The mission of this service is to provide others with a safe space to unpack beliefs around food and body that are no longer serving you and to replace them with beliefs that will support a stronger body image and relationship to food and a greater understanding of nutrition and how to fuel your body for the lifelong.
Who Would Benefit from Nutrition Counseling?
If any of these messages resonate with you, nutrition counseling could greatly benefit you:
- You've tried diet after diet but feel even more confused about food and disconnected from your body.
- You want to follow another diet plan but deep down know diets don't work and want to try something new.
- You have struggled with feeling control around food and often find yourself going to an all-or-nothing/black-and-white mentality around food.
- You want to find joy in eating instead of feeling shame and guilt around food.
- You find yourself preoccupied thinking about food and what you'll eat next.
- You feel anxious going out to eat.
- You want to improve your body image.
- You lead a busy life and want help learning to meal prep.
- You want to learn about overall nutrition and how to eat in a balanced way without using calorie-tracking apps or counting macros.
How We Work Together
Through virtual 1:1 nutrition counseling sessions, we work together to help redefine your relationship with food and your body.
- Goals are personalized to what you need at the moment and are not the same for every client.
- I support you in going from a restricted mindset around food to one of abundance and peace around food.
- I encourage you when things get hard and provide accountability to support you in meeting your health goals.
- I help challenge negative beliefs around food while guiding you to create new, supportive ones.
- You'll grow in self-awareness and self-compassion.
- You'll learn how to regain body trust.
- I help you feel confident in your knowledge of nutrition so that you know what balanced meals and snacks look like and how to best nourish your body.
- I'll teach you the 10 principles of Intuitive Eating so that you can learn how to use internal cues rather than external cues when it comes to food.
- You'll learn what hunger and fullness cues are and how to regain them if they have gone away, which is very common with chronic dieting.
- We'll cover stress management and ways to add more self-care to your lifestyle.
- If interested, we can talk about breathwork and meditation and how to use these tools to support your health journey.
- We'll talk about mindfulness and ways to incorporate it into eating habits.
Initial Session
Our first session will be for 60 minutes. During this time, you can share with me as much of your story and relationship to food and body as you feel comfortable sharing. I'll send you an assessment form prior to our appointment, so we'll go over the questions in depth together. We'll cover topics such as medical conditions, diet history, typical eating patterns, recent lab values that diet can play a role in affecting, quality of sleep, level of stress and so much more! We'll make goals together at the end that best support you in reaching your goals.
Follow-up Sessions
Follow-up sessions are 45 or 30 minutes. During these sessions, we'll pick up where we left off at our last session. We'll touch base on how the goals we made at your last appointment are going. The main thing to know: there is no judgment here. Some weeks we may feel great and other weeks we may feel disappointed if we didn't meet goals and that's okay. What matters is progress - not perfection. Success looks like being able to reflect on the last week and seeing what areas we needed more support, roadblocks in our way and how to do things differently going forward.
FAQs
Intuitive Eating is an evidenced-based, non-diet approach in creating a healthy relationship with food and the body. It was created by two dietitians, Evelyn Tribole, MS, RDN, CEDRD-S and Elyse Resch, MS, RDN, CEDS-S, Fiaedp, FADA, FAND. Intuitive Eating is comprised of 10 principles including reject the diet mentality, honor your hunger, make peace with food, respect your body and gentle nutrition - just to name a few. The approach is a weight-inclusive and non-judgemental way to create healthy eating habits. The focus is not on weight loss but on trusting your body. It takes the focus away from external factors that diet culture emphasizes such as not eating after a certain time or avoiding a certain food group due to concerns of gaining weight, and brings more awareness to internal cues and developing habits of self-care and body trust.
If you have been diagnosed with an eating disorder, I strongly encourage you to reach out to your primary care physician for a referral to a specialist. The National Eating Disorders Association is a great resource for support and finding treatment options.
I do not provide clients with a macro or calorie goal. The main reason is that this is not a weight loss service. I do not want my clients to track their macros and calories for the rest of their life. My goal is to teach you techniques that are intuitive and build body trust.
I absolutely validate the desire to want to lose weight or be in a smaller body. The world we live in sends us messages all the time that promote this desire. However, in order to tune into your body, the desire for weight loss has to be put on hold. A good part of the work we do is focused on changing behaviors and thoughts around food and body image. Since weight is not a behavior or thought, we don’t focus on weight loss. Weight cycling, also known as yo-yo dieting, is when you lose weight and regain weight over and over, which is very common in chronic dieting. Research has shown a correlation between weight cycling and binge eating, higher mortality and cardiovascular disease (Rhee, 2017). The effects of weight cycling are detrimental to our physical and mental health. During our work together, you may lose, gain or stay the same weight. The focus will always be on how to best nourish your body sustainably.
Each time I work with a client it’s individualized so the timeline is different for everyone. Since this is deep work, it usually takes a long commitment to see sustainable change. We'll usually start with weekly appointments before going biweekly and so forth. Eventually, you'll find yourself in a good groove with your body and nutrition and be ready for maintenance. At that point, we may do appointments quarterly or you can schedule appointments as needed in what I like to call "tune-up" appointments.
The initial 60-minute session is $125 and subsequent 45-minute follow-ups are $90 and 30-minute sessions are $60.
I don’t accept insurance. However, I can provide you a superbill (a receipt of the appointment) that you can submit to your insurance to get potential reimbursement if your plan provides out-of-network benefits. When you call your insurance company ask if they reimburse for the CPT codes: 97802 (assessment) or 97803 (reassessment/follow-up). If yes, ask how much they cover and what diagnosis codes they accept.
Yes, you absolutely can!