Nathalie Lennon is a qualified Nutrition & Health Coach. Through Nathalie Lennon Fitness, she empowers clients with education, tools, support & a positive environment to thrive. To grow. To nurture confidence. To essentially RISE to a place which is diet culture bullet proof.
We chatted to Nathalie to to see what sparked her interest in nutrition, discuss her nutrition philosophies and find out what she has been up to since studying with IINH.
When did you first become interested in nutrition and health?
So, I first became seriously interested in nutrition and health when I was personal training and I realised, I suppose, that that is the area that people are struggling with most. It wasn’t necessarily the exercise, it was the nutrition and the diet.
I also started to realise when in this industry, a lot of personal trainers are trying their best to educate their clients about nutrition but we’re not quite fully qualified to do so. I thought that it was really important that if I wanted to help people with their health, I needed to increase my knowledge in that area so that I could help them as much as possible for a long term change and not just a short term “meal plan” or caloric based plan.
So what made you decide to study with IINH?
When I saw how much the IINH really cared about nutrition, the quality of food, and how food makes people feel – that’s when I knew that that was the course for me. I couldn’t find a course that really just showed that they were as wholesome as IINH were. Other options that I looked into seemed to be very robotic, in a sense, and focused heavily on calories. And while they are important, it’s also the quality of your food and your understanding about how it affects your body physiologically and psychologically. That is so important for everyone individually, but especially as a coach.
You own your own company, Nathalie Lennon Fitness. Tell us a bit about that.
Nathalie Lennon Fitness, I really brought it back to life last summer when I released workout guides. I’m really busy at the moment with online work that I just can’t work with clients one-to-one anymore and I just wanted to be able to provide an exercise program that anyone could download. Even when I couldn’t work with them one-on-one. That would suit most levels and could be done from home. So I kind of gave the NLF a rebirth with the launch of my guides.
I don’t like to look at it as just Nathalie Lennon Fitness, I really try to give it a 50/50 meaning where NLF actually stands for “Nutrition, Lifestyle, Fitness”.
Those three pillars of wellbeing should be given equal attention, rather than one being given more attention than the other. Your lifestyle. How you relax. How you live. How your soul feels. Your fitness – how you move, how you exercise. And then your nutrition, of course. It is so important to balance all three.
What is the most rewarding part of your job?
The most rewarding part of my job is, when you get a message from a client or a follower months later to tell you how well they’re doing. There’s so many penny dropping moments at the time and there’s so many weeks along the way, when someone would message you, and you know, you’ve helped them so much in that moment – that’s of course so rewarding. But when someone gets back to you months later and you have actually made an impact on their life for the long haul, that’s benefitted them and their health – that’s the most rewarding thing!
Maybe that’s helping someone improve their relationship with food. Maybe it’s helping them get their hormones and menstrual cycle back. Maybe it’s the fact that they can finally do a burpee. Anything! Once it finally happens for them on their own, when you’ve actually stopped being their crutch – that’s so rewarding!
From your experience working with clients, do you feel that nutrition and health is well understood? What simple advice would you give people?
To be honest with you, I don’t feel like nutrition and health is well understood, and that’s why I decided to do the course with IINH. I feel like nutrition and health, in a sense, has become like this robotic process and people don’t realise that we are not robots, we are human!
I think that people focus too much on macros and calories, and like I said before they are important. But we need to put more education and informative information out there so people can learn about how food affects you and not just about how it affects your body composition.
So that’s the advice I would give to people. If you’re looking for advice for your nutrition, stop looking for meal plans that are really specific. Start looking for advice that nearly helps you make your own day-to-day meal plan, if that makes sense?
What is your personal nutrition philosophy?
My personal nutrition philosophy… I don’t like to have any rules, but there are some pillars that I will always live by. That is having as much colour as I can possibly have when making my own food. But also, never stress about food. So, yes we like wholesome, we like natural, but I am very much about balance. So I never want to ever stress about it.
If I can’t quite get what I want, or if I’m out and about and there’s something on the menu that I used to feel anxious about… I don’t think we should ever feel anxious about food. The number one thing for me is not to stress, but then when I can, when I’m cooking myself or when it’s an option on the menu, have as much colour and as much of the rainbow as possible – you can’t go too far wrong if you’re trying to do that.
And what advice would you give to someone who is considering studying Nutrition and Health Coaching?
My only piece of advice for someone doing it, is to do it! Because it’s life changing. If you want to become a coach or you just want to learn for yourself, it will completely alter the way you look at food, for the better.
The tools that they give you to then also become a coach and help other people – it’s just incredible. They really care about the quality of the coaching that everyone finishing their course is able to give, because you’re representing them at the same time, not just you. They really want to create a movement within the nutritional world, that’s the way I think everyone should be going. It’s wholesome. It’s slightly intuitive. It’s educated. It’s not dictated, it’s educated.
If you’d like to learn more about Nathalie Lennon and her journey as a Nutrition & Health Coach, you can visit her website Nathalie Lennon Fitness or connect with her on the below social media channels.
Instagram: NathalieLennon_
Facebook: Nathalie Lennon Fitness
If you’ve been inspired by Nathalie’s story and would like to start a new career, learn more about our Nutrition & Health Coaching and Nutritional Therapy courses.
