ABOUT MONIQUE

Monique Jephcote is an Accredited Practising Dietitian, Certified Intuitive Eating Counsellor, Credentialed Eating Disorder Clinician, Health At Every Size (HAES) Registered Provider, Sports Dietitian & Personal Trainer.

Monique is the founder & director of the ‘Centre For Intuitive Eating’ (CFIE), which existed as a physical brick and mortar Private Practice in Australia, Tweed Heads, NSW from 2019-2023, with Monique, alongside a team of other passion driven Dietitians she brought on board, working together to provide 1:1 consultation to those seeking support through Intuitive Eating Counselling, Eating Disorder Recovery Treatment, Body Image Support, or General Dietetic Care through a non-diet lens. CFIE was founded to meet what Monique saw as a gap in service delivery in the local area (i.e. limited existing and experienced eating disorder providers in the Northern Rivers NSW), providing, alongside her team, compassionate and empathetic driven care to children, teenagers and adults to help them move toward a comfortable relationship with food, movement, their bodies, and selves, in a society fuelled by diet culture and unrealistic body ideals.

In 2023, Monique closed the doors to the physical brick and mortar Private Practice of CFIE, and pivoted CFIE to exist as an online business. The primary focus from 2023 for CFIE is in diving deep into advocacy work with an intention/mission to provide more/further reach to assist with prevention of eating disorders & body disconnection. The way in which CFIE exists from 2023 to do this, is through offering educational and awareness talks to schools, gyms, within health professional groups, medical clinics, fitness teams, general population groups, and as a guest speaker on podcasts, regularly talking all things: Intuitive Eating, Health at Every Size, Non-Diet Nutrition, Body Image, Eating Disorder Awareness and Healing from Diet Culture. Monique’s workshops, presentations and talks focus on helping general population groups and health professionals alike understand why our culture’s obsession with micromanaging weight and achieving the body ideal at the time is harmful to people’s physical and mental health, and how to approach food & body size in a radically different way that leads to far better outcomes in the long term. Monique is currently working on a series of courses & resources to help extend the reach in regards to education surrounding these topics.

Monique has worked as a Dietitian in the Outpatient Eating Disorders Day Program and Inpatient Eating Disorders Day Program at Robina Private Hospital (RPH) since 2020, where she works alongside an exceptional team of expert Healthcare Professionals to assist and co-facilitate group therapy to those in recovery from an eating disorder (Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia Nervosa, Binge-Eating Disorder).

Monique was honoured to be listed as a finalist as Dietitian of the Year for the 2023 Allied Health Awards.

Monique has learnt that working with people with their bodies, with food/nutrition, movement, within health and mental health is intimate work & therefore does not take the honourable role of any of the roles she has undertaken over the years, and in the years to come from here, lightly.

Monique has always been passionate about creating change, about shedding light on perspectives and experiences that people may not have ever heard before. She holds a transparent approach in all domains and areas of her work, and comes from a compassionate and empathetic approach. Monique strongly believes that “nobody ever learnt when they felt like they were being taught a lesson”, and she often showcases her humanity by providing examples of times she has contributed to harm when she didn’t know what she knows now.

“We don’t know what we don’t know, & when we know more, we can do more, we can do better, so let’s do better, together.”

Monique is passionate about creating inclusive spaces, to allow people to show up as they are, and simply be met where-ever they are at. She feels that many of the spaces she has existed in so far, she has been able to meet this mission which she feels is a strong part of her life purpose. At the core of it, Monique feels her mission is to allow people to show up in the world as they are and as they exist in the here and now.

When Monique is not doing the above, you’ll find her by the Ocean, cooking, eating, writing, playing the piano, reading (Brene Brown’s books likely), spending time with family and friends, learning French (a recent undertaking so don’t greet beyond “Bonjour” just yet!), camping, in the outdoors, hanging out with some dogs somewhere, collecting crystals, travelling, meditating (Vipassana) or listening to Beyonce, Lizzo or some R’n’B.

“I grew up with quite a comfortable and intuitive relationship with food. My body never really shifted in terms of composition all that much. I grew up with a lot of privileges, namely, thin privilege. Food and eating were stress-free and enjoyable, and I didn’t associate food and what it would do to my body as a direct correlation; they were entirely separate entities and experiences to me.

When I finished school, I joined a gym for the first time and completed my certifications in Personal Training. I became completely immersed by the health & fitness industry and culture–where dieting, restrictions and excessive fixation on body image was normalised.

This is when things started to change for me. I entered competitive bodybuilding and went on a diet (i.e. restricted eating and/or eating to ‘look a certain way’) for the first time in my life. Coincidentally, I developed disordered eating tendencies for the first time, and my physical and mental health was significantly impacted by the turmoil I was putting it through. The easy, breezy care-free and connected Monique was no longer.

Food and eating became a disconnected experience, as did everything else in my life. I was only eating to look a certain way; to lose weight, become smaller, become leaner, become more toned. I had placed my self-worth entirely on these constructs, and it got destructive really, really quickly. Looking back through the lens of the experience and education I have accumulated over the years,  is evident that during these formers years in my late teens and early 20’s, I was struggling within the grasps of starvation syndrome as a result of significant disordered eating, which was more often than not, celebrated and encouraged by the environment I was surrounded by at the time.

During my degree, and more specifically post-university studies, I was exposed to the evidence-based frameworks such as Health at Every Size (HAES), the Non-Diet Approach, and Intuitive Eating. These learnings, coupled with a safe space in therapy to learn, unpack and process, healed my own disordered relationship with food, movement, my body, and my self-worth.

I believe there is no greater way to learn than through experience. I am grateful for my experiences up till now and am a big believer that we all have a ‘thread’– that is, something guiding us to the place we are meant to arrive at next. Without my own personal experiences entrenched in diet culture, body war, self-disconnection, disordered eating and food anxiety, I am not sure I would understand the people I sit with each day to the extent in which I feel I do.

There is literally nothing I love more than helping people to step away from diet culture, and instead, return home to themselves through the process of understanding diet culture, building body image resilience & generating radical body acceptance, building attunement & trust to ones unique appetite cues (supportive mechanisms in place for when attunement/trust is not possible/challenging), understanding non-diet nutrition education, & building a comfortable, more meaningful & connected relationship with movement.”