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

19/02/2026

I’m seeing this in clinic a lot lately.

Women genuinely anxious because their period was a few days late.
Because they had a drink one Friday night.
Because they didn’t ovulate one month during a stressful season.
Because their chart wasn’t “perfect.”

That’s not body literacy. That’s pressure. 🤯

Cycles shift. They just do.
They respond to stress. To how much you’re eating. To how safe your nervous system feels.
To travel, grief, illness, life.

Ovulation isn’t proof you’re “doing womanhood correctly.”
It’s a signal. That’s it.

And I think we need to be careful about some very loud online narratives that define “optimal female health” almost entirely through fertility.

Women are more than their reproductive capacity.
You can care about fertility without turning your body into a performance metric.

Bodies need wiggle room.

They need enough carbs in the luteal phase.
They need flexibility.
They really, REALLY need safety.
They’re not report cards.

Let’s skip the black and white BS, and keep it nuanced.

18/02/2026

This week in clinic I’ve had multiple conversations about medication shame.

SSRIs.
Statins.
ADHD meds.
GLP-1s.

The whispering tone. The apology. The “I should be able to do this naturally.”

This isn’t necessarily about the meds.
It’s about purity.

Wellness culture quietly tells us that needing pharmacological support means we didn’t try hard enough. That if we were disciplined, regulated, healed, enlightened etc we wouldn’t need it.

That narrative is soooo heavy.

I’ve needed medication to breathe. Not metaphorically, but literally.

Over time with integrative support (herbs etc) my symptoms settled. But in that acute phase, medication kept me safe (and probs alive).

Health isn’t a moral performance.
Medication can be protective.

It can stabilise risk. It can buy time. It can support quality of life.

And YES - we can integrate it thoughtfully with nutrition, herbs, lifestyle and monitoring.

This isn’t pharma worship.
It’s grown-up medicine.

If you’ve been quietly carrying shame about needing medication, you’re not alone.

And if you’re a practitioner navigating this tension with clients, let’s choose integration over ideology.

✨ Save or share if this resonates.

Over the past 14 years as a dietitian - and more recently as a naturopath - I’ve seen how often disordered eating forms ...
16/02/2026

Over the past 14 years as a dietitian - and more recently as a naturopath - I’ve seen how often disordered eating forms part of the clinical picture in natural health settings.

Not instead of gut or hormone concerns.
But INTERTWINED with them.

And I’ve also seen how abysmally little structured training we receive to navigate that safely.

This pivot isn’t about abandoning holistic care…

It’s about strengthening it.

Through early identification, harm reduction, scope clarity and collaborative practice.

If you’re a practitioner who wants to work in this space with more confidence, less burnout, and less fear of getting it wrong - I’m building something for you…

https://www.funkyforest.com.au/disordered-eating-for-naturopaths.html

📸 by Emelia Ebejer .littlewild

Holding more than one truth at once is uncomfortable. It’s also where growth lives.
15/02/2026

Holding more than one truth at once is uncomfortable. It’s also where growth lives.

14/02/2026

🐝 Let’s just bloody well say it..
A lot of “wellness diets” are just disordered eating with better branding.

Carnivore.
Primal and paleo diet culture.
Extreme pro-metabolic.
Whole30 cycles.
Clinical weight-loss programs pretending they’re about “metabolic healing”.

Most don’t teach:
• adequacy
• regular eating
• metabolic safety
• body trust
• critical thinking (the nutritional science touted is shaky AF or built on partial truths with some wild s**t thrown in for good measure)

They teach:
Control.
Fear.
Moral hierarchy around food.
Identity built around restriction.

And then we act shocked when clients develop:
• food anxiety
• binge/restrict cycles – oscillating from “being good and pure” to “eating badly, doing all the toxic things”
• fear of carbs or whole food groups (such as grains, legumes, nightshades, etc)
• fear of hunger.

Disordered eating is not just individual psychology.
It is being actively manufactured and sold.
And yes - parts of the wellness industry (including health practitioners) participate in that.

We can do better than this.

If you want to learn how to identify disordered eating early - and not accidentally reinforce it -
👉 Join my waitlist for Disordered Eating for Natural Health Practitioners (nats, nuts, herbies and students all welcome): https://www.funkyforest.com.au/disordered-eating-for-naturopaths.html

10/02/2026

For a long time, I didn’t know diet culture had a name.

What I knew was purity. Discipline. Being “good.” Being “low-tox.” 🤔

I learned those values through spiritual and wellness spaces loooong before I ever encountered feminism, non-diet work, or the idea that shrinking yourself wasn’t a moral requirement.

Yoga, vegetarianism, eating whole foods, service, even self-denial… none of these are inherently harmful. But when they’re embedded in systems that reward obedience, control women’s bodies, and frame hunger or rest as weakness, they can quietly feed disordered eating.

BTW… This isn’t about vegan vs meat, clean vs dirty, ancestral vs modern… it’s about whether purity and hierarchy are doing the organising.

Purity culture has deep historical roots: in patriarchy, in white supremacy, in fascist ideas about discipline, hierarchy, and control. When those values leak into wellness, harm doesn’t look dramatic or malicious.

It looks normal. It looks ethical. It looks “healthy.”

This is why my work is political.

And why I teach practitioners to zoom out, not moralise.

You can’t support disordered eating recovery safely if you only focus on the food, and refuse to examine the systems that taught people how to relate to their bodies in the first place.

09/02/2026

Let’s stop pretending diet culture is just a bad vibe from the 90s.

It’s built on older, heavier systems:
purity culture
white supremacy
patriarchy
fascist ideas about discipline, hierarchy, and control

That’s why it keeps shape-shifting.
Calories.. carbs… seed oils.. inflammation… primal protocols… “metabolic healing”
Different language. Same old logic:

A “good” body vs a “failed” one.
Obedience framed as health.
Fear sold as care.

And when Health practitioners don’t interrogate this (and actually advocate for and sell this)… we end up reinforcing disordered eating, just with better branding and letters after our names.

You can love natural medicine and reject body control.
You can be anti-diet and anti-conspiracy.
You can practise nuance without losing your integrity.

I didn’t leave diet culture just to join a different cult.

✨ If you’re a practitioner who feels the tension between loving this profession and being worried about where it’s heading… join the waitlist for Disordered Eating for Naturopaths https://www.funkyforest.com.au/disordered-eating-for-naturopaths.html

We go into the systems and the clinical skills needed to actually keep people safe.

Slapped on some lippy and earrings and recorded from bed today as I’m recovering from a medical procedure ❤️‍🩹


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-f**king-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 🙌🏽

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 🐸

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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.