Find Your Way Around Fluxable

I started writing this Substack as a way to share everything I’ve learned from my personal and professional cancer experience, which includes twenty years working as a registered nutritional therapist with cancer patients, and thirty years of thriver/survivor experience following a diagnosis of grade 3, stage 3, triple negative breast cancer at the age of 33.

Although writing it all down started as a gentle slope into semi-retirement which, originally I planned to be doing alongside a couple of years at art school, it soon became a busy sequel to my clinical nutrition career. The act of popping my head above the parapet led to me being made a Fellow of BANT and proudly receiving the Yes to Life Holistic Cancer Care Innovator Award. I’m busier than ever!

The ‘stack now amounts to over 175 posts. So many that even I forget how far we’ve come. So I’m listed the phases and entries below to help you navigate the information.

Please remember that cancer care is changing rapidly and, as you would expect, my understanding of the role of nutrition has evolved over the three years I’ve been writing the stack. I am not a doctor and nothing I have written is designed as a substitute for medical advice. You should always check and double check any information you gain from the internet with your medical team and also with your own instincts and intuition.

I haven’t included the numerous recipe posts in this index as they have a separate heading in the main menu bar. However, if you’re new here you might like to start with this post.

A Quick Start Guide to Cancer Nutrition: Twenty Tweaks to Recovery.

The Power Journey

The main message for cancer patients is that treatment works better when your health is supported with a good diet, exercise and environment. This series will help you make good choices.

Cancer Recovery

Most patients walk out of the hospital at the end of treatment in a worse state of general health than when they started, albeit with a reduced tumour burden. At the point where medical care stops your recovery begins. This section, and everything I am writing right now is designed to help you with that and to help you not only to recover but to be better than before.

Uncoupling Cancer

Based on my growing readership this section is where the biochemistry starts to get more involved, based in the mitochondria and centring on the idea of flux across the electron transport chain. This, too, is when I began to identify my audience as a mix of specialist practitioners working in the integrative oncology space, and expert patients who are happy to work towards a Masters degree level understanding of their situation.

The Fluxable Framework

This is the section where the concept of mitochondrial flux became front and central to the idea of cancer recovery and the focus of the stack. Based on the understanding that the first ‘difficult to reverse’ step in tumour cell formation is the reverse flux that happens when the electron transport chain is overwhelmed and unable to move forward towards ATP, when cancer cells start to become dedifferentiated and potentially malignant.

Not only is flux important in the mitochondria, it turns out that the perpetual movement of molecules along biochemical pathways, and the revolving ratios of key nutrients as they are transformed by the process, is key to maintaining healthy homeostasis and happy cells. Metabolic flexibility was already a well-established idea in nutrition and wellness audiences, it was a simple step to introduce Fluxable as a core concept and, indeed, the whole point of ‘metflex’. From there it’s just a small step (but also a giant one) to realise that we can do a lot of damage when we strong-arm our own biochemical pathways towards key nutrients associated with health and longevity or, worse still, swamp our systems with high levels of ‘vital’ supplements.

Fluxable is focussed on the inherent and ancient wisdom of letting your pathways do their thing, in line with Mother Nature, and working out how to gently support them on their way rather than trying to biohack your way to health.

A guide to supplements

A new theory of cancer

The role of the microbiome

The fluxable heart of metabolism

Zooming in on diet and lifestyle

Making better choices

Nutrigenomics

It’s now widely agreed that classifying cancer as ‘a genetic disease’ is a massive oversimplification. Moreover, acknowledging the metabolic approach gives patients much more leverage and an opportunity to make a difference to their own survival. Nevertheless an understanding of our individual genes (vs understanding tumour mutations) can help us to fine-tune our metabolism and improve cancer outcomes.

Up to date as at Weds 6th May, 2026.