Liza Twohill

I’m classified as a Naturopath,

that’s my formal training, however since then I’ve done lots of other training in regards to what we call Functional Medicine or Nutritional Medicine, which is looking at how your body is functioning rather than treating just the disease state.

I specialise in lots of gut problems. Working with traditional

medicine, we look at how the ecology or digestion is working, and we do lots of testing.

The tools to my trade are

definitely ‘change in lifestyle’ and ‘dietary intake’ using high-end nutrients like pro-biotics, and using things such as herbs to kill off ‘bad bugs’. It’s not a quick fix, it’s all about getting to the underlying reason why a person’s health is not particularly great.

I got into natural health because I just thought everyone

must have been into it! I grew up in a very healthy family. We always used both complementary health and orthodox medicines, so it just made sense to me. I’m very good with people and I’m fascinated by the human body.

Why do you think there so many people with allergies and problems? We have a lot

more foods now that are so far removed from nature. Once you highly process any food and then add additives, you don’t know what that is doing to the body.

We are choosing foods that are not designed for our genetics,

for example, we’re not designed to have lots of sugar, salt and flour products. If you eat them every day you just get addicted to them. Humans are designed to eat certain animal proteins, but you don’t need to eat a lot. We are designed to get those amino acids from meat rather than vegetable sources because of the way our gut is designed, however we should also eat a high vegetable intake diet.

The most rewarding part of my work is seeing someone enjoy life again. The people

who have debilitating digestion issues, and who are sick and fatigued to a stage where they can’t function, (with ailments such as) chronic gut and fatigue issues, you take them on the journey to try to improve that.

Life is too short to feel sick.

There’s so much out there to do in the world, and to drag yourself around being miserable and in pain is awful. z Liza works at Macquarie Natural Health, Dubbo Specialist and Rehabilitation Centre