One-to-one online nutrition support

Nutrition support is available for a range of conditions across the lifespan.

What to expect?

We’ll do an assessment of relevant background information, for example medical history, medication, hereditary factors, lifestyle and environmental circumstances (sleep, stress, physical activity), any blood tests results and a symptom questionnaire. The emphasis will be on understanding your circumstances and making changes based on preferences, sustainable behaviours and evidence. We can talk about nutrition education and meal planning for recovery and/or symptom management, for example nutrition for improving inflammation or mental health.

Nutrition counselling is available for the following conditions/circumstances:

• Eating and physical activity for cardiovascular health (including clients who have a diagnosis of heart disease)
• Eating well with cancer including weight concerns, osteoporosis/bone health and maintaining muscle
• Eating disorders and disordered eating – recovery meal plans
• Pregnancy nutrition including advocacy and support for higher BMI women in maternity services
• Diabetes Type II
• Chronic fatigue, ME
• Hypothyroid and Graves disease
• Plant-based eating and sustainability/ethical concerns
• Poly-cystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS)
• IBS

Specialist, radical nutrition and psychological support

Looking to the past, we’ll make sense of the here and now, to plot a way forward.

I offer a radical integrated approach to eating disorder recovery that blends nutrition and psychological support. With this approach we can tackle all themes and explicit issues that might be related to food, nutrition, eating or emotions.

ONLINE SUPPORT

We meet over Zoom and initially weekly, with between session support in the client portal and homework to do. Clients with disordered eating can expect to be in therapy for at least 20 sessions over a period of up to six months. This is because  we begin with weekly contact and then as therapy progresses you extend the time between sessions to practice implementing change with gradually reducing support, until you feel confident.

You do not need to have been diagnosed with an eating disorder. Self-identifying as having issues with food is enough. Likewise, if you have competing issues around mental health and the body, for example to do with identity or historical trauma, we can address these as they arise.

You can expect to do an assessment of current symptoms and a screen for risk, as I cannot work with people who are in an active phase of their eating disorder (where current binge/purge is occurring) or those at a very low BMI. We can develop a meal plan for recovery and work on implementing it to get you physically well whilst we address the factors underlying the problems and protection from relapse.

Common eating issues

• Anxiety around eating
• Anxiety about weight gain
• Chronic dieting/restriction
• Bulimia Nervosa
• Anorexia-bulimia subtype
• Orthorexia/extreme control
• Binge eating disorder
• Night eating disorder

One-to-one online psychotherapy

Online psychotherapy is available for a range of issues.

What to expect?

Online therapy is arrange on an individual basis over a phone call and then an initial video call session where we’ll agree on the goals of therapy and a plan. Sometimes I see clients for 6 weeks, sometimes much longer.

Clients pay for sessions either individually or in block packages. Sessions are prepaid.

My approach

My approach to psychotherapy is from a relational and Schema therapy perspective.

Relational therapy places the therapeutic relationship as central to the work, focussing on how we make sense of ourselves through primary relationships in childhood and how that meaning making might unconsciously influence our behaviours and thoughts in the here and now.

Schema therapy (Young and colleagues, 1990) is an integrative model of therapy drawing from CBT, psychodynamic, gestalt and attachment models of therapy. It differs from traditional CBT in that it conceptualises childhood and adolescent experiences as at the origins of psychological issues and places the therapeutic relationship as the primary vehicle for change and incorporates emotion-related strategies (mindfulness, visualisation, somatic practices).

Maladaptive schemas are conceptualised to be organising systems or patterns of thoughts, memories, emotions, physical sensations and drives that are theorised to develop when core emotional needs in childhood and adolescence are unmet. They can lead to unhelpful and self-defeating patterns of being that get in the way of experiencing life and relationships safely and joyfully.

The main goal of schema therapy is to heal these early maladaptive schemas through the understanding and soothing of emotions, thoughts, bodily sensations and memories connected to the schema, reducing the unhelpful coping styles that you might use and develop new coping styles and strategies that allow for current unmet needs to be identified and expressed.

Schema therapy integrates beautifully with Intuitive Eating and nutrition therapy, if appropriate.