Written by: Niki Pillitteri, RD
Whether this will be your 1st or 700th session with a registered dietitian, our compassionate and non-judgmental approach will welcome you here! We see lots of folks who have never met with a dietitian before, some others who have only seen dietitians at higher-level-of-care treatment centers, and others who have seen a handful of different outpatient dietitians in the past. Here at Beyond Therapy & Nutrition Center we currently have five registered dietitians on our amazing team (along with some pretty awesome therapists too!). We offer a weight-inclusive, fat-positive approach that is neuro-affirming and LGBTQ+ affirming.
While technically the work that we provide is called medical nutrition therapy (MNT) and others may use the term nutritional counseling, I personally like to refer to our work as nutrition therapy due to its relational nature. Each week we meet with you 1:1 (or sometimes along with your support person), and we start to develop a deep understanding of your personal life and how things are impacting the ways in which you take care of yourself day to day. While not “therapy” in the traditional sense of the type of work you can or may already be doing with a psychotherapist or social worker, nutrition therapy still feels like a more fitting term compared to counseling. Google defines therapy as treatment intended to relieve or heal a disorder - and that certainly describes the healing that goes on in our offices and virtual spaces. We work together with you to explore and define what healing from your eating disorder, diet culture, and/or body image struggles could look like for you.
Today, I am going to break down the different ways in which nutrition therapy may help you heal and what to expect before you make the call to see if we are a good fit for what you are needing in your life at this time. During the first few sessions in our initial assessment, we will be inviting you to answer some questions about your eating patterns, medical history, and related behaviors and assessing the emotional factors that play into all of the above. We strive to always practice patience and compassion while meeting our client where they are. This means a lot of exploring may happen before any “action” takes place. To explain this further, I have broken down four main areas we often focus on together which I will describe more in detail below.
1. Exploring your relationship with food
Out in the wild, when strangers find out I am a registered dietitian, they often immediately assume that I prescribe diets all day long and teach people what foods to eat and what foods to avoid. Unfortunately, this is a huge part of what the majority of dietitians out there do, so it makes total sense that one may assume that’s commonplace everywhere. But, fortunately, at Beyond Therapy & Nutrition Center, we have a totally different approach - we vow to maintain a universal stance against restriction for ALL bodies. Yes, we will certainly be talking about foods and your history of dieting, but more importantly we will be exploring your relationship with food - exploring how you physically and emotionally feel before, during, and after you eat. Alissa Rumsey offers a list of numerous journal prompts to explore one’s relationship with food in the following link that may be helpful to consider: https://alissarumsey.com/intuitive-eating-journal-prompts/. One of the first things that we will help you do is find ways to ensure that you are eating adequate amounts regularly throughout the day to meet your body’s individual needs, factoring in any chronic health conditions you may also be managing. We can also explore the fears that come up for you as you are navigating feeding yourself along with anything else that may be getting in the way of meeting your needs. We do not promote weight loss and will never pathologize your body. If enhancing your health is something that you feel is an important focus, we would also help you to explore ways to do so that don’t include intentionally changing the size or shape of your body. We will also explore different eating behaviors that you may be engaging in and work to remove shame and offer understanding as to why these behaviors that may have once been described to you as “bad” or “maladaptive” are actually working in some capacity to allow you to cope and to keep you alive. We may then explore other ways to cope that decrease the frequency of any behaviors that are no longer serving you. For some clients, we may be working to do food exposures or increase food variety, but this is always, always with a client’s consent. We can also offer meal support or meal coaching if this is something you may benefit from.
2. Exploring your relationship with your body
Aside from discussing food in session with you, we often are discussing how your body and your perception of your body is impacting how you feed yourself. We work to unlearn the harmful expectations placed upon our bodies often stemming from early childhood and work to reframe how we can practice respect towards our bodies, regardless of how we are feeling about it at that time. We work to understand your lived experiences in your body, including how your body may have changed/is changing/will change as you are working on nourishing yourself differently and also as a response to aging or disability. We work to heal the self-critic that often shows up in the room when discussing bodies. Our work doesn’t mean that you will never have a bad body image day; it simply can allow for more space and capacity to ride the waves when they arise and overall feel less distress in regards to your body to allow more room for you to thrive.
3. Exploring your relationship with movement
Because of the fitness industry’s close ties to diet culture, it may not surprise you that we often are discussing your history of exercise, current exercise habits, and your feelings about it. When someone has a history of dieting, they oftentimes have a history of exercising in an attempt to change their body’s shape or size. This coupling often really muddies one’s relationship with movement. Here at Beyond Therapy & Nutrition Center, we often reframe the ways in which we talk about moving our bodies as joyfully movement. As we are healing a relationship with movement, it often calls for a big step back from any formal regimen and invites in plenty of rest and exploration. Joyful movement can offer the body benefits, but healing one’s relationship with movement first is key. Please feel free to check out one of my previous blogs on joyful movement here for more information https://www.beyondnewtown.com/post/lessons-i-learned-from-my-toddler-joyful-movement-edition. Kait Vanderlaan, LCSW, one of our therapists on staff, is also a certified yoga teacher and can be a wonderful addition to your team when it comes to learning to practice joyful movement in your here-and-now body. We also have clients who choose to work with outside weight-inclusive personal trainers or physical therapists to safely engage in movement that is supportive to their body and mind.
4. Creating supportive community
Community is so, so important when it comes to healing - especially in a world where we are constantly and continuously bombarded with diet culture influences and harmful and oppressive beauty standards. There are several ways in which we can help you build community to have a sense outside of your weekly sessions that you are not alone in this challenging work. One really great way to build community is through a support group - these are often weekly, biweekly, or monthly groups that meet on specific topics to offer community and camaraderie so you feel less alone in your struggles as you navigate your journey to healing. I always find I have a love/hate relationship with technology, but one of the things that I love is that it allows us to connect with others more easily. Support groups can be happening across the state or country, and a client can still access community and connection easily at the click of a Zoom join-meeting button. If you are interested in finding a support group, please feel free to check out the following link from Project Heal that has a wonderful array of different support group offerings https://www.theprojectheal.org/free-eating-disorder-support-groups. Because your provider may have different identities than you, support groups offer ways in which to connect to folks who have similar identities to you and who face similar challenges when navigating our oppressive society. Lastly, another way to build your supportive community includes advocating for inclusive care to other providers on your team you are already seeing (i.e. your RD collaborating with your therapist or primary care physician on your behalf, with your signed permission). Or sometimes it includes helping you find and add a new provider to your team that has an approach that aligns with your values.
If, after reading this page, you feel that nutrition therapy sounds like something you may benefit from, please don’t hesitate to reach out to find out more! All of us registered dietitians here at Beyond Therapy & Nutrition Center would be thrilled to sit alongside you as we embark on this powerful work together. We are all licensed in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Florida and can also see folks in Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, New York, Michigan, Texas, and Virginia. We look forward to meeting you soon!
Check out the following link to learn more about our team: https://www.beyondnewtown.com/providers
Check out the following link to learn more about our services:
To receive email updates about future blog posts & updates at beyond,
join our mailing list!
Comments