Hi, I’m Emily
I know the ache of feeling broken
For much of my life, I lived inside that story - trying to be the good girl, the good woman, to do things the “right” way, to keep the peace while quietly losing touch with my own body. Before I was a dietitian, I was a teacher; I knew how to show up and help others make sense of the world, even when I couldn’t make sense of my own.
My move to Australia from Scotland in my twenties brought with it the hope of a new life - the hope that an equator between me and my old life would bring a new body, a new peace. I threw myself into a career change - studying nutrition and biomedical science, praying that I would fix myself along the way. Instead, I met the same hunger that had followed me since childhood: the ache to feel at home within myself.
the moment everything changed
Years later, newly graduated and sitting with my first nutrition client, that ache spoke again. They’d come to me for weight loss, and even though I was still navigating an incredibly painful relationship with my own body, I performed like a good dietitian - I followed the textbook, preached the rhetoric, but something in me recoiled. Session after session I would leave with a sickness in my core - I was teaching them to shrink themself, just as I’d spent decades doing. The feeling in my gut whispering, there is no peace at the end of this road.
Because the problem wasn’t food. The problem wasn’t weight. It was the story they carried in their body. The story I was still carrying in mine.
That was the beginning of Alitus.
dreaming an alternate path
I began searching for alternate ways of practicing… mindfulness, intuitive eating, body trust, attuned eating. And as a I trained and wove this into my practice, I began to fall in back love with being a dietitian… and slowly, ever so slowly, things began to shift within me too.
And then I hit another wall… these practices offered a gentler approach to nourishing the body, one woven with compassion and love, but there was still something missing.
As I listened, really listened, to my clients’ stories, I noticed that I didn’t have the language spacious or deep enough to fully hold what I was witnessing. I found this depth in nervous system science, somatics; I found this depth in the body.
The body reminds us that the nervous system, not willpower, determines when we feel safe to eat, to rest, to live. Slowly, a new way of practising began to unfold: one that married the precision of science with the poetry of the soul.
what Alitus stands for
alitus means to nourish, to sustain, to hold.
It is both my practice and my prayer; a hearth for those who are tired of fixing, and ready to come home.
Here, nourishment is not about control, but connection, to ourselves, to each other, to Mother Earth. Food becomes a sacred portal pointing to what the body has been trying to say all along.
At Alitus, we explore the nervous system’s rhythms, the stories the body still holds, and the wisdom held within.
my soul’s work
I don’t teach people how to control their bodies, or how to eat ‘right’; I help them learn how to listen to them.
When I’m not in session, you’ll find me out in nature with my husband and our cattle dog puppy, pouring over a book, or creating chaos in my kitchen: small rituals which remind me that nourishment begins with presence.
Alitus isn’t a place to perform wellness. It’s a homecoming - to body, breath, and belonging.
