Food for thought

She’s a rock star of the nutrition world, a poster woman for the health conscious and a beacon of hope for a mind/body health solution. Meet NZ Life & Leisure’s new health & well-being contributor, Dr Libby Weaver

WHEN LIBBY ELLIS WAS A CHILD, she wanted to save the world. Even so, it was a stretch for the girl from the New South Wales country town of Tamworth to find herself centre stage earlier this year, receiving a standing ovation from 6500 Americans at a health and nutrition conference. But that’s the way the universe leads Dr Libby (now Weaver). She is still fuelled by a desire to help people and now the whole world is her oyster.

While Libby was at university studying journalism – her first route to saving the world – she realized that she liked writing only about health. While studying psychology – her second go at a helping-people career – she realized she was really interested only in understanding why people ate the food they did. So she switched to nutrition. When several of her early patients (autism and eczema) showed almost instant responses to dietary changes, she began to question why the role of food in ill health wasn’t paid more attention. From her mother, Libby had learned great respect for the nutritional value of good food and that, coupled with the almost miraculous results of her early work as a dietitian, took her back to her professor of nutrition with the question: “If I can achieve such radical improvements in the health of these patients, just with diet and (at the time) as a new grad, then why isn’t more attention paid to understanding this?”

She was advised to go back to university and study it herself – the last thing she had imagined. “I didn’t consider myself a scientific type, even though I’ve spent 14 years at uni now. I thought I was a people person.” But it was that calling, that need to help people, that drove her back and into what became a ground-breaking PhD, exploring biochemical and nutritional aspects of autism. Her work was stimulated by the then-new discovery of partially digested casein (from cow’s milk) and gluten (from grains) in human spinal fluid. The brain is bathed in spinal fluid, thereby establishing a link between neurological disease and diet. We are – not only – what we eat; food also significantly influences our mental health.

For Libby this has become a calling of sorts – trying to help people understand that their brains and their bodies are as one so they have the tools to make healthy choices. “I love helping people to understand how our thoughts are all linked to how our bodies behave.” Following completion of her highly respected PhD and while in private practice as a nutritional consultant in Newcastle, NSW, Libby was contracted by the now-renowned Australian health retreat Gwinganna in Queensland to help establish its nutritional philosophy and educate its chefs accordingly. Her love affair with the retreat and her pride at its startling success stories (see page 18 for a letter from a NZ Life & Leisure reader who won a trip to Gwinganna to which he says he and his wife owe their lives) was interrupted by a chance meeting with an Aucklander and another love affair that led to marriage and a move to our side of the Tasman.

Fortunately, Libby is not from the preachy or boot-camp schools of health and wants people to understand their bodies and feel empowered to make changes. And she wants us all to be kinder to ourselves. “I want people to be happy and to stop judging themselves so harshly about the sizes and shapes of their bodies.” She is particularly concerned about the modern world’s stress load caused by our 24/7 availability. Stress hormones can be extremely harmful when constantly flooding our bodies and fooling our brains into thinking we are about to starve or be killed. Guess the result of that? We become expert at laying down stores of fat. Great… just what none of us needs.

Libby’s first book, Accidentally Overweight, has sold 19,000 copies in 10 months, making it New Zealand’s second-best-selling non-fiction title of the year.

NZ Life & Leisure readers may purchase Dr Libby’s new book Rushing Woman’s Syndrome for $22.45, a discount of 25 percent off the retail price, and receive it before it hits the bookshops in late January 2012. Visit www.drlibby.com