About Me

Born and raised in upstate New York, I ate mostly home cooked meals and helped my dad tend a huge garden.  I would in-turn, work with my mom to find uses for all the garden's bounty - canning tomatoes, fermenting vegetables, making fresh salads.  Despite my love of vegetables, I was not eating a balanced, health promoting diet due to the prevailing belief that fat made you fat and too many carbs and calories led to weight gain leading to severely limited intake of fats and carbohydrates for decades of my life.  

By the time I was in my mid 20s, I struggled with extreme fatigue, skin issues, and poor digestion.  I  knew intuitively that food had the power to nourish and thought I was making good diet choices but my body was giving strong messages that food was actually hurting me.  I couldn't sort out the details. At the same time, I was working as a Speech Language Pathologist caring for patients who had suffered acutely from traumatic brain injuries and strokes. In that capacity, I saw firsthand the extreme need for people to be nourished while they were healing and my desire to better understand and work in nutrition was born.

After searching for answers, trying countless protocols and restrictive diets, my first profoundly positive experience with the healing power of food happened when I started incorporating more beneficial fats and complex carbohydrates into my diet.  Finally giving my body a greater variety of nutrients, my digestion and skin issues improved, and I was excited to find I had renewed energy needed to get through my day.  

I decided to dedicate my efforts to better understand my own health journey and a way to ground it in science that would allow me to help others navigate their nutritional pathway to optimal health. As a result, I became a certified Nutritional Therapy Practitioner (NTP).  It was with through my NTP training that I finally understood why I was improving, and how others could improve, through the foundations of nutrition which support overall health and well-being.  Immersing in the foundations in a highly structured way gave me the systems-level view and evidence-based answers to questions long asked.  A foundational approach to nutrition resonates so deeply because at that fundamental level, it is possible for individuals to reverse chronic health conditions as well as improve outcomes for those with acute healing needs.

I understand what it is like to feel overwhelmed by the amount of conflicting information on what to eat and not eat.  My focus on health for myself, my family, and my clients, is through this lens of nutritional foundations and my passion is to help people create an educated, intuitive, and sustainable way of nourishing for the long term.  Nutritional therapy supports people across the age span to find balance so they can move through each day with hope, energy, and vitality.