I started my nutrition practice in 2013, with the goal of helping others connect with food as a tool of love and healing.
My relationship with food and health is rich and complex. My father’s work as a poet brought us to Tehran in the late 1970s. However, we ended up penniless in Italy in the aftermath of the revolution and hostage crisis. After a few years of extreme poverty and hunger in Venice, we moved to a whimsical old house in the Tuscan countryside.
I fell in love with the abundance of foods there, both cultivated and wild. At a young age, I learned to forage for wild medicinal herbs, mushrooms, chestnuts, and rose hips. We had a family vegetable garden, while I raised chickens and ducks.
My childhood taught me that food wasn’t just nourishment. It was survival, medicine, and connection. This is a fundamental lesson I bring to the complex, often broken relationship my clients have with food and chronic illness today.
Throughout my life, I’ve experienced my own struggles with illness and pain. At one point, I collected quite an impressive array of diagnoses. Unfortunately, I was still labeled as a “medical mystery” by my health care team.
However, it wasn’t my own illness but rather the gift of motherhood that grounded the importance of nutrition in my life. It was when I held my newborn in my arms, reflecting on the significance of nourishing my children with love and good food, that I decided to leave my academic career to pursue nutritional therapy.
When I held my newborn in my arms, I felt the softness of his little body and understood that his vulnerability was matched by my desire to nourish and protect him. This realization was so potent and impactful in my life that during the postpartum period I decided to leave my academic career to pursue clinical nutrition, allowing me to connect the dots between the ‘wild medicine’ of my childhood and the imperative of nourishing my little one.
The academic world, while incredibly vibrant and stimulating, paled in comparison to the deep sense of purpose I felt when I thought about the importance of nourishing moms and babies during that crucial early postpartum period. The beautiful smell of the books in the library could not hold a candle to the beating heart that drove my new passion.
So when my son was a baby, I enrolled in the Nutritional Therapy Association’s training program, and the rest is history. I still deeply love books and research, which remain pillars of my clinical work and curriculum development in the holistic health field. But in my current career, I feel a unique sense of fulfilment I never experienced in academia, as I resonate through and through with the deep, daily purpose of supporting and nourishing human life.
My commitment to restoring health in the face of chronic illness and my desire to help families are the central catalysts for the work I do with all my clients. I emphasize a whole-person, root-cause approach where my journey as a former “medical mystery” is a lens through which to practice compassionate, evidence-based clinical nutrition informed by poignantly lived experience. While I work with clients seeking optimal health in preconception, pregnancy, and postpartum, my specialty is chronic, complex illness. I focus specifically on the Ehlers-Danlos Syndromes, bipolar disorder, and autism spectrum disorder, empowering clients to experience an empowering transformation.
I have always expressed love and affection for others through food. Certainly, the abundance of nature and the healing power of foods is a deep form of magic and connection. My clients often remark on how much they appreciate the way I help them restore their connection with the source of their nourishment, along with a trusting, expansive relationship with food and their own bodies. Because I’ve experienced firsthand what it means to lack basic nourishment in a vulnerable time, I help my clients rebalance any patterns of excessive restriction, rigidity, and deprivation that they might not even be aware of.
After serving hundreds of clients and seeing the profound impact of my method, I realized my mission needed to expand. Now, through curriculum development and mentoring, I empower other professionals to integrate this complex, compassionate approach into their own practices, magnifying the healing impact on thousands more families.
My commitment to pioneering research and education for clinicians in the field of preconception, pregnancy, and postpartum health is reflected in my masterclass, “What You Never Learned about Blood Work during Preconception, Pregnancy, and Postpartum,” co-created with MaryAnn Marks.
Practicing nutritional therapy as a healing art is an expression of my love of food and health. To rephrase one of my favorite lines from my father’s poetry,
“Life is a celebration not a search for success.”
Good nutrition is a celebration of nature’s gifts, not a quest for perfection.