What is it?

Individualized nutrition counseling sessions tailored to each individual's unique nutritional needs and their personal relationship with food. Individuals will explore their past history of dieting and will assess how this may be affecting current eating patterns. Nutrition education, counseling and motivational interviewing are provided by meeting you where you are at in your readiness to change and helping you to set personal health goals that are meaningful for you. 

What to Expect in an Initial Assessment:

An initial assessment is 60-90 minutes and, during that time, your dietitian will gather information related to your past and current relationship with food, specific food-related concerns and behaviors, whether or not you have met with a dietitian in the past, medical history, medications you may be on, a typical day of eating, and what you hope to get out of meeting with a dietitian. This is also your opportunity to learn more about your dietitian and the non-diet approach.

What to Expect in Follow-Up Sessions:

Follow-up sessions are 60 minutes and consist of looking into a more detailed day of eating. Your dietitian will get an idea of what your typical day looks like and whether or not specific parts of your day are more challenging than others (ex. skipping breakfast or binging in the evenings). During this session, you and your dietitian can create an individualized meal plan if desired and will discuss specific goals that you would like to be working on in between sessions.

Non-Diet Approach

A diet is any plan, program or product that tells you when, what and how much to eat. Diets usually consist of rigid food rules and use labels including "good" and "bad." Some diets will require that you eliminate certain foods or even food groups and they send us messages that we cannot trust our own bodies. Research shows that 95% of diets fail and lead to weight re-gain within the first 5 years of ending the diet. Diets usually result in a slowed metabolism, an increased set-point weight (the range your body naturally wants to be at), increased preoccupation with food and increased shame about our bodies.

Intuitive eating, unlike dieting, is a process of learning how to increase mindfulness in order to better connect with your bodies internal hunger and fullness cues. It is learning to eat when you're hungry and stop when you're full,  but it is also so much more than that. It's recognizing the psychology of eating, the importance of why you're eating versus simply what you're eating. It is focusing on eating behaviors without trying to manipulate a number on the scale.

In our practice, we use Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch as a foundational resource for helping individuals to reject the diet mentality and make peace with food. In nutrition sessions, you and your dietitian will work to recognize and challenge your preconceived food rules while dismantling the lies of diet culture and learning to trust yourself with a variety of foods. You will learn how to view food as emotionally equal (neither eliciting a sense of self-righteousness nor shame) and will work to increase variety, flexibility and spontaneity with food.

Body Acceptance

In order to properly nourish your body, you have to first accept it. Only then can you practice self-care through adequate nutrition and mindful movement. There is a difference between body love and body acceptance. Maybe body love does not feel realistic to you. Maybe it feels like a far stretch from where you currently are at in your relationship with your body.

Body acceptance allows you to hold space for the fact that our bodies change over time. It allows you to be able to perhaps not love your body and, at the same time, still be able to care for it through proper nourishment and mindful movement. Body acceptance looks like caring for your body instead of punishing it through restrictive dieting and over-exercise.

The diet industry is a 60+ billion diet industry and its primary strategy is to get you to be dissatisfied with your body. It sends messages telling you that you are broken and that it has the magic solution you need in order to be fixed. Our culture has defined beauty as the thin ideal and countless times we strive to meet our society's unrealistic standards which only leaves us more depressed and more preoccupied with food.

Our practice believes that health can be achieved in all shapes and sizes. We believe that you cannot determine one’s health status simply by looking at their physical appearance. Our practice believes that our bodies are good and we strive to empower clients to treat their bodies as if they believe it too!

Our practice can provide a faith-based nutrition counseling approach to clients voicing faith as a value of theirs. We respect each individual client and will not provide this service for clients uninterested in bringing the topic of faith into sessions. For those interested in this approach, clients will learn what scripture says about food, body, worth and identity and will discuss these topics from a spiritual lens.

As believers, we are called to be holy and set apart for the services of God. Yet in the area of body image concerns we are just as dissatisfied as the rest of the world and looking to the next diet or weight loss plan to give us a sense of value.

With a faith-based approach to nutrition counseling, clients will learn what it looks like to view disordered eating and body dysmorphia (obsessive focus on a perceived flaw in appearance) as a form of spiritual warfare as well as gain scriptural tools for battling these issues.

Clients will also learn how the pursuit of health, though good, if made ultimate, can become a form of modern day idolatry. They will learn what scripture has to say about stewarding our bodies well while not placing our worth and identity in such things.