Celebrity chef combines reiki, mindfulness and integrative nutrition, and clients including Sean Combs are hungry for Serena Poon’s holistic health programme
- Poon nursed her parents through cancer while at the University of California at Berkeley, then battled her own life-threatening illness, MRSA
- She found that reiki helped, studied the energy healing technique and combines it with nutrition and mindfulness to improve clients’ diet and spiritual health
Celebrity chef and nutritionist Serena Poon should not have been surprised at how her body responded to the stresses in her life.
While she was at the University of California at Berkeley, her father was diagnosed with stage 4 liver cancer. Two months after he died, her mother was told she had a rare and aggressive form of ovarian cancer.
Over the next few years, Poon’s grandmother and uncle also became seriously ill.
“I took all of that on,” says Poon, whose parents emigrated from Hong Kong to Los Angeles as college students.
“I think in our culture, there is this idea of self-sacrifice, ‘I will take care of you, I will pour all of myself into you.’ If you didn’t care for those around you, you were selfish. And then I started to have my own health issues.”
She developed a serious case of post-surgical methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) – an antibiotic-resistant infection – that almost claimed her life twice.
