After years of malnourishment, poor  health and chronic injuries that kept me from dancing – my life long passion, I learned these 2 crucial elements to a vibrant and healthy life:

1. Everyone is different and there isn’t a “one size fits all” approach to nutrition

2. You have to be your own health advocate

Do you suffer from low energy? brain fog? poor sleep? sugar cravings? I’ve personally dealt with all of these issues and understand how frustrating it can be! I love helping my clients find the root cause of these issues and overcoming them through nutrition and lifestyle changes.

Most of my passion and inspiration originated from my father, Gene Sambataro. He was a true pioneer in the world of Biological Dentistry back in the 1980’s, always educating himself on the most cutting edge ideas and implementing them into his practice before anyone else. Through watching and learning from him, I have been surrounded by holistic medicine for most of my life. However, while this did provide me with a strong foundation and valuable knowledge about holistic health and nutrition, the real fire was ignited for me to turn this into my career as I battled through my own personal journey and challenges to achieve a state of optimal health.

Spending many hours of my youth in a ballet studio provided incredible experiences, professional training and friendships that will last forever. However, along with those positive elements were also extreme pressures to reach and maintain a certain body image. I took those strict requirements and the pressure to follow them very seriously, and also too far. As a result, I became very malnourished, and unable to keep the proper physical strength and fuel that a ballet dancer needs. At the age of only 14, I injured myself with two stress fractures in my lower spine. As I continued to push it and dance through the injury over the years, I would continue to make things worse, sometimes knocking me out of dance for weeks and even months at a time. Due to this injury, my dream of becoming a professional ballet dancer was gone forever. My only choice was to find some way to turn this experience into something positive.

As I bounced between different jobs, I became more interested in nutrition and learning how to properly fuel my body. It was this personal venture that I started realizing my true calling, and how genuinely passionate I was about nutrition. After a couple more years of researching, studying, reading every nutrition book I could get my hands on, as well as some basic trial-and-error, I finally discovered what type of nutrition my body actually needed. I learned that I could eat in a healthy and nourishing way that would make me not only feel amazing, but would also fuel my body, all without restricting myself to purely counting calories.

However this wasn’t the end of the difficult road for me to reach optimal health. I had challenges with adrenal dysfunction, chronic fatigue, mercury toxicity and even a 10-year battle with the Epstein-Barr virus. No single practitioner could help me, and I went to discuss these issues with countless experts. I had no choice at that point but to educate myself through any means necessary and to learn as rapidly as possible about all of these personal health issues I was dealing with. Although it was extremely difficult, I eventually healed myself, and this personal journey empowered me to build my career helping others overcome similar challenges. There has been absolutely nothing more rewarding to me than seeing someone else get to feel the relief that I did, and watching them completely transform their life and  health by simply eating the way their body actually needs. It is why I do what I do, every single day.