Transition Nutrition
Transition Nutrition
Owner of Colchester-based business Transition Nutrition, Michelle Paterson, finds renewed perspective and direction for her business with help from the Backing Essex Business Peer Network Programme Group2Grow.
Established in 2017, Michelle of Transition Nutrition helps people to ‘get their happy back’ by offering a different approach from mainstream medicine, to help people get back to feeling their very best. Offering deep dives and total transformation programmes to help with an array of health concerns, she’s turned her passion for sustainable and beneficial health support for her own body into a way to help others.
“I use what’s known as a functional medicine approach. It’s all about using natural approaches to understand and heal the root causes of poor health & wellbeing for a particular individual, rather than just using a ‘sticking plaster’ which at best, will only be a temporary solution. I work in depth to explore and help someone make positive changes to their nutrition and lifestyle, which often includes working with sleep, stress, movement and helping them to find joy in their life.”
- Michelle Paterson, owner of Transition Nutrition
Michelle works with clients with lots of different symptoms and conditions.
“My clients often come to me when they are feeling stressed, sleep-deprived and fed up. They commonly complain that their mood, energy, digestion and hormones are ‘all over the place’. Sometimes people want help with a particular condition and support to manage it. But often, people are just feeling ‘generally rubbish’ and like they’ve not been able to get the support that they need elsewhere. My main goal is to help people to feel better so they can stop missing out on the things they love and get back to living the life that they desire”
Michelle had known for a long time that she eventually wanted to work for herself, but she was unsure in what area. Before embarking on her journey of being a business owner, her vocation was helping people with addictions and mental health problems, and she worked her way up to a strategic role in the sector. Having had a career focused around working with people in terms of helping them to alter behaviours and reducing barriers to change, using those skills to create her own business felt like the logical next step.
Having struggled with health problems including hormonal issues herself, led Michelle to search for solutions to help. This ignited the idea for turning what she had learnt about holistic medicine and healing the root causes of ailments into a business idea that could help others. Her own extensive research into alternative methods to mainstream western medicine led her to make the decision to retrain in 2012, completing a Post-Graduate Diploma in Nutritional Therapy in York in 2015, while still working full time to support herself alongside studying. Her course provided her with the formal qualification to embark on her quest, along with practical experience working in a clinic setting to embed the learning in practice. Fast forward to 2017, she gave up her full-time position and set up ‘Transition Nutrition’, as juggling establishing her new venture and working full time was proving difficult to manage.
““Retraining alongside working full-time was a real juggling act, particularly as I was travelling to York from Essex 2 weekends a month for almost 3 years. But as they say, ‘a change is as good as a rest’, and I was invigorated and fascinated by everything I was learning. I loved it!””
Michelle is a Registered Nutritional Therapist and Health Coach. The title is not statutorily regulated so voluntary registration with the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (CNHC) that holds the Government’s accredited register, enables the general public to be assured of high-quality practice and educational standards.
Michelle typically works with clients on 12-week programmes, because as she says, it can sometimes take time to make and embed changes, and it’s not about a quick-fix.
““If someone has developed habits and a large number of symptoms over a long time, it can be a tangle of dietary, lifestyle and mindset issues, which need working through and healing. It is most successful when actions are broken down and prioritised. We cannot change everything at once. It is unrealistic and unsustainable. I find the emotional support is at least as important as the practical support in helping people to reach their goals””
The starting point for Michelle is building a full and thorough picture of the person in front of her – considering what they want to achieve, all their symptoms, their full health history, how they live their life and what is important to them. Following this assessment, Michelle will identify which systems of the body need further support to restore health, sometimes also using private testing or considering existing test results from the client’s GP.
The actual programme will vary considerably from individual to individual as it is fully personalised to what is needed and at a pace that suits each person. Michelle will make recommendations around diet and lifestyle and provide practical help and emotional support to actually make the changes required. She often recommends further testing that can be really helpful in understanding more about what is going on. She also regularly recommends high quality supplements and other health products which can be very supportive for the healing process.
“I’m a ‘moderate’ nutritional therapist, so I look at things in terms of real life, what is doable, and the most important changes that will make a difference. I’m all about making the diet as full as possible, by adding things in. Even though sometimes people need to cut things out temporarily, I’m always looking to expand the diet, rather than restrict. People have got to have a practical sustainable diet, and food is one of our great joys, and you still want to enjoy life. It’s got to be realistic and work well for what that person is trying to achieve. Obviously for some conditions, it may be necessarily to avoid certain foods permanently, but I would always try and keep this to the minimum needed for wellness”
““I’ve also trained as a health coach. Working with people around their barriers and mindset and how we can adapt those can be really powerful. It’s not about expecting everything to be different overnight, but with practice, habits which once seemed strange, become more automated. It also gets easier as time goes by and people experience positive changes in how they feel - this can be very motivating”. ”
Michelle also offers the service of interpreting GP test results, as she says that sometimes symptoms can be dismissed due to patients results falling within a ‘normal’ range set by western medicine standards.
“The ranges used are to identify ‘disease’ and I am trying to identify when function may be reduced but often before disease has set in. If someone is on a path to ill health, surely it makes sense to support the body at this stage, rather than wait. Also, some of the testing available, for example thyroid hormone testing does not provide the full picture about what is going on”
“There’s no such thing as the average man or woman - I look only at the person in front of me and their health and life history up until the current date. Who we are today is a product of how we have lived our life and I can often see patterns, see where situations and conditions may have been triggered. Of course, our genetics are also relevant but how we live our life can alter how affected we are by our genes. It’s also important to understand what is manageable for a specific client. If I had a client who was a single parent with 2 jobs, they might really struggle with an elaborate plan that involved lots of cooking from scratch. it could cause a lot of strain and not work for them. I need to look at what is possible, that will help the individual in front of me.”
Transition Nutrition in a Post-Covid world
Prior to COVID19 lockdowns, Michelle had three clinic bases to work from to meet her clients, but due to premises closures, after the pandemic only one of the bases survived. A vast majority of her work and client meetings can be carried out online, and she says this works, as it gives her and her clients an element of flexibility with their meetings, and it allows her to branch out of her local catchment area for new clients, when travelling for each meeting is taken out of the equation. Ideally Michelle likes to provide a mix of online and face-to-face sessions.
A positive outcome of going online meant that Michelle could also offer her services through a national platform, which has enabled her to grow her client base and connect with people all over the UK. Turbulent the last few years may have been, Michelle has been able to grow her business as an outcome, but the need to create longevity has remained in the back of her mind.
As she’s a one-woman-band for Transition Nutrition, Michelle had juggled running her programmes, the background work of creating the plans for each client, as well as managing the strategic side of her business and finding new ways to market herself. She has experimented with putting on more talks about issues that people commonly struggle with, like getting better sleep and help for people dealing with perimenopause. In addition to this, she is keen to develop more themed group sessions for clients who don’t want individual plans but rather a place to come together and learn from each other. This is also a more affordable option for some clients.
After finding out about the Group2Grow Peer Network Programme in an email newsletter from a local business enterprise organisation, Michelle thought the initiative might benefit Transition Nutrition. She’d had previous experience with a business development course in 2017 when she first set up the business, and so with a few years of owning her business now under her belt, she felt that making some new connections and sharing experiences would be useful to take Transition Nutrition forward.
The Group2Grow programme, delivered by expert business coaches on behalf of Backing Essex Business, was specifically created to bring together business owners from across the county to help them to solve issues their business is facing and find solutions. The cohorts of likeminded businesspeople come together once every fortnight to attend a session guided by their business coach, where they will discuss common problems faced in running a business and discuss how they can overcome it together. In addition to the group sessions, each participant benefits from 3 hours of 1:2:1 mentoring to discuss their individual problems and goals.
““Especially after COVID, I thought it was a good idea to talk to other business people, and share with and learn from people who are going through the same things. The businesses on my group were all very different, so it helped me look at things from a different perspective.””
Another thing that drew her to the programme was the opportunity for individual support sessions. On the female-only cohort, Michelle had Sarah Brockwell as her business coach, where she was able to benefit from Sarah’s background in PR and knowledge of marketing to come up with new ways to put herself out there and increase visibility for her business. She was able to be connected with new contacts and explore partnerships with charities where she might be able to offer sessions to people who may not ordinarily be able to afford her usual service, putting her former experience and background to use again, too.
““The 1-1 support was so useful and helped me to do a deep dive into areas that I hadn’t really even considered before, with an expert like Sarah who really knew what she was talking about.””
The mix of that individual support and the group sessions proved helpful for Michelle. She found that she was able to find out more about what was happening locally and about what support was out there for businesses like hers, while expanding her network and getting reassurance from fellow business owners.
““I’m still in conversation with some of my cohort about potential joint projects and initiatives. It was so useful, that wider view - working with people in the same kind of situations with experiences, and knowledge to share with each other. I found I had knowledge to share too, so that was invaluable in terms of confidence.
For people in a lot of different stages with their business, I think it could be really useful. Having that ‘helicopter’ view and being able to look at your business objectively as a whole was great.”
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For more information about Transition Nutrition and to get in touch with Michelle, visit https://transitionnutrition.co.uk/
