Rome

Last week, I found myself at the House of Commons, and was invariably asked the question that everyone gets asked: "So… what do you do?"

It was a perfectly ordinary question.

And, this time, I was ready.

I was ready because, a few years ago, that simple question would have completely unsettled me. My ego didn't like it. In East Africa, I had been a household name. In the vast ocean that is the UK, not so much.

I couldn't understand why I found it so hard to adjust. It wasn't that I wasn't good at what I did anymore, or that I didn't know what I was doing. It also wasn't that I was intimidated by all the other, sometimes even bigger, fish. Neti neti. Not this, not that.

So what was it?

That somehow, I no longer mattered.

It was exactly the strange phenomenon that I had encountered at a silent retreat at a Thai monastery many years prior. With no mirrors and no talking, it was like I didn't exist. It used to be my ego, my inner child, and my abandonment wound screaming, every time this totally innocuous question was asked.

So what did I do? I got to work! There were sick people everywhere. It didn't matter where I was.

When I started out in Nairobi, I remember seeing a lot of gout cases — something I'd barely encountered during my clinical training in the UK. Coming back home after almost 25 years away, I'm treating conditions I never saw in Kenya, like gastroparesis. It never ceases to fascinate me how different cultures get ill differently. Kenyans like to eat like 18th-century French aristocrats, while the English literally hold it in.

But I digress.

What was I going to do about this non-existent reputation of mine? As I tell my patients, this is an "eat-an-elephant-one-bite-at-a-time" situation. Or, in other words, Rome wasn't built in a day.

But sometimes, again as I tell my patients, it is.

It's made by one decision: the decision to commit to 8 glasses of water, or the decision to go to bed at a particular time, or the decision to stop making all your decisions from fear.

Rome can be built in a day.

And I have seen it.

In my case, it was simply about having a better answer prepared and not mumbling, somehow ashamed of the fact that I was starting afresh in a new country.

"So… what do you do?"

"I developed The Sona Method."

What I realised is that I had been given an opportunity — because The Sona Method isn't Nutrition by Sona. It's a brand new process, one that over the coming years, people will come to experience – both in London and abroad.

Turns out, the first patient I needed to help in England wasn't anyone else. It was myself.