ABOUT ME
Health geek, coach & human being.
Hi, I’m Dan
Registered Nutritionist, Functional Medicine Certified Health Coach and the Founder of Sleep Better Live Better.
I spend my time teaching others how to radically transform their lives whilst spreading my passion for a natural and holistic evidence-based approach to health.
But it wasn’t always that way…
Back in 2010, I was anything but healthy.
When the photo below was taken, I may have been smiling, but I was deeply unhappy. At age 16 I was unfit, overweight, anxious, depressed, addicted, sleep-deprived and suffering from severe allergies and eczema. At the time, I believed that I had inherited most of these issues through my family genetics and that there was little that I could do to change that. The rest I put down to sheer laziness and a lack of willpower to control my choices.
What follows is my personal story from ground zero to present day.
The journey begins
As a teenager, my mental and physical health took a nosedive when my video gaming habits rapidly spiralled from occasional weekend enjoyment to deep daily addiction.
Between the ages of 13 to 16, I gained over 5 stone in weight whilst sleeping for an average of only 5-6 hours each night. The perfect recipe to shatter the foundations of any teenager’s mental and physical health.
At that time, I had no idea that the decade following my 17th birthday would begin a personal journey that would revolutionise not only how I understood the pursuit of health and wellbeing, but also my ability to connect with and understand the struggles of others as a result of my own challenging experiences.
I spent the first half of that decade wading my way through a confusing and complex modern health and wellbeing industry, saturated by outdated, unhelpful beliefs and opinions about how I should ‘diet and exercise’.
Throughout that period I tried all the magazine’s methods. I moved more, ate less, counted and tracked all of my calories (every single one of them) until I realised that my health was no better off than where I started.
Finding my feet
At age 21 I was more depressed, anxious, obsessive and lacking in self-confidence than ever before. This was mostly due to the fact that I had over-complicated every aspect of my life and lost touch with the person that I was deep down in the pursuit of becoming ‘fit and healthy’.
It’s safe to say that my years spent navigating toxic diet culture, orthorexia, binge eating disorder, exercise addiction and other obsessive health-behaviours taught me everything that being healthy wasn’t.
Ironically, I was studying for a degree in psychology at the time, so I was all too aware of the pathological and dysfunctional thoughts and feelings I was experiencing in my everyday life. Deep down I knew that my approach to health wasn’t working, but I didn’t know where else to turn so I just carried on ‘grinding’ to get where I thought I should go.
Fast forward a few years to the second half of that decade and I was graduating with a Master’s degree in Nutrition and Behaviour.
My focus of study had pivoted from traditional psychology, where we exclusively discussed counselling and drug therapies, to a new passion for understanding how food and lifestyle affected my mental health. I couldn’t stop there as I was desperate to better understand how all aspects of my mind, body and spirit impacted my wellbeing.
That’s when I was blessed to find Functional Medicine, which provided me with a modern, evidence-based understanding and appreciation for how so many different factors including nutrition, movement, stress management, relaxation, sleep, toxicity, environment, relationships and more were all central to great health. For the first time in my life, I began to appreciate how key my mindset and perspective were for my ability to feel happy, healthy and whole, no matter where I was on the ‘health’ continuum.
A deeper understanding
Over the course of several years, I used my new understanding of functional nutrition, movement and mind-body relaxation practices to heal myself.
I focused on fixing the health of my gut and getting better sleep. I took responsibility for reducing stress in my life and learning how to move better. I began to detoxify from chemicals and negative relationships, as well as reprogramming destructive thought patterns and deeply held distorted beliefs about what I was capable of.
I lost weight in a healthy way and got fitter than ever. My anxiety and depression were replaced with confidence and self-esteem. My eczema and allergies (two things I was honestly convinced were genetic) completely disappeared as I began to fall back in love with my life.
The more I learned and experienced, the more I came to understand that any approach to health that failed to appreciate an individual’s physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing was unable to help someone to create changes in their health that were sustainable and long-lasting.
After a decade long personal journey exploring all aspects of the mind and body, I’ve become deeply passionate about helping other people to demystify their struggles, showing them just how simple it can be to resolve the root cause of their health challenges when they’re provided with the right knowledge, tools and guidance.
I do what I do because, until now, I haven’t found a better way that I can relate to other people and help them to create greater happiness and happiness or more freedom in their lives than by supporting them to understand and reshape their health struggles so that they can move forward in the direction that they want for themselves.