Meet Sarah Grant

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A Behavioural Eating Specialist with more than a decade’s clinical experience, I set up Gut Reaction in 2013 to pursue my passion to help people take intuitive and science-led approaches to transforming their eating patterns.

For the past eleven years I have immersed myself in my work, empowering my clients to overcome unhalanced or disordered eating patterns, and to learn to trust themselves around food, so they can drop the overwhelm, feel at peace in their bodies, and reclaim their energy.

People work with me to find freedom from challenges such as emotional eating, compulsive overeating, yoyo dieting and weight cycling, digestive and gut-related health concerns, and poor body image - and to embrace ways of eating that better support their physical, emotional and mental wellbeing.

My holistic, personalised approach to eating behaviour change and nutrition draws on a range of modalities to take into account my clients’ physiological and pyscho-emotional connections with food. It is a weight-inclusive approach, meaning I respect body diversity, and prioritise life-enhancing behaviours like improving eating habits, movement, and working on emotional regulation.

My professional background includes: Intuitive Eating Counselling, health coaching, body image healing, a mindfulness-based behavioural therapy called Acceptance & Commitment Training, and the latest in Nutritional Therapy and gut health. I also provide testing to help assess gut function, nutrient status and more.

PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND

• I achieved my Diploma in Nutritional Therapy in 2013, and am a full member of the British Association for Nutrition and Lifestyle Medicine (BANT). I adhere to the strict BANT Code of Ethics and Practice, and am a member of the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (CNHC).

• I trained with The Original Intuitive Eating Pros to become a Certified Intuitive Eating Counsellor, and completed Applying Intuitive Eating and Non-Diet Approaches in Practice with the London Centre for Intuitive Eating.

• I have studied with the National Centre for Eating Disorders, completing a course in Psychological Approaches to Obesity

• To help inform my coaching practice, I have trained extensively in Acceptance & Commitment Training (ACT). ACT is an evidence-based behavioural therapy widely used in a variety of settings to help people embrace their emotions, respond more flexibly to the challenges they face and take action in their lives. Study includes ACT for Dieticians, ACT for Mindfulness & Acceptance, ACT for Self-Esteem, and ACT for Body Image Concerns.

• As a long-term associate of Patrick Holford's Zest4Life, I am continually developing my skills as a motivational Health Coach, drawing on NLP, CBT and mindfulness, and incorporate Zest4Life resources into Gut Reaction’s programmes as appropriate.

• I am a Certified Food & Spirit™ practitioner, having trained under the wing of renowned Functional Medicine practitioner Dr Deanna Minich (2018- 19) to learn how to use the Food & Spirit™ methodology for holistic, evidence-based and personalised lifestyle medicine, and to add new dimensions to my practice.

• I hold a Level 2 Certificate in Counselling Skills.

• I am currently undertaking Body Image training with Marci RD Nutrition: Food and Body Image Healers™ Training Institute

• Gut Reaction is fully insured for Nutritional Therapy and health coaching. 

I’m fascinated by the many interconnections between food, our digestive systems and our emotional and mental wellbeing, and in order to help me stay at the forefront of my profession, I invest time reading the latest research papers and maintaining CPD annually, with a particular focus on eating behaviour change, gut health, body image, women’s health, cognitive health, food and mood, and neuroscience.

my personal story

As a child I was a very picky eater! With the benefit of hindsight, I can see my narrow, sugar-fuelled diet may have been a contributing factor to the issues I later experienced with gut health. Into my teens and early 20s most of what I ate left me bloated and uncomfortable, and I felt disconnected from how to eat to make my body feel good. My symptoms fell under the banner of IBS and I struggled with a general ‘fogginess’ which detracted from some of my enjoyment at work and at play.

Then, when a stressful job coincided with a series of family bereavements in my mid-twenties, exhaustion hit and I felt things taking more of a toll on my overall health and my weak area - my gut. I’m so grateful that a few conversations sparked a visit to a nutritional therapist and I soon realised the impact that nutrition and some dietary tweaks could make to how my body felt and how it responded to stress.

Keen to develop my understanding of nutritional science, I took to studying a Diploma in Nutritional Therapy alongside my old career job. I tried out the clinical tests that I now recommend to others, learned a whole lot about gut health and the root causes of my symptoms, addressed food sensitivities, and used some incredible natural supplements therapeutically.

And with my new-found knowledge, I gradually retuned my eating habits. I effectively transformed a largely vegetarian diet dominated by beige and baked foods into a vastly more interesting, tasty, diverse and colourful one. I started incorporating more plant-based proteins, fish, seafood and occasionally meat. I dropped my grazing habit. And I got into the habit of integrating an array of 'functional foods' such as fermented foods into my daily meals to help support my gut health.

SOME GUTSY LESSONS

Whilst rebalancing my gut health helped transform my overall health and energy, starting nutrition work supporting other people and getting overwhelmingly absorbed in nutritional science brought about other lessons too.

As well as working directly with gut-related conditions, the first few years of my nutrition career was focused on helping people to lose weight. Like most conventionally trained nutrition professionals, I believed that as a nutritional therapist I was offering a healthy alternative to dieting rooted in nutritional science. But, the more people with food and body struggles that I coached, the more I recognised the impact of a culture obsessed with weight and food on people’s sense of self, their emotional wellbeing and relationship with food.

With an inner knowing that something felt off, I started to question aspects of the way I’d been trained and in doing so I came across a very different philosophy of health and nutrition to the mainstream weight-centric paradigm. This was a liberating self-care eating framework called Intuitive Eating that empowers people to divest from dieting mentality and become the experts of their own bodies. This far better that aligned with my professional and personal values.

Practicing the concepts of Intuitive Eating myself helped me better attune with my own body and approach eating in a more flexible way that accounted for my gut health but also enabled more satisfying eating experiences, with less ‘food rules’ and less concerns around how foods would react with my body.

Today, I am passionate about helping people find physical and emotional freedom around food and providing weight-neutral nutrition support, rooted in true nourishment - not dieting rules, deprivation or health obsession. I continue to develop my coaching skills in holistic ways and study the connections between food and mood, and the gut and the brain.

Of course, a healthful, fulfilling experience of life extends extends well beyond what we eat! I love a range of activities in my life including spending quality time with loved ones, regular travel and experiencing different cultures and art, swimming (seawater is my favourite!), Yoga, Zumba, tennis, walking, and chilling with my cat Bruno… basically, making space for all the things that make me feel energised and satisfied.