The Body Catalyst Hawthorn

Body Catalyst Hawthorn celebrate their first birthday on 19 November 2019 with an open day. The holistic body sculpting clinic is managed by Luzie Lonsdale.

Luzie grew up in the ‘sunshine capital’ of New Zealand, the “really beautiful” coastal city of Nelson, where she hiked in the bush and drove around the island with friends. “I’d heard Melbourne was a cool, creative city to move to,” she said. “All my friends were writers, artists, and musicians.” After graduating from high school, she moved to Melbourne with five other girls from Nelson and Wellington. She worked at the cafe Bread and Jam for Frances, now Supernova, located behind the bookstore Readings on Glenferrie Road, Hawthorn. Soon enough, her gap ‘year’ had turned into three.

“Eventually I decided I needed to be an adult and go back and study,” said Luzie, who moved back to New Zealand to attend Victoria University in Wellington. By the start of 2016 she had completed a Bachelor of Biomedical Science and Psychology and spent the rest of the year reconnecting with her family.

Moving back to Melbourne at the start of 2017 seemed like a “natural easy step”. Initially, she worked at a cafe in Melbourne's CBD, but this was not her long-term plan. When the opportunity to work with Body Catalyst came up, she was “immediately intrigued” as she found medical aesthetics “bizarrely combines” her fields of study into one.

When she first started one-and-a-half years ago, Luzie worked between the South Yarra and Hawthorn locations. Now she is the full-time clinic manager at Body Catalyst Hawthorn. The clinic helps people “to make a shift in their life” and “be where they’d like to be physically when they’ve exhausted all their personal efforts through diet and exercise”. They accomplish this through non-surgical, non-invasive treatments for stubborn pockets of fat, cellulite, and loose skin with scientific technology, as well as dietary and nutrition counselling from qualified staff. For Luzie, there is great reward in “seeing the same clients every single week” and “watching the way they feel about themselves shift, going from looking in the mirror pinching the parts they don’t like to becoming confident in the skin and clothes they’re in.”

Having to commute from the CBD each day, Luzie's favourite part of working in Glenferrie is that “every single store I go into, the person is always so happy to see me. I walk into the Hawthorn Brew Bar and they know me by name, they smile and wave.” She is grateful that repeat business is really valued in Glenferrie, and believes “you don’t get to build that kind of rapport in the CBD or in other suburbs.” She personally loves to visit Readings, the ‘gorgeous’ Lido Cinemas and appreciates the “bustling strip” of Glenferrie with its “neat little places that have a cute, almost bohemian vibe to them.” Being close to Swinburne University, “you know there’s that undertone of social movement going on.”

On her days off, Luzie can be found on her bike cycling to the beaches of Hampton and Brighton. She loves to keep up-to-date on new research in the health field, often ‘geeking out’ and reading textbooks and publications. One of the most important things to Luzie is living an ethical life with a ‘do no harm’ mentality. “We’re not here forever, we’re essentially caretakers.”