My journey to a Menopausal & Perimenopausal Nutritionist 

I was born in England, although my heart is quite torn these days between countries, as I’ll explain.

In the 1980s, I completed a three-year hospitality course at a London college. Yet it was only the chef classes that ever held my interest. (And, oddly enough, the Quantitative Business Analysis module – go figure!)

While that hospitality course led to a corporate career for me in London, marketing for international hotels, food kept calling. I soon hung up the business suits and donned chef’s whites instead, catering myriad events like the Wimbledon tennis and even for the Queen!

When I moved to Sydney, Australia, in the late 80s, I found it easy to get work in food and keep pursuing my dream.

I cooked in all sorts of venues, at one point running the kitchen for a very large law firm that provided healthy lunchtime meals for the partners. At the other end of the spectrum, I was catering posh meals for politicians, visiting royalty and celebs.

Bring on another costume change: I set aside the chef’s whites and tackled a bachelor’s degree in Nutritional Medicine.

This was an eye opener. I was juggling the needs of my kids and getting my brain into gear after almost 20 years “off”. But oh my, I was like a pig in mud! Learning about nutrition and what goes on in the body physiologically – I couldn’t get enough of it. It made so much sense.

I began practising my new-found nutritional knowledge on myself and started to feel fantastic. I thought wow, that worked out much better than I expected.

Then I practised on my family but received a mixed reception. “What’s THAT I’m eating Mum!?!?” The males in my family were particularly concerned they would grow boobs from eating so much tofu. Spoiler alert: they didn’t! And, of course, they felt better for eating it. Mum knows best, right?

Once I realised how much more vitality I had from eating these foods, I was bursting to let the world know. I started helping people as a nutritionist in a Sydney clinic, which led to the path you’ve found me on.

I began to offer food workshops and give corporate talks on the subject, then started writing cookbooks, which led to The Happy Hormone Cookbook.

When I learned about the amazing perimenopause and menopause work of Dr Louise Newson and the other passionate doctors at Newson Health, I knew that’s where I needed to be. It required a tough decision: leaving my life in Sydney to return to England.

That meant bidding farewell to my daughter, son, and sisters at the end of 2018. (I’m not alone though: another daughter, my brother and my husband are in England with me).

The plan was to get together with my Sydney-based family every six months or so, which I thought I could manage. However, as so many others also found, the pandemic does not respect plans.

With Australia closed to outsiders, our only contact was via lots of tearful video calls. I never want to go through that again. Happily, in December I was finally able to visit: hugging them was the best Christmas gift ever!

Apart from the dreadful pandemic, I wouldn’t change anything about these last few years. It has meant so much to me to contribute to a better quality of life for women in perimenopause and menopause. That’s why I happily see people one-on-one in clinic, and enjoy giving talks, presentations (public and corporate) and workshops. I also write articles, develop recipes and, recently, started working with Dr Newson and the team at balance app.