I have been contemplating my next moves in my nutritional therapy journey recently and have also been taking time to reflect on how I got to where I am and the aspirations that I held when I first stepped into this profession.
The Journey
I started my Diploma with CNM in 2018 after moving back from New Zealand. A family member had become unwell and it sent me down the rabbit hole of researching how food and lifestyle may be able to support them through their treatment. I had been a chef for all of my working life before then and had always been passionate about creating new, healthy recipes but I had never fully considered the functional power of the nutrients that were held within food.
When I found the Nutritional Therapy course with CNM I was confident that I had found my calling – and still believe it to this day. Soon after starting the course, I put some of my early learnings into practice and experienced a disappearance of acne that I had been struggling with since my early teens. Safe to say my ears were fully tuned in from this point on!
I walked away from the 3 years of studying with a deeper understanding and absolute amazement of the human body and with a significantly heightened understanding of the individual, almost magical, nutrients that are held within the food we eat.
The CNM course very much encourages 1:1 consultations as the main mode of nutritional therapy and so I started up my 1:1 practice quite soon after qualifying. Unfortunately, I put this on pause after 3 months as I quickly realised that I had too much going on in my own life to truly offer the service that I desired. On top of this I felt I needed time to really integrate 3 years’ worth of learning into my own life without the support of my college tutors to hand.
Where I’m at now
It’s been 1.5 years since I qualified from CNM and all I can say is that I am incredibly thankful that I have given myself this time to allow my own personal experiences, beliefs and passions to blend with the nutritional and biochemical learning that I gained from my studies.
As clearly as I can see that I will be working with people on a one to one basis at some point, I have realised how much I love working with groups. It is something that gives me such a deep sense of satisfaction and it makes me feel like I am truly achieving my goal of spreading nutritional learnings to the masses! Although it may not be personalised, I believe that teaching a group of people the mechanisms behind nutritional changes and the skills required to implement them can empower the individual to make long lasting changes plus they have a deep enough understanding to spread the word to others too.
I have realised that I my main passion is based around supporting gut health – mainly because I LOVE working with live bacteria and experiencing the incredible ways that they function. I am also extremely driven to encourage nutrition in a way that holds the environment in high regard. By this I mean an eating pattern that creates as little waste as possible (both rubbish and food waste), is connected with the seasons and the produce in my locality, is as in line with ‘old’ ways of eating/preserving as my skills enable me to explore, encourages the growth of the supportive bacteria that are all around us and that puts food first nutrition on the highest of pedestals. This list could be miles long, but you get the gist.
I am on a journey at the moment of trying to increase my own knowledge and skillset in these areas to allow me to pass it on to others. I have already begun teaching a wide variety of gut health and fermentation based courses but my dream is to offer many more and to some day have the capacity to work with people 1:1. My goal is to continue to spread the message that we do have the ability to live a nutritious, gut supportive life that doesn’t cause harm or excess waste to the environment.
This passion is ever growing and I am so excited to keep sharing it with you.
