Vanessa Fitzgerald is one of those rare women who lives what she practices.
After 8 years in private practice, she's built her work around Cellular Nutrition Therapy, a non-invasive method to get to the root of what the body is trying to say. She's helped countless women trace the mysterious symptoms most doctors dismiss back to something real, and something fixable.
What drew me to Vanessa long before I knew her work was the way she shows up. Honest, embodied, never performing. She is a new mother, a fiancée, a practitioner, a founder and a woman whose life looks the way it does because she's listened, deeply, to her body.
Most people have never heard of Nutrition Response Testing. How did you find it, and what made you know this was the work you wanted to pursue?
When I first moved to New York for NYU, I found a chiropractor who practiced a method called SOT (sacral occipital technique) — the same method that had literally saved my life back in LA. She became my safe haven for the next six years. Then one day I walked in and the entire office had been transformed. Shelves upon shelves of supplements I had never seen before. Something about it gave me this overwhelming, anxious excitement — like I was about to discover exactly what I had always been searching for.
I asked her what was going on and she told me she was learning a new modality called Nutrition Response Testing, which is essentially about getting cells to regenerate by detoxing and properly nourishing them. What she didn’t know was that I had just been told by one of the top eye doctors in New York that at 26 I was already showing signs of cataracts. I was also losing my hair and getting dizzy every time I stood up. I told her, and she said she believed NRT could help.
Within one week of starting the supplements, my eyesight cleared up, the dizzy spells were gone, and my hair stopped falling out. I was hooked. Colds, UTIs, missed periods, insomnia, rashes, brain fog, Hashimoto’s, PCOS — NRT addressed all of it for me. I couldn’t imagine my life without it, so I became a practitioner. I needed to help myself, and I wanted to share it with everyone.
You built your practice publicly, which is its own kind of vulnerability. What’s something you’ve learned about yourself as a business owner that surprised you?
Honestly, the fact that I am a business owner surprises me. I have always been more of a daydreamer than a doer. But what I’ve learned is that with the right support around me, I actually get things done. That was a big one to discover about myself.
What was the hardest part of motherhood no one warned you about?
That my heart would be expanding and breaking at the same time, every single day. Every day with my daughter is the most magical, heavenly thing. Watching her lights me up and gives me a sense of purpose I have never known before. But in the same moment I am thanking God for delivering me this perfect little person, I am terrified of losing time with her. It’s all moving so fast. Watching her grow is a miracle and also quietly heartbreaking, because one day she won’t be my tiny baby anymore. And with every milestone, they need you just a little bit less.
You show up as yourself online whether you’re having a good day, a hard day, a hormonal day. That kind of consistency is rare. How do you do it?
Thank you for saying that, but I want to be honest — there have been plenty of times I’ve disappeared or not shown up authentically because of hard days. I was pretty paralyzed on social media during most of Covid and for a stretch after. It’s hard to be vulnerable when people are looking for something to get angry about. The fear of being judged or not liked is real.
It was actually easier to show up when my following was smaller because it felt like a close-knit, loving community. The bigger the audience, the more that changes. I think that dynamic is part of what has kept me from actively trying to grow. It’s something I’m genuinely working through right now.
What’s the most beautiful part of motherhood no one could have prepared you for?
It’s a love that cannot be put into words. I am more at peace than I have ever been in my entire life.
You’re deeply intentional about what goes in and on your body. What’s your filter?
I don’t actually overthink it that much, because the motivation is simple: I want to feel good, and feeling good requires making smart choices. That said, sometimes I just want to indulge and I think that’s completely fine too. I’m not neurotic about it.
But here’s something almost no one knows about me, only my assistant and my fiance: I am constantly muscle testing myself throughout the day. Not in a theatrical, look-at-me way, but quietly under a table, behind my back, in the car. I am genuinely communicating with my body about what is best for me in any given moment. It’s become second nature.
What have you learned about trusting your intuition? Has it always come easily?
I think a lot of people carry this belief that if you trust your intuition everything will go your way and you will be protected. But sometimes your intuition leads you down a path that is painful. And then people blame it on not following their intuition, even when they did.
What I’ve come to understand is that those experiences are not failures of intuition. They are opportunities for evolution. A diamond only becomes what it is under pressure. The hard paths are often the ones that shape us the most.
What’s on your nightstand and bathroom shelf right now?
OneSkin eye cream and face cream, OneSkin lip mask, Lancer Nourish moisturizer, my eye mask, baby monitor, a gua sha scraper, my tongue scraper, my electric toothbrush, Before toothpaste, and SEALD face tape.
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