Svetlana Shihepo is a young Namibian aspiring Nutritional Therapist. As a 10-year-old, she figured the only way to drive into and contribute to the Health and wellness of humanity was by becoming a medical practitioner. In the Early 2000s before the explosion of the world wide web, she forced her Dad to sign her up for a library membership, to enable her to borrow and start reading books on anatomy, cardiology and anything relating to the human body and health care.
10 years later, at 20 with unrealised medical practitioner dreams, she developed the desire to transition her own lifestyle to becoming a vegan. Her purpose for this was far from the traditional ideology of contributing to saving the planet, rather she was driven by the purpose of presenting herself as a case study in order to understand the relationship between health, fitness and nutrition.
As an African, she hails from a community of people that live from the land, who farm their own organic produce, and raise their own animals for food consumption. To her, it’s very important to acquire the tools to educate her community and beyond. Modernisation should not mean we move away from farming organically. Thus, she wants to be able highlight the health benefits of maintaining an organic lifestyle, be it to a PhD holder or to an uneducated or unskilled villager. Information is only valuable when shared wth all who are willing to learn.
She has always been physically active and loves to work out especially after she had her daughter. In 2014, she started her own baking business. It was strenuous and time consuming in a way that she found herself without time to exercise and picked up irregular eating habits. In an effort to find a solution to keeping her health up and weight down, she decided this was the right time to transition her lifestyle to veganism. During this journey, she found a lot of misinformation and untrue facts about how a vegan diet may and does often affect one’s health. She saw stories of people who were vegan for up to 10 years, developed deficiency and had to go back to implementing animal products back into their diet in order to reverse their health deficiencies. She saw this as a need to gain credible scientific based knowledge on the relationship between health, fitness and nutrition.
Many people suffer from bad health and create an unhealthy dependency on pharmaceutical or synthetic drugs in an effort to correct or reverse minor and severe health or weight-loss and fitness challenges.
Svetlana’s goal is to educate people on how nutrition affects their health, and how, in addition to their various medical treatments or lifestyle choices, it can help guide them to a better and healthier human race.
She also desires to educate her vegan community in understanding that choosing a vegan lifestyle or diet can be driven by reasons outside the ideology of veganism. She wants to create more acceptance in an effort to discourage the judgement and dogmatism within the vegan community.
She might reason in a manner that seems contradictory to some, however it’s her vision to create a community that understands different people’s health may flourish in different diet combinations, based on their body, health history, environment and geographical location, accessibility and most importantly, affordability.
Svetlana’s personal philosophy of choice is this: There are 7 billion+ people on the planet, possibly more people than the planet can accommodate on the system we are currently living by. So, it might be unrealistic for everybody to go green in one or two generations in the world we live in today. We need to be patient with one another and focus on educating one another, rather than judging one another. In a perfect world eating green and organic seems like the ideal circumstance for humanity’s health and for the planet. Realistically not everybody cannot afford organic food that 100% caters to all their nutritional needs, this is why it’s imports to focus on building a world that makes healthy food choices or the tool and skills to grow and produce organic food choices accessible to all.
In 2018 when she saw there was so much misinformation about being a vegan and the health challenges most vegans face, Svetlana made the decision to study and get certified as a professional in Nutrition. Although in a country of a small population of 2.5 million people, she was disappointed to discover that there are no Certified Nutritionists and no Black Dieticians. She came across THSA while looking for an ICY accredited certification. THSA has reviews as one of the best online institutions to study Nutrition, the courses are short and are at a self-study pace, which was very convenient for her busy working schedule as a baker. The educators of THSA are scientists and researchers who are experts in their respective fields.
With her income as a self-employed baker with no financial backing or business investor, and with the currency comparison in her home country, the courses were too expensive for her to afford. Due to her drive and interest, she continued her interest and subscribed to the THSA newsletter for about two years. In 2020, at the brink of the covid 19 pandemic outbreak, THSA offered a free short immunity course, and a webinar that week that aimed at discussing the current circumstances with THSA students and how they intend to grow an online footprint in order keep in contact with their Nutrition or Fitness Clients in spite of the lockdown.
From this webinar she received an opportunity to submit a short article highlighting her predicament as to why she was not enrolled as a full-time student. In her ambition and drive to become the first black Nutritional Therapist in her country and to be able to offer a skill in her community as a whole and in her vegan community, she was blessed to become the recipient of a Scholarship to realise her dream with THSA.
THSA is, in her opinion, undoubtedly the right institution that provides her the correct tools and, above all, the support she needs to achieve her goals and realise her vision for the Global village at large where Nutrition is concerned. She desires to see a world where people understand that health is wealth, and this is a vision she proudly credits to THSA as her foundation. There are no other organisations she would choose to walk this journey with.
