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.
“That became the start of my journey,” she said. “From that experience, I knew I had to rebuild the blood in my body. And I realised that I didn’t have the same practice with my spiritual body as I did with nutrition and exercise. It needed to be the same kind of commitment.”
As a consequence of her illness, she couldn’t use the left side of her body. “I could barely lift my arm, and I’m a private chef and caterer,” she said.
“I began working with healers, and I knew a lot of it was experimental. But nothing else was working for me.”
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Poon spent a few years working with the energy-based healing technique reiki to return to wellness. As her body started to slowly heal, she developed the fundamentals of a practice she now calls Culinary Alchemy, which she describes as a “combination of integrative and functional nutrition with energy work and mindfulness practices to help people find sustainable holistic health”.
She learned the art of fine gastronomy at Le Cordon Bleu and became a reiki master. This enabled her to educate her clients on the foods they were eating – and to elevate their spiritual health.
“Having had those difficult experiences, seeing what could happen with the body that even the doctors didn’t think could happen, I learned how to help people support their body in a different way – whether it’s preparing for surgery, or helping them to recover from it.
“There’s an energy to it. Everything is all about balance and alignment. And I learned how to open up this new pillar in my practice.”
Poon’s segue from the world of private catering to this more esoteric approach was almost predictable.
“Watching him go through that made me feel helpless, and made me want to really dive into nutrition.”
Her mother fortunately survived her cancer battle.
Poon, whose Instagram account @chefserenapoon has attracted more than 305,000 followers, has settled into her role as a holistic nutritionist and adviser; she arranges lab tests and blood work to check her clients’ biomarkers, works to understand their “energetic surroundings” and looks at all the ways they could have happier, healthier lives.
“The way I see it, all our systems support each other so we can try and live a fully holistic life,” she said. “Food and supplements and other practices are just tools. And good health is about more than just meditation and yoga.
“I teach my clients to connect the dots, to have the understanding that they can nourish their souls.”
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Not only does Poon cook healthful, nourishing meals for her clients, but she also helps them cultivate a connection between themselves and what they eat.
Her services appear to be in demand. She is working on a book proposal, and is shooting a pilot for a series that bridges these different approaches. There is an app in the works, and her website sells a selection of products – including bundles of sage to burn for cleansing rituals, and bracelets made from amethysts and other semi-precious stones.
People who seek her out are already “a little bit open”, she says.
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“Some of my clients come to me just to take care of their meals, for weight loss and weight gain … But mostly, my clients believe in this integrated approach, that you can’t have one type of health without the other, and there sometimes needs to be something that bridges that gap.
“Our goal always is to live an optimally healthy life as long as we can.”
