Today we’d like to introduce you to Ayla Withee.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Ayla. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
My career in nutrition and wellness has taken a meandering path over the past 12 years. I began teaching nutrition in inner-city Philadelphia schools, in some cases, introducing children grades K-12 to their very first fresh strawberry and showing them what a whole potato looks like straight from the ground. I loved this work and found it very rewarding both professionally and personally but when I moved back to the Boston area, where I’m originally from, I took a job in adult weight management. This job helped me develop my counseling and teaching skills but it also taught me everything that I don’t want to do in practice now! After several years in that position I felt frustrated and ineffectual, like what I was doing really wasn’t helping people become healthier, so I drifted further from the profession and took a job in project management for a non-profit. From there, I took a position as a corporate wellness manager for a fortune 500 company. Along the way, I earned my MS in Health Communication from Boston University and started studying integrative and functional medicine, along with various areas in clinical nutrition.
About 5 years ago, I started seeing clients “on the side” while working in corporate wellness. I enjoyed the work immensely and felt that finally I was truly helping the people I worked with through functional medicine. My business have grown and evolved over these 5 years and I now employ a very talented dietitian, Bridgitte Carroll, MS, RD, LDN.
I have become nationally recognized as a specialist in infertility and have helped couples conceive and have healthy pregnancies even when they were told that it wasn’t possible to do so naturally. I feel completely at home in my niche now and love working with women struggling to conceive, with “period problems”, thyroid disorders and more. While I primarily see women’s health and digestive issue cases, Bridgitte works with a wide range of individuals but it particularly skilled at weight management, gastrointestinal disorders, diabetes and general wellness.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
As previously mentioned, my career has taken a zig-zagging path through various areas of practice and it hit a point about 6-7 years ago where I was ready to leave the field all together. I felt jaded by an profession that felt more and more about alignment with the food industry and recipe blogging and less about healing. This, combined with personal health issues that has started to develop, I was feeling at a loss. In an effort to heal myself, I started studying functional medicine and integrative therapies. I absolutely poured myself into this work and haven’t stopped learned since.
Please tell us about Boston Functional Nutrition, LLC.
Boston Functional Nutrition is an integrative and functional nutrition practice that is known for its “big picture” approach, which starts with a thorough whole-person assessment and uses cutting edge research to help individuals create effective, meaningful change even with the most complex of cases. While we always collaborate with a client’s healthcare team, we are known for helping individuals where conventional therapies have failed by thinking outside the box, encouraging our clients to listen to their intuition when it says something “isn’t right” about their health, and by ultimately getting to the root cause of health issues. We use food as medicine, educationg and supporting our clients to heal themselves.
I am one of the only nationally recognized dietitians that works specifically with infertility. My success rate for helping couple conceive (and have healthy babies) is 80% across the board and continues to improve -this is more than double the success rate of conventional therapies like IVF. And I do this naturally, helping couples avoid the emotional, physical and financial expense of medical fertility treatments. My ultimate mission is to show women that in almost all cases, infertility does not require medical intervention; that you can heal from infertility and go on to have a healthy pregnancy naturally.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
I would have found integrative and functional medicine right from the start. I’d love to see, and help facilitate (one day), getting this into the dietietics curriculum to educate and empower young dietitians.
Pricing:
- To work with Ayla, book a strategy session to discuss: http://bostonfunctionalnutrition.com/wholehealthstrategysession/
- Bridgitte takes insurance and can be reached directly at Bridgitte@BostonFunctionalNutrition.com to book an appointment
Contact Info:
- Address: 97 Lowell Road, Concord, MA 01741 (but we also work virtually -coming to the office is not a requirement)
- Website: bostonfunctionalnutrition.com
- Phone: 617.631.8870
- Email: ayla@bostonfunctionalnutrition.com
- Instagram: @Bostonfunctionalnutrition
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BostonFunctionalNutrition/
- Twitter: eatsimply
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/boston-functional-nutrition-concord
- Other: nourishyourfertility.com
