Welcome
I'm Helen and I'm excited to share my passion for real food and preventative healthcare with you. Knowing what and when to eat is important, but understanding our relationship with food and what motivates our habits (both good and bad) are key to long term health. I established Embrace Nutrition with the aim of combining both education and coaching in a single workplace wellbeing offering, to help employees take control of their health and make confident, sustainable diet and lifestyle changes.
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Employers are perfectly placed to promote preventative health through facilitating structured education and optimising the work environment to make healthy behaviours enjoyable and easy to sustain.
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Please do get in touch to discuss how we can work with you and your staff.
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Helen
Helen Gowers
Director
My Story
I am a registered dietitian and nutritionist with a level 3 health and wellbeing coach qualification. I am passionate about empowering people to maximise their health using diet and lifestyle.
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I completed a BSc in Nutrition and Dietetics in 1989, but pursued a career as an IT consultant solving problems for large private and public sector companies. My love of food and nutrition stayed with me and in 2003 I retrained as a Food Technology teacher, thriving on inspiring teenagers to cook and eat well.
In 2018, I learnt of the ground breaking work of Professor Roy Taylor on the cause of type 2 diabetes, demonstrating that the condition could be reversed through weight loss. I also heard how Dr David Unwin was supporting his patients to achieve remission using a real food, low carbohydrate approach. Excited by the potential for dietary interventions to tackle the country's epidemic of metabolic diseases, I enrolled on an MSc in Human Nutrition, initiating my return to the field.
Since then, I have spoken at leading diabetes and NHS conferences on patient activation, type 2 diabetes remission and the real food approach to health, advocating for clinicians, managers and patients to embrace nutrition over medication. As Director of The Lifestyle Club (TLC) I scaled an award winning health coaching service to 100 GP surgeries across England helping over 1,600 adults improve their type 2 diabetes. I also worked with the University of Surrey to robustly evaluate TLC's efficacy in the hope that the NHS will adopt this model of healthcare, but my own motivation is more personal.
My dad was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in his sixties. He wasn't particularly overweight, but quickly needed insulin to control wildly fluctuating blood glucose levels. Witnessing the impact of living with Dad's illness for both my parents galvanised me to want to help others understand their options and the possibility of reversing type 2 diabetes altogether.
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Panel discussion at PHC Conference 2023 with Prof Taylor and Dr Unwin
The charity Public Health Collaboration is on a mission to create a society where every one enjoys good metabolic health. Directing The Lifestyle Club for them and taking it from inception to receiving the HSJ Silver Award for Primary Care Project of the Year has been a highlight of my career, and I am proud to be vice-chair of their Scientific Advisory Committee.
Embrace Nutrition will give me the opportunity to reach a wider audience, sharing my passion for making metabolic health accessible and practical through our Health Accelerator programme and satisfying my love of nurturing and empowering individuals to better health.
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