Woman of the Week: Meghan Telpner

by Kelsey Rolfe

Being a nutritionista wasn’t her first choice. But, as the bubbly Meghan Telpner, owner of The Love In The Kitchen Academy, tells it, a story like hers isn’t exactly unusual.

Telpner graduated from Ryerson University’s School of Fashion, and immediately after made plans to go to Africa. However, she said, after receiving her vaccinations for the trip, she was “sicker than [she’d] ever been in [her] life.”

She left for Africa still dealing with health issues, but remained sick for the entirety of her trip. When she returned, Meghan got a job in advertising — through an awkward date — and, still unwell, went from doctor to doctor, trying to figure out what was wrong.

“Through the process it took three years and nineteen doctors,” she said. “I was so sick that they finally sent me for [a] test, and they diagnosed me with Crohn’s disease, which at the time I was told was incurable.”

Crohn’s disease, an inflammatory bowel disease, usually affects the intestines, and though the exact cause is unknown, the condition is linked with problems in the immune system. Essentially, with Crohn’s disease, the immune system cannot tell the difference between normal body tissue and foreign substances, so it becomes overactive and leads to chronic inflammation.

“I was twenty-six at the time, I had this cute boyfriend in England, and my worst fear was that I was going to have one of these surgeries where I’m left with a colostomy bag outside my body that collects my poo, so I [thought] ‘this just can’t happen,’” she said. “At that point I was too sick to work, so I’d actually quit my job, and decided to take a three month sabbatical...to see if I could get myself healthy.”

From there Telpner moved to California to see an acupuncturist — “doctor number nineteen” — and with a combination of acupuncture, yoga, walking, and meditating, she was “one hundred per cent symptom free” within a month.

In the process, she also learned to cook. “I decided that if my digestive tract was going to be affected by what passed through it, I would eat one hundred per cent whole food made from scratch — I wanted to know absolutely everything that I was eating. So I started going to farmer’s markets and discovering things like kale, which I’d never heard of before.”

After Telpner’s self-imposed sabbatical, she said she was “healthier than [she’d] ever been in [her] life.” She had no plans to go back to advertising, and instead enrolled herself in nutrition school, and attained her certification.

“When I finished that, I decided I was never [going to] apply for a job again — it was sort of my main driving force. I didn’t want to work for anybody, I didn’t want to put in face time at an office.”

From that train of thought came The Love In The Kitchen Academy. Telpner, who was looking for “the most fun job,” wanted to have people over for dinner parties, or go on holidays to lead retreats, and make that her living. “So everything I did...was about how to develop that into the business that I now have.”

These days, Telpner is leading cooking classes in her Parkdale converted loft, and retreats in the sunny St. Lucia. “[The retreats are] sort of like these immersion, healthy living experiences, where we stay in an organic estate, everything we eat is off the property, everything’s made from scratch,” she said. As well, she leads yoga, and meditation in the morning, nutrition sessions, and visits to different places on the island.

The always-fashionable nutritionista is also making headway as an author: she was recently signed to McClelland & Stewart to publish her first book, The UnDiet,which will show up in book stores in 2013.

To find out more about Meghan Telpner and The Love In The Kitchen Academy, check out her website.