Canberra nutritionist Kate Freeman says it is "a dream came true" after she attracted $250,000 in local investment to develop a healthy eating app.
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The mum-of-two, now living in Googong with husband Brad, has been practicising as a nutritionist for more than a decade, most recently as founder of The Healthy Eating Group.
With the investment from a local Canberran, who wishes to remain anonymous, Kate hopes to release the app before the end of the year, at this stage called The Healthy Eating Hub, the same name as her online program.
She says the app is all about giving people bite-sized nuggets of information on how to eat healthily - without resorting to fad diets of which, yes, she does include intermittent fasting.
"It won't be calorie tracking or anything like that. It's completely new to what people are used to with those kinds of apps," she said.
"Essentially, it breaks down nutrition into small, incremental steps. You learn a small piece of information and that gets changed into a small change or habit. The idea is to work on one thing at a time as opposed to waking up Monday morning and decided to start a diet and change everything at once.
"It's incremental habit-building combined with nutrition education, but the education is in small chunks so it's not overwhelming."
Kate is determined to "kick fad diets to the kerb" saying they might produce quick results but with also a lot of stress and anxiety.
"What we would class as a fad diet is any type of protocol or regime that basically sets rules around how and what people can eat," she said.
"So intermittent fasting is basically telling you when you can eat and when you can't eat. Whereas my argument is that is quite individual when you want to eat and I'd rather teach people how to learn to listen to their own bodies and find what works with them as opposed to sticking to a specific protocol of 'Do this, don't do that'."
Food is also for pleasure and it shouldn't torment people, she believes.
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"I think at the end of the day, regardless if people eat a brownie or a bowl of broccoli, they just want to feel happy with their food choices and making the right choice for them," Kate said.
"I would argue there are times when a brownie is right."
Kate said the app would have a free level and a paid upgrade level.
"It's time that the most influential nutrition messages in Australia came from qualitied nutrition professionals; not advertising, celebrities or people who've 'done their own research' - aka a Google search," she said.
Kate was "super-excited" to see her hard work reach as many people as possible through the app.
"This has been a dream of mine," she said.
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