It started when I was 18.
I was away at school, playing hockey in NY, doing everything I thought I was supposed to do. Waking up at 5am, coffee on an empty stomach straight to the gym for team lifts, a quick protein shake before hitting the ice, then a salad for lunch — without the dressing, because fat was scary. Classes, studying, sprinkle of sleep, repeat.
From the outside it probably looked like dedication. On the inside I was exhausted, anxious, and getting sick constantly — my immune system was shot. My body was reacting to everything I ate. I started cooking in my dorm room — which was absolutely not allowed — because I was genuinely afraid of how my body would respond to the dining hall food. I was gripping onto every new program, every supplement, every fad diet that promised to fix me. I even tried bodybuilder supplements at one point. yeahhhh.
I was burning out and I didn't even have the language for it yet.
Then hockey ended — and everything shifted.
When my career finished, my body started changing. I'd look at photos of myself and not recognize the person looking back. I was grieving something I didn't know how to name yet, and I started gripping even harder — terrified of flaring my IBS, but also desperately wanting to shrink my body. The two fears lived side by side and fed each other constantly.
My anxiety kept me small. I avoided being in photos. I felt completely disconnected from myself.
I finally reached out to a naturopath, ready — or so I thought — for real, lasting answers. She put me on an elimination diet, sent me on my way, and never checked in. No support. No follow up. I remember thinking: this isn't good enough. I deserve more than this.
So I found a nutritionist.
Here's the part that still gets me — and you might be able to relate:
When she asked whether I'd ever had a restrictive relationship with food or an eating disorder, I said absolutely not. I couldn't even see it. That's how deep I was in it — I genuinely believed I was just being “healthy”.
She was the one who helped me start to see it. Slowly, she helped me heal my relationship with food, reconnect with my body, and start actually listening to what it needed. For the first time in years, I felt safe in my own skin. Something was shifting.
And then came the mold.
Just when things were starting to feel better, I was exposed to mold — and it hit me hard. Chronic digestive issues, brain fog, anxiety that felt like it came out of nowhere. My body was in crisis again, in a completely different way.
Around this same time I was working in mental health — on a crisis line and with at-risk youth — work that I loved deeply but that was slowly burning me out. I kept thinking about how much nutrition had changed my life, how I wanted to bring that into my work with young people, but I didn't feel I could speak to it without the proper training.
So I made a decision.
I quit my stable job and enrolled to become a holistic nutritionist — and I never looked back. I was that student who asked every question, requested every resource, and wanted to go deeper at every turn. Because I knew firsthand what it felt like to finally have someone in your corner who actually got it.
That's why I do this work. Not from a textbook — from lived experience. From years of fighting my own body before I learned to work with it. From knowing what it feels like to be told to just eat less, restrict more, push harder — and how hollow that advice really is.
If any part of my story sounds familiar — the exhaustion, the bloating, the feeling of being a stranger in your own body — I want you to know that's exactly who I'm here for.
You don't have to keep guessing. You don't have to do it alone.