How it all started.

My relationship with food has been tumultuous to say the least. I often feel sad looking back and thinking about how much younger me hated the way she looked from the age of 8 and how much it dictated everything else in my life. I missed out on a lot of my youth because of it and I don't want this cycle of body hatred and disordered eating to continue into the next generations. We deserve better.

From the age of 12 I engaged in different dieting methods in an effort to change how my body looked. This included skipping meals at school, eating "clean", cutting carbs, obsessive exercising (Hello WII Fit trauma), volume eating and drinking apple cider vinegar (this has to be the worst one).

This obsession with food disguised as a passion for nutrition and health eventually lead to me pursuing a career in nutrition. Whilst studying my bachelor in health science, my eating thoughts and behaviours worsened. I started to count calories, over exercise to purge calories, restrict a lot of my favourite foods and eventually binge eat multiple times a week. I was always painfully hungry, chronically bloated, constantly sick and I lost my period. I was completely consumed by thoughts about food, what my body looked like, and food-related anxiety, guilt and shame. I was so tired and irritable, my training plateaued and I couldn't concentrate at uni. I was disengaged in my relationships, training, studies and life.

“I was just exhausted in every way you can imagine.”

Entering my master’s degree to become a dietitian was the starting point for healing my relationship with food. I slowly realised how disordered my eating actually was and that it was the cause of all my ongoing health problems I couldn’t solve. I also knew I couldn't be an effective dietitian if my own relationship with food was disordered and consuming my cognitive and emotional capacity. So, I slowly started to shift my values, thoughts and behaviours around food to prioritise my health, performance and well-being over thinness. Overcoming the fear of weight gain and finding value in myself outside of my appearance was by far the most challenging thing I've done (which is really saying something because that master’s degree was HARD), but it was also the best. It allowed me to become the healthiest, happiest version of myself.

I still have moments of appreciation when I think about how long it’s been since I've binged, thought about how many calories I'm eating, felt overwhelmed or anxious about food, cried about my body shape or weight, or ignored a hunger cue. Creating these moments for others is what fuels my passion for the work I do now, supporting hundreds of people like you to find the healthiest, happiest version of themselves.

“I want you to feel the way I do now - strong, confident, connected and free, because you deserve to.”