Diana Warrings left a fifteen-year fashion career in her early 40s to retrain in nutrition through ION, building a Berlin-based practice spanning consultations, recipe development, and cooking workshops. Now completing her BSc Top-up with a thesis on menopause, she’s moving into corporate health work focused on women’s wellbeing – living proof that it’s never too late to change course.
Taking the leap in her 40s
For Diana Warrings, it all started with a book. She picked up Patrick Holford’s Optimum Nutrition Bible, and the way it explained the health benefits of individual foods captivated her. But the fascination stuck, eventually leading her all the way to the Institute for Optimum Nutrition (ION).
Diana had spent fifteen years in fashion, having originally trained as an accountant before moving into photographic production as an agent. It was a dynamic, lively world, but she found herself wanting something more rewarding. “We weren’t saving lives,” she says of her old career. “I’m not saving lives now either, but I’m certainly helping people feel better. That’s a bit more rewarding for sure.”
She was in her early 40s when she decided to study nutrition, and she admits the science intimidated her at first. Biology, biochemistry… “I thought, oh, I’ll never be able to do that.”
So she started with the Science Access course in 2012, and this changed her mindset. “It was excellent. Of course I could do it.” She reassures anyone in the same position that the course is well structured, and the tutors were brilliant. She still remembers learning about the immune system, and how much fun the course was.
Studying part-time while working was, in her words, very hard. “I basically gave up my life for four years.” But the effort helped everything fall into place. Already a keen cook, Diana started a food blog in 2014, and that brought the theory to life. “It just made it more whole to me.”
She layered on further courses with Daphne Lambert of the Green Cuisine Trust, learning fermentation, eating for women’s health and cooking around food allergies – always pairing theory with practice. It’s a model she still uses in her own workshops today.
A winding career path
Diana graduated in 2016, the same year as Brexit, which prompted a move back to Germany and, in 2017, to Berlin. What followed was anything but a straight line. She worked as a nutritionist for a health app, developed recipes for a cancer support platform, contributed to the Food for the Brain newsletter and, for years, supplied recipes for ION’s own online collection and cookbook. She spent four years as a culinary manager and recipe developer at a meal kit company, where she built hundreds of recipes and learned exactly how to make healthy food taste good.
Along the way she kept training: a year of classic French cooking with Leiths School of Food and Wine during the pandemic, and three months in Barcelona at the Hofmann culinary school, including vegan cooking with a high-end chef whose food she still raves about. The point, for Diana, was never just technique. It was learning how to up a dish’s nutrient density, fibre, flavour and texture all at once. “When I see a dish, I think, what can I add to make it better? It’s a game.”
Returning to practice
In 2022, Diana became self-employed again, and in 2024 she returned to practice through ION and rejoined BANT. Her recent work spans both consultations and content.
She spent a year and a half as a freelancer on Ancient and Brave’s German launch, brought in by the collagen brand to help introduce it to the German market. Since April last year, she has been running consultations for York Test, focused on food intolerance testing and elimination diets, and is now taking on additional work as the company expands into Germany. “I’m doing some other work for them as well, because they’re also launching to the German market, so that’s quite nice.” Alongside all of this, she finally launched the cooking workshops she had been dreaming about for a long time.
Her honest verdict on running them solo? “It’s a lot of work. I cannot recommend that to anyone.” The advice she offers other graduates and students is simple: find a friend to help you. But the payoff makes it worth it.
The best part is the feedback. When people love the food, you go, okay, this was worth it.
Diana’s takes a flexible approach to nutrition. She teaches the 80/20 principle: eat well around 80 percent of the time, enjoy whatever you like for the other 20, and let the ratio flex with the day. “It just takes the pressure out.” Rather than eliminating foods, she prefers to crowd them out. “If you increase your vegetable count, there’s less space for other foods. We never take away, we replace or add on.” Healthy eating, she insists, should be about enjoying food, never blandness.
Building a career in Berlin
Diana was part of the Nourish Collective, a beautiful studio space in Berlin shared with a fermentation expert, a naturopath and a vegan chef, tucked in a backyard near a park where they go foraging. Nutritional therapists are still relatively rare in the city compared with naturopaths and herbalists, but holistic, healthy living is thriving, and she loves the festival side of it: yoga, sun salutations, good food…
Her workshop format builds on what she first learned with Daphne Lambert, and earlier still through demo-style cooking workshops with Christine Bailey, one of ION’s trustees: theory first, then straight into the kitchen.
A session might open with a talk on hormone balance or feeding the microbiome, then everyone cooks the meals that put it all into practice – a microbial feast built around the beneficial ingredients she’s just walked them through. Participants go home with a PDF of every recipe they cooked and a little guide to go with it.
Diana is clear that it isn’t a cooking class in the traditional sense. “It’s not like, this is how you chop the onion. It’s more of a practical nutrition course.” The challenge is the spread of abilities in any one room. One participant once told her the recipes were too simple; others, she laughs, didn’t know how to peel an onion. “You have to be able to cover everyone.”
This is where her years developing hundreds of recipes for the meal kit company really pay off. Diana shows people how to lift a dish with toppings, a dip, a tomato jam packed with lycopene and flavour; how to reach the 30-different-plants-a-week target; and how to add texture without much effort.
The aim is always to inspire people to cook for themselves and prove that healthy food does not have to be bland.
The workshops serve a practical purpose too. Held in a lovely Berlin studio, they’re a gentle form of marketing, a way to reach people who can’t stretch to one-to-one consultations, and a route to new clients. She has also had help spreading the word from Soul Collective, a group that shares holistic recommendations across the city.
In the early days, Diana says, it was never really about the money. “When you start out, you won’t have the reach.” It was about putting herself out there and making an impact. Recommendations given in a consultation are not always followed, but a workshop lands differently. “You have more of an impact. That’s for sure.”
Specialising in women’s health through her BSc Top-up studies
Now Diana is completing her BSc Top-up, due to finish in February 2027, with a thesis taking shape around menopause. It’s a content analysis of the advice given in newspapers and magazines, examining which symptoms get covered and which slip through the cracks. The gap matters to her. A woman in her 40s with low mood might be handed an antidepressant when the real cause is hormonal. “The knowledge is not there,” she says. Her aim is partly to carve out a clearer place for nutrition professionals in the media, and to support women better.
That focus runs through Diana’s client work too. Working with women in their 40s and 50s, some on Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) and some not, she combines nutrition, lifestyle and supplements according to each individual’s needs. She is careful about the boundaries of her role, leaving prescribing decisions to GPs, but is firm about the value of a holistic approach. “Some women think HRT is the answer to everything. If they’re not doing the work on nutrition and lifestyle, it may not be.”
Diana has also just stepped into a new corporate health role, only a week old at the time of speaking to ION, and it is clearly where much of her energy is heading next. She has already told the team her interests lie in women’s health, particularly perimenopause and menopause in the workplace – an area where many women cut back their hours or even leave their jobs altogether.
She expects to see a diverse range of clients booking in for consultations, and she is keen to run workshops on menopause and gut health, since digestive problems are so widespread and, in her view, so often endured needlessly. “It’s just lack of knowledge again, so it’s about educating.”
She couldn’t share specifics yet. “Ask me in a month or two,” she says, clearly excited about what lies ahead.
Would the woman who picked up that book all those years ago have predicted any of this? Not a chance.
Had you asked me eight years ago if I’d do a bachelor’s, I’d have said no. It’s always about whenever we’re ready. I was just ready now.
Her message to anyone wondering if they’ve left it too late is the one she’s living proof of: you haven’t.
“It’s never too late.”
