My Story:

Hello! I am Toni (she/her), I am a UK HCPC registered online dietitian who helps women worldwide to recover from binge eating and emotional eating using a non-diet approach.

I am passionate about helping you improve your relationship with food so you can stop feeling guilty after eating.

I am a MASSIVE foodie and I love helping you understand the right from wrong facts within the nutrition world because let's face it... there is so much rubbish out there and in my experience, I know you are confused as well.

I love this job because I am helping people like me. 

During my 20s, I was stuck in the dieting cycle. I counted calories, ate within specific times, limited myself to 500 calories a day for 2 days a week, and went to bed at 7 pm to ignore the hunger and not eat any more. I also believed eating grapefruit will burn the fat off my body as if it was magical. This was all while I was training and working as a dietitian in the NHS.

For the last 10 years of my life, I have been very dissatisfied with my body image and struggling with a healthy exercise balance because I have always felt I need to work out for my food. I have only relatively recently started reflecting on why...

DIET CULTURE!

Being a 90s baby I was brought up around a diet culture where thin equals health and happiness. It was in our magazines and TV shows and unfortunately, it still is. I watched the women closest to me in my life fight a constant battle of weight loss and weight gain. My mum was a well-known slimming group coach when I was younger and I used to go to her meetings with her 2-3 times a week… so I got brought up around men and women getting weighed weekly.

As a child, I was a dancer and I don’t remember ever hating my body, I was active most days and I ate what I wanted (as you do when you're little). I always had an awareness about which foods gave me more energy for my dancing and which ones didn't.

But when I went to dance college at 18, it wasn't a good experience for me. I was surrounded by pressure to look a particular way. I was strong enough to know that that career wasn't the right path for me and I remember telling my family that they were trying to make me out to be something I am not.

After deciding to train to become a dietitian in the NHS I started my career as a dietitian focussing on helping people lose weight. I saw first-hand how aiming for weight loss as a treatment is simply ineffective. Clients would lose weight, but then regain the weight lost plus more. 

So I started learning more about the non-diet approach by reading books such as ‘Just Eat It’ by Laura Thomas. This opened my eyes to how diet culture thrives on us hating our bodies and that dieting interventions create a revolving door which keeps you thinking you are the problem.

Doing this work has helped me be in a better place with my body image and relationship with food which looks like:

• I no longer spend hours measuring or monitoring every food that goes into my mouth.

• Understanding and trusting my hunger and fullness levels so I know when to eat and when to stop.

• Not weighing myself. Ever.

• No more strict dieting before and after big events or holidays.

• Enjoying dessert after dinner without guilt.

• Having the freedom to go out for a meal without worrying about the calories I’ll have to burn the next day.

• Being able to rest without guilt or overthinking.

• Never “starting again” after every weekend, holiday and celebration.