why I became a holistic nutritionist
When I launched Maggi Michelle Nutrition a year ago (coinciding with my 30th birthday), a friend told me that my brand was an extension of myself. That made a lot of sense to me. But what I didn’t realize was that starting a business would force me to reflect on myself: on my relationship with food and exercise over the last decade and my career and why I decided to become a holistic nutritionist. I didn’t write this because I think my experience is groundbreaking or unique; quite the opposite. I know so many women who have gone through a similar experience (or maybe can relate to aspects of my story). I hope this helps to break the stigma around disordered eating while offering some thoughts on what health, success and embracing your authentic self means to me.
I remember the exact moment I knew nutrition was something I might be interested in. Seventeen years old and sitting in the living room of my family home sipping a green tea, I recall thinking how cool it was that what I ate could influence how I felt. Intrigued by the power of that, I wanted to learn more. What I didn’t realize was that the greatest shifts in my health would come from unlearning what I was taught the following decade.
In high school, my approach to nutrition and exercise was quite intuitive. I regularly ate my favourite foods—pancakes every Saturday morning, spaghetti nights, and Kawartha ice cream—but I also consistently ate fruits and vegetables, green tea and oatmeal. And more often than not, I walked home from school instead of taking the bus and did hot yoga classes with friends here and there.
Like most teenagers, I had insecurities (tons), but my hobbies and interests at the time gave me a lot of confidence. I went to a school that offered many art courses which was an outlet that allowed me to feel creative and ambitious. I was obsessed with fashion: I took sewing courses, completed an internship at Holt Renfrew and was head of design for the school’s fashion show. While I wasn’t athletic in the traditional sense, I grew up skiing, snowboarding, swimming and doing yoga. I played guitar, went to camp, and travelled alone to Europe for the first time. Nutrition and exercise weren’t things that made up my identity or worth but habits I had developed to support the more exciting aspects of my life.
But within the first year of university, I lost touch with many of these interests that had made up my identity as a teenager. The university I attended was not only the epitome of drinking culture but also diet culture. Diet culture had always been in the background, but I was fortunate enough to grow up in an environment where my body wasn’t ever the topic of conversation. That said, I had thin privilege, which skewed my experience and treatment: I could always find my clothing size at stores, my doctor didn't make me feel bad about my weight, and I never received discriminatory comments about my size. In this new environment, It felt like a switch had been flipped. The message that having a smaller body was inherently better and that attaining one should be a top priority seemed to be everywhere (while simultaneously scrutinizing women who developed disordered eating trying to fit into this ideal).
My interest in nutrition and exercise peaked, but surprisingly, my approach to nutrition and exercise was still intuitive (in some ways). I ate foods that made me feel good, and I loved cooking with my roommates. I exercised, but my workouts were only 30 minutes long, and I listened to my body, taking days or weeks off. I did experience a lot of health benefits—better digestion, balanced hormones, greater strength and endurance, healthier skin and hair. But my motives were heavily influenced by my desire to be smaller. No foods were off-limits, but I did feel a lot of guilt around food, and I eventually realized that it would be a lot more effective to just skip meals entirely. My eating habits fluctuated on various ends of this spectrum for the years that followed.
That might sound a lot like disordered eating, and it was. I used to feel a lot of shame about admitting this because although so many women I know have had similar experiences, there is still a stigma; I thought that meant I was vain or superficial. I’ve since realized that 1) there are so many reasons why someone might fall into disordered eating, and 2) it has little to do with who I am as a person and everything to do with how harmful diet culture is.
When I graduated, I naturally started to think about my career options. I know it’s an immense privilege to come from a socioeconomic background where I have the means to contemplate the type of work I want to pursue. I’ve always been very mission-driven and knew I wanted to find a career where I could not only support myself financially but also feel like I was contributing to something I believed in. I wanted to be a nutritionist but had no clue how or if I could even make a living doing that. I thought maybe teaching or working for a charity, like Ronald McDonald House Charities (RMHC), might suit me.
At this time, I started working as a receptionist at an investment bank in downtown Toronto while I figured out what I wanted to do next. To my surprise, the job brought me so much joy and confidence. I had always been sensitive growing up, but this was the first time in my life that I realized that being an empath could be a strength. I discovered I was a good listener, nurturing, non-judgmental, and highly attuned to other people’s feelings. I loved listening to the diverse group of people who popped by the reception, from the cleaning/maintenance staff and couriers to employees and clients. Being in a role that valued those qualities helped me to tap into other facets of myself that didn’t come as naturally to me at that age: I was assertive, structured, confident, self-assured and had strong boundaries. I felt more thoughtful in my relationships with my family and friends, and I even had time to volunteer at Ronald McDonald House Toronto. I felt like my best self in many ways, but I was also feeling a lot of pressure to figure out my career, and I had adopted a pretty narrow idea of what success and ambition meant. So, going against my intuition, I landed a job as an Account Coordinator at an advertising agency, ironically on the McDonald’s account (justifying it because the charity I was passionate about would be one of my portfolios).
Agency life was the epitome of “work hard, play hard." The role highly favoured someone with traditional masculine energy: logical, extremely assertive, analytical, and action driven. These qualities are valuable, but we live in a society that highly favours masculine energy over feminine energy (these energies have nothing to do with gender and we each have a unique balance within us). The qualities I had once viewed as a strength started to feel like weaknesses. I felt like being a good listener meant I was perceived as being passive, that being compassionate meant I was cute or sweet. While I worked with incredibly talented people who have been so supportive of me in this new career path, the job wasn’t right for me and it pains me to think about how much of myself I abandoned trying to fit into the mould. Challenging ourselves can often feel uncomfortable and is essential to growth, but ideally it should be in the pursuit of becoming more of ourselves, not less.
Inevitably, I felt so disconnected from myself. I thought that if I could do more—work more, run more, work out more, read more, clean more, volunteer more, go out more—I would feel like myself again. Despite “doing everything right” my mental and physical health quickly plummeted. I felt stuck, and for the first time anxious and depressed. I saw a few different doctors during this time, and I received a similar sentiment: eat more vegetables, get more steps, that’s not a thing, go on birth control, that’s normal for women, or the worst, you’re just getting older—I was 25!
Finally, I left the agency to pursue a less demanding job in communications. I convinced myself that I was the type of person who worked to live and that maybe I just wasn’t that ambitious. I didn’t realize that my job was only part of the problem and that the habits I had developed in the previous five years were catching up to me. Stuck in what I thought I should do, I was so cut off from my intuition, something that came to me effortlessly when I was younger. It wasn’t even about fitting into a specific ideal at that point. I just wanted to feel like myself again.
In 2018, I went to Europe and spent the last part of the trip travelling solo around Budapest. I knew the only way to get out of this cycle was to change my mindset, and it seemed like the perfect time to reset. For the weeks that followed, I gave up everything I thought I “should” do and fully trusted what my body wanted. From that space, I started to unlearn: the idea that my productivity or how I did or didn’t move my body were tied to my worth, that eating less and exercising more equals health, that my body should reflect the latest beauty ideal, that the people who truly love me would even care about these things, that I need to be anything else but myself.
With this mindset shift, I started to feel better within weeks and was able to make changes that intuitively felt right for me. I also stumbled upon a holistic practitioner who explained the science behind what I was experiencing while providing personalized nutrition, supplement and lifestyle recommendations to help my body regain balance. Being much more attuned to my intuition, I was able to recognize some of the suggestions that weren’t right for me in the long run.
My health turned around in the two months that followed, and I finally felt like myself again. I was stronger than before and felt more stable in my body, and I was a lot kinder to myself through the ebbs and flows that we naturally go through (although, ironically, they felt a lot less drastic now that I was giving my body what it needed). For the first time in years, nutrition and exercise fell into the background of my life while I pursued other interests; I volunteered as a ski coach, took painting classes, cooked, rested, read, and daydreamed about what it would be like to start my own business. After two years, I finally felt ready to go back to school to become a Holistic Nutritionist, this time with a totally different perspective on what health meant.
I would be lying if I said this process has been linear, which is why I've had a hard time putting this into words over the last year. Reflecting on my experience has taught me a lot: why I experienced these issues in the first place; to see that, in some ways, I was still chasing a specific definition of success; that the qualities I was running from are actually my greatest strength, especially as a health practitioner; and that it’s okay to have health and fitness goals, it just depends on my intention behind it and whether they are truly supporting my emotional and physical wellbeing. The past year has also taught me to be comfortable standing up for my values, personally and professionally. There will always be conflicting messages about how we, as women, should look, eat and move and my job as a holistic nutritionist is to be discerning, providing my clients with reliable information and recommendations based on their unique needs.
This time last year, I had just become a holistic nutritionist and had started working full time for a wellness company I had freelanced for during the pandemic. I was proud of myself. A year later, things look completely different and, yet, I’m prouder of myself than ever and this time for completely different reasons. If my mid to late twenties were all about unlearning, the first year of my thirties has been about re-learning. I'm so excited to enter another year of my thirties with a greater understanding of myself and how I can best support women in my community in the next decade of my life.
