I wish to inspire you to set yourself free from too-restrictive diets and disordered eating and develop a healthy, hearty, intuitive and loving attitude toward your body and food.

Enough with extreme diets, trying to survive on too low calories, and being undernourished. How can a woman thrive like that?

It’s time to be a well-nourished woman.

It’s time to stop talking badly about your one precious body.

With proper nourishment, and balanced thyroid, adrenals, blood sugar and hormones, you will have the energy to live a full life. My experience working with women from teens through to postmenopausal is that we are far too focused on the size of our body in the mirror instead of how we feel inside our bodies.

We are bombarded from birth with images of how we should look by people who want to sell things to us. Most of us, especially women but increasing numbers of men as well, have internalised this message and look at ourselves from the outside in, checking ourselves constantly to see if we live up to the images. We mostly don’t…and if we do, we often still can’t relax our vigilance and control. This measuring ourselves against external images prevents us from living full lives.

Weight is not so related to health as you might think, although the medical industry is still caught up in old science and dogma around it. My focus is always on getting you in touch with your body, listening to it and having the vitality and energy to live the life you want to live.

Chronic extreme dieting is damaging to our metabolism and unsustainable. The emotional high of undereating is usually followed within hours, days, weeks or months at most, by the low of the body taking back power and making us eat more.

Not only do most people, including medical professionals, overly focus on the number on the scale, but there are also many people overly focusing and obsessing over extreme and unbalanced ‘healthy’ diets and lifestyles, coming from an underlying lack of self-acceptance.

Here are some definitions:

Body Dysmorphia: a mental illness characterised by constant worrying over a perceived or slight defect in appearance. Also common with women who are slim but see themselves as fat (prevalent!).

Orthorexia: an eating disorder characterized by having a dangerous obsession with clean and ‘pure’ healthy food., to the extent that is negatively affects other essential aspects of their lives. However, I also affirm for people, it is ok to eat differently to other people, especially when healing from chronic illness, since most people do not eat in a life-affirming way.

Eating Disorders: a range of psychological conditions that cause unhealthy eating habits to develop. They might start with an obsession with food, body weight, or body shape. These need referral to a medical practitioner, and I work with people at the milder end of the spectrum.

I coach people to have compassion and acceptance for themselves, be healthy, and live a whole life regardless of their size, weight, body type, or image. Unraveling the deep cultural conditioning can take some time. Still, we are left with a sense of freedom and self-acceptance—far more valuable than being skinny and ever-vigilant (not to mention hungry and undernourished).