My interest in nutrition started when nutrition helped me to conceive our first child. It should therefore come as no surprise that when I first opened the door to my nutrition business it was focused on “women’s hormones, especially around fertility and menopause.” You can read a bit more about what sparked my interest in nutrition here.
Now, men are a key part of my nutrition practice. Many people ask why?
First and foremost I enjoy working with men because they are great clients. They ask me what to eat, I tell them what to eat and then they go away and do it. It is not uncommon that they arrive back in clinic for their second consultation and say “I’ve done what you asked. I’m feeling much better. Now, what?” Men just need to be told what to do and be given a good reason and why they should do it. Men often find this easy as they tend to have less emotional attachment to food. This makes men very rewarding as clients. They are quick to get results and to achieve their goals.
Secondly, men need help. Globally, men die 5 years earlier than women and the gap has widened since the 1970s and will continue to widen. Did you know that men have a 40% higher probability of dying between the ages of 50 and 74 than women? These differences may be because men are often less engaged with their health than most women and they know less about food. But I find that men are willing learners and they are happy to learn from ‘an expert’. Men can engage with their health if they are given the right tools. The expression that “men love their gadgets” is a good one. Finding the right test or tool is important for each individual man. Things like blood tests, functional tests and tracking technologies can be a great way to engage and motivate men and hold them accountable.
My third reason is that, despite the clear need for male-focused health services, men are an underserviced market. Few businesses focus on men and men’s health, with most focusing on women and using female friendly language. Men may find the language used by many nutrition businesses a deterrent as they talk about ‘nourishing’, ‘healing’ and addressing ‘hormone imbalances’. The foods recommended – such as quinoa, kale and green smoothies – are often unacceptable to men (my friends would laugh at me), inaccessible to men (never heard of it, where do I buy it?) or not nutritionally adequate for biological reasons unique to men (e.g. plant sources of omega 3 – read more here). I give practical nutrition advice to men who don’t want to give up alcohol, who don’t want to drink green smoothies and who don’t necessarily want to learn how to ‘balance their hormones’.
My final reason relates to fuelling for sport and exercise. I love sport and I love to exercise. In my experience, men strongly associate doing exercise with good health and so many men on a health-kick will be exercising a lot but struggling to fuel correctly. There is very little advice for ‘normal’ men who want to exercise at ‘normal’ levels. The internet is flooded with nutrition advice for men wanting a 6-pack, 8-pack, 0% body fat or 20 girlfriends. The result is that many men increase exercise, but fuel incorrectly or get an injury, and end up putting on more weight than before they started. Fuelling for exercise often requires an individual approach. No event or race is the same and no person is the same. For example, fuelling for a 100 metre sprint versus Sydney’s City2Surf are very different. Similarly, someone starting to exercise who is a couch-potato has very different needs to someone who starts from a reasonable exercise base.
I know that I can help men. Men tend to wait for things to go wrong. This is where I want to step in. I want to prevent things from going wrong in the first place. This preventative approach is known functional medicine or integrative medicine.
Women ‘watch their weight’ from the day they hit puberty. Somewhat stereotypically, men tend to have a much more cavalier attitude to their health. They eat poorly and drink heavily and hide their growing waistlines under baggier shirts until they are well into their 40s. Only then, when something goes wrong, do they start to think about their health. Unfortunately many men don’t even know something is wrong altogether because they don’t even manage to see their GP.
This is why I like specialising in nutrition for men.
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