About

My name is Candice Trudel and I want to help you discover the amazing healing power of food. Just as Hippocrates said, “Let food be thy medicine, thy medicine shall be thy food,” I use diet and lifestyle along with other modalities to bring balance back to the body with a technique that is sustainable and intuitive. My passion is helping others and using food as medicine, and I am living that passion every day as owner of Live Well Nutrition and Ayurveda, LLC and co-owner of Healthy Roots Integrative Wellness Center | Hudson NH (healthyrootsnh.com).


Qualifications


My Story

My journey into nutrition began in the lab at UMass Lowell doing nutrition research. I then worked as a Medical Technologist in Toxicology at the Mayo Clinic in Andover, MA for seven years. I learned so many amazing skills along the way and though I really valued my time in the lab, I was not feeling fulfilled.

At the same time, I was dealing with my own health issues that Western medicine alone could not solve. I was misdiagnosed for two years because I was not being heard by the practitioners I saw — they told me they knew better and had a way they did things from which they did not stray. Whether it was certain hospital protocols, or dictations from insurance providers, the root of my disease was not the focus — shutting down the symptoms was.

I think that Western medicine philosophies work well and absolutely have their place; however, only when I went through my own health battle did I see how this medicine alone cannot and does not have all the answers. It’s a challenge to see outside of the box for many practitioners, and was the experience I went through with the specialists I saw.

I was put into the right hands when I saw my first naturopath. She truly listened to my story and sent out blood work for the test I had been begging my other practitioners to do for years. I received a positive Lyme test and that’s where my difficult road to recovery truly began. I was referred to a Lyme specialist who unbeknownst to me was also an Ayurvedic Practitioner. When I walked into her office, I felt an unprecedented amount of comfort and warmth from the practitioner and the office as a whole. I had no knowledge of Ayurveda, homeopathy, or naturopathy, but I did what I was told and started to see results.

After many years of suffering I am now a survivor of Lyme disease. I owe this to the care I received and my own hard work, compliance and trust in the process. This experience gave me a perspective that I would never have gotten had I not become ill and it is what drives me to help others find healing as I did.

There is a lot of conflicting information in the world of nutrition. As a practitioner trained in not only holistic nutrition, but Western nutrition, Ayurvedic medicine, and nutrition research, I know this first-hand and do not subscribe to any one-size-fits-all notion. What sets me apart is my comprehensive and integrative background.

Western nutrition gave me a great foundation in biochemistry and a more scientific approach to what constitutes a good diet, yet it is focused on disease and symptom management and not the most important and overlooked component — the individual. Holistic nutrition, on the other hand, looks at the whole person, body and mind to get to the root of the problem, not just put a Band-Aid on and treat the symptoms. The whole is more than merely a sum of its parts. Yet still there is something missing and that’s where Ayurveda comes in to fill in the gaps.


Ayurveda

Ayurveda is India’s traditional system of medicine that has been practiced for over 5,000 years, long before there were labs to run research or biomarker testing, and it is still practiced today all over the world. It is known as the original diet and lifestyle philosophy and is translated as “the science of life.”

Ayurveda emphasizes the importance of leading a life that brings one purpose, otherwise known as fulfilling your dharma. Along with this, Ayurveda uses a 5-elemental theory that makes up everything in nature, from the seasons, to time of life, to the human body itself. A different proportion distribution of the 5 elements is what gives rise to each person’s unique Ayurvedic body/mind type and dictates which diet and lifestyle choices support one person and not another.

Ayurveda knew about the brain–gut connection way before other sciences and stresses the importance of strong digestion, not only for the food we consume but also for all of the experiences we go through. Practicing Ayurveda helps people live in tune with their own nature and the world around them.