Sara Barreirinhas

My mission is to improve the lives of all those people who, like me, are not defined by a weight, by an illness, but by the joy of living, well-being and health.

My Story

Today I am a Nutritionist (CP 2098N), vegetarian, have irritable bowel syndrome and inflammatory bowel disease. I work in the area of conscious weight loss, vegetarianism and intestinal diseases, and I love travelling without limitations (in time and food).

… I grew up eating what our home garden gave us. I was fascinated by the whole process of food, from planting to the moment I pick them up from the garden. Maybe that’s why, from an early age, I was very interested in food, in why we eat what we eat and in respect for what nature offers us.

Somewhere around the age of 17 I decided that being a nutritionist was my path. Around that age, I also had some digestive problems, which were monitored in good time, because at that time I realised that my body was not accepting food as it used to. The awareness of food sustainability, which accompanied me from an early age, settled down during my degree and so I became a vegetarian while still a student.

I finished my degree in 2013 and started working in the areas of intervention that fascinate me the most, in the area of clinical nutrition and food education, especially in weight loss, vegetarianism, oncological disease and gastrointestinal pathologies. Throughout my clinical experience I have realised how much emotions shape us, how much they influence our food choices and often determine our nutritional status. So I felt the need to study more about emotions, their nature, how we can manage them and improve our eating decisions by identifying them in our eating behaviour.

It was a good 11 years with controlled gastrointestinal symptoms and consuming (a little) almost everything until I had an accident in 2019 that forced me into intense pharmacological therapy. Then my body changed. The body began to reject the foods it once digested. I started to have very intense and different symptoms that I had ever felt. And my journey through bowel disease intensified. This episode forced me to further deepen my knowledge and clinical practice, especially on diet low in FODMAPs and nutrition in inflammatory bowel diseases – which, as a patient myself, I had to apply them in my eating routine.