2024 Women to Watch
This year we showcase over 80 South Australian women to watch throughout the year. From business, to careers, arts to science. This year’s selected women highlight the depth and diversity of the women in our state and also the vast array of opportunities to develop a business or career in South Australia. Find our more about our inaugural Women to Watch initiative here.
Natalie is a Dietitian based in Adelaide, South Australia. She is the Founder and Director of Pod Dietetics, a team of Dietitians providing weight-neutral, trauma-informed and diversity affirming nutrition care to people of all ages, with a focus on supporting those with a chronic illness, disability, eating disorder or feeding tube. Prior to founding Pod, Natalie worked in SA Health across multiple clinical areas including acute, sub-acute, outpatient and ambulatory services, with specific experience and expertise in supporting adults with complex clinical conditions. She is passionate about providing high quality clinical care that is tailored to the individual and integrates their lived experience with evidence-based guidelines for medical nutrition therapy.
In addition to her work with clients, Natalie is committed to the growth and development of Dietetics as a profession. She provides clinical supervision to other Dietitians and contributes as a member of the Dietitians Australia Disability Leadership Group. She regularly presents in a variety of contexts, on topics including navigating the NDIS, implementing weight inclusive practice, use of the biopsychosocial model in disability care, general nutrition education for community groups, and building body positive cultures for young people in environments such as schools and sporting clubs, or for adults in the workplace.
// Favourite inspirational quote
Opportunities are like buses – there is always another one coming, you just need to know which one to take.
// Let’s get to know you
My path to being a Dietitian began as a teenager, when I was competing in Trampolining at a state, national and international level. Fuelling my training was a high priority, and the pressure of maintaining a ‘gymnastics’ aesthetic was also ever present. I completed a Bachelor of Nutrition and Dietetics at Flinders University and won a new graduate clinical role at Flinders Medical Centre. From there, I worked across multiple SA Health roles and won permanency at Hampstead Rehabilitation Centre where I worked with people who had experienced a significant illness or injury, such as a brain injury, spinal cord injury, stroke or amputation. When the NDIS came to South Australia, it significantly changed our service delivery model and when discharging people to the community, there was a big gap in the clinical capacity of private practice Dietitians. I added a few hours per week of private practice work in addition to my full time SA Health role in 2019, and in 2020 had a 6-month honeymoon planned that got called off due to COVID. Because I had already locked in this period of leave from my full-time role, it presented an opportunity to increase my private practice hours and a year later in May 2021 I resigned my permanency and launched Pod Dietetics. This was a defining moment in my career and has led to an incredible few years of growth which I could never have predicted. I am so glad to have taken that leap, and feel I’m now working in the space where I belong and can create the most positive change.
// What makes you a Women to Watch for 2024?
This year I hope to consolidate all the rapid growth of the past few years and strengthen my professional identity as a leader. My goal for Pod is to do dietetics differently, providing nutrition care in ways that enhance our ability to be intersectional and innovative. Dietitians are so much more than the stereotypical idea of a thin white woman prescribing weight loss, and I want to lead that change in South Australia.
In 2024, I want to continue to lead my business in a way that prioritises people but is still profitable and integrates principles of social justice into nutrition care. I am passionate about empowering people to build a strong relationship with food and their body, one that can withstand the constant barrage of diet culture and outrageous beauty standards. I am passionate about empowering my team to learn, to lead and to find satisfaction in their work. I am passionate about building relationships with like-minded people and collaborating to achieve the best outcomes for the communities we serve, taking opportunities to amplify voices from these communities as often as possible.
// If you could share one takeaway from your business or career journey, what would it be?
That with the right people around you, anything is possible. Strong relationships, both personally and professionally, have been the foundation of Pod’s success. Initially, it was my family and my previous work colleagues who gave me the confidence to take the leap away from my secure, permanent role. Then, it was my husband providing financial and emotional support to carry me through the challenges of our startup phase, as well as friends and colleagues in the community healthcare sector providing referrals, spreading the word about Pod, and sharing their own experiences/learnings which enabled me to grow my team. Now, it is my team, our referral network, and our clients, which are the relationships that enable our ongoing success. Without all of the people along the way, we would not be where we are today.
// What would being a Woman to Watch for 2024 mean to you?
This is a lovely acknowledgement and affirmation from a good friend who submitted the nomination, because she has witnessed a lot of the hard work behind the scenes, and I really appreciate that. This is also a great opportunity to reflect on where I and Pod have come from, where we are now, and where we are going. I’m excited to be able to share that more broadly with the community and believe that sharing stories is how we create change, so I hope that being a Woman to Watch will help me to connect with others who may benefit from what we do and how we do it.
// What would you like to see for the future of South Australian women and girls?
Dismantling of diet culture, and the freedom to exist in their bodies peacefully. I would like girls and women to not waste their time and energy trying to change their body to meet a fickle external beauty standard. I would like to see women celebrated for who they are and what they do, not what they look like. Importantly though, this needs to be from an intersectional lens, where white women who fit a socially acceptable beauty standard (tall, thin, white) use this to make space for and amplify the voices of more marginalised women, such as those who are disabled, people of colour, queer or trans. We cannot fully dismantle diet culture and decrease the use of female bodies/beauty standards as a tool of oppression without collective action and a commitment to not leaving anyone behind.
The main thing we need, I believe, is to be brave enough to unlearn much of the messaging we have spent our lives being told. To disengage from the narrative that our bodies are something to control through a hyperfocus on diet and exercise, or through medical intervention. We need to spend time reflecting on how we continue to feed into diet culture with our language and our behaviour, then have courageous conversations with women in our life to gently shift the narrative. We can commit to not commenting on other women’s bodies, and do the hard work required to comment less on our own in our internal dialogue. We can recognise that it is very likely that diet culture and our beliefs about our bodies were passed on generationally through women, often our grandmothers, mothers, aunts, and that it wasn’t their fault, but that we can offer the next generation of girls something different. That our fears around our bodies don’t need to be passed on, and instead we can create so much more space for the women of the future to learn, to lead, to innovate, because they won’t need to waste their intelligence, their energy, their money, on changing their body.
Get in touch with Natalie:
LinkedIn: Natalie Mullins
Website: www.poddietetics.com.au
Check out all of the incredible Women to Watch for 2024 here as their profiles are uploaded throughout the year.
To become an SA Woman Member, check out our Membership Options here.
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