Why North Austin
I get asked this a lot now, in waitlist replies, in messages, at the gym when someone hears the accent. Why is a South African woman, living in England building a nutrition coaching business in Austin, Texas, of all places. Fair question.
Right now I am still based in the UK, in a small town outside London, packing up a house and finishing the paperwork that comes with moving a family across an ocean. Mind the Plate is being built from my kitchen table and it will keep being built there for a few more months yet. But every part of it, the packages, the pricing, the office at 11801 Domain Blvd, is built for North Austin, because that is where I am opening this business.
People ask why Texas, and Austin specifically. The answer goes back further than this move. I am originally from South Africa, and my family emigrated to the UK almost eleven years ago now. It has been a wonderful home and at the time it was the right move for us as a family. Lately though we have felt the pull towards a new adventure, towards a more outdoor orientated lifestyle, towards sunshine and warmth.
When the chance to build something of our own in Austin came up, we felt that it was too good an opportunity to miss. Austin is a city that takes fitness seriously without being precious about it. There is a strong community of women who lift, who train, who care about how their body performs rather than just how it looks in a photo. That is the exact community I have spent years helping to build in the UK and it is the community I want to keep building in Austin.
This feels like a new chapter for us rather than a goodbye to everywhere else. Our roots are still very much in South Africa and in the UK, and this move is us giving Austin a proper go, seeing how it feels to build something here and live somewhere new for a while. It is an adventure more than anything else, and we are treating it exactly like that.
I am (in no particular order) a weightlifter, a mum to two teenage daughters, a wife, and a small business owner. Those three things are the whole foundation of how I coach. I am not someone who found nutrition through a textbook and decided to turn it into a business. I found it through my own years of getting it wrong, through slimming clinics and marathon training and every diet trend you can name, before landing on the thing that actually worked, understanding macros and training like I meant it. If you want the longer version of that story, it is on my about page. This post is really about the next chapter, not the one that got me here.
Building a business for a city you have not moved to yet is a strange kind of patience. I cannot open the doors until I am actually standing in North Austin with staffed hours and a proper local presence, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What I can do right now is get everything ready. The packages are built. The office is arranged. The waitlist is open, and the women who join it now get priority booking and founder pricing when coaching launches in early 2027.
So if you are in North Austin, or the Domain area, or anywhere nearby and searching for a nutrition coach who actually understands macros and trains the way she coaches, this is me telling you where to find me when the doors open. In the meantime, the waitlist is the best way to be first in line.