Hola, I'm Kate Squires
I'm Kate, a Health + Nutrition Coach, raised in the country, ripened in the city, mountain bike rider, music lover, and professional makeup artist.
Health, to me, is about taking a conscious approach to your nutrition, exercise, lifestyle, and mindset so that you can feel your best and improve your quality of life and longevity.
I’ve always been fascinated by the human body and how our thoughts, lifestyle, and environment affect us. Our biochemical and neurological processes (read: fancy scientific wording for how we function and think) are so incredibly intertwined that the relationship between these processes can lead to both positive and negative responses in the body. It’s kind of like a multiple-choice quiz. Your choices, and your body’s response to those choices, can ultimately lead to great health, intolerances, and yep, even disease.
As a Creative Director for an international cosmetics brand, I spent the first phase of my career focused on external beauty. But as I’ve grown and evolved I’ve realized it’s the internal stuff that affects not only how we feel, but also what shows up on the outside.
Now, as a certified Integrative Nutrition and Holistic Health Coach, I use world-leading AI tech (Artificial Intelligence) to help my clients understand their unique genetics and create a personalized approach to their health transformation. With this information, we work together to develop a customized wellness plan that empowers them to make informed decisions and develop self-awareness and confidence in their bodies.
Through personalized, one-on-one sessions, I support my clients to make nutritional and lifestyle tweaks and shifts that rocket-launch them toward their health goals. I combine my two passions to help you find your fiercest version of true beauty – AKA glowing health, a happy gut and hormones, unshakeable confidence, and sweeter-than-honey happiness.
One person’s food is another’s poison, which is why periodical and fad diet plans tend to fail. I’m about getting to the root cause of resistance in your health because life’s too short to be feeling so meh. I’m here to support and empower you to find your missing road map to health, so you can get both hands back on the wheel.
MY HEALTH JOURNEY
My journey of health struggles is a doozy of a run sheet; gut issues, hormone imbalances, toxic relationships, near chronic stress, fatigue, overwhelm, mood swings, PCOS, irritability, poor sleep, brain fog, hormonal acne, troubled relationship with alcohol, anxiety, depression, complete lack of self-worth and a minor nervous break down.
But you know what, when I learned how to identify the root cause of the issues and navigate my way out, conquering my goals of reaching optimal health and waking each day feeling great was much easier than I thought it would be.
There are times when life throws you a curve ball, and waking each day feeling great is difficult due to unavoidable, real-life issues. However, it IS possible to reach the place of waking with energy and feeling great around these times.
The breaking point for me was when I realized I was sacrificing my health for being a slave to my job. I've always loved my work, but as the workload and stress grew, so did the symptoms of my health conditions. The stomach pains were crippling, I was sick to death of worrying about needing to run out of meetings to go to the bathroom (and worse not making it), anxiety would keep me awake at night and stop me from living my life like I wanted to, getting out of bed in the morning was a struggle and on days off I would fall into a heap. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was depressed (hindsight through the guidance of healers is a wonderful thing). When all of this manifested into a minor nervous breakdown, I knew it was time to make some big changes.
Coincidentally, at the time I hit breaking point, I was studying Integrative Nutrition. In a moment of synchronicity, I used myself as my first client, learning how to heal myself and get my life back on track. Through nutritional and lifestyle changes, I was able to minimize my symptoms if not eliminate them completely, and learned how to manage areas ongoing to avoid symptoms as much as possible.
Now, I sleep better, wake with a tonne more energy to take on the day, know what foods will trigger my symptoms and which will fuel and heal my body, and have a giant box full of tools that I use each and every day to keep me feeling happy, healthy and able to live my life to the fullest.
Integrating Shae into my life has been game-changing. I thought I knew so much about my body, but the insights that the Shae AI gives you into all parts of your health - mind, body, and soul - are absolutely mind-blowing, and is an incredible value-add to anyone, regardless of your status of health. I now know which foods are going to take my health and nutrition to the next level, which will help to prevent disease and aging later in life, how to time my food for maximum benefit to my metabolism, how hard and when to exercise to energize my body as opposed to depleting my energy stores, plus so, so, so much more.
MY BODY NEUTRALITY STORY
From never feeling good enough to the feel-good effect!
For as long as I can remember, I’ve not gone a day without hearing commentary on other people's bodies; the shapes, sizes, and differences, from both positive and negative perspectives. From comments on what the weather girl was wearing, how her hair looked, how flat chested or well endowed she was, to personally experiencing bullying in primary school about being so thin and lanky, judgments about the size of others, comparison against the size of others, cattle calls and discussions about what celebs look like on the red carpet. Commentary about the way we look is prevalent in our society, and it’s a very dangerous topic of conversation.
These messages create a culture where thinness is equated with beauty, success, and desirability. They create unrealistic expectations and standards that are unattainable for most people, and as a result, many of us end up feeling inadequate and unhappy with our bodies.
I’m guilty of contributing to these conversations and perpetuating them. But one of the biggest things I’ve learned in my years of self-discovery and growth is that this narrative needs to change. We need to stop capitalizing on people's insecurities and turn the conversation into something more rewarding and worthwhile, that’s really going to leave a mark on this world.
As I was growing up, the societal conditioning to be thin was pervasive and inescapable. The 90s was peak heroin-chic era, the models and celebs we saw in magazines continued to become thinner and thinner. It wasn’t just the visuals we’d see, as a teen reading magazines that were intended for twenty-somethings and above, I’d read headlines like ‘best and worst beach bodies’, ‘burn more fat’, ‘lose your belly’, and ‘slim down now’. The narrative + the visuals created all our insecurities.
As an impressionable teen, this became a benchmark for ‘pretty’, or ‘beautiful’. What I didn’t realize my brain was processing and wiring at the time, was that these standards began to solidify the basis of my ‘worth’ and what was important in life.
If you’ve known me all my life, you know I’ve always been thin, what is now known as ‘thin privilege’. I grew up as an athletics kid, dancing, doing BJP Physical Culture, and I lived in the country, so I was always riding bikes and spending time outside, because there wasn’t much else to do in the tiny little town I grew up in. Into my 20’s I still remained thin, however, my weight began to fluctuate up and down as I was experiencing different phases of my life.
So with what was part genetics, part active lifestyle, I always remained thin. But despite this, I still never felt truly happy in my body because I was always comparing myself to others and striving for the unattainable ideal I'd see in the media or that would be discussed in conversations around me.
I was always trying to lose that bit of belly fat, the wobbly bits on my arms, enhance how visible my collar bones were, and wanted any ounce of fat on my body to disappear. I’d notice every little ripple or bump of my clothes sitting on my body and think about what I could do to make things fit better and make my body look smaller, smoother, and more like the shapes I'd see in magazines.
I fell victim to hacks and products that promised fat loss success, like laxatives, skinny teas, and working out harder and more often. There were times when I was living on barely any food, drinking my calories, and loved the idea of getting gastro or the flu in the hope it would help me lose weight.
Why? So I could be desired, beautiful, noticed, accepted, and worthy.
I was thin and had always been thin, but I still spent so much time thinking that I wasn’t thin enough, or my body wasn’t the right shape.
Everything I used to do for my ‘health’, was really about a result in fat loss, and an improvement in the way I looked, not about improving how I felt or my vitality.
Then, I began to have some real health struggles and concerns. You’ve just read about that above, so I won’t go into it again, if you skimmed the previous section, feel free to go back up and have a read.
When you spend so much of your time feeling unwell, it makes you begin to reevaluate your life and what is meaningful to you. When I started to reassess my values, I realized how unnecessary and harmful this societal pressure to be thin can be. It creates a culture where we are constantly comparing ourselves to others, rather than celebrating our individuality and what lies beneath the surface.
I knew I needed to make a change in how I perceived my body, how I spoke to and thought about my body, and gain a new perspective on what my body meant to me. I no longer wanted it to be something that I let define my worth or would be the thing that would finally help me meet the guy I’d been waiting to meet. I knew there was more to me than my physical appearance and that’s what I wanted to now focus on growing, nurturing, and evolving.
Looking after my body then became about true health - which for me is about improving my quality of life and longevity. I now focus on eating, moving, and living in a way that amplifies my energy, brings me joy, and prevents the uncomfortable symptoms that can arise when I’m living out of tune with my biology.
I want to continue to increase my strength and stamina so I can improve my riding skills and carry that into my later years of life (amongst many other uses for a strong body). I want to look after my gut, hormones, and my brain to increase my energy, and cognitive function and support my body through pregnancy one day and eventually into menopause. And much, much more.
Of course, this journey has not been easy and it’s not over - the conversations are still ripe in our society so days with negative thoughts still pop up. I practice self-compassion, try my hardest to only talk to myself in a way that I would talk to others, and have released the sabotaging inner monologue that used to perpetuate my negative body image. There are times I slip, but I don’t let it ruin my day. I now have an understanding of where these thoughts come from and tools to use to pull me out of the negativity.
It’s taken time and effort to shift my mindset and overcome the societal pressures that have been ingrained in me since childhood. But I am proud of the progress I have made, and I am excited to continue to grow and learn and share what I’ve learned along the way.
The truth is, our bodies are just one aspect of who we are. They do not define our worth or determine our success in life. By perpetuating harmful societal expectations and beliefs, we are not only harming ourselves but also contributing to a culture of body shaming and discrimination.
All bodies are beautiful. Like all things in nature (and also like pasta), they come in all shapes, sizes, and colours. There’s no one model that you should be subscribing to, because who made those rules anyway (ahem - a white man in a boardroom a very long time ago).
All I want for myself, my loved ones, my clients, and you, Beauty, is to experience the feel-good effect. When you step out of the small space that’s keeping you tamed to your perceived expectation of others, and into the expansive place that is life on your terms, it feels so bloody good, and I can’t wait for you to experience it!
QUALIFICATIONS
THE INSTITUTE FOR INTEGRATIVE NUTRITION
What is a Health Coach?
A health coach is a supportive guide who helps clients set health goals, whether to lose weight, improve energy, better manage stress, and much more. In addition to being a mentor who holds clients accountable, health and wellness coaches are vital members of the greater healthcare team, bridging the gap between traditional healthcare and enacting sustainable and positive behavioral lifestyle changes. Health coaches empower and motivate their clients to become experts on their own health, to create change that lasts a lifetime.
A PHA-trained health professional specialises in an integrated and completely personalized approach to health. By understanding the relationship between specific biomarkers on the human body with hormonal and genetic development, as well as advanced training in anthropometric assessment and phenotypology. A PHA-trained health professional is able to work alongside you, in a way that meets your unique needs, helping you to piece together and put into action, your very specific nutrition, exercise, and lifestyle program. All tailored to your unique biology. PHA-trained health professionals are the leading experts in personalised health and undertake continual development through the PHA educational program to ensure they are up to speed and ahead of the game with the latest research and science in the personalised health space.
Bodhi Holistic Hub is your trusted platform helping to turn your curiosity into confidence for all your holistic and well-being needs.
Bodhi prides themselves on living out their core values and mission of being the best, trusted and most loved platform for all your holistic needs. To ensure that they are upholding their promise, they have implemented a comprehensive selection process and quality standards for all their practitioners.
