I trained at the University of Pretoria, qualifying as a Registered Dietitian and registering with the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) in 2015. My first years were in clinical and community settings — paediatric wards, allergy clinics, weight management programmes — and the throughline was always the same: people don't fail at nutrition because they lack willpower. They fail because the plan they were handed didn't fit the life they actually live.
That observation shaped how I work. I don't write meal plans for theoretical patients. I write them for this patient, with this family, this medical history, this budget, and this Tuesday-night reality of school sports and homework and exhaustion.
Over the last decade I've deepened that work into five overlapping specialisations: paediatric nutrition, food allergy, FODMAP / IBS, nutrigenomics, and postpartum weight management. Each came from following the questions my patients were asking — and finding that the local literature, the testing infrastructure and the clinical training in South Africa were finally catching up to what was already evident at the bedside.