Oll about health arose from some pretty serious challenges I faced with my health - that ultimately became some of the best lessons of my life. Teaching me how precious my health is, something I hadn’t realised until it was taken away from me for some years. The process of regaining and reestablishing my well-being was quite a journey, and Oll about health is a way for me to share the valuable tools, techniques, practices, knowledge and information I learnt along the way - and I continue learning to this day.

Before talking a bit about how I got here, I’d like to express my aim with all of this - which is simply to share what has helped me personally, with the intention to encourage, support and inspire people to take good care of themselves, as well as each other - because we all deserve that. It has nothing to do with perfection, restriction, labels, or extremity… it’s simply about moving toward a way of living that creates more connection to ourselves, and the world around us.

So, a little about me… I’ll start at 20 years old, which is when I began feeling a bit troubled about the way I was living - I wasn’t experiencing passion, nor was I particularly excited about life, having not much direction, or any real idea about what I should do with myself - I felt quite out of place in the world. All I knew was that the life I wanted to live wasn’t anything I’d seen seen so far.

I began to understand that actually, I’d been feeling somewhat uncomfortable since I was young… Earth can be a weird place to grow up, and I wasn’t really feeling nourished or fulfilled by my experiences here - I know a lot of people can relate to this feeling.

I realised that I needed to take some control of my life, and began making some better decisions regarding my health - I started by changing my diet, and then experimenting with Yoga/meditation (although still taking drugs, smoking cigarettes, weed, and drinking alcohol, which started in my early teens). I was choosing my battles - implementing some things that were good for me was what I could do at that moment, the thought of giving up all the “bad” things was too much to consider.

I was having some issues with addiction at that time, and had been using substances from a fairly young age, I felt they helped me navigate life, and see things in a way that I could be okay with - because I didn’t like the way the world was…

At 21, I travelled to India for a second time, for a more meaningful trip - I’d decided I wanted to learn more about Yoga and Meditation. I had shed my attachment to the cigarettes, alcohol and drugs (except weed), but I’d never had a particularly healthy relationship with food, which I only began to realise at that time… the way I used food started to become almost uncontrollable, because my addictive tendencies & compulsions were all channelled into a single outlet, without all the other vices to pacify them.

I would eat and eat, because I loved the tastes and pleasure that came with that experience - I was eating what most people would consider heathy food, but in quantities that were far from healthy. Thankfully I was very active, which I’m sure helped me somewhat, but didn’t divert the chaos I was soon to experience.

This way of eating was putting far too much stress on my digestive system and organs, which of course led to issues - and the combination of that, with the accumulated stress and toxicity from years of neglecting and damaging my body - sent it over the edge…