Eleanor Hoath is a Registered Nutritional Therapist, the founder of Well Nourished Clinic, and the founder and editor of The Well Edit, a practitioner-led wellness platform. In other words, she’s a wellness expert through and through.
Ahead of our joint event on 28 November, eleanor and i sat down to talk all about how we can use nutrition to support nervous system regulation. as someone who is constantly thriving to achieve a calm, balanced state of being, i couldn’t wait to hear what eleanor had to say.
What is your mission?
My mission is to edit wellness rather than add to it. There’s so much noise out there, and most women I speak to aren’t short of information, they’re exhausted by it. So my job, in clinic and editorially, is to filter: this is worth your attention, this isn’t, and here’s why. And to remind people that living well means a full, rounded life with colour in it, not a perfectly optimised one.
2. How did you come to study nutritional therapy?
Through my own health. In my early twenties I went through a long period of being really unwell, and the hardest part was not understanding what was going on. I kept being told everything looked “normal”, which isn’t very comforting when you don’t feel normal at all.
Functional medicine was the first approach that asked “why is this happening?” rather than “what’s the diagnosis?” It looked at the gut, stress, nutrition, and how it all connects. Food had always been my way in. My first business, Ells Kitchen, started as a meal prep company while I was studying, built around “colourful plate, colourful life”. So training as a nutritional therapist felt less like a career change and more like finally putting a name to what I’d learned I needed to do to get myself on the straight and narrow.
3. What does a typical day in the life look like for you?
Honestly, no two are the same, which I love. But the anchor is always the morning: green time before screen time. I get outside, or at least look outside before I pick up my phone. I'm realistic and workig across timezones can ocassionally mean I'm on tech earlier than I'd like to be so this anchors me. Then cacao or a herbal tea infusion whilst I get ready for the day. A matcha rather than coffee, and a proper breakfast.
From there it might be clinic days with clients, an in-office day consulting for a supplement brand, editing and commissioning for The Well Edit, filming content, or speaking at an event or a corporate wellness talk. Evenings can often be events, but I try to protect a few at home where I cook, move my body, have a bath, and switch 'off'.
4. When did you decide to broaden your career into wellness writing and editing?
It happened quite naturally. I’d always written, and I found I loved translating science into something people actually wanted to read. Then I joined Healf as an editor, and that was a real education. I was sitting at the point where brands, science and consumers all meet, and I saw how much information people were being handed and how little of it was filtered.
It made me realise that clinic and editorial weren’t two separate careers. They were the same job at different scales. In clinic I help one person cut through the noise; in editorial I get to do that for thousands of at once.
5. What catalysed the creation of The Well Edit?
I kept seeing two extremes. On one side, influencer wellness: beautiful, aspirational, but often not grounded in much and unattainable for the majority of people. On the other, clinical information that’s accurate but completely inaccessible. I wanted to build a third way: practitioner-led, but with editorial taste. Science you’d actually want to read.
The other catalyst was how beige wellness had become. Neutral linen, the perfect routine, everything muted and a bit joyless. That’s the opposite of what I stand for. The Well Edit is about better information, fewer rules, and more colour, on your plate and in your life. It's why we also talk about fashion, where to stay when you go on holiday, the best coat to wear to the school drop off - because all of these things contribute to doing life 'well'.
6. How does chronic stress and anxiety impact our digestive system? How does being in rest and digest versus fight or flight impact our digestion?
The clue is in the name: you can’t really rest and digest when your body thinks it’s being chased.
When we’re in fight or flight, the nervous system diverts resources to whatever helps you survive the next five minutes: heart rate, muscles, alertness. Digestion isn’t on that list. So stomach acid and digestive enzymes drop, blood flow moves away from the gut, and the movement of food through the digestive tract changes, which is why stress can show up as bloating, constipation or the opposite.
Long term, chronic stress also affects the gut lining and the microbiome. And it works both ways: the gut and brain are in constant conversation via the vagus nerve, so an unhappy gut can feed back into feeling anxious. It’s a loop. In rest and digest, the parasympathetic state, everything switches back on, which is why how you eat matters almost as much as what you eat.
7. Can our diet and nutrition impact our ability to regulate our nervous system?
Absolutely. I explain it like a bank account. Your resilience is the balance, and every stressor is a withdrawal. Some of the biggest hidden withdrawals come from how we eat.
Skipping breakfast, coffee on an empty stomach, a beige lunch at your desk: your body reads a blood sugar crash as an emergency and releases stress hormones to correct it. Do that a few times a day and you’re living on cortisol before anything stressful has even happened. Add in low magnesium, not enough protein, and a gut that isn’t absorbing properly, and your nervous system simply has less to work with.
8. Can we use diet and nutrition to help regulate our nervous system?
Yes, and this is the hopeful part. Food is one of the most consistent signals of safety you can give your body, several times a day.
The foundations are really simple. Eat regularly so your blood sugar isn’t on a rollercoaster. Build meals around protein, fibre and healthy fats. Get your minerals in, especially magnesium. Support your gut, because so much of the nervous system conversation happens there. And slow down when you eat. It isn’t about a perfect diet, it’s about removing the stress your diet might be adding and topping up what your nervous system needs to recover.
9. What foods do you recommend for clients who are struggling with nervous system dysregulation? What foods are the most beneficial and why? What foods should be avoided?
I’m always going to start with add, don’t eliminate.
The ones I reach for most:
Greens. I’m not called the Queen of Green for nothing. Leafy greens are rich in magnesium and folate, both essential for a calm nervous system, and magnesium is one of the first minerals stress burns through.
Oily fish. I always say SMASH: salmon, mackerel, anchovies, sardines, herring. The omega-3s support brain health and help keep inflammation in check.
Protein at breakfast. Eggs, Greek yoghurt, nut butter. It steadies blood sugar for the whole morning.
Slow-release carbohydrates. Oats, sweet potato, lentils. People are often scared of carbs, but cutting them too hard can actually push cortisol up. They also help with sleep.
Fermented foods and fibre. Kefir, sauerkraut, a wide variety of plants. A happy microbiome supports that gut–brain conversation.
Vitamin C-rich foods. Peppers, kiwi, berries. Your body uses a lot of vitamin C when it’s under stress.
As for avoiding, I’d frame it as what to be mindful of. Caffeine on an empty stomach, alcohol (it disrupts sleep and that next-day anxiety is real), very sugary foods eaten on their own, and skipping meals. None of these are forbidden. It’s about timing and pairing, not fear.
10. Should we be doing breathwork before we eat?
I’d love for more people to, but it doesn’t need to be a big practice. Even three or four slow breaths before your first bite, with a longer exhale than inhale, is enough to nudge your body towards rest and digest.
The bigger point is the transition. Most of us go straight from emails to eating, so the body is still in work mode. A pause, a few breaths, sitting down, putting the phone away, that’s what tells your digestion it’s safe to switch on. I also love humming before or after a meal. The vagus nerve runs right past the vocal cords, so it’s a lovely, slightly silly way to stimulate it.
11. Can supplements help us regulate our nervous system? If so, what do you recommend in terms of active ingredients?
They can help, but they work best on top of the foundations, not instead of them. If you’re not sleeping or eating regularly, no supplement will out-perform that.
The ones I’d most often look at:
Magnesium, ideally glycinate or bisglycinate, which tends to be gentle on the gut and lovely in the evening.
L-theanine, found naturally in matcha. It supports a calm-but-alert state, which is part of why I love my matcha.
Omega-3s, if you’re not eating oily fish a couple of times a week.
B vitamins, which are involved in energy and nervous system function and get used up faster in stressful periods.
My caveat is always: speak to a qualified practitioner, because what’s brilliant for one person can be pointless for another.
12. When you are personally feeling dysregulated, how do you self-regulate?
First, I get outside. Green time is my non-negotiable, even if it’s five minutes around the block with nothing in my ears. No podcast, no calls.
Then it’s the small things that work for my body. Actually having nothing on in the background helps, we're always consuming something these days so switching that off helps. Movement, especially yoga or piates, which I’ve done since I was 18 and has been the one constant through every phase of my life. A warm cacao instead of more coffee. Humming in the kitchen, which sounds ridiculous but works. Putting my phone in another room. And honestly, telling a friend. Connection is massively underrated as a regulation tool.
13. What is one wellness trend you wish you could erase?
Performative wellness The idea that you need a twelve-step morning routine, a supplement for every hour, a cold plunge and a tracker on every limb to be “doing it right.”
Ironically, the pressure to be well has become one of the biggest stressors I see in clinic. Your body doesn’t need to be optimised to its limit. Often the most powerful thing is doing less, more consistently, and actually enjoying your life while you’re at it.
14. What is one wellness trend that you hope sticks around?
Wellness going offline and becoming communal. Walking clubs, supper clubs, people learning in a room together rather than alone on a screen. It’s why I started the Green Time Before Screen Time community walks.
Loneliness is a huge, under-discussed health issue, and connection is good for your nervous system in a way no supplement can replicate. If that’s the trend that sticks, I’ll be very happy.
15. What is your favourite non-fiction book?
Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers by Robert Sapolsky. It’s the book that made stress physiology click for me. His point is that a zebra’s stress response switches on when a lion chases it, and then switches off again once it’s safe. We, on the other hand, can switch on that exact same response just by thinking about an email, a deadline or something someone said three weeks ago, and keep it running for days. It’s brilliantly written, genuinely funny in places, and it underpins so much of how I think about the nervous system and digestion in clinic.
16. What is your favourite podcast?
I don’t have one favourite, it really depends on my mood. I’ve been enjoying the Waitrose Dish podcast, which is lovely for food inspiration, and sometimes I will put that on when I'm cooking (if it's not jazz). I love The Bosticks because they challenge a lot of my thinking, and The Functional Health Podcast is a good one for staying sharp on the clinical side. And sometimes I just want a bit of a girlie giggle, so I’ll put on the Wednesdays podcast, or Newly Parents. Balance, always.
17. Who are your three dream dinner guests?
I know it’s meant to be three, but I’m sneaking in a fourth.
Emma Grede, because I’d love to pick her brain on building something with real staying power. Elizabeth Day, because, well I just LOVE her and How to Fail is such an honest look at the lows that sit alongside the highs which is something I've been so so open about recently, and she’d make sure the conversation went somewhere real. Elizabeth Gilbert for a little bit of woo woo magic, she’d have us all believing anything’s possible by dessert. And Miranda Hart, to keep it from ever getting too serious, and I think she’d understand the health side of my story too.
I’d cook, obviously, and it would be a very colourful plate.
18. What do you hope to be doing in ten years?
I’m going to go big on this one, because why not?
I hope The Well Edit is the place people trust to edit wellness for them. Not just a platform, but a real destination with a community around it: events, a roster of brilliant practitioners alongside me, and a name people recognise as the antidote to wellness noise. I’d love to still be in clinic too, because working one-to-one keeps me grounded in what real people are actually dealing with and because that work truly changed my life, I never want to lose that.
Something that really lights me up is being in a room full of people and talking about things you genuinely care about. I’m an ex performer at heart, and I think that never really leaves you. So in ten years, I’d love to be doing much more of that. Bigger stages, keynote talks, live shows, that are still educational BUT also fun, empowering and make nutrition and wellness feel fun and accessible rather than preachy.
I think wellness is crying out for people who can bring a bit of personality and joy to it, and that’s exactly what I hope to be.
But mostly, I hope I’m living what I preach: a full, colourful life, not a perfect one.
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Reserve your spot our our breathe studio in conversation with eleanor hoath event on 28 November here.
