Funky Forest Health & Wellbeing

Funky Forest Health & Wellbeing My approach is body inclusive, LGBTIQA+ friendly, and neuroaffirmative. Deeply personalised, compassionate care for you and your family. Message us for details.

Naturopath • Dietitian (APD) • Eating Disorder Clinician • Yoga Teacher • Artist
Embodied, earth-rooted nourishment + nervous system care 🌿
Weight-neutral, harm-reduction support for humans + nuanced guidance for practitioners seeking braver ways to work Casey Conroy, BVSc(Hons), BHSc(Nat), MNutrDiet, APD, CEDC
Accredited Practising Dietitian (APD) | Non-Diet Nutritionist | Naturopath | Medical Herbalist | Credentialed Eating Disorder Clinician (CEDC) | Provisional Sports Dietitian | Yoga Teacher | Strength & Conditioning Coach

I am an experienced health practitioner blending evidence-based science with traditional wisdom. Medicare & health fund rebates available, in person and Telehealth consultations available. At Funky Forest Health & Wellbeing we operate from a Non-Diet, Body Acceptance, Health at Every Size® philosophy which values people for who they are rather than what they look like. SPECIALTY AREAS:
- Eating, Weight & Body Image: Eating Disorders, disordered eating, emotional eating, diet recovery
- Nervous system: Neurodivergent Support (ADHD, ASD, SPD), CFS, stress resilience, Anxiety, Depression, Insomnia
- Hormones: Menopause, painful & heavy periods, menstrual irregularities, low testosterone, HT support for trans folks

INTEREST AREAS:
- Fertility, Pregnancy, Breastfeeding
- Gut: Bloating, Constipation, IBS, SIBO, Reflux, Dysbiosis, Food Intolerances
- Sports & Performance Nutrition
- Acute Naturopathy (e.g. colds, flu, recent injury)
- Thyroid: Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, Grave's disease
- Cardiometabolic: High cholesterol, Hypertension, Type 2 Diabetes
- Musculoskeletal: Arthritis, fibromyalgia, sciatica

CLASSES: Yoga, AcroYoga, Strength & Conditioning - privates available! For more info visit https://www.funkyforest.com.au/how-i-can-help.html

17/12/2025

As Christmas approaches, I’m seeing client anxiety rise… not about Christmas shopping crowds or dealing with loud misogynist uncles (though legit), but about appetite, overeating, and “losing control.”

In a culture that’s glamorising appetite suppression (hello GLP-1 era) and shrinking beauty standards yet again, it makes sense that hunger feels scary.

But hunger isn’t the problem!
Cravings aren’t a moral failing.
Body diversity has ALWAYS existed.

Suppressing appetite isn’t healing… it’s control, rebranded.

If this season is stirring fear around food, you’re not fu**ed up.
You’re responding to a SYSTEM that benefits from your distrust.

👉🏽 Full reflection + context in my latest blog: https://www.funkyforest.com.au/blog/natures-compass-honouring-hunger-fullness-and-the-healing-power-of-nature

Ahimsa often gets flattened in Western yoga spaces into one instruction:“If you want to practise non-harm, go vegetarian...
10/12/2025

Ahimsa often gets flattened in Western yoga spaces into one instruction:

“If you want to practise non-harm, go vegetarian… or (even “better”), vegan.” 🤨

But ahimsa is far older, deeper, and more nuanced than a dietary rule.
And I say this with respect and lived experience (knowing some folks won’t agree):

For some, veganism is non-harm.
For others, it creates harm.
Both can be true.

I became vegetarian (and later vegan) through compassion.
My first degree was Veterinary Science. I adored animals. But compassion wasn’t the whole story.

At the same time, I was working as a promo chick:
a job where my appearance determined whether I got shifts.

Add lifelong perfectionism, “top of the class” conditioning, and purity culture in some yoga spaces, and you get a nervous system primed for restriction.

Yoga didn’t cause my ED.
Veganism didn’t cause it.
But the way these ideas landed on a vulnerable system abso-fu***ng-lutely contributed.

What started as kindness slowly became control.
Devotion became disappearing.

My body paid the price:
injuries, constant cold, brittle hair, digestive shutdown, losing my period for a year, and a full-blown restrictive ED.

This is why nuance reeeeeally matters.

Ahimsa isn’t a food rule.
It isn’t about purity.
It isn’t about shrinking.

Ahimsa is whatever reduces harm for your body -
whatever keeps you nourished, present, and whole.

For some, that’s plant-based living.
For others, it’s eating enough, letting go of food morality, resting, softening the belly, reclaiming pleasure, refusing to disappear.

Your ahimsa doesn’t have to look like mine.
And that’s the whole point.

🌿 If this speaks to you, the Body As Earth Retreat waitlist is open.
Comment or DM Ahimsa and I’ll send you the link 🙌🏽

I didn’t start out as a weight-neutral practitioner.My first job as a dietitian was selling weight loss, strict calorie-...
25/11/2025

I didn’t start out as a weight-neutral practitioner.

My first job as a dietitian was selling weight loss, strict calorie-restricted diets, and “detoxes” in a colonic hydrotherapy clinic… served with a generous side of orthorexia and healthism.

I thought I was helping. Many of my clients felt I was, and I’m not dismissing the ways I may have helped. But looking back, I can see that I was also doing some serious fu***ng harm.

I also had my own disordered eating and diet mentality at the time… and research shows this is extremely common among nutrition and dietetics students.
📌 Up to 32% are at high risk of eating disorders
📌 23-89% show symptoms of orthorexia
(Budhiwianto et al., 2023)

And a recent scoping review found a relatively high prevalence of orthorexia among both dietitians and dietetic students. (Ephrem et al., 2025)

Most of us enter this field unhealed, perfectionistic, and deeply vulnerable to diet culture… both in ourselves and our clients.

My turning point came when I realised I was contributing to the very suffering I wanted to alleviate.
That’s when I dove more into mindful eating, Yoga psychology & Buddhist philosophy, then intuitive eating, HAES, trauma-informed care, weight-neutral naturopathy, and decolonising frameworks… all of which became part of my own recovery.

Today, my practice centres:
🌿 health gain over weight loss
🌿 harm reduction
🌿 ED/DE screening
🌿 clinical nutrition without weight stigma
🌿 autonomy + informed consent
🌿 nuance, always nuance!!

And now it’s my mission to bring this work to naturopaths, herbalists, and holistic practitioners… so fewer clients are harmed and more people receive care that is actually safe, human, and evidence-aligned.

✨ Practitioners - want to deepen this journey?
DM GUIDE and I’ll send you my free resource:
Working With Clients With Disordered Eating for Naturopaths (and other holistic health praccies).



References:
Budhiwianto et al. (2023). Global prevalence of EDs in nutrition/dietetic students.
Ephrem et al. (2025). Orthorexia nervosa in dietitians and dietetic students.

20/11/2025

I’m not anti-weight loss…
I AM anti-harm.

A lot of people come to me wanting weight loss: for fertility, mobility, comfort, GP recommendations, personal confidence, or simply to feel more at home in their body.

I don’t shut that down. I get reeeeally curious about it.

But I also don’t jump into calorie deficits, fasting windows, carb-cutting, or anything that risks malnutrition, stress, or disordered eating.

My job is safety first.
🔸 Are they already undereating?
🔸 Has a GLP-1 flatlined their appetite?
🔸 Is cortisol high and sleep trashed?
🔸 Is there a DE/ED history?
🔸 Are they actually malnourished despite appearance or weight?

If the red flags are there… weight loss is not the safest thing to chase.

And when it is seemingly safe?
We talk honestly.
I can’t guarantee they’ll lose X kilos.
I can’t promise their body will do what they want it to do.
My focus is health gain - that’s the approach recommended by the RACGP, NEDC, and Size Inclusive Health Australia.

If weight changes, ok.
If it doesn’t, we’ve still improved their health.

Most people appreciate this transparency. They want honesty, safety, attunement, and someone who isn’t going to push them into malnutrition to chase a number.

And for the 2% of people who truly want a strict deficit (I screen my clients so this % isn’t particularly high for me) I walk them through informed consent: the risks of weight-centric VS weight-neutral approaches.

If weight loss is STILL their #1 priority and they just want to see those numbers go down, I refer out with zero shame.

Choice and consent matter.

✨ If you’re a practitioner wanting to navigate this with nuance - without ideology or harm - DM GUIDE and I’ll send you my free resource.

It’s packed with tools to help you:
🌿 screen for ED/DE safely
🌿 identify malnutrition even in larger bodies
🌿 support clients on GLP-1s without underfeeding
🌿 avoid iatrogenic harm
🌿 stay aligned with Australian guidelines
🌿 build a weight-inclusive practice that’s actually nuanced

DM GUIDE and I’ll send it straight to you 💛



🎵 Soundtrack by a very loud frog 🐸

18/11/2025

Wellness is overflowing with binaries right now.
Hot takes. Shock-value contrarianism. “Just do the opposite.”
As if rebellion = simply reacting in the other direction.
But that’s not “sovereignty”! 🤡
It’s not discernment.
It’s def not critical thinking.

Naomi Klein writes about this “mirror world” effect, where each side defines itself only by opposing the other. Wellness has absorbed that same dynamic:
natural vs medical, intuition vs evidence, purity vs toxicity…
as if those are the only two lanes available.

And the algorithm rewards it.
Quick dopamine. Punchy extremes. Faux certainty.
Honestly it’s pretty fu**ed.

But real healing (and real integrity) lives in the messy middle.
In the compost. The contradictions.
The place where you pause long enough to ask:
“Is this actually mine? Or am I just reacting?”

This is something Miriam Latif and I talked about deeply in our latest conversation: the pressure to turn complexity into clickbait, and how nuance is becoming radical in a culture addicted to certainty.

Because nuance IS the new rebellion.
And my perhaps overly radical thought 😂 is that it’s the only way forward.

✨ Listen to the full episode: Beyond the Binaries with Miriam Latif. Anywhere you get podcasts. Link also in bio.

This one is deeply personal.Growing up mixed-race in a mostly white town, I learned early that food, body and belonging ...
17/11/2025

This one is deeply personal.

Growing up mixed-race in a mostly white town, I learned early that food, body and belonging weren’t separate things: they were all shaped by the same colonial gaze.

Food shame wasn’t “kids being kids.”
It was racialised conditioning.
It was my mum’s poverty and scarcity being framed as “strange,” “smelly,” or “less than.”
It was the belief that the only “right” way to eat, look, or exist was the white way.

Colonialism has always had a talent for extracting what it finds exotic (spices, dishes, herbs, labour, whole cuisines…) and for discarding the people who created them.

It devours the flavour, then rejects the bodies.
This is food shame as colonial violence.
Many of us carry it in our bones.

My mum’s story of surviving on very little in Malaysia, and my story of growing up mixed in small-town North Queensland, collided in my body in ways I’m still untangling today.

Scarcity became thrift…
Thrift became discipline…
Discipline became disordered eating.

All of it rooted in a system that said our food, our faces, our accents, our families were “wrong.”

Healing, for me, came from naming the system, rather than blaming my body.
From reclaiming the foods my mum raised me on.
And (eventually) refusing to shrink.
And from community and belonging, not from assimilation (tried it, didn’t work).

If any of this hits something inside you, the full article is on my blog. And just yesterday it was published by .net.au 🙏🏽

Your story matters.
Your mum’s story matters.
Your food belongs.
You belong.

🌏 Colonialism, Food, Body & Belonging
[Link in bio / comments]

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We focus on wellbeing, not weight.

Evidence-based, holistic, compassionate healthcare for EVERY body.

Dietitian | Nutritionist | Naturopath | Yoga | Bodywork

www.funkyforest.com.au

The people who often come to see us often say they want/need to lose weight.