Student Spotlight: Meet NutraPhoria Alumni, award-winning Registered Holistic Nutritionist, and renowned body transformation specialist Roshni Sanghvi!

This week, we’re honoured to spotlight NutraPhoria graduate Roshni Sanghvi, a trailblazer in plant-based nutrition and one of India’s leading voices in holistic wellness. From her beginnings in psychology to becoming the country’s first-ever vegan bodybuilder, Roshni’s journey has been defined by resilience, passion, and an unshakable commitment to proving that food is medicine. What started as a mission to help her father overcome obesity, diabetes, and hypertension has grown into a thriving career serving her clients through transformative health journeys as they reverse chronic conditions, build strength, and redefine what’s possible with a plant-based lifestyle. Today, she continues to inspire as a wellness entrepreneur, athlete, and changemaker, dedicated to making India free of metabolic disease and helping people fall in love with a healthy way of living.

1.  Can you share a bit about your background, your specialization, and what initially drew you to holistic nutrition?

I have a very mixed educational background. I started my undergrad with the intention of studying Animal Psychology. This was also the reason I moved from India to New York as there were not a lot of Indian universities teaching animal psychology. But my interest soon grew towards human psychology and I studied the same in my Grad school. I was on my way to working with people and specializing in counseling therapy. But my father fell gravely sick back in India and I had to move back just as my career in psychology was at its peak. 

My interest in nutrition and fitness grew as we were looking for treatment options for my father and could not find any medical professional advising us on lifestyle and nutritional changes. He made it out of the hospital, but was obese (nearly 300 pounds) and had two metabolic conditions, diabetes and hyper- tension. Doctors only told us that he had to take medication for his entire life but I refused to believe that. In the quest for helping my father did I first ever start looking into nutrition. 

Being vegetarians ourselves, my interest was particularly towards plant- based nutrition. With the right support system, lot’s of learning and patience did my father not only lose nearly 80 pounds, but also stopped his medication for hypertension. He even reduced his medication for diabetes and now successfully maintains his HbA1C with nutrition and lifestyle modifications alone. This built my trust on nutrition even more. I had to study further to help as many people as I knew. This motivated to me do my course from Nutraphoria and learn more. 

Working on my personal health was another huge motivation for me to understand nutrition better. I did not want to give up on my ethics of being plant- based and yet wanted to compete at a national level bodybuilding competition. back then, vegan bodybuilding was unheard of. I was the only vegan (leave alone vegetarian) to compete on the national stage. I came in as the first runner- up in the zonal competition and was the first ever Indian Vegan Bodybuilder. But this experience further shaped me to study about nutrition, particularly for athletes and only made me realize that a plant- based diet can be your biggest weapon and not a setback. Plant- based diets are highly anti- inflammatory and anti- oxidant. This means faster recovery post training sessions, better immunity and more endurance! I work with athletes now and help them adopt a healthy plant- based diet. 

2. Can you share a success story or transformation from a client you’ve worked with?

My primary focus with the type of clients I choose to work with now is disease reversal. There are many people who are helping others lose and/ or gain weight. But not enough people working with disease management. 

One of the clients I recently worked with was for Achelecia Cardia management (here is is full story!). He came with extreme GERD symptoms. So much so that he could not sleep through the night. Besides this, he was also about 20 kilo’s overweight, shared a very bad relationship with food due to years of yo- yo dieting and was highly addicted to hyper- palatable foods. 

This is not uncommon. Our easy access to “quick- calorie” snacks and highly palatable foods, coupled with sedentary lifestyles sets us up for failure. Its cheaper and easier than ever to order- in food. Billions of dollars are spent to design foods that keep us addicted. Yet we are expected to stay unrealistically lean owing to countless social media messages we see daily. 

With this particular client, Ram, we had to work with a lot of positive reinforcement, helping him get rid of sugar addiction, improving gut dysbiosis and form a healthy body image. Slowly but surely, in just a span of three months, Ram experience:

• A complete reversal in his symptoms,
• Lost almost 15 kgs weight loss and 9% reduction in body fat
• Abandoned his love for midnight ramen noodles and chips
• Adopted a Plant-based Lifestyle & is Learning how to cook for himself
• Set a New Fitness Goals like, training for 5K run (he completed this last week ;))

3. How do you stay inspired and continue to expand your knowledge in the ever-evolving field of holistic nutrition?

Inspiration comes easy as I genuinely have the hunger to be the best in what I do. Education and upgrading my education is not a task for me, but rather my “fun- time”. I am to do one new diploma course per year and two to three certification courses. My 2024 started with doing a diploma on Pranayam and Meditation. Seeing so many people struggle with hypochondria and anxiety post covid made me realize that I have to know the basis of stress management techniques to help them better. This was my inspiration to upgrade my knowledge. 

My team and I also have a very strict learning policy. We aim to read (at least) one new book per month and listen to one educational podcast per week. All our team meetings begin with sharing what we have recently learnt and helping each other grow. We also take up very complicated client cases that other nutritionists might not take. This further forces us to upgrade ourselves and stay up-to date with the current research. 

4. If you could share one piece of advice to your fellow holistic nutrition students and graduates of the program, what would it be?

Never stop learning. Especially once you have enough clients, it is easy to get comfortable with the money coming in and settle into day to day activities. But we owe it to our clients and future clients to continuously educate ourselves. 

Also treat your own body as an experiment ground. Nothing else works better. If you ask your clients to measure food and eat to count calories, do it with yourselves first. If you yourselves find it impractical, how do you expect someone else would do it daily. Try different fad- diets on yourselves to know why they dont work and how you feel on them emotionally. This will help you connect better to clients who would have tried them in the past. Try different fitness routines on yourselves from Pilates to Yoga to Strength Training just so that you know how impactful they are. Everytime you come across a superfood or supplement or superherb, make it part of your lifestyle for a few months before suggesting your clients to consume it. Practice what you preach, it is the only wat to grow with integrity. 

5. Looking ahead, what goals or projects do you have for the future of your wellness practice?

The bigger goal I identify with is to make India free of metabolic diseases. Diabetes, hypertension and cholesterol can very well be controlled with very easy to follow lifestyle and nutritional changes. I want to bring this message to people that nutrition doesn’t have to be boring and strict. I eat the most delicious food that also happens to be healthy! I want to help people fall in love with fitness and make eating healthy a part of their lifestyle. 

In the short- run, I am working on setting up my very first longevity clinic, Clinic Living Plus. I want regenerative medicine and anti- aging protocols to be accessible to people at an affordable price. I intend to have doctors, recipe curators, wellness experts, fitness experts, lifestyle modification coaches and most importantly nutrition coaches all under one roof working to help clients reverse diseases and live longer. Clients should not have conflicting opinions from doctors and nutrition coaches as it happens so often. I want Clinic Living Plus to be one place where a client can go and have an entire team working on their health goals.