About

About me…

My journey into holistic nutrition therapy wasn't a gradual shift from the beauty industry. I began my career in the beauty industry as a freelance make-up artist. I worked for companies like MAC cosmetics, NARS, Make-up Forever, and Bobbi Brown. In 1998, I decided to attend hair school in Falls Church, VA, and in 2000, I obtained my cosmetology license. I loved being a hairstylist! It brought me so much joy to make my clients feel and look amazing. I was also a color educator for Framesi, an Italian line of hair color.

In January of 2011, while participating in an advanced hair cutting course with Vidal Sassoon Academy in Santa Monica, CA, I sustained an acquired brain injury (ABI). The doctors couldn't understand how someone with low cholesterol levels, slim and under-weight (not to mention that I had an excellent diet, eating mainly fruits, vegetables, and lean meats) could develop a blood clot that cut off oxygen to my brain. You see, I took a long flight to California a few days earlier, and the doctors suspected that this event caused the clot to develop, causing an ischemic stroke. The blood clot caused damage to my brain's limbic system; this is the part of the brain that controls emotions, memory, and regulation of the autonomic and endocrine function.

After a lengthy hospital stay, I traveled back to the East coast. I had to relearn how to read, write, and do basic things such as cooking, cleaning, and paying bills. Unfortunately, my short-term memory was completely gone. It was a trying time as I worked to regain basic life skills. My work week was significantly reduced from 50-60 hours to one day with only 2-3 clients. My symptoms include intense nerve pain (neuropathy), loss of feeling on the left side of my body, brain fog, and loss of stamina and short-term memory. I realize that I could have been paralyzed, and life could have been much more complicated than it is now.

It has allowed me the time and space to figure out what I wanted my life to be post-injury. The idea came to me almost immediately! I needed to work in the nutrition field because no doctor could help me with my low stamina, brain fog, and loss of feeling on my left side. As I worked on my reading comprehension, I read everything I could; I wanted to learn how to support my body and reduce my symptoms. I began to focus on well-sourced foods paying close attention to proteins and healthy fats. As I began to feel better, I wanted to understand how food can heal the body. That led me on a search for an undergraduate program that focused on holistic nutrition. One of the few undergraduate programs I found was at the esteemed Bastyr University Naturopathic medical school in Kenmore, Washington, a suburb east of Seattle.

After graduating from Bastyr University in 2016, I moved back to the Northern Virginia area. I decided to apply to the Clinical Nutrition Master of Science program at Maryland University of Integrative Health with a concentration in Herbal Medicine. After my first term, I decided to dual-track the Clinical Nutrition Master's program and the Herbal Product Design Master's program. The decision to attempt two Master's programs simultaneously was tough. Yet, it made sense because of my background in making meals with increased nutritional value. I wanted to know if I could blend therapeutic cooking with the benefits found in culinary herbs. It is definitely paying off. I'm able to incorporate the knowledge I gained from both programs into my clients' lives.

This spring, I will launch her topical product line, elliot james, a woman's line, and Circa 1964, a men's line.