Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Phoebe Liebling. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Phoebe thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about the best advice you’ve ever given to a client? (Please note this response is for education/entertainment purposes only and shouldn’t be construed as advice for the reader)

Having worked in my field for a decade now I really enjoy the opportunities I have to reflect on my practice to date and the evolution I have undergone as a clinician. When I then come to mentor young practitioners who are just starting out on their journey this is the most valuable insight I have to give. My overwhelming realisation, especially in the last few years, is that ill health and poor wellbeing is fundamentally drive by disconnection from ourselves and our environments. This will manifest in different ways for different people but what I aim to give all of my clients and those who follow me on social media is a renewed ability to trust themselves. To be able to discern what their individual needs are from their diet and lifestyle habits, how to use that understanding to sift through the endless tsunami of information we are constantly bombarded with as to what ‘healthy’ is/should be, and how to be free and comfortable with the choices we make on a day to day basis.
There is no such thing as perfectionism in health, in fact the idea of seeking constant excellence is going to be the thing that undermines consistent and cumulative good. My aim is to empower through the lens of working with the law of averages. We want to invest in ourselves through multiple channels, swings the scales in our favour over time, and make sure to enjoy ourselves every step of the way.

Phoebe, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I am a Registered Nutritional Therapist who also happens to be a fully accredited Environmental geologist, what can I say I love to learn! I have run my own private practice for the last 8 years and utilise a functional medicine approach to help my clients achieve optimal wellness through dietary and lifestyle adaptations. I also use my clinical experience to educate and empower those who follow me on social media to be the masters of their own health as I strongly believe this is something we all deserve. All doctors should be teachers, they should explain the why behind their suggestions. Sadly however this is not always the case and it is my mission to change this.
I began as a specialist in oncology, supporting women through breast cancer treatment and beyond to mitigate the side effects the interventions have on systemic health and wellbeing. I left this field when I began my practice, not because I didn’t love it, but because I didn’t love it enough and such specialist care requires someone whose entire being is invested in it. Cancer treatment is such a personal path to tread with someone you have to be 110% with the person who invites you in, and after 2 years I realised I couldn’t do this ongoing.
My passions then led me to work in complex digestive health for a number of years, and this is something that still forms a cornerstone of my clinical work to date. Gut health is foundational to whole body wellbeing but there are so many facets beyond the actual functioning of the digestive system. The impact of dysfunction on mental health, the behavioural adaptations we make when there are reactions to foods that we can’t understand or pinpoint, the long ingrained habits we don’t even realise we’ve established around our eating that aren’t serving us, I love unwinding this web for people and giving them true freedom with food.
I have also established a name for myself in working adjunctively with orthodox medicine, helping people to understand when pharmaceutical intervention is necessary and when we can put in place practises that would allow them to decrease or even come off medications by remedying the root cause of their health issues. Cardiac and hormonal health are perfect examples of where this is incredibly effective as the understanding and approach to things like blood pressure, cholesterol and menopause are incredibly antiquated and this is whether a holistic approach really comes into its own.
Alongside my clinical work I have also acted as a consultant for brands and businesses for a number of years providing a number of services ranging from product development, educational writing, press pieces, practitioner training and market insight.
I find the combination of the 2 keeps my creative brain satisfied as clinical work is tough going emotionally and I need that outlet!

Training and knowledge matter of course, but beyond that what do you think matters most in terms of succeeding in your field?

There needs to be an element of resilience, and you also need to be very good at keeping your mouth shut! So firstly you need to understand how to compartmentalise. You will be invited into the depths of someone’s discomfort and you cannot let that infiltrate your psyche. Yes you must invest, you can empathise, you can use your own experiences in life to understand that person’s story but there is a line between you and them and for both you and your client’s wellbeing you must not allow that to blur. Your story is your own, and many practitioners will have a personal tale that led them to work in this field but that is not what your client is here for, they are here for you to help them. And similarly their story is not yours and at the end of the day you will absolutely ruminate on how you can best tailor your skills to help them, but you must also be able to turn off your professional self and go and live your personal life without their burdens on your shoulders.
My second point then relates to a mistake I often see practitioners making and that is to forget that if you listen properly someone will tell you what they need.
There is often a keenness to fix, and with functional medicine we see everything as interconnected so a cluster of symptoms could absolutely lead to a huge wealth of adaptations, interventions and suggestions for that person to do that would solve their issues. However if you don’t take a pause you won’t hear that the client in front of you does absolutely need to solve ‘X’ in the long run, but right now the thing that is most perturbing for them is ‘Y’. And if you then skip over this and give them all those mechanisms to solve X they won’t feel heard and the client to clinician rapport and trust won’t be established as it could have been. So yes, zipped lips until the person in front of you has fully finished their story, and then let them guide you rather than the other way around.

How’d you meet your business partner?

So I have the great pleasure and privilege at this point in my career to be the founder and director/co-director of 3 autonomous businesses. I have my nutrition practice/consultancy, a supplement company I run with my boyfriend, and then I have my passion project, a holistic health retreat business, which I run with my dear friend TeriAnn Carty and this is the one I will focus on here. TeriAnn and I met ~5 or 6 years ago through Instagram, she is an incredible food photographer, recipe developer and yoga teacher from Toronto, Canada, and I am me, born and bred in London, England.
We had followed each others work for a while and then naturally found ourselves chatting more consistently because we had similar interests, passions and goals. When the pandemic hit we both started walking on treadmills at home as we have a tendency to be Duracell bunnies with endless creative energy and the lockdown regulations weren’t going to stop us! And this naturally became the time that we would FaceTime each other and just chat.
To scan forward what we realised as our friendship developed was that we were both trying to provide people with the insight into themselves that we had gained through our own health and wellness journeys, and despite the languages we were using being different (hers relating to chakras and ayurvedic principles, mine taking elements of these and then combining them with more medical terminology) our key message was the same. And so we decided that what we would both love to do is take those who wanted to learn and put them in an environment where they got to experience what it truly feels like to be wholly well. Nourished from all angles. And thus The360 was born!
We run a number of international retreats per year, in early 2023 we hosted a group in Baja, Mexico, 2024 will see us in Nicaragua from January 27th – February 3rd and then in Kenya November 12th – 21st, and 2025 will then see another swathe of amazing adventures.
I have had the opportunity to form businesses at other points with other people and what I will always come back to is that when you know you know. And with TeriAnn and I we both just knew.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.naturalnourishment.me
• Instagram: @_naturalnourishment
• Other: http://your360.life