Reintroducing Myself, and How I Found My Way Here.

A note on becoming an accredited Integrative, Performance and Clinical Nutritionist, and why this work has become the most meaningful chapter of my career.

My path from design into yoga and, eventually, nutrition wasn't one I sat down and planned. It unfolded the way most true things do, slowly, through lived experience, through a growing sense that health is never shaped by one thing alone. It's shaped by the lives we live: the food we eat, the way we move, the people we love, the challenges we face, and the environments that quietly shape us every day.

Growing up, my dad laid the foundations for my health simply by the way he lived. After my mum passed away when I was seven, he raised me alone, and taught me through everyday life that good food, movement and caring for your body were simply part of living well. When I was around twelve, he gave me a Reader's Digest cookbook that I still have today. While most people probably remember the recipes. I found myself drawn instead to the pages on digestion and nutrition, on how the body actually worked. Before long I was planning our grocery shopping, and sometimes cooking dinner for the two of us, not because I had to, but because I wanted to.

It was in my twenties, however, that I first began to understand that health was about far more than what we eat or how we exercise.

Discovering Bikram Yoga introduced me to a completely different way of understanding the body. Until then, movement had always been something I did for fitness, strength and body composition; things I still value today. But yoga taught me that our bodies carry far more than physical capacity. I would often leave class, sit in my car, and cry, not from unhappiness, but because something inside me felt as though it was finally being released. Years later, reading The Body Keeps the Score gave language to what I had already lived, long before I had the words for it myself.

That experience carried me out of a full time career in design and into a studio of my own; Bikram Yoga Christchurch, which I owned and ran for nearly two decades, and which became my world.

While I was helping others reconnect with their bodies through movement, life was quietly teaching me its own lessons.

Then, everything changed.

What began as digestive trouble after a parasite in Australia slowly unfolded into years of IBS, food intolerances, hormonal dysregulation and an increasingly sensitive immune system. While on a yoga retreat in France, life took another unexpected turn. I suffered myocarditis and a heart attack with no clear underlying cause. Almost overnight, I found myself living with persistent migraines, chronic pain and a body I no longer recognised.

Not long after, I lost my dad to a devastating accident.

For the first time in my life, I wasn't trying to improve my performance. I was trying to understand how to rebuild my health.

When my cardiologist told me to step back from teaching and rest, I enrolled at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. That decision probably tells you a lot about me; I've never sat comfortably with uncertainty. I wanted to understand the body I was living in, why it had changed so completely, and what I could do to rebuild its foundations.

As I studied, I came to realise I wasn't learning something new. Instead, I was beginning to understand my own story through a different lens.

After losing Dad, I returned to design. My years with The New Zealand Merino Company gave me the stability and creative outlet I needed while I found my feet again. Alongside that work I kept teaching yoga, and wrote The Bikram Method and Your Healthiest You; two projects that let me keep showing up for the community I cared for so deeply.

Then, two years ago, I returned to study Clinical Nutrition; the best decision I think I've made in a long time. It gave me the scientific framework to better understand what life had already been teaching me.

Today, I practise as a Clinical and Performance Integrative Nutritionist and Complementary Medical Practitioner. I bring evidence-based nutrition together with a genuine curiosity about the person sitting in front of me, recognising that our bodies are constantly communicating with us and that no symptom exists in isolation. My role isn't to replace the care of doctors or specialists, but to complement them by helping people better understand the foundations of their health and become active participants in their own care.

My own health journey has shown me just how vital that medical care is, and how much I respect the clinicians who give it. It has also shown me that people living with complex, chronic conditions often need someone who has the time to connect the dots, to trace the quiet conversation between nutrition, lifestyle, the nervous system, the immune system, and the many other threads that make up our health.

While we may not always be able to change our circumstances, I believe there is always something we can do to become the healthiest version of ourselves, and that in understanding our bodies, and making small, consistent changes, we can profoundly shift the way we feel, function and experience our lives.

If you ever find yourself at a crossroads, know you don't have to do it alone. I've been there, which is why this work has become the most meaningful work of my career, and the foundations my dad gave me all those years ago are still the ones I'm standing on.