Hi my name is Vicky. I'm a nutritionist and I have my own nutrition coaching
business called Nourish Me.
So today I'm working at the Rec Room in Feilding
which is a new gym and and I'm helping out the clients there. There is a
challenge that's going on at the moment - it's an eight-week challenge and I've
got a few of their clients coming to me today to work on their nutrition to try
and drop a few kilos over the next eight weeks, and then we'll be going to the
supermarket and doing a supermarket tour - so helping people to read labels and
teaching people to be able to make the right choices in regards to what foods
are available to them. And that's pretty much it for the day today
so a few clients at the gym and then off for a supermarket tour.
So I became a nutritionist - it's a little bit of a story... So when I was
younger I was quite chubby growing up and I went to university and studied
biomedical science. When I was at uni I sort of realized that I needed to do
something with my life in regards to my health and wellness because I wasn't
eating well. So I left University and I went and
became a personal trainer and from there obviously I was with the same mindset of
wanting to help people and I realized that actually my PT clients
needed the nutrition help rather than the exercise help and I love nutrition
and I had learned a lot myself and had helped myself through nutrition as
well and so I decided from there that I'd actually go and study nutrition and
give people the help that they actually need.
A nutritionist helps people in
regards to their general health and I teach people what foods they actually
should be eating for their health, for their lifestyles, for their daily
activity and for their goals as well. I do a lot of different things - I do one on
one nutrition coaching and I can also do nutrition coaching for families and the
coaching can be either in person or over the phone or on skype that works really well
as well. I can do seminars which are really popular as well I also spend one
day a week working from a gym in helping out their clients.
I contract to people
and do recipes for them so that they can provide healthy recipes for their
clients so as a nutritionist it varies a lot which is really cool because every
day is quite different.
So what I love most about my job is seeing the
difference in people from when they first come to see me and quite often
they're feeling really low in energy with no self-confidence and they just
don't have that spark that you know you want to have, and then a few weeks down
the track it's like a whole different person's coming in the room to see me
and that is what I love about my job.
So there's not too many downsides to my job
I actually really love it especially working for myself is great because well
pretty much I choose what I do and when I do it but one of the downsides would
definitely be having to rely on clients to come and see me purely because if
they pull out last second that's pretty much it for that time slot it's really
hard to fill that within a couple of hours, so it is really hard in the sense
that you need to rely on people.
So if you're thinking about doing nutrition as
a job and being a nutritionist you'll definitely need a science background so
make sure you study science in high school and then you'll need to go and do
a nutrition degree which will be a three year degree. If you'd like to you can do
some postgraduate study as well. So I didn't actually do the nutrition degree
I did a biomedical science degree and so from there I -- because it was
science-based -- I was able to go and do the nutrition postgraduate study which
allowed me to be where I am today. So it was really important that you do have
that University qualification or you won't be able to come down this pathway.
Finding a job as a nutritionist is not necessarily easy, so I started up my own
business straight away because there was no new nutritionist jobs around, so that is
probably the hardest part of being a nutritionist is the job availability.
So if I were to give advice to anyone that wanted to become a nutritionist I'd say
that you need to make sure that you are really passionate and do actually care
about people, because that is one hundred percent what your job is about and
you definitely need to be really proactive especially if you're working
for yourself because you need to actually put in a lot of work, so passion
is extremely important.