About

My life has been a unique portfolio, with every stage getting me to where I am today. If you’re curious to know more… read on! I grew up in Belgium surrounded by beautiful flavours, and I find inspiration in fresh seasonal produce. In 1997, I trained at Leith’s School of Food and Wine in London and cooked in professional and private kitchens for over 20 years. This took me to wild and wonderful locations where I had to be resourceful as there was often no supermarket to be seen.

After attempting to follow the crowd to London after university (I lasted 9 months!) I followed my dreams and moved to the ski resort of St Anton, Austria, to live and work for 12 years. This is where I met my husband! In the summers we travelled to Bali, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa (he’s South African) and loved eating all the food and absorbing ourselves in the countries and cultures.

I then went on to be the Head Chef of a hotel/restaurant/pub on the tiny island of Colonsay in the Inner Hebrides. Working with the freshest ingredients available day by day – mentored by renowned recipe author and menu consultant Hugo Arnold who has worked with The Ivy and Avoca. I was incredibly fortunate to cook from organic vegetables grown in the estate walled garden, and deal directly with Graham the farmer, Bill the crab man, Andrew the oyster and honey man, the fishing boats from Oban, and the organic farmers on Mull. Utter heaven!

After our remote island stint, my husband and I headed back to the ski resort of St Anton, Austria to start our own chalet business called Alpine Evolution which we ran for 6 years. My kitchen was tiny and open plan and it led to lots of conversations with guests around food, and what they cooked, and I was always fascinated by their stories and what they enjoyed about cooking and what they found was really hard. I did a lot of listening here and heard how interested (but often confused) people were around cooking for their family. There was real emphasis in the chalets on good homemade local seasonal food. Guests often asked me for recipes which led me to writing my first cookbook.

When we moved to the UK in 2013, with our 7 month old, I stopped cooking, and worked in Travel Sales. This led me to discovering the power of Insights and Personality Profiling which changed my life.  While I was working full time, I went on top have 2 more children, and I soon realized how much harder it was to cook well when you had zero time and energy and how it was relentless feeding your family nutritious food.

It became clear that there were thousands of women just like me, struggling to find the time and energy to cook nutritious food for their families and get out of the cooking rut.

I have observed many ‘better food’ initiatives and had seen that many didn’t have a clear, practical direction and that at its core, changing the way we eat and our behaviours around food is all about humans, individuals, and their habits…

I started working with case studies with amazing results and realised how powerful some of these conversations were getting as client’s were opening up to me and confiding with how they felt about food and cooking. Anxiety, overwhelm, confusion and guilt were the main themes, so in 2020 I completed a Professional Coaching and Mentoring Diploma with the OCM (leaders in Coach Mentoring) to give me the ethics and competencies of how to support people to reach their goals and make the changes they were looking for. I’m accredited with the European Mentoring Coaching Council, have a Supervisor and keep my practice up to date with regular CPD.

What does DizzleSky mean?