Nikola Howard, Life Transformation Specialist and the UK’s leading Low Carbohydrate and Ketogenic lifestyle Expert since 1999.
She started her business (Low Carb in the UK) formally in 2016, having been offering informal advice via her website, mailing list and Facebook group since August 2000.
She is on a mission to free people from the current system, one that she refers to as “Diet Prison”.
She helps women who want to live a healthy life ditch their belly fat and gain more energy in less than ten weeks, without fussing about calories, macros or starving themselves by using the award winning “HOPE Protocol” of eating tasty whole food and shifting their attitudes to life
When I asked why she is doing what she does, she answered
“I believe that I am here utterly disrupt the diet industry!
“I want to move us away from guilt and shame when it comes to food and our bodies.
“My mission is to empower the UK to eat itself healthy and get rid of the words “weight loss” from society.”
Her company is one of the only ones within the diet industry to address the mental/mindset side of body composition management, breaking people away from “victim mentality” to ensure long term success.
She fully stepped into the business in October 2019, having worked on growing it part time since 2016.
Before going all in, Nikola studied Physics and Chemistry at University and then worked in IT roles for both public and private sector clients, starting as a desktop support person in 1989, and rounding out her IT career as a Data Centre Manager before she left to work on Low Carb in the UK full time.
She managed people and projects as well as stakeholders for over 30 years. This means that she brings forward a logical and structured approach into running her business as well as in creating the materials she gives to her clients to ensure their long term success.
She notes that
“I have a ‘bad business model’. I want to create empowered healthy people that work with me for a while and then can easily live their healthy life on their own afterwards.
“They don’t need to keep coming back again and again because they believe have failed, when in fact there is zero chance of long term success in the current model for them.
“I’m very much not looking to create the ‘repeat custom’ that the current industry model relies upon.
“However, even if my clients don’t need to work with me anymore, they continue to do so, because they want the support and on-going life transformation my coaching gives to them.”
Nikola began her low carb life on the 6th of December 1999 and, whilst every body is different, it suits her body a great deal.
She has Polycystic Ovaries, a hormonal condition exacerbated by an excess of insulin in the body, caused by eating a high carb / processed food diet.
She very soon discovered that as well that much of the nutritional advise that we are told to take as gospel based on science done between the 1960’s and 1980’s is actually based on faulty assumptions, using biased cherry-picked data and sometimes is even simply made up to fit a narrative to get funding.
She also discovered that a great deal of the information coming from the USA actively contradicts how the UK eats and our labelling laws.
Because of this, Nikola set up the Low Carb in the UK mailing list and website (https://lowcarbinthe.uk) in August 2000.
As she told me,
“If I was having issues finding information, well… it would have been selfish of my to keep what I was finding out to myself!”
At this point in her life though, she used the familiar to all of us “it’s just a diet” approach to her food and didn’t address at all her underlying food addiction tendencies.
So, when she was diagnosed with “possibly having endometriosis” and given a medical menopause in 2003, the sudden hormonal change caused her massive anxiety and depression meant that she unfortunately tried to find sanity via comforting herself with vast amounts of chips, mashed and other form of potato and cookies and cream ice cream.
And of course, she regained all of the body fat that she had removed in the previous three years and added more for good measure.
When she was finally mentally ready to come back to a low carb way of life in 2010, she knew that this time she needed to address her mindset to create something sustainable for herself.
As she observes,
“Changing the food on our plates is the easy part. It’s what is going on between our ears, that is where the work is!”
She worked out her own system over the next 6 years, used it sucessfully with clients and published her 3rd book “How to do Low Carb, UK Style!” in 2018, which crystalised it into the “HOPE Protocol”
This book has sold thousands of copies, and as a 1:1 coach she has won several industry awards.
This spurred her on figure out how she could make even more impact, especially given that the impact of the Global Pandemic hits people with obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and chronic heart disease the hardest.
She created Low Carb Living UK (https://lowcarbliving.uk) in September 2020, a weekly Network Support group provided over Zoom as an easy to access budget friendly way for people to get the support they to need to ditch that belly fat and improve their health for life.
The programme itself has now also won several awards and continues to go from strength to strength.
Now we are well out of lockdown, the vision for Low Carb Living UK in its first phase of growth is one real life group available in every county of the UK.