Empowering women with the tools and solutions to achieve optimum health and emotional well-being.

 

Through Empowered Women for Health, we aim to give you the power to take control over your health, happiness and future and:

  • Educate women about health and how their bodies work
  • Advocate towards making the health system work better for the individual
  • Address how to recognise and naturally treat symptoms and fight ill-health
  • Change unhealth views on what is normal, and what we should accept.

All women deserve to age vibrantly.

As with all of us, the story of how we got to here is unique to us individually.  

We are a mother and daughter: a degree-certified natural health practitioner and a passionate head chef turned natural health advocate. 

We are on a journey to raise up the women around us who face physical and mental health challenges frequently unaddressed and often downplayed by the medical system and society. 

Why? We have both faced health (and other) challenges, wading through, stumbling, getting lost and having some wins. We have come out on the other side with a wealth of knowledge, life experience and a strong desire to share that information for the benefit of all women.

We have combined our talents and knowledge to help women regain control, ownership, and responsibility for their health. By educating women on how their bodies work, giving systematic ways to improve health and opening up conversations about how we look at women's health, we hope to change women's perception of what they need to accept and give them the power to demand changes.

Why are so many women facing health challenges especially hormonal and early in life? Why are many health professionals not listening, hearing or doing testing to try to uncover the cause? Is it them? Is it the system? Is it the training? Do they not have the tools to help? Why is it so acceptable for women to live with a certain amount of discomfort?

With our lived experiences, qualifications, training and passion for helping women of all ages, we will walk beside you and assist you with the tools to reclaim yourself and your best health. The challenge is yours to accept.

In a nutshell after doing the course with you I found myself. That looks like self acceptance. I became comfortable in my skin and who I am and knowing that my values are my values and that's ok. Knowing this and experiencing this empowered me to make different decisions, speak my truth (respectfully) and not feel the need to apologise and be less than. Knowing my values also empowers me to ensure that I am living these on a daily basis and I can see that when I don't the outcomes are less than optimal. Having greater clarity on my values also enabled me to put past experiences into perspective and reduce the victim mentality that I had towards some of my past experiences.

I would encourage anyone looking to find themselves, I highly recommend the completion of this course. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and assisting me on my journey, my growth has been invaluable and my children also benefit from me loving and accepting my whole self. CL x

At any age, and at any stage, you can reclaim your health and happiness.

Dear Jacinta,

Thanks for a great workshop- nothing at all like what I expected, but got so much more out of it than I thought I would!! Keen to be part of the next one.

Have already had great opportunities to observe- and will keep practicing!

ABOUT US

Jacinta Callaghan

B.HSc.(Nutritional Medicine)

Certified EFT Practitioner

For over a decade, I have been working as a Nutritional Medicine and EFT Practitioner, treating women with health conditions which on further investigation were more likely associated with daily emotional stress than dietary imbalances. 


These women were in toxic relationships with family, friends, partners, employers or work colleagues and quite often a combination of a few.


My goal is to help, inspire and enable women, to move from victim to “survive and thrive” and reclaim their life and their health.

Jacinta's story

Many moons ago, I was born into a Catholic Irish English family as the 5th child in just over five years to become the middle child of 9 children.

At age 3, an accident left me with severe burns to several parts of my body that took many months to heal.

During early childhood, I began to have problems with bloating, digestive issues and kidney problems requiring medical intervention and multiple rounds of antibiotics. On an emotional level, there were also many experiences of targeted bullying, the scars of which take time to heal.

Around 20 years of age, I found myself pregnant with my fiancé and thrust into adulthood in a heartbeat. (Though no regrets). In this era, though, there was much judgement and little emotional support. It was the era of "you made your bed, now lay in it".

Marriage and the relationship did not turn out to be a healthy long-term choice and had its "challenges". I found that despite being health conscious (possibly OTT) with diet and exercise, the stress of the situation led to health deterioration.

During these years, I was diagnosed with Coeliac disease, Raynaud's and Thyroid Auto Immune problems.

It took several years to diagnose Coeliac disease, during which time I was quite ill, continually hearing from medical practitioners there was nothing wrong".

I was frustrated for myself and other friends and family who were not seemingly being heard or helped. Following an illness coinciding with long-term workplace bullying and losing family members and friends, I re-assessed and started my degree in Nutritional Medicine. My passion for learning was on steroids.

In 2014, after another health scare, I found the courage to leave the marriage even if it meant the loss of some friends and family support (which it did). It took several years of legal to finalize everything, which took its toll.

Towards the end of this time, my dad became ill and soon after passed away.

Then along came the big CC, Covid Chaos.

When this began, I lived on the coast with my new partner, and life was good. The Big CC struck, and we decided to uproot for the duration of the Big CC and move to his farm (Move number 4 in 6 years)

Late in 2021, Mum passed suddenly and unexpectedly. Her sudden passing has been difficult for us to accept and process. It has heightened differences and created challenging times.

In February 2022, the rains came! For the first time in the history of the 3rd Generation Farm, the levels rose faster and higher than ever before. We anxiously awaited to be airlifted out or left to our own devices. Thankfully, the armed forces came to our aid, and we spent the next ten days with family (very thankful).

In May 2022, the rains came again! This time we did not wait and were out early. It was several days before we could return when my father-in-law had a stroke, and we spent the next few days in the hospital as he recovered.

Our life stories and health/stress stories of how we got here are already different. We will discuss in later posts why our life events change our health and how.

Cherie Harding

Healthy Living Advocate

I am a young 37-year-old, mother of two little boys with a longstanding passion for health and nutrition who also happens to be in the early stages of peri-menopause. I have been a professional chef for most of my working life, particularly focused on healthy eating and allergy aware food and love all things holistic healing.

I, like many women around me have spent a considerable amount of my 30's trying to regain back my health and energy for life.

My goal is to use my lived experience to support other women because women don’t just deserve to age gracefully, we deserve to age vibrantly.

Cherie's story

My hormone health story starts in my early teen years when as a non-sexually active teen I was put on the contraceptive pill (Yasmin) to combat heavy-ish, painful periods. My doctor saw this as a good solution but failed to inform me of the likely side effects and I believe she thought she was doing the right thing to avoid any possibility of a pregnant teen. Jump ahead six months and I am seeing the same doctor for crippling depression (a well-known side effect of Yasmin) and subsequently put on a strong anti-depressant without any other alternatives offered.

I spent the next few years fighting my way through depression, struggling to academically and socially achieve as I had in my earlier years, suffering insomnia and thinking there was something fundamentally broken with me. In my early 20s, with the help of my mother, my determination and a specialised naturopath, I went off the pill and went on a yearlong process to slowly get off the anti-depressants. And I never suffered from depression again because at the root of it, for me, it was a direct result of the hormone and chemical disruption caused by the pill (this will not be true for everyone of course).

Unfortunately, I then spent the rest of my 20’s working as a chef, which while it came with some rewards, it also came with a largely negative lifestyle. I burnt out my adrenal glands constantly being in an adrenaline-fuelled environment, ruined my circadian rhythm by often starting and finishing work when it was dark and failed to give my body food and water in any consistent way while continually overworking it (a surprisingly frequent occurrence for many chefs, despite always being in the kitchen).

By the end of my 20’s, I had switched to a healthier way of working with less hours and stress. Still, I was already suffering the consequences of adrenal fatigue and had begun to have recurring kidney stones and UTI’s. I had laser surgery to remove larger stones that could not pass on their own but continued to produce new smaller stones and was hospitalised repeatedly. This started a 2-year process of almost continual antibiotic use, resulting in a host of gut and digestion problems that had compounded on top of an already sensitive digestive system. At the worst point, I could not eat a banana without my stomach bloating to the size of a 6-month pregnant belly. I reached a point where I refused to take any more antibiotics (unless 100% necessary). Instead, I went to regular acupuncture to assist with kidney function and treated myself with food, supplements, yoga and alternative therapies.

While on this journey back to health, I went through my parents getting a divorce, had two beautiful children in under two years, went through a period of extreme financial stress and like all of us, survived the covid years. Through all this, I repeatedly went to doctors to try and get some answers and help with worsening symptoms of chronic fatigue, non-existent immunity, extreme bloating and gastro-intestinal pain, loose and irregular bowel movements and ongoing kidney and urinary issues. All they offered was; you have young kids you are supposed to be tired, drink more water, this is normal at your age, all your levels look fine - there is nothing wrong with you. It left me with enormous frustration because I felt I was already doing everything in the treat your body with kindness book, but my health was not reflecting it. But what was missing, on top of the results of a life lived, is what doctors had not mentioned to me and that was my symptoms were likely stemming from hormone imbalance and unresolved gut health issues.

And this is why together with my amazing and knowledgeable nutritionist mother, we want to educate and empower women about the role their hormones play in their health and the best ways to navigate post child-birth, peri-menopause and menopause to make sure that you are moving into the next stage of your health with your best foot forward.

What Women Want … What women need … This article has been beautifully written by a colleague to

More
What women want! (and need)

Foreplay!!! … Boys and girls, it’s a 24-hour thing! (at least) Is Sex enjoyable for you? Did you

More
It’s not about the sex!

What Legacy do you want to leave to your daughters and sons? There are many subconscious beliefs and

More
What garbage are we passing on to our sons and daughters?

# 1 most talked about problem now amongst 30-plus women. Why the sudden increase in weight gain in

More
Sudden Rapid Unexplained Weight Gain Epidemic

Digestive Enzymes What are they? What do they each do?  At which point of the digestive tract are

More
How does the food factory in my body work?

Fruit and Vegetable Growers call it quits! After generations of growers in the Brisbane Valley and Lockyer Valley,

More
Chaos in our Fruit and Vegetable Regions