I spent six years handing people printed handouts. This practice is what I did about it.

I grew up in a house where the kitchen table was where everything got worked out. Homework, arguments, bad news, good news. Food was never a health project. It was just how the day ended.

Then I went to work in a hospital gastroenterology department and watched food become the opposite of that for people. It became a minefield. Patients would come out of a fifteen minute appointment holding a low FODMAP handout, genuinely frightened of onions, with no idea what to actually cook that night. Six months later most of them were eating from a list of about twelve foods and feeling worse, not better, because nobody had ever walked them back out.

The clinical care was not wrong. It was just unfinished. Someone has to do the part where the plan turns into dinner, and where the food list grows back afterward. That part almost never happened.

I opened Nourish in 2019 to be that part. It is one practitioner, roughly thirty clients at a time, and a very short supplement shelf. We work at kitchen tables, real and virtual, with the food you already buy.

I test when a test will change what we do, and not otherwise. A stool panel that produces a colourful chart and no decision is an expensive piece of paper. When testing is worth it I will tell you exactly what I expect it to tell us before you spend the money.

I use restriction as a short diagnostic tool with a fixed end date, written down at the start. If we take something out, we have already planned the week it comes back.

And I write plans as meals. Not macros, not a rules list, not a colour coded spreadsheet. Actual dinners, with the batch shapes that make them possible on a Tuesday when you get home at seven.

She was the first person in eleven years who asked what I liked to eat before telling me what to stop eating.

Marguerite D.

Reflux and reflux medication since 2013