Some people find their calling. Christine Barnes lived her way into hers.

It started with a book. As a young girl growing up in rural Australia in the 1960s, Christine stumbled across a book about healing the body through fresh vegetable juices. Intrigued, she tried it on herself and it worked. That early discovery that food could be medicine planted a seed that would quietly shape the rest of her life.

But life had other plans before she could follow it.

In her late teens, two devastating car accidents changed everything. The first left her with a broken nose and shattered teeth. The second took something far greater, her father and her elder brother. The grief was immense. The financial fallout was immediate. The young woman who had grown up curious and full of confidence suddenly had to find a different kind of strength.

She found it in work. Through her twenties and early thirties Christine threw herself into business, real estate development, hotel management, retail. Building success through sheer determination and a burning creative energy. But burning the candle at both ends eventually caught up with her. A severe acute case of hepatitis stopped her in her tracks and left her unable to work.

It was in that moment of forced stillness that she remembered what she had learned as a girl.

She returned to food as medicine, refining her approach to suit her own genetics, her own health and her own goals. The results stunned even her doctor. The hepatitis resolved within weeks. She returned to work with more energy and creativity than she had ever had. She continued to enjoy her social life too, only now with organic cocktails, liver-protective protocols before and after a big night, and weekend meditation retreats woven into the rhythm of her week. Health wasn't a restriction. It was her edge.

That edge funded something remarkable.

In her thirties, Christine's business success gave her the freedom to take an extended sabbatical. One that led her to India and Sweden to study advanced ancient practices taught only under strict conditions to a select group of students. Waking at 4am. Cold showers. Two hours of work before breakfast. Thirty-three days of complete silence - no writing, no reading, no eye contact. Cleaning tiles with a toothbrush. Not practices she would recommend to her patients, but ones that forged in her a depth of discipline, stillness and self-knowledge that no university course could replicate. She would go on to travel the world studying herbal medicine, healing practices and positive psychology, gathering knowledge the way others collect air miles.

Then cancer arrived. Twice.

First in the people she loved, her mother and her best friend both received a cancer diagnosis within the same period. Christine treated them both with nutritional medicine, herbal therapies and healing meditation. Both survived. Then, despite being exceptionally fit with a carefully considered diet, her own genetics caught up with her, a tumour in her bowel. Christine faced her own diagnosis with the same forensic curiosity and quiet determination she had brought to everything else.

She came through it. And she came through it with a mission.

Everything Christine had lived, the grief, the illness, the recovery, the ancient practices, the businesses built and lost, the GFC that took a second fortune, the years of clinical study, all of it converged into a single driving purpose. To give other people access to what she had figured out the hard way. To create a methodology so comprehensive yet so practical that anyone could use it to protect and optimise their own health.

That methodology became The Body Guard.

Today Christine holds a Masters of Wellness, qualifications in naturopathy, nutrition, herbal medicine and homeopathy, and sits as an Adjunct Professional Fellow at Southern Cross University's National Centre for Naturopathic Medicine. She is a keynote speaker, author, educator and one of Australia's most respected naturopathic mentors, known within the profession as a practitioner's practitioner.

She has lost two fortunes and built herself back each time. She has faced grief, illness and uncertainty with the same tools she now offers her patients.

She doesn't just understand what it means to protect your health. She has lived it.