About
Kymber
I’m a functional nutritionist, a somatic health coach, a trauma-informed neurosomatic intelligence coach, and a big health science nerd. I’m also a girl who’s spent most of her life navigating chronic illness, trauma, dysregulation, and fitting the puzzle pieces together. I’m someone who’s here to help you heal and to navigate it all with you.
My work is geared towards helping women eat, function, and live in ways that resolve their symptoms and cater to greater self-understanding, regulation, and sanity. Through my years of nutrition science education, coach training, somatics, and real-world experience, I have found that food and lifestyle choices offer THE greatest levers to the sanity we’re all seeking.
Over the past few years, I’ve also discovered some of the greatest tools for creating lasting health improvements – somatics and nervous system regulation work.
I was failed by our healthcare system and sympathetic-driven culture early in life and I had to take my health into my own hands. I grew up struggling with mental and physical symptoms for which modern medicine and even therapy couldn’t help and I had no larger context to place these struggles within & no coach to guide me back to my body at the time. Through years of trial and error, suffering, and repeating the same patterns over and over… I developed the strength & clarity to make lasting changes in my own health and thus those of hundreds of women I’ve worked with privately. Through my personal work, I’ve been able to change long-term patterns with body dysmorphia, bulimia, depression, anxiety, ADHD, and have found relief from multiple physiological issues. I have also learned to recognize my own nervous system patterns, CPTSD, and attachment insecurities and the roles these have played in my relationship struggles and health conditions.
Now I coach.
Through my professional work, I continue to help other women along similar paths of health & self-discovery — using nutrition, lifestyle, and nervous system regulation tools to develop strength, sanity, and more freedom in their lives. I am in no way perfect or completely healed myself – despite my professional skills and experience, I am in the trenches with you, ever the vulnerable woman, figuring out how to best be well.
I Most Value: Mother Nature and the lessons she constantly teaches us. Embodiment, somatics, and learning how to regulate and co-regulate my nervous system. Science and its various health applications & insights. Regenerative farms, ranches, and all the places which bring us back to our food sources. Eating whole animals and plants like our ancestors did. Self-care rituals. Animal Protein. Physical Intimacy and secure attachment. Moving my body and getting stronger through strength training. Feeling like a woman and embracing all that this means and uncovers. Deep connections with other humans and conversations which can heal and change the world. Coaching and asking my clients questions that help them view their health differently. Evolutionary and historical perspectives towards health and behavior. Geeking out over health science!
Human sexuality. laughter. Coffee. YOU.
Qualifications & Training
1. Training Programs I’ve Completed
NeuroSomatic Intelligence Coaching Program
This training program was the most powerful and unique training program I’ve ever taken and a first of its kind. It is a 3-month intensive into human nervous system functions, neuroscience, and applied neurology. Ran by experts in the fields of applied neurology, the founders of this program firmly believe that all aspects of human health and behavior can be changed and improved when we learn to understand and work with the nervous system, through utilizing applied neurology, a field previously made available mainly to high-end athletes and those suffering from severe pain disorders. The program combined neuroscience education, practice drills using applied neurology, and group discussions around ways to integrate and apply everything that we learned each week. The goal of this training is to offer what has previously only been available to those listed above to the general population since nervous system regulation is something every single individual needs. I have taken this training and applied it to the private nutrition consulting and health coaching work that I do with women, to better help them address the areas of their health that are being impacted most by a brain stuck in survival mode.
Somatic Attachment Coaching Certification
I went through the Somatic Attachment Coaching program offered at Embody Lab. This is a 5-month online certification program that goes over all aspects of human attachment and addresses the many factors that can disrupt healthy attachment, from environmental disruptions in the home to biological sensitivities that affect secure attachment to cultural and social trauma that affects healthy development and family structures. It offers a plethora of skills, practices, and tools for me to utilize to best assist my clients with their attachment needs and has brought another layer to my coaching work. My career and education background before nutrition and health coaching was in early child development and infant/birthwork, therefore, working with adult attachment patterns was an easy and familiar transition and only built upon my previous knowledge of human safety and security, beginning in the womb. The somatic aspect of this program placed an important emphasis on the many ways that attachment shows up in the nervous system and the brain and is therefore not something we can simply override with our conscious mind. It must be worked with in the same way that trauma must be worked with – slowly, patiently, subtly, and with the utmost respect and care.
Somatic Parts Work Certification
I went through the Somatic Parts Work Certification program offered through the Embody Lab. This was a self-study course that I completed in a little under two months and have since integrated into my coaching and personal healing work over the past year. Having been greatly influenced by my personal work with a coach who offered parts work, I knew I wanted to offer this to my clients. Derived from the IFS model, this particular training program focused specifically on how our parts show up in the body – in symptoms, illness, and bodily sensations. In the felt sense. This fits perfectly with the health coaching and other somatic trauma therapies that I’ve since been trained in and has proven invaluable with countless clients throughout our sessions, as self-healing work inevitably uncovers many of our protector parts and the more vulnerable parts that exist to protect. It is a deeply spiritual way of integrating so many aspects of the self which we often ignore, repress, gaslight, and fight against, which I’ve found to be a key to long-term healing for many of us.
NARM Training & certification
NARM (NeuroAffective Relational Model) is a comprehensive training program designed to address Complex Post-Traumatic Disorder. It includes both bottom-up (somatic) and top-down (talk and other cognitive applications) approaches to understanding, recognizing, and working on an ongoing basis with different manifestations of CPTSD. The training program is online and international and goes through each developmental stage which trauma can disrupt and the adaptive survival styles that manifest as a result of this disruption. It helped me to understand ACE Scores (Adverse Childhood Experiences) and how a woman’s ACE often correlates and contributes to her health struggles and other life challenges. This program helped me better understand and recognize my own ACEs and CPTSD and the ways that these patterns have manifested in my health and relationships over the years. This program radically changed the way I approach health coaching and helped me to better recognize the role that shame plays in so many of our patterns and struggles as adults. I am currently in their ongoing extended training group for practitioners and will continue to deepen my skills in this model.
Integrative Health Coaching
Went through the Institute of Integrative Nutrition program. This gave me a greater sense of what it means to be a coach vs. just a nutritionist and placed a lot of emphasis on the nonfood-related aspects to healing, such as community and lifestyle choices. It also offers lectures from some of the most inspiring leaders in the worlds of health, nutrition, science, personal development, food industry, media, and business – helping us to see the common thread underlying all of these areas of life.
Holistic Nutrition Consultant
Attended the nutrition consultant program through Bauman College – a highly respected nutrition and culinary school located both in CA and online. This program provided a more scientific and comprehensive understanding of the ways which custom tailored whole foods diets can heal the human body from most chronic conditions and the ways to live a preventative lifestyle using the right foods.
Holistic Health Practitioner Program
Upon leaving college in my early twenties, I moved to San Francisco and went through a year-long holistic health practitioner certification program. This program provided me with the foundations for everything from holistic paradigm shifts in our ways of viewing health to nutrition, aromatherapy, herbal therapies, and touch therapies like massage.
Associates of Science (AS)
With the intention of transferring into a dietetics program and going on to receive my dietetics license, I went through the required science prerequisites, which included two years of basic and advanced anatomy & physiology, biology, chemistry, and genetics classes and lab work. Upon time to begin applying to programs, I had a change of heart and chose a private nutrition school instead. However, these science foundations have proven invaluable in understanding and applying all nutritional theories hereafter.
2. SEMINARS I’VE ATTENDED
Vagus Nerve Decompression Course With Melanie Weller
Polyvagal Theory: Neural Exercises for Safety and Connection with Dr. Porges
IHH-UCSF Symposium on the Paleo Approach and Functional Medicine
Microbiome Medicine Summit
3. ONGOING EDUCATION
One of the most exciting aspects of my work as a healthcare practitioner is the pace at which science is evolving and the access I have to brilliant out-of-the-box experts, past & present, whose work continues to inform and broaden my own. Below are a few of these experts who have contributed immensely to my personal understanding of health.
Dr. Gabor Mate
Peter Levine, PhD
Ray Peat, PhD
Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC
Broda Barnes, MD
KYMBER’S CORE VALUES
What I Stand For
Freedom
We’re usually raised with a limited sense of what’s possible, of what we can achieve, and of who we are. This creates all kinds of problems and obstacles in our lives. I want to live in a world where we can all create the lives which we truly want and can bust through our unnecessary limitations.
Health
Healing from chronic illness has been one of my greatest teachers and I believe good health is the access point to all growth. I find a lot of value in applying an evolutionary perspective to health, behavior, and cultural issues. I believe it’s our birthright to feel good and to function optimally. Chronic illness and mediocre genes does not have to be our destiny!
Depth
We’re all onions. We need all of our layers. The most shallow person has depths we may not be able to see and the most deeply felt person can still focus on shallow concerns. I bring depth to the table and feel most alive in environments where I can access any and all layers necessary. A lot of healing involves digging below the surface – biologically, historically, emotionally, spiritually, psychologically.
Nature
A lot of problems in health and society come when we remove ourselves from nature and forget how much we need the earth and natural elements. We need them for basic biological health, but also for psychological and spiritual health. We need the soil, the sun, clean waters, open spaces, trees, rain, healthy oceans, and a connection to the animals we consume.
Truth
Truth is the greatest and yet most challenging of all my values. We live in a world that gives us incentives and encouragement towards dishonesty & imbellishment — in small & big ways. Being truthful with the world means being truthful with ourselves, made possible through practices such as mindfulness meditation, self-inquiry, and understanding various fields like psychology, neuroscience, and human behavioral studies. Seeking to be truthful and to find truth is noble and valuable, even when we know it is elucive and subject to change. It is the ultimate commitment and the underlying drive of the scientific method.
Self-Awareness
I see that in this culture we’re constantly pulled outward and told what to think, buy, say, do, believe. What is normal, what is acceptable, what is right, appropriate, normal, healthy. Indoctrination from such an early age that before we know it, we don’t know what we truly stand for! Self-awareness is not a destination, it’s an infinite process and healing requires a commitment to this process.