Kiki chats with Meal Garden Professional Skylar, who is a Registered Holistic Nutritional Consultant and Certified Reiki Practitioner, with a B.A. Honours in Sociology. Her goal is to help her clients achieve vitality by addressing the root of physical and emotional symptoms such as, auto-immune disease, heart problems, fatigue, depression, anxiety, and hormonal imbalances through diet and energetic balancing. She offers personalized nutritional coaching, menu planning for groups, families or individuals, meal plan programs, EFT tapping and Reiki energy healing to help her clients achieve their desired vitality.

Show Notes

2:03 - Why was it important for you to supplement your holistic nutrition with these different kind of healing modalities?

It came to me kind of authentically. It was sort of like a snowball. I learned about one and then the other, and then the other. And now it's been a little bit of “how do I put all these passions together into one way of healing to help people in a different way than others are used to?”

So specifically, like with the energy healing, food is energy. Right? So that it became a natural fit for me when I started learning about nutrition, I was learning about it for myself specifically to help me to less fatigued, more energized.

I was studying sociology actually at a university, and I have my undergrad in that and just even doing my exams and stuff, I was addicted to coffee, and it wasn't working, the coffee, anymore really. So it's like, "Okay, well what's going on?"

And that's really what started my path and journey to nutrition in a way. And so learning what foods to bring into my body to help me feel more energized was like, "Oh, interesting," and then when I learned what Reiki was, and for your listeners who might not know what it is really, it is very much a healing modality to help balance your energy systems.

3:49 - The role of Reiki in Skylar’s practice

We have a metaphysical or energetic or a body as well as our physical body. We have our seven different chakras and different modalities that might be different for different people. But we have our energetic chakras and throughout life they become imbalanced in different ways, through physical, through mental, through emotional situations.

And so what Reiki can help to do is help to realign and rebalance this energy to help flow it through our body a little bit more. And so what I learned when I was learning more and more about Reiki and about energy healing is that there are foods that can help with this process as well.

At each different chakra, there are different foods that have similar energetic wavelengths essentially that can help to balance that chakra as well.

5:11 - How unbalanced chakras affect our digestive system

A client of mine would come to me for digestive issues, for instance, and they maybe have acid reflux or some sort of digestive problem. And not only would I approach through holistic knowledge through my holistic nutrition training of trying to build your digestive juices through food, through citrus, and there's protocols. I actually have a blog post that I've written to help with your digestive balancing because so much of the root of a lot of our issues come from our digestive system.

But then where the energy can come in too is that our solar plexus, which is one of our chakras, can be thrown out of balance. And when that is thrown out of balance we can have digestive problems.

6:31 - Foods that help balance your energy

Not only do I suggest certain foods that will help build your digestive system up to help support you, but then also yellow foods that are specifically helpful for the solar plexus to help realign and balance your energy as well. And these yellow foods actually, like we have lemons, right? We have pineapple, we have bananas, and these foods have nutrients in them that actually help to absorb our nutrients a little bit better.

And so all in all, even though it does help energetically, it helps physically  as well. And so I use a combination to help the client to get what they can out of the food that they are going to be consuming.

7:22 - How Skylar helps her clients implement new foods and recipes into their lives, and why she chose Meal Garden to help with this task

It very much depends on the client. I have a few different types of clients. So one is just like, "Give me the raw facts. I already have such a level of cooking experience and et cetera, but I haven't really explored it in the way that you're talking to me about it." So they just want the information and then they take the information and go with it.

But for a lot of my clients, this is something very new to them, and they're really trying to reassess the way they cook and the way they think about food.

That’s where Meal Garden has been so important because it's so user friendly, and I often create meal plans for my clients. Sometimes it's just recipe collections, but for the most part, it's meal plans that they can get a week's worth of meal plans. And they see what they’re having for lunch,  breakfast, dinner, and how to incorporate the foods that maybe they've never heard of before into their diets and simplistic ways.

9:08 - How Meal Garden makes it possible for Skylar to work with clients all over the world

I started working out of country. I'm from Canada, but I was working in Costa Rica, and so I was working at a wellness retreat center there. And in that process, I was working with people from all over the world as clients. And one of the things that was most difficult was trying to prescribe and suggest meals for people and foods for people that maybe they couldn't get in their countries.

What was so great with Meal Garden is that I saved so much time by creating meal plans for certain people and maybe a specific recipe wouldn't work for one person because they couldn't get those ingredients in their country. So it was easy enough for me to go in and switch out the recipe to make it totally manufactured for that individual.

10:13 - How Skylar decided to start working remotely from Costa Rica

I was reminded of what my joys were in life, and I essentially, I was actually... My mom's a yoga teacher, so she was leading a retreat in Costa Rica that I went to. And from there, I had a really great experience actually with Reiki for the first time. And I was reminded through that process what my joys were in life.

Coming back from that, I shifted things around. I got out of a relationship that was maybe a little bit toxic for me and did a few other things which opened up in a line for me to have space to see different opportunities. And so a different opportunity was working at a retreat center in Costa Rica on a volunteer basis.

So I applied and got the position, and I was actually finishing my degree in holistic nutrition at the time. And so my position there, as I finished my degree molded into doing all of the meal plannings for all the retreats. And then from that, I also was starting to receive clients for the first time. So I had no idea really what that experience would have really provided for me and what I really got out of it, but I removed my fear and just followed my joys.

At the very beginning, it looked like it would have made no sense to the average person, but then by the end and from the experiences I received from it, it was absolutely the best thing I could have done.

12:49 - How do you market and deliver information about what you do in a way that resonates with prospective clients?

The best thing I can recommend is networking. And in that sense, for me, with the energy of adding into the food, the best thing for me I thought was yoga studios. So I was very lucky to fall into place with the retreat center I was working at. But then when that finished and I moved back to the town I grew up and was living in, it was like, "Okay, now I have these online clients, but how do I build a clientele here in my hometown?" Which to be honest, it's a smaller city. Not quite as the clientele here are much less cosmopolitan, but yeah, exactly. And so, as a result of that, in the yoga retreat center, it was so easy. Everyone is very open already. And so then when you come into a smaller city, people are like, "Sorry, what? What's Reiki? What do you do? What does that even mean?"

It was very challenging to have to come to this space of what do people, no one knows what I'm even talking about. So getting into two different yoga studios was one of the best things I could do, even just I was providing Reiki in those spaces. And then from that, doing workshops.

I highly recommend online workshops if you can create those and put them out there, even on Facebook. And Instagram's a huge tool as well to help with marketing for particular age groups, especially.

Further Reading:

4 Tips on How to Create Meal Plans Your Clients Will Actually Follow

How This Nutritionist Teaches Clients How to Make Daily Decisions for Long Term Success

Why Feeling Calm Matters for Both You and Your Health Coaching Clients

Understanding Body Dysmorphia (& How to Navigate It With Your Health Coaching Clients)

Holistic, Getting Started, inspiration

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