My story.

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 and eventually lead to me pursuing a career in nutrition after high school. 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. My head was filled with thoughts about food, what my body looked like, and feelings of anxiety, guilt and shame 24/7. 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 everyway you can imagine.

Entering my Masters degree to become a dietitian was the starting point for my healing journey with food. I slowly realised how disordered my relationship with food actually was and that it was the cause of all my ongoing health problems I couldn’t solve. Most importantly, I 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 took one day at a time to shift my values, thoughts and behaviours around food. It was the most challenging thing I've done (which is really saying something because that Masters degree was HARD), but 4 years later and I'm myself again.

I still have moments of appreciation when I think about how long its been since I've binged or even thought about how many calories I'm eating, when I'm eating food other people have cooked without feeling overwhelming anxiety and guilt about what’s in it, when my weight increases and I genuinely don't care and every time I just eat when I'm hungry and move on. These are the moments that fuel my passion for supporting others to improve their relationship with food. I don't want anyone to feel the way I did for most of my life.

I want you to feel the way I do now - free, content and connected, because you deserve to.