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.
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.
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.
My nutritional therapy practice emphasizes restoring health to those who have lost it and fostering optimal health in generations to come. I work with a deep commitment to the birthright of every baby to be born healthy. I want all parents-to-be to meet their full fertility potential.
I received my nutritional therapy training through the Nutritional Therapy Association. Since completing my certification, I have run my practice full-time and have served hundreds of clients. I have advanced training in hair tissue mineral analysis and have helped numerous clients restore their health through mineral balancing.
While I have experience in many areas of functional health, my specialty is chronic, complex illness. I focus on Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, metal toxicity, and Autism Spectrum Disorder.
My commitment to preconception, pregnancy, and postpartum health is reflected in my Feed Your Body, Grow Your Family trilogy of courses.
I offer mentorship work, as well, for nutritionists and practitioners. I currently lead two distinct, but complementary, mentoring groups for those who want to grow their practice and clinical skills.
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.