Linda | Holistic Coach, Bsc Applied Psychology

I came to counselling because I was extremely sad and miserable, I was morbidly obese, and my weight consumed every thought I had from waking to sleeping. I needed help. I needed to find a way to live. I had tried and failed at every attempt to lose weight, this in my eyes branded me a loser with no willpower or discipline. I was shutting down and shutting off to the world. I lived with constant negative thoughts about myself.

The positive changes to my well-being are phenomenal. I no longer am consumed with the shape and look of my body. I would say that 90% of the time I no longer am consumed by  “diets, what I can and can’t eat”. When I wake in the morning my first thought is not about food, it’s about my day. When I have negative thoughts, I can use the Tools that I have experienced through the counselling sessions to work through them. 



Linda took time to know me as me, not as a number or person to fix. She nudged me in the right way: to enable me to reflect on a lifetime of negative thought processes and to live my life in a positive way. Linda enabled me to come to terms with some confronting issues and work through them.

I think that the biggest gift that Linda has given me is that I no longer dread life, I can enjoy food, and I no longer live in a state of deprivation or negativity!

Linda had an understanding and an ability to connect with me 100%. She spent time to get to know me and went above and beyond to get invested in my healing and my journey.
Working with Linda completely transformed my relationship with my body and my relationship with food. She took me back to the beginning of my eating and got me in touch with my natural needs. What I had been doing was not working for me and Linda helped me transform my relationship with myself and my body.
I am finally free from the prison I’ve subjected myself to over the last 30 years and for the first time I feel beautiful and ALIVE and above all else I have FREEDOM and happiness. I have started to truly live my life focusing on how I want to feel.
I’m more confident, kinder to myself and happier than I’ve been in so long (if not ever).
Growth is uncomfortable and to be honest at the start I couldn’t have even imagined being where I am today as at all seemed just impossible to me!
Seeing Linda once a week for 12 weeks and then a further 3 sessions over 2 months was CRUCIAL for me and it opened my eyes to how much of a chronic dieter I’d become and how low my self-image and confidence was!
I really wish I had bigger words than THANKYOU to say to Linda I honestly do.

I reached out to Linda because I had a complex relationship with body image, food and exercise after years of competitive sport and studies. These concerns and thought patterns were taking up a lot of my time and energy and making me very unhappy. I was eager to address them for my own well-being.

Linda formed a lovely rapport with me, is a great listener and is non-judgemental. I felt very comfortable sharing things with Linda that I had never voiced aloud previously.

I now have awareness of restrictive food habits that I hadn’t given much thought to previously, I can now approach and undertake intuitive eating and have a different view of health as more than just body size, food intake and exercise.

Thank you Linda for all your help and guidance over the past few months. It's helped me more than I can say. I will use the skills you have helped me to develop for the rest of my life.

I started my coaching journey with Linda because I wanted a more positive/neutral body image, and I needed some guidance on intuitive eating and finding movement I enjoyed. 

Linda is really good at making you feel comfortable and safe to open up about anything and everything! A lot of the time it felt like I was having a zoom call with a close friend giving me advice.

Linda has amazing empathy skills and also has an awesome sense of humour! Linda always knew the right questions to ask to make me look at my thought patterns with a different perspective, and that ultimately led me to having more balanced thought patterns in the long run. 

Since working with Linda, I understand the root cause of my emotional eating. Instead of numbing my feelings with food, I now acknowledge them and work through them and honestly can’t remember the last time I ate until I was sick, which is a huge win for me.

To put this into perspective, I’m currently going through an extremely challenging time with a ruptured Achilles as well as an endometriosis diagnosis with fertility struggles (in other words, this would have been prime emotional eating time for me in the past) and I haven’t once turned to emotional eating to regulate myself.

I can have photos taken of me without freaking out or feeling like I need to edit or delete them! I love that I can look at photos as a whole instead of zooming into parts of myself. 

I’ve let go of food labels and instead listen to what my body feels like - and know that my body has different needs every day and that’s okay! I’m embracing gentle nutrition and focusing on movement I enjoy.

I don’t get upset if clothing is too small for me anymore, and I don’t find clothes shopping as stressful as I used to. Clothes are meant to fit me, not the other way around! 

I’m still working on this one but I’m feeling more comfortable with letting go of the perfectionism trap. I’ve learnt that perfectionism is just another way of restricting myself. 

After this being my goal for so many years, I can finally say that I’m now focusing more on how I FEEL rather than how I look.

I sought support because I have been struggling with my body image for over a decade and was unable to “resolve” the issue on my own. I was looking for tools to better be able to handle self-criticism, comparison to others as well as to myself in the past, and in general low and negative moments regarding my appearance and eating habits.

Linda has helped me address more than just the things I contacted her for and has helped me make some real tangible changes (I’m still going to the gym every week and while I have lost no weight at all, I’ve become way stronger – exactly what I wanted).

Linda created a space that felt safe and judgement-free and in which I was able to admit things (out loud and therefore to myself, as well), which I would normally not dare to admit to others.

Linda challenged me to redefine the things which I regarded as flaws and to describe the person I want to be in new words. Those were my favourite exercises.

I’ve become kinder to myself, both regarding my “failures” (for example by not seeing them as such) and self-criticism.

I am more accepting of the way I look now and I am better able to avoid comparing myself.

Fun fact, the two things I wanted from my wedding dress were to hide my arms and my belly but I went for a form-fitted, sleeveless dress and really like the way I look in it!

I feel like I can rely on things we discussed, it’s like having a safety net to fall back on.