For over a decade, I ran my own art companies — discovering and representing emerging artists, and arranging portrait commissions for private collectors and royal families across the Middle East. My work took me to Los Angeles, Monaco, Kuwait and India, where I was also part of the team behind India’s first international biennale of contemporary art, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale.

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Then my own health changed dramatically. Severe insomnia, chronic fatigue, migraines, dizziness and neurological symptoms began to dominate my life. Months of appointments, specialists and testing left me no closer to understanding why.

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What I found missing was a question:

What’s driving this?

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A diagnosis can identify what is happening. Understanding what may be driving it is a different question.

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That question led me to train in integrative nutrition, qualify as a health coach and study herbal medicine. It also led me to the work of Anthony William, whose protocols I had initially dismissed because I could see little conventional evidence behind them. But after examining years of publicly documented experiences and witnessing the remarkable changes people attributed to his approach, and discovering endorsements from respected figures including Dr Alejandro Junger, Tony Robbins, Pharell Williams and Novak Djokovic, I reconsidered.

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The transformation in my health was profound. Symptoms I had feared might be permanent began to resolve.

That experience didn’t make me less interested in evidence. It made me more interested in understanding why these approaches appeared to work.

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That search led me deeper into the work of doctors and researchers including Dean Ornish, William Li and Emeran Mayer, alongside practitioners approaching chronic illness from very different perspectives.

Their methods differed, but I kept finding areas of convergence: reduce what may be burdening the body, replenish what it needs, and create the conditions in which it can regulate, recover and function more effectively.

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As I began working with others, I saw those principles prove valuable again. The real work became understanding why certain approaches appeared to work, where they converged, and what patterns held across practitioners, research and real people.

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Practitioner methodologies. Scientific research. Real-world outcomes.

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Together, these became the intellectual foundation for Shimalia Intelligence™ — our AI system designed to identify patterns, priorities and potential drivers, challenge hypotheses and help determine which strategies warrant consideration for each individual.

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The scale of chronic illness and the suffering it causes should create an enormous sense of urgency. What concerns me most is that people are unknowingly compromising their health through everyday choices, simply because they have never been given the information to understand their impact. Nutrition, environmental exposures and the way we live are not peripheral to health — they play a fundamental role in the development and progression of so many chronic diseases.

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Yet our understanding of health remains remarkably fragmented. Nutrition, sleep, stress, environmental influences and the body’s interconnected systems are too often considered in isolation, rather than as parts of a larger picture.

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People cannot make informed decisions about their health without understanding what influences it.

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Too often, a diagnosis becomes the end of the investigation into why illness developed, rather than the beginning.

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The Principles in Practice

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The principles that underpin Shimalia are the same ones I apply to my own health. I regularly monitor biological age, biomarkers, body composition, sleep, recovery and heart-rate variability to understand how my health is changing.

At 47, my most recent GlycanAge assessment measured my biological age at 30 — indicating a younger immune-ageing profile. No single measurement defines health, but it is one way of testing objectively whether the principles I follow are producing meaningful change over time.