Welcome to the Podcast

Find the Women's Health Nutrition Learning Hub at whnlearninghub.com 

Transcript

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Hi, and welcome to the Fem Health Nutrition Podcast. I'm Nilu De Lamy, a registered dietitian and the founder of the Women's Health Nutrition Learning Hub, a platform designed for dietitians and nutrition professionals to learn, connect, and collaborate on all things related to female health and nutrition. This is my very first podcast episode, and I want to take this time to just introduce myself and share the vision behind the learning hub. So I'll just start by sharing a little bit about myself. I've been practicing as a registered dietitian in Canada since 2017. I actually completed my education and training in Toronto, and later Moved to Vancouver in 2022 where I'm based right now. In 2018, I was having some of my own health issues, which was diagnosed eventually as suspected endometriosis because I never caught the laparoscopic surgery to confirm the diagnosis. But I was just in the hospital a couple times with extreme pain. At some point one of the ER docs suggested that I remove my appendix because of a misdiagnosis and it was just very frustrating at the time. And that led me to go on a personal journey of learning more about my own body and figuring out how to best manage my symptoms because the only guidance I got was, oh, you probably have endometriosis. Here is birth control, and we recommend taking Painkillers before your period starts, so that was good advice, and it was helpful, but I was never told about other lifestyle strategies that could be possibly effective, including nutrition. So I went on this journey to learn about my own body and figure out how I can manage my symptoms using nutrition and other lifestyle strategies. And this experience, it really deepened my passion and interest in female health and nutrition. So in 2022, I started my private practice and naturally began to focus more on female health. And I found it limiting to niche down into just one area. At first I started mostly seeing clients for PCOS. But then I just found that I'd have a client come to me for PCOS and then they'd want to get pregnant. So we'd focus on fertility and then they would become pregnant and we'd shift to prenatal nutrition and then breastfeeding. So it just made me realize how interconnected these different phases of female health were. Were and how it was important to have a little bit of a more broad scope for me personally a little bit more of a broad scope, but yet have a deep understanding of all of these different life stages and conditions. So on my own learning path, I found it was very frustrating to actually learn about female health. And I wonder if other dietitians experience the same thing. But I just had to go to multiple sources to get the information I needed. I just found it very disjointed. And there are also many different perspectives. So some. Courses and some information was more from a functional approach. Some were more traditional views and it just, it wasn't very cohesive. So I started thinking about creating this learning hub, which is now the women's health nutrition learning hub, because I wanted a space where I could share what I've learned, but also create a community where professionals, dieticians, nutritionists could come together and exchange ideas, collaborate. Learn from one another work through cases together and I've been thinking about this concept for at least three years, but I wasn't sure if there was enough interest so to test the waters. And my partner encouraged me to do this. I hosted a few webinars and the response was incredible. I had so many people sign up and so many people send messages after the webinars thanking me because they felt like this was such a gap in their knowledge. So I just do want to take a moment to thank everyone who did attend and those of you who reached out to me with messages of support because your enthusiasm did give me that confidence to officially launch the Learning Hub. Now the platform has officially launched, but it is still growing. It is still in its beginning stages, so it will evolve over time. At the moment, what you can find is a free community that you can join so you can connect and collaborate with your peers. There is right now about 15 evidence based blog posts, which are basically like evidence summaries on various topics on female health. And this is a collection that will keep growing. So I'll be contributing to this collection and also yearly. I will be updating. these blog posts as well. I will also continue to host free webinars as I have been over the past few months. So on the platform right now, you have the option of joining our mailing list so you can hear more about when these webinars will be taking place. I do also have some downloadable tools like a menopause assessment form and a prenatal supplement comparison chart that you can download. And again, this is a collection that will continue to grow and it's completely free so you can download these anytime. And finally, over the next year, for those who want more in depth knowledge on certain topics, I will be launching continuing education courses throughout the year that you can register for as well. And these will be paid courses. So those again, if you join the mailing list, or you can join the wait list on the platform, I will let everyone know when those officially launch. So if you want to learn more, you can visit the website at the WHNlearninghub. com. The link along with my contact information will be available in the description of this podcast episode as well. So looking ahead, this will be a weekly podcast covering a wide range of topics related to female health. If you have suggestions for topics you'd like me to cover, I'd love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out at any time and thank you so much for tuning in I can't wait to take this journey with you all