We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Elizabeth Harris a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Elizabeth, appreciate you joining us today. When you’ve been a professional in an industry for long enough, you’ll experience moments when the entire field takes a U-Turn, an instance where the consensus completely flips upside down or where the “best practices” completely change. If you’ve experienced such a U-Turn over the course of your professional career, we’d love to hear about it.

I switched careers to get a master’s degree in nutrition science and become a registered dietitian in my mid-40s. Health and wellness had always been a passion for me (I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis in high school so I understood the importance of taking care of your health and wellbeing from a young age), and the timing finally felt right to pursue my passion and turn it into a profession.

Shortly after I passed the RDN licensing exam, I opened a private practice in Annapolis MD. For a hot second, I worked with clients whose primary goal was weight loss. But to be honest, I didn’t like it. Something within me just didn’t feel right about making weight the focal point of my work or people’s health.

I also noticed that people could be making all sorts of great changes to their eating, exercise, or other health habits but if the number on the scale didn’t change as quickly or as much as they would like, they would feel frustrated and tempted to give up. “Elizabeth,” they’d say, “it’s not working.”

This made me sad because of course it was “working.” They were making impactful changes in their health habits.

With three teenagers, I also couldn’t ignore how many people in our orbit had very fragile relationships with food and how much disordered eating is normalized and promoted out in diet culture.

I knew there had to be a better way to help people elevate their eating, health and wellbeing.

Buoyed by the research, I shifted my practice to a weight-inclusive, Intuitive Eating model of nutrition care and immediately saw the tremendous impact in people’s lives and overall health.

Now, I help people break up with dieting and diet culture so they can heal their relationship with food and their bodies and nourish and prioritize their whole (physical, mental, and emotional) health. I show folks how to shift their focus from losing weight to elevating their wellbeing by putting the emphasis on health-promoting behaviors instead of the scale.

My motto is “self-care, not self-control.” Because food is meant to be enjoyed, movement should make you happy, and we’ve all got better things to do than counting carbs or calories!

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m a dietitian and certified Intuitive Eating counselor. I run a private practice in Annapolis Maryland and offer nutrition counseling and body image healing services.

What You Get When You Work With Me: Support and guidance to cultivate a happy, healthy relationship with food that addresses your most pressing food and eating challenges and meets your unique health needs. With me by your side, you can stop feeling confused or frustrated and start feeling empowered to nourish and prioritize your whole mind-body health and wellbeing.

The benefits of working together:

A peaceful relationship with food: Experience the joy of guilt-free, feel-good eating that you can and want to stick with. I’ll help you tune into, trust, and respect your body’s eating cues while showing you how to adopt gentle, flexible nutrition strategies that fit into your real life — without counting, tracking, or measuring your way through mealtimes.

Better body image: Explore your body story and learn how to separate your sense of value, self-confidence, and self-worth from how your body looks so you can feel more peaceful and at home in your body (without chasing weight loss).

Improved health: Nourish and prioritize your health with an approach to food and healthy habits that recognizes the intricate link between mental and physical wellbeing and promotes a steadfast commitment to caring for yourself and your body.

How I can support you:

One-to-one nutrition, Intuitive Eating, and body image counseling services

Small Intuitive Eating coaching groups (my Thrive Tribe)

VIP “whole health” strategy days

Employee or team wellness programs

Raising kids with food and body confidence — a self-paced course

What I want you to know:

I pride myself in offering compassionate, non-judgmental, weight inclusive care that meets my clients where they’re at. I don’t just want to tell you what to eat or what to do to lose weight. I want to show you HOW to eat (and feel good about food and how you’re caring for your body) for the rest of your life.

Training and knowledge matter of course, but beyond that what do you think matters most in terms of succeeding in your field?

Other than training, knowledge, and evidence-based nutrition strategies, I believe it’s most important to provide compassionate, non-judgmental, weight-inclusive care that meets clients where they’re at and helps them understand the WHY behind their eating and food choices. This understanding and insight is crucial to helping people reframe their mindset around food, movement, and other health habits and it’s the key to successful, lasting behavior change.

My goal as a dietitian is not to simply tell people what to eat or how to lose weight. I want to show my clients HOW to eat (and feel good about food and how they’re caring for their bodies) for the rest of their lives.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Entrepreneurship and building a business require tremendous risk-taking and lessons in resiliency.

Many of the hurdles I’ve faced or overcome as an entrepreneur parallel the challenges or struggles that I help my clients overcome on their journeys to breaking up with diet culture, healing their relationship with food, and landing on a steadfast, feel-good approach to food and health.

Here are 6 of the most meaningful parallels as I see them:

Flexibility is essential. Rigid business plans aren’t very useful — as the Covid pandemic so pointedly taught us, you’ve got to be able to adapt to unforeseen circumstances and challenges. Strict, inflexible eating plans don’t work long-term either. If your approach to food can’t mold easily around vacations, holidays, stressful life events, or busy periods, it won’t be sustainable.

Progress isn’t linear. There are ups and downs and twists and turns on the road to building a business. Same goes for changing eating habits and redesigning or strengthening your relationship with food and your body. The ability to learn and grow from setbacks is what ultimately determines success. I always tell my clients, there is no failure when it comes to nourishing your body—only helpful feedback! Part of my role as an Intuitive Eating dietitian is teaching people to notice, interpret, and apply that feedback to improve their nutrition and health.

Satisfaction matters, a lot. I couldn’t show up for my clients day after day if I didn’t truly love and feel fulfilled by my work. It’s equally as difficult to show up for yourself and your wellness choices day after day if you’re muddling along, trying to do or eat what you think you’re “supposed to” instead of enjoying what tastes good, is meaningful for you, or feels good in your body.

Mindset is everything. It’s relatively straightforward to teach my clients which foods are nutrient dense or will help address specific medical or nutrition needs. But helping them shift their mindset around food and how they’re caring for their bodies is the key to translating that knowledge into sustainable behavior change. Ditto in business!

Growth happens outside your comfort zone. I couldn’t do what it takes to be successful in business without challenging myself and going well outside of my comfort zone. Likewise, giving up dieting and shifting the focus from weight to health-promoting behaviors and overall health and wellbeing might feel scary, but ultimately, it’s life-changing.

Success takes many forms. Income is one way to measure business success, but flexibility, growth, client feedback, and my favorite—impact—are perhaps even more meaningful.

Success in nutrition and Intuitive Eating is measured in multiple ways too. My clients:

• Find consistency with their eating and wellness habits
• Quiet food and eating guilt
• Learn to trust their bodies and their food choices
• Enjoy foods they love in ways that taste and feel good
• Enhance their physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing
• Improve their lab markers
• Better their body image

The list—and benefits—go on!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.elizabethharrisnutrition.com
• Instagram: @elizabethharrisnutrition
• Facebook: @elizabethharrisnutrition or please join my Health and Healing with Intuitive Eating community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/healthandhealingwithintuitiveeating
• Other: Podcast: Wellness Rebranded (available on all the major platforms) I’d love to offer your readers an opportunity to participate in my free 5-day challenge, Discover Intuitive Eating. Here’s the link to sign up: https://elizabethharrisnutrition.com/5day-challenge

Image Credits
Maureen Porto Photography