Back story

I think every health professional knows from experience how easy it is to lose sight of their health. Between 2016 and 2020, stress, anxiety and undiagnosed neurodiversity caused me to become so focused on meeting the needs of others that I neglected my own health. Looking back, like most kids in the 80s, ‘health’ was something I didn’t really think about and ‘fitness’ was dance classes with friends or basketball practice with teammates. My parents were responsible for these early exposures to sport and physical activity. But the habits evolved into long peaceful solo runs and dabbling in strength training as a young adult, both of which helped regulate my brain. In hindsight, regular movement and eating mostly whole foods via mom’s home cooking was doing it’s level best to manage symptoms of undiagnosed ADHD.

These habits also became the first steps in my professional life as they led me towards personal training as a potential career option. Halfway through the course a pivotal moment changed my arc. A guest dietitian came in to lecture us on the complexity of human nutrition and instantly I had found my passion. I walked away from that lecture with the realization that physical fitness was only just skimming the surface and I set out to pursue a Bachelor of Science then Masters in Nutrition & Dietetics.

I was content seeing clients between two practices and starting a family in my native town Sydney, when in 2016 we made the decision to swap the Harbour Bridge for the Golden Gate and move our very young family to San Francisco. The move challenged everything I thought I knew about myself and my career. As the primary carer of two children in a foreign country, isolated and disconnected from my support network and professional identity, two years into our move, my wheels completely fell off. I found myself mentally and physically drowning—50lbs heavier from using food as a coping tool to numb stress, anxiety and boredom. I became completely disconnected from my once-passionate interest in health and nutrition. The paradox of calling myself a health professional yet neglecting my own health wasn’t lost on me. We’re human too though and when push came to shove, my exhausted brain outvoted my expert brain. That time had very real consequences on my health, just ask my doctor (and my liver). In learning the hard way, I finally got the lessons I wish I’d known earlier in my career. Being ‘well’ encompasses all of our past and current lived experience, current personal barriers and limiting beliefs. And adding neurodiversity to the equation can have a profound impact on our self-esteem and daily behaviors. We all need help learning how to armor ourselves for those inevitable curve balls.

Individual and group therapy, as well as learning to ask for support from friends and family became the catalysts for me, and now influence my professional approach. There’s a critical need to shift away from telling people what they ‘should’ do and instead really listening to their story, understanding their daily barriers, and co-creating solutions that feel sustainable and authentic to them. People already know what they ‘should’ be doing. This is magnified in the neurodiverse community. We’re bombarded with ‘shoulds’ from childhood. We’re also among the first to be swept up in the new and interesting internet health crazes but also the first to see them for the BS they really are. But that doesn’t seem to save us from picking up confusing messaging, amplified by the sheer volume of 'health experts’ on social media today.  For every ‘health expert’ there seems to be another saying the exact opposite. So it becomes a game of ‘choose your own guru’ and defend them with all your might. But real nutrition research doesn’t yell at you from a screen, it exists quietly in the background, because it doesn’t have something to prove.

Mental and physical health work in tandem and many neurodiverse people feel shame around being different and having created ways to ‘cope’. The habits they create to fulfill a physical or emotional need might not always be the best for their health or their family. I see and understand that habits are often created to fulfill a need at a moment in time. Especially when most other solutions seemed inaccessible. Using myself as an example, after forgetting to eat for most of the day, running around kid-wrangling two hyperactive toddlers, strung out and at my wits end, I would eat ravenously in the late afternoon until I was uncomfortable. Obviously eating to physical discomfort wasn’t a good habit, but when you don’t have a good internal indicator that tells you ‘Stop. NOW!’ and food has become your only alternative to feeling permanently anxious and stressed, numbing those emotions, even if just for a brief respite, felt like a reasonable solution. It helped me by bringing my attention back into reality and into my body. I guess you could call it grounding, the kids today might describe it as ‘touching grass’.

In it’s simplest form, I coach my clients on their personal nutrition, physical activity and behavior changes and provide the science backed research that links the ‘why’ with the behavior. We need strategies to help us shed habits that we’ve outgrown and adopt new habits that better align with our future goals. My mantra is ‘the solution should always fit the lifestyle, not the other way around’. Self-compassion is at the core of my coaching and I encourage my clients to decompress during our sessions, acknowledge that change is hard, but not impossible. Professional’s often talk about their reason for what they do as their ‘why’. My ‘why’ is the person who feels stuck at the intersection between, neurodiversity and society's double standard messaging around health. Society has an obsession with appearance and that has eclipsed the real importance of mental, hormonal, cardiovascular, skeletal and metabolic health, particularly as we age. No two clients or families are ever the same. Similarly, no one solution will work for every single lifestyle, despite what basically every diet book ever written would have you believe. I'm motivated by the challenge of finding real, science-backed solutions and helping clients adapt them to work within their lifestyle.