Everyday Eating

Everyday Eating offers specialised counselling, therapy, and support to children and their families. Using play-based therapy and food education sessions, they aim to improve health outcomes and foster positive eating behaviours.

A Paediatric Dietitian with experience in nutrition research, Alecia uses a holistic approach when assessing and managing children. When we consider the whole child, we ensure education and feeding therapy are tailored around each individual’s strengths and challenges.

As a trained Sequential Oral Sensory (SOS) Therapist, Alecia can assess children with feeding difficulties and provide education and feeding therapy. Her passion is developing a mindful and intuitive eating style that promotes long-term health. She encourages positive relationships between her young clients and their families regarding food and eating.

Alecia’s nutrition research at the University of Newcastle covers a variety of topics, including improving healthy food purchases in primary schools, and improving child diets in early childhood care and education settings.

Being a mother to three little ones who constantly remind her to enjoy the simple pleasures of life, she enjoys gardening and cooking together with her family and values the way food brings people together.

Based in Warners Bay, Alecia offers telehealth consultations and local home visits.

Services Offered

Maternal Nutrition

During pregnancy, fertility, and postpartum, nutrition plays an important role. 

Women who seek maternal nutrition consultations receive detailed assessments of their nutritional intake as well as education on:

• Choosing the right foods prior to conception, during pregnancy, and postpartum
• Healthy weight maintenance
• Dietary management for PCOS and Gestational Diabetes
• What foods to avoid
• Which supplements to take
• Snack and meal ideas
• Motivational strategies

Childhood Nutrition

In the early years of life, joyful exposure to food, experimentation, and role modelling with food are positive eating experiences. They promote growth, development, and optimal nutrition. 

Children with sensory processing disorders, oral-motor and motor skill weaknesses, as well as food allergies or intolerances, may experience difficulties eating. Children with feeding difficulties are often more than just picky and need additional support and therapy to improve their ability to eat and their relationship with food.

Below are some areas Alecia can help you with:

• Body awareness, mindful eating
• Dietary allergy
• Gastrointestinal sensitivity
• Growth problems
  
  • Undernutrition, growth faltering, stunting
• Infant feeding
• Overnutrition, overweight, obesity
  
  • Feeding challenges, food aversion picky eating
• Sensory processing challenges
  
  • Motor / postural stability challenges (supported by Occupational Therapist)
  • Oral-motor challenges (supported by Speech Therapist)

Nutrition consultations for children include:

• Cognitive development
• Dietary intake
• Digestion
• Growth
• Medical information
• Motor skills, posture
• Nutritional status
• Oral-motor skills
• Relationship with food and eating
• Sensory processing responses

Family Nutrition

Everyday Eating aims to encourage families to eat nutritiously and enjoy their meals. It involves connecting as a family, strengthening trust, and modelling behaviour. 

Despite busy lives and feeding challenges, they can help families enjoy family meals again by providing strategies for getting everyone involved.

Nutrition consultations for families include advice on:

• Creating calmer mealtimes
• Catering to each family member’s dietary needs
• Cooking one meal for the entire family
• Allowing children to participate in meal planning, grocery shopping, and cooking
• Planting a vegetable garden
• Maintaining nutritious lunches for your children
• Dining out with children
• Checking in to increase body awareness
• Goal setting

Contact Alecia to schedule your consultation today!