In 2004, Catherine Burns had her first panic attack.

Her heart started pounding and she couldn’t breathe. She didn’t know what was happening as she managed to pull over her car.

“I thought I was going to die,” the nutritionist and Royal Gazette columnist said.

She’d taken on too much. She was juggling a full-time job and the training that came with it, and also worked as a receptionist at a long-distance lorry dispatch in the UK.

She got through it until the following year when she moved to the island with her Bermudian husband. She’d been hired as the resident wellness manager at insurance company Argus, and while she “loved the job”, anxiety set in hard.

“I remember doing a staff presentation at Gorham’s and I was holding on to the windowsill because I felt so anxious,” she said. “I thought I was going to pass out. But, one day at a time, I managed to apply what I had learnt from a nutritional perspective to manage my anxiety, and it got better.”

It’s hard to imagine that scenario now. Mrs Burns is the head of a “thriving” company, Natural Ltd. It offers a range of programmes aimed at helping people adopt a healthier lifestyle.

She “procrastinated” over starting the company for years. It took a thief to get her there.

Mrs Burns accidentally left her card in an ATM machine and her savings account was emptied. She and her husband were going on a skiing trip with friends. They’d saved for months and were left with nothing. She immediately launched a weight-loss class, hoping it would generate the needed cash. “When I taught the class it was intended to be a one-off, but it was going so well the next one sold out before I had finished teaching the first,” she said.

The mother-of-two taught her classes at lunchtimes and in the evenings. She then quit Argus so she could devote all her energy to Natural Ltd.

“I went from being robbed at the ATM to, five years later, having a company that’s thriving,” she said.

Nutrifit, Beat the Couch, Natural Kids, a Natural Kids summer camp, Eating Psychology and a two-week Family Sugar Detox challenge are all Natural Ltd programmes.

The 38-year-old created the detox challenge after noticing how difficult it was for people to change their diet when the people around them weren’t doing the same.

The “manageable” commitment sees families work as a team to form better habits.

“It’s so much easier to change your own dietary habits if your food environment is supportive,” she said.

“It’s very hard to raise a healthy child in Bermuda because of the sheer volume of sugar that is around them. It used to be that the gas stations just sold gas and the pharmacy just sold medicine.

“I don’t think you can point the finger at any one person when the environment is not set out to help people succeed. We all need to be better about making healthy food choices but, at the same time, until the environment is set out better, it’s going to be very difficult.”

Mrs Burns was given the Business and Professional Women’s Association of Bermuda’s Woman of the Year award at their anniversary gala on May 14.

It’s presented annually to a woman for her “outstanding achievements, ongoing volunteer services, generous support and dedication to the Bermuda community”.

“When they contacted me to let me know about the award, I was obviously very flattered,” she said. “[Although] I felt like they might take the award away from me if they could see the state of my house.”

A two-hour BPW seminar led by Mrs Burns last year questioned whether women’s health was being affected in their efforts to work and raise a family.

“We had a very honest conversation about how overwhelming it can be to try and achieve all those things and raise children whilst growing your career,” she said.

“One of the conclusions we all drew from that meeting was yes, it’s possible to have it all, but not necessarily all at the same time to the standards to which you would like to achieve it. I now know what matters — spending time with my kids, without being distracted by Facebook or e-mails, and the quality of my work. So, if the house is chaotic behind me then unfortunately that’s just the way it is.

“One of the areas in which I’ve been really lucky is my family and friends have been so supportive in what I’ve done.”

• Visit www.natural.bm or call 236-7511 for more information on Natural Ltd.