My Story

I graduated from Barts Medical School in 1995 and qualified as a GP in 2001, and it was then that I started to make the link between lifestyle and health, and also the impact that excess body weight had on people. I thought long and hard about this, and started thinking about what I already knew about lifestyle.

What we now know as the ‘pillars’ of lifestyle medicine are diet, activity, sleep, stress, avoiding risky substances and maintaining healthy social connections.  I concluded back then that I knew a lot about stress and avoiding things like cigarettes and alcohol because that was all part of the day job. I knew enough about exercise at the level that most people need it in order to stay healthy. Telling people to get more sleep and hang out with loved ones more seemed to make sense, and didn’t need any particular training on my part. But I knew almost nothing about nutrition.

This and my near obsession with food led me to return to University in Surrey to study a postgraduate degree in nutrition., qualifying me as a nutritionist registered with and regulated by the Association for Nutrition (ANutr).

My nutrition studies prompted me to reassess my own diet, and I now eat a vegan plant based diet. When consulting with people about their own diets, I promote a diet based on unprocessed vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds and legumes as far as possible; ‘based on’ does not necessarily mean ‘entirely’, and you can read more about this here. As a lifestyle doctor I also have a keen interest in physical activity, sleep, stress management and many other aspects of the lifestyle choices we all make every day, and you can read more about these here.

Over the last few years I have gradually reduced the amount of time that I spend in general practice, and these days I work almost exclusively as an obesity physician (weight loss doctor), and I absolutely love it! I never, ever tire of hearing peoples’ weight loss stories and how shedding the pounds has positively impacted them.

A long time ago, I heard one of my mentors and heroes, Dr Michael Klaper say ‘I’m the luckiest doctor in the world because my patients actually get better’, and I so desperately wanted to be able to say that for myself. General practice isn’t always about making people better. Sometimes it is, but a lot of the time it’s about slowing illness down, or doing damage limitation, and these are all very valuable things for a doctor to be doing and I salute my GP colleagues unequivocally.

But my home is in weight management; if you want to know more about my experience you can read about it here.

PS: I am not naturally slim myself, I have to work hard to maintain my own weight, and I know that the challenge is real! A lot of the things on this website are borne out of my own research to help myself.