Fiona Mealing
Having grown up in a vegetarian (although I do not advocate this for everyone!) household with a father who was particularly into health and nutrition I suppose some of it had to rub off! I started to experiment in adolescence with fruit and vegetable fasts discovering that I felt much better when I didn't eat certain foods. Unfortunately, at the time I didn't have the knowledge to find out how to discover which foods were particularly upsetting me or to take my interest further.
I continued to be interested in health and when pregnant with my first child read The Better Pregnancy Diet by Patrick Holford - little did I know at the time that he would interview me for a place at the Institute for Optimum Nutrition several years later. I continued to get on with my life, child rearing and running my own word processing and desktop publishing service for the next few years until my second child was two when I started to experience terrible pain in my right ankle on waking. I tried excluding various foods but all to no avail. Due to my fascination with food intolerances, a friend of mine suggested I become a Nutritional Therapist. In actual fact the ankle had nothing to do with food intolerances but was a repetitive strain injury caused by our Renault Espace!
Even though I was quite aware of the various types of complementary therapy and had tried several of them out, I hadn't realised that such people as Nutritional Therapists existed so I proceeded to find out about colleges and enrolled on the three year training at the Institute for Optimum Nutrition.
I have been in practice since completing my training in 1999 and have also taught for the Institute for Optimum Nutrition, the UK College of Nutrition and Health and Morley College in South East London.
I am a registered member of the British Association of Nutritional Therapists and regularly attend independent courses in order to update my knowledge.
One of the things that I believe passionately is that we should be able to stay healthy and active throughout life and that nutrition can help us to do this!
For further information, see my own website.