About Me
If someone had said to me 10 years ago that I would be a nutritional therapist, I would have laughed. I liked spreadsheets not smoothies! I sometimes feel like a bit of an outsider in the nutritional therapy community. Don’t get me wrong, I am passionate about food being our best medicine. But I am not necessarily a vision in the kitchen.
Rather, a woman in her 50’s who reflects the long commutes, long hours and late nights that summed up the first 30 years of my career. I have wrestled with my weight my whole life along with mood swings, a 25 year struggle to give up smoking and an unerring determination to keep going, no matter what.
My ‘suck up the pressure and carry on’ approach to life and work came crashing off its heels a few years ago. My burn out wasn’t just exhaustion and stress from work. I had lost the strength to keep pretending that I was someone other than who I really am. I had to unpeel the psychological and physiological drivers behind why I was feeling so dreadful. I found someone to talk to about how my mind was feeling, but I couldn't find anyone to talk to about how my body was reacting.
It was my body that was having anxiety, panic attacks, cravings. ‘It’ needed it’s own therapy to sit alongside talking therapies. So I started to read and read and read. Uncovering the workings of a human being is an extraordinary experience. How cells are made, how bits ‘talk’ to each other, how food can change chemicals in the brain and how we can interact with our genes! I got a qualification, a career change and most importantly for me, compassion for how I had inadvertently thrown myself out of balance and some pointers, that I would like to share with you, about how we can start to right ourselves.
I am a Nutritional Therapist, accredited with BANT.
How I work
In functional medicine, the naturopathic process is often likened to a tree. The symptoms are the leaves, e.g. feeling shaky or bloated. The branches are the internal dysregulated system, in our examples, the nervous system and the gastro-intestinal system. And the roots, are the root causes of why the systems are causing you problems of discomfort.
These root causes may be obvious and known to you or they could be the accumulated load of your work stress, adverse childhood experiences, malnourishment, bereavement, your living conditions as well as physiological stresses.
Prior to our first meeting, I will ask you to fill in a health and wellbeing questionnaire and return it to me at least 3 days beforehand. All information you tell me either in writing or verbally is strictly confidential.
At our first meeting, we will talk through your questionnaire, your presenting symptoms, your hopes for our work together and your personal approach to change. We will always work at a pace that is set by you. We will agree the best way that we can work together.
This will be dependent upon your budget, your availability and the level of support you require. At the end of the session, we will book a follow up call to talk through the plan that I will send you within 3 working days of our first meeting.
