Holistic Nutritional Therapy Year

Holistic Nutritional Therapy Year

Course Overview

A deep training in holistic healing

This training goes way beyond most Health Coach training courses, by giving you a range of skills to aid clients’ healing and wellbeing.

• Become a Holistic Nutritional Therapist, giving specific dietary and lifestyle recommendations based on the Oriental medical system of the Five Elements, to accelerate their healing, along with healthy lifestyle and emotional healing.
• Become a Healing Chef preparing plant based dishes and meals that are not only wildly colourful and tasty, but also designed to bring the body back into balance and health. This is using food as medicine.
• Give Wellbeing Shiatsu bodywork treatments to relax, de-stress, and rebalance the body and mind. People love receiving healing body treatments! Shiatsu is received wearing light natural clothing, and can be given in many different settings.

With three different healing skills you can offer deeper healing/a range of healing modalities to help more people, and also build a complementary medicine business more quickly.

The IMS’s professional training is divided into three parts:

• Year 1 – Holistic Nutrition & Cooking Year (Holistic Healing Guide and Healing Chef level 1).
• Year 2 – Holistic Nutritional Therapy Year (Health Coach, Healing Chef level 2 and Wellbeing Shiatsu).
• Year 3 – Advanced Holistic Nutritional Therapy Year (qualify as an accredited Holistic Nutritional Therapist & Medicinal Cook)

Holistic Nutritional Therapy Year

Why train for two years to become a Holistic Nutritional Therapist?

• This gives time for your own personal health transformation. The further you are on your path of self-healing and growth, the more you are able to help others follow the same footsteps.
• Time is needed to develop not just head knowledge, but practical wisdom on how to heal using a combination of good nutrition, healing cooking, bodywork, lifestyle changes and emotional healing.
• Offer specific dietary guidance, exercises and lifestyle changes to clients using Oriental medical principles.
• Develop your skills in three areas – nutrition and dietary advice, healing cooking, and wellbeing shiatsu bodywork, along with basic emotional healing.
• We support your own emotional healing during all our training courses, helping you to release old limiting emotions you are still holding from the past, and feel greater freedom and compassion for yourself and others.
• Become a complete healer, able to help people move to greater physical, emotional and spiritual health.

What You’ll Get

Holistic Nutritional Therapist

• Rather than just giving generally healthy diet and life advice, you will learn to use the best of Oriental and macrobiotic medicine to identify particular imbalances in people’s health.
• You can then give specific recommendations on how they can rebalance these areas to experience better health, more energy, a greater sense of wellbeing, and possibly alleviate common health problems.
• You will be learning to look at a person’s whole physical, emotional and spiritual make up, and see and see which areas healing changes are needed on.
• By learning the fundamental principles and skills of emotional counselling, you will be able to offer a safe space for clients to open emotional doors, heal and release old limiting beliefs.
• You will be practicing giving Holistic Nutritional Therapy sessions during class time and at home to build your skills and confidence.
• You will be receiving specific feedback on all your therapy sessions to rapidly build effective skills.

Healing Chef

• Learn to cook the healthiest plant based wholefood meals, including breakfasts, lunches, suppers, snacks and desserts.
• Learn to cook for all kinds of clients, including baby food, children’s meals, families, and exclusion diets such as gluten free or low fibre.
• Study balanced meal planning, so meals contain all the physical nutrients we need, and are balanced energetically e.g. in warming and cooling, energising and relaxing, cleansing or building.
• Cook meals with a balance of all the Five Element energies, through your choice of ingredients, cooking styles, seasonings and tastes, for maximum health and satisfaction after eating
• Identify clients’ health imbalances and learn to create specific dishes and meals to rebalance and bring healing.
• Practice over 100 plant based wholefood recipes in hands on cooking classes in our purpose built cooking school.
• Create your own ferments, with a range of plant based pickles.
• Cook healthy plant based dishes for birthdays, weddings and other special occasions.
• Develop your skills to cook for individuals, groups, events or in cafes and restaurants.
• Assist our expert cooks catering for other groups and special events.

Wellbeing Shiatsu Practitioner

• Having learnt the meridian system and Do-in exercises in the Holistic Nutrition & Cooking Year course, you now learn to give shiatsu to the same meridians to bring healing to others.
• Shiatsu is received wearing light natural fibre clothing, lying on a futon on the floor.
• You will learn to use your hands to bring healing, through feeling the energetic imbalances in the meridians and body areas, and using gentle pressure and stretches to move the body’s Ki (life energy).
• You will learn to give full body treatments, working over all areas of the back and front of the body, arms and legs, as well as the neck and head.
• A 45 minute shiatsu session brings deep relaxation, enabling the body to go into a self-healing mode, and letting go of stress and tension.
• Giving shiatsu is very enjoyable, and for some highly addictive. It is like a moving meditation, practicing being in the present moment, reading where the energy needs to move. You can feel as good as the client after giving a session!
• Clients often want weekly or fortnightly shiatsu, which is great for building an income from your complementary medicine practice.

Professional and Business Studies

• Learn professional ethics, to keep you and your clients safe.
• How to build the complementary health business you want, incuding how to promote yourself and being self employed.

Some graduates love working with individual clients, and set up giving Holistic Nutritional Therapy and Wellbeing Shiatsu practices. Others love to cook, and go for offering catering to individuals or on yoga and other health orientated retreats (where people just love really healthy balanced plant based meals!) Some have set up their own cooking schools offering healing cooking classes. You can follow your own passion in what you want to set up for yourself.

Course structure

We offer this course fully residentially on site at the school, or mostly online with two residential modules to develop more practical skills.

The Residential Course

Consists of 31 days of teaching over 8 modules.  There are seven modules of 4 days and an eighth module of 3 days, each starting at 6.00pm on a Wednesday or Thursday evening with dinner, and ending at 3.00pm on Sunday.

There is a maximum of 12 students on this course to ensure that a high quality of personal guidance and support is offered throughout.

• Each day begins with do-in, breathing exercises, meditation, shiatsu or other embodiment practices
• Classes in all aspects of macrobiotic healing and plant-based cooking
• Oriental medicine and health diagnosis, personal development and emotional counselling training

Live practice is also an important element of the training. The course includes sessions with members of the public at the school – either receiving consultations from you or cooking lessons under the supervision of our tutors.

• Work with real clients in class and at home
• Supervision, personal guidance and feedback on every client session you give
• Envisioning and building your ideal business

The Online Course

Is taught mostly online on weekdays and weekends, with two residential modules at the school to learn practical subjects like Oriental diagnosis, healing cooking and shiatsu bodywork.

The daily teaching plan is the same as with the residential courses, with live practice sessions demonstrated online and practiced where you live.

Why Study with the IMS?

As with our Holistic Nutrition & Cooking Year course, this training attracts people from all over Europe, north Africa and the Middle East, and our online course also appeals to those based in the USA. Our students are often wanting to change direction in life, develop a new career or add to existing professional skills. Many have gone on to create successful businesses as health coaches, cooks, nutrition consultants or holistic chefs. You can learn about what our graduates have achieved here.

You will be taught by a team of teachers led by Oliver Cowmeadow who has over 40 years experience of teaching as well as guiding thousands of students and clients towards greater health and is one of the country’s leading practitioners of macrobiotics. Find out more about Oliver and the other teachers for this course on our teachers page.

Other members of the team have all studied the full training at the school, and have gained wide practical experience through their own professional practice.

• We use a person-centred approach with an emphasis on embodied nutrition and the health and deep transformation of our students.
• Solid, in-depth training and practice-oriented study leading to confident and successful practitioners.
• Our student numbers small to guarantee high quality support and mentoring to support students in their personal growth and professional development.
• We offer a transformative, holistic approach which includes the study of life on a physical, energetic, emotional, mental and spiritual level.
• Excellent advanced & post graduate studies for continuous professional development.

Prerequisites for IMS’s Health Coach Year

You need to have completed the Holistic Nutrition & Cooking Year or equivalent studies elsewhere prior to booking this course. If you are joining from elsewhere, please email the school with details of your studies to date, and we will get back to you to discuss how you can join our Holisitc Nutritional Therapy Year training.

Training Pathway

Holistic Nutrition
& Cooking Year

Starting February 2026 (online)
or April 2026 (residential)

Holistic Nutrition for Body & Soul

• For personal development, growth
  & healing
• Pre-requisite for further training
   

What you'll learn:

• Improve you health & wellbeing
• Develop a solid foundation in macrobiotics & Oriental philosophy & medicine
• Improve cooking skills
• Personal development & emotional healing

Holistic Nutritional Therapy Year

October 2025 (residential)
November 2026 (online)

Qualify as a:

• Holistic Nutritional Therapist
• Wholefood Chef
• Wellbeing Shiatsu Practitioner
   

What you'll learn:

• Offer health & food coaching to individuals & groups
• Cook in restaurant & cafes
• Cook for Individuals, retreats & groups
• Give shiatsu treatments for wellbeing & relaxation
• Give cooking classes & demonstrations

Advanced Holistic Nutritional
Therapist Year

February 2027 (residential)
 

Qualify as a:

• Advanced Holistic Nutritional Therapist
• Medicinal Chef
• Shiatsu Therapist (with 5 days additional Tuition)

What you'll learn:

• Give personal sessions of in-depth dietary, lifestyle, exercise & emotional guidance
• Cook medicinally to help heal many health problems
• Use shiatsu as therapy for a wide range of health problems

Holistic Nutritional Therapy Year

Course times, fees & booking

Timings

Next residential course begins October 2025.

Next online course begins November 2026.

The Health Coach Year consists of 30 days of teaching over 8 modules. There are seven modules of 4 days and an eighth module of 3 days, each starting at 6.00pm on the first evening with dinner, and ending at 3.00pm on the last day.

Price

The full fee for the course is £3995, with a £750 deposit to secure your place on the course. The remaining course fees can either be paid in one payment of £3245, or in 12 monthly instalments of £274.58.

Accommodation

We have various accommodation options on site, please email us to request accommodation and prices.

Cancellation Policy

All courses and accommodation are subject to the school cancellation policy, which includes changing dates. Please click here for details before booking.

Apply or find out more

To secure your place,  please download the Course Details for either the Residential or Online course, below, and complete the form at the end. If you have any questions, please contact us.

Full Residential Course DetailsFull Online Course Details