What happens when everything stops? In this episode I talk to Catherine Arnold - Nutritional Therapist and Functional Medicine Practitioner about receiving a call she hoped she'd never receive and how that took her on a journey from documentary film-maker to a more nourishing and heart-centered career and life. This is a heart-warming tale of food, love and miracles.
Catherine Arnold is a Nutritional Therapist and Functional Medicine Practitioner specialising in Hormones, Gut Health and Fertility. She is based in Nunhead, South London - but can be visited virtually from anywhere!
WEBSITE: https://catherinearnoldnutrition.com/
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/catherinearnoldnutrition/
CORONA VIRUS SUPPORT FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/groups/581538742705234/about
INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/catherine_arnold_nutrition/?hl=en
LATEST BLOG: https://catherinearnoldnutrition.com/what-can-you-do-to-support-your-health-right-now/
RECIPES: https://catherinearnoldnutrition.com/recipe-cat/ca-recipes/
Solomons: [00:00:01] Many of us are experiencing a time right now of incredible change and transition. My next guest on the Giant Pause podcast, Catherine Arnold, tells her incredible story of moving from a really successful career in documentary film making for companies like the BBC, to something more nutritious entirely. But like many of us, when we're going through, or we're feeling close to a change, we only know in part what that change is going to be. And in fact, for her, that's exactly what it was. She took the next best feeling step and in the middle of taking that step, life stopped. And this story is how she responded, how she navigated her way through and how she found a completely new and different career. A career that she'd never considered before, one which she now absolutely loves and nourishes her and others. This is a really fantastic tale. It's a really inspiring tale. And I hope that you enjoy listening to as much as I enjoyed giving the interview. This is Catherine Arnold.
Solomons: [00:01:55] Welcome to the Giant Pause Podcast. For the purposes of listening, we met when you and your husband came into a restaurant a few months ago and I really appreciated, what you've meant to us, like how you've enabled us to grow our restaurant locally. And obviously, like many, many local businesses, we're closed. And part of this podcast, has been about reaching out to local businesses and using some platforms and talk about what they're doing and and give them an opportunity to connect with people that might not know - that might know your face, but not the story behind your business. So do you want to tell us a little bit about you and where you started and then we'll kind of get into talking about you nutrition business?
Arnold: [00:02:48] I live in Nunhead, near you, near your business. I love your restaurant. It's amazing. And I can't wait to open again. I've got two children and a husband, and it was actually through my husband getting ill in 2007 that I got into nutritional therapy. So,I'm a nutritional therapist. That means that I work with people to help optimise that diet and lifestyle to support their body's healing process. So often people will come to see me if they're not very well, and then we navigate through with various lifestyle and dietary changes. Most of the time they get better, yep most of the time they get better and have really good results. And yeah, I love it. It's my absolute passion.
Solomons: [00:03:46] I'd love to delve into a little bit about what that that moment where you you - well not a moment, but that period of time where you supported your husband and how that then impacted on you to retrain in nutrition. What were you doing before before this career.
Arnold: [00:04:05] Yes. So I worked in TV for around fifteen years and had quite a successful role as a TV director, directing documentaries, factual programs for all the main channels. BBC, Channel Four. Channel Five. And it involved travelling around the country, often filming people, because they are all human interest stories, human interest programs. So lots of interviewing, you know, and it was fun. It was fun for, you know, I got into it when I was in my late 20s and it was a fun time, but it was really hard work, and yes well paid. And it had - I enjoyed the process of making it to some degree, especially in the edit. I really enjoyed that, the creativity of it, but it was also really stressful job. And I also used to feel that it wasn't a very nourishing job in that it was quite punishing schedules. It was there was you know, you did a job for about. It would take about four months on average to make a program and there would be no let up, really. It would be quite relentless during that period. And and then at the end, I used to even when the program was done and went out, I was never quite happy with it. And so there was not a huge amount of job satisfaction. But also I used to feel that I wasn't really giving anything. Well, there was no real benefit from for the people that I was filming. So even though my intention was to do good and be a documentary maker and to highlight plights and struggles and difficult issues that were going on, I felt like actually that the bottom line was the people that I was filming weren't actually getting very much out of it. And the only people really who were getting anything out of it was that the channel, who was selling it or the production company who was selling it to the channel.
Solomons: [00:06:15] That must have been a challenging thing to be creative, which you are but not necessarily having a level of agency over it that say you do now in your business. Was that something that you were cognisant of at the time? Was something that having made the switch, you've looked back on and going - That's where I was feeling that gap or emptiness was it - when did you realise that?
Arnold: [00:06:41] Yeah. At the time, I think especially by the end of my career doing it, I was not getting it. That's why I feel it wasn't nourishing. It wasn't nourishing me and it wasn't nourishing anybody else. It was flogging me with the stress and the relentless schedule. And that the end at of the day, the people that I was filming were then going on the TV and God knows what would have happened to them afterwards in terms of how people would view them and what would happen in their lives and what the effect of them going on to national television would do. And I just wasn't comfortable with that ever. It wasn't something that happened afterwards. I was never comfortable with that. And I used to actually spend quite a lot of the time trying to persuade them not to do it. So I know that in my heart that I'd fully explained this will happen. This will happen. This is what the consequences are of doing this. Are you sure you still want to do it? Well, they always did. So it wasn't the do-gooding career that I wanted it to be. It didn't have. It didn't have. I didn't think it had the important impact that I wanted it to have, but I felt it could have had. And that's not to say that documentaries don't because I love the documentary industry and film-making. You know, it's an important it's important communication, form of communication, and it's got an important role. But it just didn't. The area that I was working in just didn't just didn't work out for me, but I was still working in it very successfully, right up until the point when my partner, Paul got ill. I had a plan to escape and I didn't know, I didn't know what the second part was. But the first part was to train as a yoga teacher because I had been practising yoga since my 20s and absolutely loved it. And so I decided to do my yoga teacher training. It was actually when I was in Thailand doing my yoga teacher training that I received the call to say that my partner Paul was wasn't well and I had to come home.
Solomons: [00:09:01] Wow. Because this I remember the day that you posted on your Instagram feed, you had a picture of you and Paul and you just you you told the story of how what happened and how you worked with him through to health. And I remember and I could feel myself welling up now, just remembering it. But I remember reading that and just crying and I think on a few different levels. One, just feeling into what that must have been like to being married myself and just kind of, I guess, that kind of heart tugging thing around empathy where you can imagine being in a I imagine being in that situation myself and how empowering and how amazing it must've felt to have been in that position or put yourself in that position to nurse him through that and to support him through that. And what qualities must be in your relationship now, having experienced that thing together? I think that really moved me, but it also moved me having been through a big personal tran.. or series of transitions, as well as something that wasn't nourishing into something that I felt very nourished by. Just the whole story got me and I remember that then at the point that I felt like I knew something very precious about you, too. And maybe it was your gift of this as a storyteller, having told so many other people's stories that really came through. Or maybe it was the energy behind it or a combination of the two. But I remember that day [00:10:55]. I [00:10:55] felt deeply connected with you in that moment. And it really yeah, it really moved me. And it also made me want to find out more. Which I guess is also the point of getting you on here. Because I felt like if I want to know more than other people are going to want to know more.
Solomons: [00:11:14] So would you mind talking a little bit about what that process was like? Yeah. That journey then into what you have now, which is this amazing nourishing career for yourself and for others. Could you talk a little bit about that transition?
Arnold: [00:11:30] Yeah, well, I mean, at the time, I wasn't thinking this is going to be the beginning of of my part two of my escape. I hadn't hadn't realised that that's what was happening until much later. I got the phone call. I just finished a three day silent meditation retreat with a Buddhist, a female Buddhist monk in the countryside. And I'd been cycling around that Thai countryside. And I I got back to the retreat. And the person who was running the retreat said your sister was fine.
Arnold: [00:12:09] And then she said, you've got to come home. Paul's being tested for leukaemia. It was just unbelievable, really. It was just out of the blue. I think I cried the whole way back and literally got off the plane and went straight to the hospital. That's when they told us that he needed four months chemotherapy, two years on chemotherapy medication. And this story is, I do a talk actually and I tell this story at the beginning. And it - people often have the same reaction as you and are really interested in it. So I think it's just it's just something that everyone dreads, I guess. And in a way, it's nice to hear a hopeful story. And, you know, it did have a happy ending as such. But at the time I you know you just get on with it when you've got something like that happen to you. And I just went into kind of caring mode in terms of what can I do to help with the process of him getting better. And it felt to me like the period where I'd - just the two weeks where I'd been in Thailand doing my yoga teacher training had given somehow given me some extra tools that enabled me then to just embark on this next stage. Somebody from the retreat actually had said to me, this is a blessing. And I remember feeling very surprised at the time and thinking that's some really odd thing to say.
Arnold: [00:13:52] But I've never forgotten that because because it turns out it was a blessing. Got some money to one side. So as I knew that I was able to just fully focus again. I was in a lucky situation. A lot of people don't have that privilege, but I was in a situation where I could just focus on helping Paul. And so I hired a nutritional therapist because I just had a feeling that that would be helpful. I didn't, I don't really know where I based that feeling from all you know, obviously, I was interested in food and nutrition and but yeah, I just decided that that's that's what he needed was a nutritional therapist. And so my sister actually found one for me. Then I did the consultation with her on Paul's behalf and I worked with her basically changed Paul's diet. I didn't want to eat any of the hospital food because as we all know, that food is pretty awful. And that meant the only option we had was take his food in every day. He was in King's College Hospital. I got a little fridge to put in his room and worked out what he would breakfast.
Arnold: [00:15:16] And then I would take lunch and dinner. And every day I enlisted the help of friends and family. And some time some really helpful, lovely people would sometimes take over a whole day and and they would deliver the food because it was it was exhausting. You know, it was four months of of preparing his food and taking it in. And the hospital didn't give, you know, they didn't give me any support because the consultant kept saying it's nothing to do with what he's eating. His food is irrelevant. And that's, you know, I mean, wow, you know, I do credit it with them, with saving his life. They gave him the drugs that helped him get better. But that's a world class blood specialist who sees no connection between diet at all and cancer. Which is just not true. So the nutritional therapist I was working with explained that sugar feeds cancer cells and cancer cells have more sugar receptors on them than anything any other cells in the body. And so they survive on an acidic diet. So, you know, it just made absolute sense to me to take all of those things out and to nourish him as much as possible.
Solomons: [00:16:52] I didn't know you guys aren't cancer cells. They have more sugar receptors.
Arnold: [00:16:58] Yes. And then other cells and night, so they survive on the glucose.
Solomons: [00:17:04] Wow. That's so simple. I mean, and profound. And yet this world class special saw no connection with with food. That's...
Arnold: [00:17:21] No. But because I know now, because I train alongside a lot of doctors on my functional medicine training and doctors don't learn about nutrition at all. So it doesn't matter if you're a doctor or a consultant or surgeon, you know. They don't they don't do any nutrition training.
Solomons: [00:17:44] So you're on your yoga retreat. And yeah you didn't necessarily know where this wisdom came from. To say I'm going to hire a nutritional therapist. But you did. And what was the journey, the healing journey beyond the hospital?
Arnold: [00:18:00] He actually sailed through everything really well. You know, he was really positive. He had no doubt he was going to get through it all. When I work with people now, I I am really acutely aware of the huge stress that the other person - the person who is not on the well is under because it's a huge trauma to watch your partner go through it. And to some degree, they probably feel powerless to do anything. But as the party might like, I did feel this huge responsibility to help them get better.
Arnold: [00:18:42] So actually, I started going to lectures, nutrition lectures while Paul was still unwell just because the information the nutritional therapist was helpful and interesting. But I needed to understand why, it wasn't enough for me to know that he couldn't eat bananas or sugar or what have you. I needed to understand exactly why. And I just discovered, obviously, that this was something I was really, really interested in. And so I went to a lecture. I went to a few different lectures. But the most memorable one was by a lady called Dr. Jane Plant, who is quite a famous scientist who had breast cancer several times. And she managed to reduce her tumours through addressing her diet. And so my nutrition education had already started at that point, in terms of those lectures and everything that I was reading about. I just was able to try and help support on the sidelines with optimum nutrition. And then afterwards, you know, a lot of work building him back up and starting to address some of the impasses that may have even been part of the reason why he got ill.
Arnold: [00:20:14] My main area of interest now is probably gut health, gut health, hormones and women's health. That's that's what I'm really that's what I really love. So I'm really interested in. I'm due to take my functional medicine exam actually this year. So hopefully by the end of this year, I will be an official functional medicine practitioner. But the way nutritional therapists work anyway is that they work in a functional medicine way. So functional medicine is a movement from America. Functional medicine is like the future of health care. It combines the best parts of alopathic medicine with natural medical, natural nutrition and lifestyle science. But in addition, they about the impact of nutrition on the body and they learn about lifestyle, what's called lifestyle medicine. I think it will be the health care of the future. I hope it will be.
Solomons: [00:21:34] So could you talk a little bit about kind of you practice and how you're using what you know to support people and in what ways during this period of lockdown?
Arnold: [00:21:45] Yes. So I set up a Facebook group right at the start because I felt, you know, when I when I studied nutrition, I used to go to each lecture and literally have my mind blown by by everything that I learned and just used to think, you know, why doesn't why doesn't everybody need it? So, I mean, really, this should be common knowledge. You know, it shouldn't just be me because I was in a position to be able to afford this training to know this. And so I'm always very passionate about sharing the information, as much information as I can. With everyone so that they can awake, become awake to the fact that their health is in their own hands and that they can optimise their health. And they don't have to just sit there and wait until they get ill. They can take charge of their health and say, that's partly why I set up the Corona-virus Facebook group. There's so many ways that you can support yourself from a health perspective. And diet is one of those ways. And I'm on this group on know, giving ideas for recipes and inspiration and thoughts on different ways and different foods that will be really beneficial to include in your diet right now.
Arnold: [00:23:07] But there's also loads of other things that you can do. You know, there's an EFT practitioner who is offering tapping sessions on my Facebook group. There's yoga teachers offering daily yoga classes exercise. There's acupressure. And, you know, all these things are there for us to explore during this unique period right now where we have a bit of a pause in normal daily life. And maybe it can be for some. I know. For others, it's you know, it's very difficult. But for some people, it might be a really good opportunity to start to explore some of the array of tools that are, you know, at our service to basically help us live the healthiest life that we can. As someone who's seen what it's like when someone's health is taken away from them. That, to me, is the the most, one of the most important foundations for a happy life is to is to is to be healthy.
Solomons: [00:24:18] I wholeheartedly agree with you. Catherine, this has been - I really appreciate you coming on and telling your story, very personal story. But also just I think anybody listening to who are in that health crisis space just I think hearing hearing you and your story, I can't imagine them not wanting to connect with you because I think one of the things you hear over and over again when people have had the courage to either go to a doctor or seek support in so many other ways is that they end up coming away feeling even worse because they haven't been seen and they haven't been understood and they haven't I think connecting with the practitioner and feeling seen and feeling safe is a really huge piece. And I, I just I think you offer that in spades. You really do. Kind of I find you really inspiring. And I'm so happy to have got to know you a little bit over the last few weeks and months. And I look forward to more of that. And I really appreciate your time today. I really do. I know you - things are not business as usual. You have kids at home and a whole life going on out there. So thank you for this for donating some of your time here to talk about this.
Solomons: [00:25:42] And if I can, you just let me know, like people want to connect with you on your Facebook page or via you Web site, or would like to actually engage and work with you. Like, what are all the ways people can find you and connect with you?
Arnold: [00:25:57] Okay. Thank you. It's a subject I love talking about. So I'm so people can get a hold of me via my Web site, which is w w w dot. Catherine Arnold nutrition dot com. And it's Catherine spelt with a C. I also have an Instagram page which is Catherine Underscore Arnold, underscore nutrition and I'm quite active on that. And then that actually has links to the Facebook group. So again, my Facebook group is Catherine Arnold Nutrition. So it should be fairly straightforward to find, but everything will be on my Web site anyway.
[00:26:38] Fantastic. And I have to say, as someone who follows your Instagram feed, your recipes are fantastic. Your photography is brilliant. And honestly, if if you're listening and you really stuck with something to cook, then head on over to Catherine's website or Instagram feed and and I love the fact as well that often the food that you cook is also inexpensive to buy. So it cuts out that barrier, doesn't it?
Solomons: [00:27:07] Because I think that's you talked about that, you know, sense of feeling like what you were learning should be common knowledge, but also just good healthy food should be available and accessible to everybody. I love how you, you just put out recipes that are both. Which is important, I think, isn't it kind of cutting out that barrier to entry to health and knowledge?
Arnold: [00:27:31] Yeah. I mean, I think the thing is this, you know, you didn't have to be fancy. It's just a normal this the seasonal ingredients that are available to us. It's quite simple. You know, just eat whole foods, eat vegetables, you know, eat foods, you know, animal products that have been from animals that have been well looked after. Well treated, you know, and and try and put as many of those kind foods into your body as possible. And and that that's that's hopefully that's probably what's reflected in the way I cook.
Solomons: [00:28:11] And the reality is that the way you live and the way you practice. Yeah. A great piece to wrap up on, but thank you very, very much indeed. I look forward to seeing you guys again in person.
Solomons: [00:28:25] Well, when lockdown finishes. Yeah we look forward to opening your doors again. Thank you again so much. And love to Paul. And we'll see you very soon.
Solomons: [00:28:38] Thanks so much for listening to another episode of the Giant Pause podcast. Please do follow along on our Instagram Facebook page. Like share comment telling your friends. Much appreciated. Look forward to hanging out with you on the next episode.