Something new: alive and well

"What I don't believe in are detoxes and diets," says Kanchan Porta Panjabi, proprietor of Living Alive, a boutique wellness agency that instead operates to the mantra "Balance. Care. Simplicity."

"It's not about a short-term fix," says Kanch, as she prefers to be known. "It's really about a lifestyle and mental shift and often this is hard for people to do.

"So what I do is add little things to my clients' lives," she says, "which often then become a new way for them, which they can keep up with and use forever. All the habits, food, etc that are not serving them fall away in no time."

Born in India and raised in Hong Kong, New York and London, Kanch spent five years working in fashion design. Overworked and stressed, the woman behind the Kanchan Couture line, decided to take her health into her own hands and enrolled in the New York-based Institute for Integrative Nutrition, qualifying as a health coach after two years of training and study.

She now instructs Hong Kong clients in holistic health, which covers nutrition and wellness, usually in three- or six-month programmes that amount to six or 12 60-minute sessions, respectively.

During the sessions, Kanch hands out samples of products "that encourage a healthier lifestyle, are 'clean' [this means they could be organic, or made in a sustainable manner or without chemicals and artificial substances] and one of the big things is I have to love and use the products myself".