Holistic Nutritional Therapy Year

Holistic Nutritional Therapy Year

Course Overview

A deep training in holistic healing

This training gives you a range of skills to help clients holistically towards greater health or healing a range of common health problems. 

• Become a Holistic Nutritional Therapist, giving personally tailored dietary, lifestyle and exercise recommendations, along with emotional healing and life guidance when appropriate.
• Become a Healing Chef preparing plant based dishes and meals that are not only wildly colourful and tasty, but also designed to bring the body back into balance and health. Using particular ingredients, teas and recipes using food as medicine. Cook for retreats or teach your own cooking classes!
• Give Wellbeing Shiatsu bodywork treatments to relax, de-stress, and rebalance the body and mind. People love receiving healing body treatments! Shiatsu is received wearing light natural clothing, and can be given in many different settings.

With three different healing skills you can offer more effective and often faster healing of a range of health problems. You are not just offering dietary advice, lifestyle recommendations, or exercises or emotional support, but a combination of all of these for deeper and more effective healing. With a range of healing modalities you can help more people, and also build a complementary medicine business more quickly.

The IMS’s professional training is divided into three parts:

• Year 1 – Holistic Nutrition & Cooking Year (Holistic Nutrition Guide and Wholefood Chef).
• Year 2 – Holistic Nutritional Therapy Year (Holistic Nutritional Therapy, Healing Chef and Wellbeing Shiatsu).
• Year 3 – Advanced Holistic Nutritional Therapy Year (qualify as an Advanced Holistic Nutritional Therapist & Medicinal Cook)

Why is Holistic Nutritional Therapy so Effective?

Who Gives Holistic Nutritional Therapy

Holistic Nutritional Therapy Year

Why train for two years to become a Holistic Nutritional Therapist?

• This gives time for your own personal health transformation. The further you are on your path of self-healing and growth, the more you are able to help others follow the same footsteps.
• Time is needed to develop not just head knowledge, but practical wisdom on how to heal using a combination of good nutrition, healing cooking, bodywork, lifestyle changes and emotional healing.
• Offer specific dietary guidance, exercises and lifestyle changes to clients using Oriental medical principles.
• Develop your skills in three areas – nutrition and dietary advice, healing cooking, and wellbeing shiatsu bodywork, along with basic emotional healing.
• We support your own emotional healing during all our training courses, helping you to release old limiting emotions you are still holding from the past, and feel greater freedom and compassion for yourself and others.
• Become a complete healer, able to help people move to greater physical, emotional and spiritual health.

What You’ll Get

Holistic Nutritional Therapist

• Rather than just giving generally healthy diet and life advice, you will learn to use the best of Oriental and macrobiotic medicine to identify particular imbalances in people’s health.
• You can then give specific recommendations on how they can rebalance these areas to experience better health, more energy, a greater sense of wellbeing, and alleviate or heal many common health problems.
• You will be learning to look at a person’s whole physical, emotional and spiritual make up, and to identify the imbalances in organs or tissues where healing changes are needed.
• By learning the fundamental principles and skills of emotional counselling, you will be able to offer a safe space for clients to open emotional doors, heal and release old limiting beliefs.
• You will be practicing giving Holistic Nutritional Therapy sessions during class time and at home to build your skills and confidence.
• You will be receiving specific feedback on all your therapy sessions to rapidly build effective skills.

Healing Chef

• Learn to cook the healthiest plant based wholefood meals, including breakfasts, lunches, suppers, snacks and desserts.
• Learn to cook for all kinds of clients including baby food, children’s meals, families, and exclusion diets such as gluten free or low fibre.
• Study balanced meal planning, so meals contain all the physical nutrients we need, and are balanced energetically e.g. in warming and cooling, energising and relaxing, cleansing or building.
• Cook meals with a balance of all the Five Element energies, through your choice of ingredients, cooking styles, seasonings and tastes, for maximum health and satisfaction after eating.
• Identify clients’ health imbalances and learn to create specific dishes and meals to rebalance and bring healing.
• Practice over 120 plant based wholefood recipes in hands on cooking classes in our purpose built cooking school.
• Create your own ferments, with a range of plant based pickles.
• Cook healthy plant based dishes for birthdays, weddings and other special occasions.
• Develop your skills to cook for individuals, groups, events or in cafes and restaurants.
• You have the opportunity to assist our expert cooks catering for other groups and special events.

Wellbeing Shiatsu Practitioner

• Having learnt the meridian system and Do-in exercises in the Holistic Nutrition & Cooking Year course, you now learn to give shiatsu to the same meridians to bring healing to others.
• Shiatsu is received wearing light natural fibre clothing, lying on a futon on the floor.
• You will learn to use your hands to bring healing, through feeling the energetic imbalances in the meridians and body areas, and using gentle pressure and stretches to move the body’s Ki (life energy).
• You will learn to give full body treatments, working over all areas of the back and front of the body, arms and legs, as well as the neck and head.
• A 45 minute shiatsu session brings deep relaxation, enabling the body to go into a self-healing mode, and letting go of stress and tension.
• Giving shiatsu is very enjoyable, and for some highly addictive! It is like a moving meditation, practicing being in the present moment, feeling where the energy needs to move. You can feel as good as the client after giving a session!
• Clients often want weekly or fortnightly shiatsu, which is great for building an income from your complementary medicine practice.

Professional and Business Studies

• Learn professional ethics, to keep you and your clients safe.
• How to build the complementary health business you want, incuding how to promote yourself and being self employed.

Some graduates love working with individual clients, and set up giving Holistic Nutritional Therapy and Wellbeing Shiatsu practices. Others love to cook, and go for offering catering to individuals or on yoga and other health orientated retreats (where people just love really healthy balanced plant based meals!) Some have set up their own cooking schools offering healing cooking classes. You can follow your own passion in what you want to create for yourself.

Course structure

We offer this course fully residentially onsite at the school, or mostly online with two residential modules to develop practical skills.

The Residential Course

Consists of 31 days of teaching over 8 modules of 3 to 5 days.  Each module starts with dinner at 6.00pm on the first day, and ending at 3.00pm on Sunday.

There is a maximum of 10 students on this course to ensure that a high quality of personal guidance and support is offered throughout.

• Each day begins with do-in, breathing exercises, meditation, shiatsu or other embodiment practices
• Classes in all aspects of macrobiotic healing and plant-based cooking
• Oriental medicine and health diagnosis, personal development and emotional counselling training

Live practice is also an important element of the training. The course includes sessions with members of the public at the school receiving Holistic Nutritional Therapy sessions under our tutors guidance. Students love working in this real life situation with real people!

• Work with real clients in class and at home
• Supervision, personal guidance and feedback on every client session you give
• Envisioning and building your ideal business

The Online Course

Students study with the residential group in a hybrid course, attending most modules online using Zoom, and an onsite module at the beginning and end of the course school to learn practical subjects like Oriental diagnosis, healing cooking and shiatsu bodywork.

Why Study with the IMS?

As with our Holistic Nutrition & Cooking Year course, this training attracts people from all over Europe, north Africa and the Middle East, and our online course also appeals to those based in the USA. Our students are often wanting to change direction in life, develop a new career or add to existing professional skills. Many have gone on to create successful businesses as nutritional therapists, cooks, cooking teachers or Wellbeing Shiatsu practitioners. You can learn about what our graduates have achieved here.

You will be taught by a team of teachers led by Oliver Cowmeadow who has over 40 years experience of teaching as well as guiding thousands of students and clients towards greater health and is one of the country’s leading practitioners of macrobiotics. Find out more about Oliver and the other teachers for this course on our teachers page.

Other members of the team have all studied the full training at the school, and have gained wide practical experience through their own professional practice.

• We use a person-centred approach with an emphasis on embodied nutrition and the health and deep transformation of our students.
• Solid, in-depth training and practice-oriented study leading to confident and successful practitioners.
• Our student numbers small to guarantee high quality support and mentoring to support students in their personal growth and professional development.
• We offer a transformative, holistic approach which includes the study of life on a physical, energetic, emotional, mental and spiritual level.
• Excellent advanced & post graduate studies for continuous professional development.

Prerequisites for IMS’s Health Coach Year

You need to have completed the Holistic Nutrition & Cooking Year or equivalent studies elsewhere prior to booking this course. If you are joining from elsewhere, please email the school with details of your studies to date, and we will get back to you to discuss how you can join our Holisitc Nutritional Therapy Year training.

Course times, fees & booking

Timings

The next second year Holistic Nutritional Therapy course runs from February 2027 to February 2028. You can choose to take this course completely onsite (recommended if this is possible for you) or as an online course with attendance onsite on one module at the beginning of the course, and another at the end.

Holistic Nutritional Therapist year consists of 31 days of teaching over 8 modules of 3 to 5 days, each starting at 6.00pm on the first evening and ending at 3.00pm on the last day.

Price

Fully onsite course - the full fee for the course is £3995, with a £600 deposit to secure your place on the course. The remaining course fees can either be paid in one payment of £3395, or in 12 monthly instalments of £287.08.

Online course - the full fee for the course is £3695, with a £600 deposit to secure your place on the course. The remaining course fees can either be paid in one payment of £3095, or in 12 monthly instalments of £262.08.

Accommodation

We have various accommodation options on site, please email us to request accommodation and prices.

Cancellation Policy

All courses and accommodation are subject to the school cancellation policy, which includes changing dates. Please click here for details before booking.

Apply or find out more

To secure your place,  please download the Course Details for either this course below, and complete the application form at the end. If you have any questions, please contact us.

Holistic Nutritional Therapist Course Details

Holistic Nutritional Therapist Application Form