MY STORY

I want to tell you the real version of how I got here. Not the polished one.

I was a sick kid. Not the kind of sick where you miss a few days of school and bounce back. Part of that came from a surgery early in my life that removed a significant portion of my intestine, and what most people don't realize is how much of your immune system and digestion actually live in your gut. I had significantly less of it than most people do, and back then there wasn't real support or guidance for what that actually meant long term, so I was mostly just expected to figure it out on my own. I spent a lot of my early years in and out of doctors' offices, dealing with things most kids never have to think about. I don't say that for sympathy; I say it because it's the actual starting point of everything I do now. Long before I had any language for what was happening in my body, I already knew that the standard advice, the stuff everyone gets handed, was not written for a body like mine.

That question followed me everywhere, even when I didn't realize it was still following me.

As a kid, I found my way into gymnastics, and later into luge, and I loved sport for a very specific reason. My body had spent so much of my life being something that happened to me, something unpredictable, and sport was the place I got to experience it as something capable, something that could actually get stronger with the right training and attention.

But sport ended up proving the same point my early years already had: that my body just made things harder. At fourteen, I was diagnosed with a degenerative back disorder. Illness still showed up constantly, no matter what I did. And at seventeen, I was diagnosed with meningitis, which significantly affected my sport career right when things were really starting to build.

Underneath all of that, my health became a running joke. My family joked about it; if anyone was going to "catch" anything or come down with something, just leave it to Leah. Kids at school did it too, so did my coaches and teachers, and eventually clients, work colleagues and partners. It usually wasn't meant to be cruel, and some incidents left bigger memories than others. One client actually made me stand at a whiteboard once and write "I will not get sick" over and over, like a punishment, and I still remember writing it. Year after year it added up, until being the sick one wasn't just something that happened to me anymore. It became part of how I saw myself.

I started working when I was fourteen, at what was then Canada Olympic Park, now WinSport. I coached and instructed youth, school groups and summer camps in the sport I loved, and I also helped run the admin side of daily operations at the International Ice House. Honestly, a lot of my motivation was practical. This was the late 1990s and early 2000s, long before gluten-free was something you could just find at any grocery store, so if I wanted to eat food that actually worked for my body, I had to pay for it myself, and it wasn't cheap.

After high school, I enrolled at Mount Royal University to pursue a personal training diploma, and I graduated top of my class and as valedictorian, which still makes me laugh a little considering how many sick days I racked up over the years to get there. I started training youth sports teams, and eventually became the head novice team and recruitment coach for Luge Canada. From there, I moved into boutique personal training gyms, and I actually got to travel the world with clients on fitness destination trips, everywhere from Peru to Nepal to different parts of Canada and the United States. That's also where I first noticed something that stuck with me for years afterward: that clients could follow the exact same program and respond in completely different ways. I didn't have the science to explain it yet; I just kept seeing it happen.

When I got pregnant with my first son, I had my first big career shift. I moved off the fitness floor and into marketing, at the same health and fitness company where I'd worked as a trainer. I went back to university for a marketing certificate, and after maternity leave I returned as the marketing manager. I was still very involved in the health and wellness world, just from a different seat, and it was there, sitting behind a desk, that it became very clear this wasn't where I was meant to be. I was meant to be back with clients, actually supporting people through their health.

That's when I met the functional medicine physician I still work alongside today, and I'm honestly honoured to still be there. I assist her with bioidentical hormone procedures for both men and women. Around that same time, I went back to school myself and completed my Certified Functional Medicine Health Coaching certificate, associated with the Institute for Functional Medicine, finishing in 2018. It was actually she who brought me to a nutrigenomics conference that same year, and that's where genetics entered the picture for me for the first time. Once I understood what it could actually explain, I couldn't unsee it, not as some magic answer key, but as a missing piece I'd been looking for since I was a kid trying to understand my own body. I started taking every training and course I could get my hands on, eventually travelling to England to study nutrigenomics and epigenetics properly, and three years ago I finally took the leap and built a business around it entirely.

Even after starting my business, I’ve continued my love of learning. I went back to school again and completed my Holistic Nutrition Diploma through the Canadian School of Natural Nutrition in 2024, graduating with distinguished merit. When I'm passionate about something, I go all in, and I always have.

Genetics is really the piece that changed everything for me, and it's still the foundation of everything I do today.

If there's one thing I want you to walk away with, it's that your genes are not your destiny. They're simply context of a much bigger puzzle. They can explain why something works beautifully for your friend and does absolutely nothing for you, why a supplement your sister swears by does nothing for you, or why your body needs more explaining than everyone else's advice seems to account for. But they don't write the ending, and a genetic result doesn't mean something is wrong with you or that your future is already decided.

I'm also a mom of two very busy boys, and our own family has had plenty of complicated health stuff to work through along the way, so none of this is theoretical for me. I know what it's like to be exhausted and still show up. I know what it's like to build a plan on Sunday and watch it fall apart by Wednesday, because that's just what life does sometimes.

My own health still has its ups and downs, and it probably always will to some capacity, but now I have a real roadmap I can come back to instead of guessing, and that's made all the difference in my day-to-day health and routines. When something feels off, I know where to look and what questions to ask, instead of just pushing through it the way I used to. I don't buy into the whole "tough it out" mindset anymore.

Outside of work, you may find the three of us piled on the couch watching whatever the boys picked that week. Being active matters a lot to us too. The boys play sports, and I try to get to the gym as much as my schedule actually allows, which some weeks is a lot and some weeks is not at all. We camp when we can, we're big on crafts, and we love being around friends and family. I'm also a lifelong learner at heart; hand me a good book or a new idea to chew on, and I'm genuinely happy.

That's one reason I don't believe, and never have believed, in one-size-fits-all health advice. I spent years of my life confused, following plans that clearly didn't work for me, thinking I was doing everything "right" and still feeling terrible at the end of the day, with no idea why. So when a client finally gets that moment, the one where something clicks and their whole face changes, when years of confusion finally start making sense, it means something different to me than it probably would to someone who's never actually lived it. That's the whole reason I do this work.

If you've ever felt like your body needed something the standard advice never accounted for, I understand that more than you probably know. I'd love to help you figure out what your body's actually been trying to tell you.