Meet Melinda Staehling,
Neurodivergent Menopause Nutritionist

🍿My Story

Hi! 👋 I’m Melinda Staehling, and I use she/her pronouns. I live in Bend, Oregon. You can call me Mel, or Melinda. I like both!

When I was a toddler, I loved messing around in the kitchen and making “mixtures” on the floor with pantry items, the odd Pyrex, and a spatula. 

My headache story also starts at a young age. I remember awful attacks when we traveled, especially when the weather changed quickly. My mom had migraine up until menopause, which put an imprint on me as a kid.

The cooking special interest stuck, and as soon as I could work, I wanted to be around food. My first job was in a mall coffee shop, steaming lattes and making club sandwiches.

After college, I traveled up the restaurant ladder to locations in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, as a sommelier and general manager.

Then I burnt out.

🫖From Wellness Culture to Clinical Nutrition

A decade of struggle with chronic health issues led me off the restaurant floor, seeking fewer late nights with a more reasonable schedule. I sold fine wine in Southern California and on the Las Vegas Strip. 

I fell down an internet healing rabbit hole, discovered functional nutrition, and self-tested all the restrictive diets like keto, AIP, elimination diets, and, when I got more into fitness, counting macros. 

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Caught in the grips of wellness culture, I was throwing darts to solve issues with digestion, histamine, dysautonomia, gynecology, and crushing hormonal migraine.

At the time, I had no understanding of how neurodivergent wiring also commonly comes with complex chronic health issues.

As a lover of cooking and food experiences, it took a messy, winding path to find that cutting out entire food groups, lists of Yes/No food rules, so-called “clean” eating, and hyperfixating on the amount of pecorino on my pasta was not the move for me.

In 2018, I went all-in on a career change toward nutrition and started at the very beginning with actual (not Blogosphere) nutrition education, my first biochemistry classes, and a bunch of mistakes. 

Since then, I’ve held thousands of client sessions and sought out supervision from experienced colleagues in medical nutrition therapy, eating disorders, and neurodivergence.

💦Neurodivergent Perimenopause

My personal entry into perimenopause was more like getting hit by a freight train than a gentle glide. I slammed into peri with new mental health symptoms that didn’t feel like myself. 

I started seeing menopause practitioners and simultaneously learning about neurodivergence.

Perimenopause, grad school, and a pandemic collided to show me where certain aspects of my life were hard, where others were strengths. 

My perimenopause timeline also brought on ADHD, then an autism diagnosis, which has felt so affirming and, simultaneously, a lot to wade through at this stage in life.

In 2025, I became a Menopause Society Certified Practitioner and further focused my practice on midlife nutrition and health. 

I believe that through education, coaching, and clinical support, we can live in relation to food in a way that honors our health, energy, and capacity