About
Hi there, I’m Kym!
The Carnivore Coach is a business created to inspire and empower all of us to take back control of our health through the food that we eat.
I am a qualified nutritionist, specialising in weight loss, elimination diets, carnivore and low carb ways of eating. I also specialise in IBS support and correcting vitamin and mineral deficiencies, especially iron deficiency anaemia.
I live on 2.5 acres in the Peel region of Western Australia, with my husband, two teenage kids, a dog (who thinks she’s a human) and some very spoilt chickens.
Why am I so passionate about being in control of our health?
Well, lets just say that I haven’t always had good health.
Before having kids, I lived in London with my (now) husband. We lived in a small hotel room without a kitchen for over a year. We ate takeaway or pub meals every night, and breakfast and lunch were not much better (staff cafeteria buffet at the hotel I worked at).
I went up three dress sizes whilst working in London, and remember this vividly, as I had to keep going to the uniform shop and ordering the next size up. Upon returning to Australia, I worked as an accommodation manager for a large remote mining camp. This gave me unlimited access to the buffet for breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert every day. There were healthy options, but I definitely didn’t choose them. Bread, carbs and loads of desserts.
My daughter was born in 2009, and this was when I was at my heaviest. I had pretty much forgotten how to cook, after many years of having food prepared for me. Dinner was mainly those packaged Continental creamy pasta packets (where you just add milk), frozen potato wedges, processed meats such as crumbed Chicken Kievs and pre packaged salads or some microwaved frozen veges.
My immune system was so low it couldn’t even fight a common cold. Someone would just have to sneeze near me and I would be sick the next day. We just always seemed to be sick. A common cold would carry on for the entire winter and we never seemed to be able to shake the sniffles, coughs, croup, asthma, allergies, eczema and general unwellness.
I really did normalise a lot of this as I was too busy prioritising work and trying to get ahead in life. I developed a very common style of eating known as ‘abundance eating’, whereby I convinced myself each day that I ‘deserved’ two pies and a cake for breakfast (because I was up so early and out working), and that I ‘deserved’ those glasses of wine after the kids went to bed because I had worked so hard all day.
Food and drink became my gift of abundance to myself, but I was really just stuffing food and drink down to keep my emotions from rising up.
The last thing I will mention is that I was severely dehydrated. My mornings started with coffees and finished with wine. There was not much in the way of liquid in between.
Often we can become so disconnected from our bodies, as we go about in survival mode in our daily lives. We can normalise and learn to adapt to quite a lot of aches and pains and ailments, and often we just put it down to old age. But I wasn’t even that old…
By 40 years old I…
- Had bursitis in my hip joints and elbows which really reduced my flexibility and range of movement.
- Felt bloated all the time.
- Struggled getting in and out the car because of pinched nerves in my back and hips.
- Found it uncomfortable to do every day tasks like bending down to tie my shoes and shave my legs.
- Had brain fog and found it hard to focus.
- Normalised wearing the same clothes every day because that was all that fitted.
- Couldn’t fit my wedding rings.
- Had candida overgrowth throughout my body. White tongue, yeast issues, body odour.
- Psoriasis and dandruff on my scalp and throughout my hair.
- Brittle hair and nails.
- PMT and unbalanced hormones.
- Cracked heels and dry skin on arms and legs.
- Lack of energy.
- Eczema on my hands and legs.
- Snored every night.
- Had a hiatial hernia. When I filled up on bread and pasta and pies, part of my intestine would literally pop out of my rib cage through the hernia gap, which was hugely painful.
- My peripheral nervous system was struggling. I had pinched nerves in my shoulder, which would cause painful aching and then numbness down my arm and into my fingers when I lay on my side in bed. Peripheral nerve issues are a common symptom of pre-diabetes and insulin resistance, so it made sense that this all went away once I lost weight. (I am certain I’d be diabetic by now if I hadn’t made the changes).
- Random skin tags and random black body hairs (related to insulin resistance).
- Seasonal affective disorder all summer as I just couldn’t cope with the sun and the heat.
- One day I bent down to pick up a plastic storage container and felt a sharp pain in my lower back. It became hard to walk. Turned out I had slipped a rib off my spine. This became an on-going issue where my rib had to be regularly ‘popped back in’ by a chiropractor until I lost some weight.
- I did not like the way I looked or felt. I’d sit in the car in the supermarket, staring at my phone, procrastinating about going into a real world where I would be seen.
By playing around with many different ways of eating, I found what worked sustainably for me, and managed within one year to go from obese to a healthy weight range, with massive non scale victories as all the above symptoms disappeared. I feel like I’ve aged in reverse, and have more energy now than I had in my 20’s!
Food literally is medicine!
I’ll leave it up to Hippocrates to sum this theory up with his most famous quotes…
- All diseases begin in the gut
- Every time you eat or drink, you are either feeding disease or fighting it.
- The natural healing force within each of us is the greatest force in getting well.
- Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food.
- The greatest medicine of all is teaching people how not to need it.
If you look at all the species on this earth, humans are actually the only ones who commonly choose to eat a diet which is not meant for them (oh, and also any animal which is unfortunate enough to be getting fed by humans).
I truly believe that the first step to keeping or gaining back our wellness, is by eating gut friendly foods, and avoiding (as much as possible) the sugar laden, highly processed foods which feed the bad bacteria and allow them to take over the delicate balance in our gut.
I love inspiring and empowering others along their journey to finding that control over their health again, and becoming their biggest cheerleader and supporter as they reach all those scale and non-scale victories!
Thank you for visiting my page, and I hope that I inspire you to at least sit back, take some time for yourself and book in a chat with me over zoom, to give a voice to your health and nutrition goals.
