app won’t tell you that, because none of them model amino acid profile.

13/08/2026

You can’t measure a signal in a noisy room.

And if you lowered the noise in that room, maybe you’d be less fixated on measuring a new signal anyway.

My last post was about protecting your reserve capacity: becoming more discerning about the unnecessary demands that lea...
11/08/2026

My last post was about protecting your reserve capacity: becoming more discerning about the unnecessary demands that leave you with less capacity for the challenges that matter.

But protecting capacity and expanding capacity are not quite the same project.

Reserve capacity is not one generic pool of energy. It is the spare functional range available across multiple systems when demand rises.

Your cardiovascular system has reserve. Your mitochondria have respiratory reserve. Your muscles have force-producing reserve. Your thermoregulatory system has additional heat-producing capacity. Even your response to psychological threat can become better calibrated through graded challenge and successful recovery.

The practical implication is specificity.

And adaptation requires a sufficiently specific signal, repeated at a recoverable dose, with enough time and resources to build from it.

Protect your energy.

Then decide what you are protecting it for.

11/08/2026

For an otherwise healthy adult, viral URTI symptoms — extreme fatigue, malaise, the classic “I can’t even get off the couch” — are happening for a reason. Your body knows the most effective way to force you to rest is to generate exactly these symptoms.

Most people reaching for pharmacological support are doing so in the hope it suppresses those symptoms and lets them ‘get on with it’. The classic “I can’t afford to be sick right now.”

But the “I can’t afford to be sick” line is usually a sign you’ve been operating beyond your capacity for a while — and the illness is the invoice.

Some symptoms are worth flagging: a very high or persistent fever, delirium, significant fluid loss, breathlessness or chest pain, or symptoms that worsen after the first few days or don’t improve within a week. If you’ve got any of these, get checked.

But if you don’t, just heed the message your body is sending.

Which is to do nothing.

Someone who takes nothing but heeds the message to do nothing will generally recover much faster than someone who takes everything and insists on ‘soldiering on’.

Whether an ice bath energises you or flattens you is less about gender and more about reserve capacity: your autonomic n...
08/08/2026

Whether an ice bath energises you or flattens you is less about gender and more about reserve capacity: your autonomic nervous system’s bank balance.

Every late night, every hard workout, and every deviation from your routine is a withdrawal. When your balance is healthy, hormetic stress like cold exposure is a deposit that compounds into resilience. When you’re already overdrawn, it’s a debt you can’t repay, and you’ll usually feel that debt straight away.

recovery metabolichealth naturopathy nervoussystemhealth stressresilience

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