Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Jessica Stamm. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Jessica , thanks for joining us today. If you had a defining moment that you feel really changed the trajectory of your career, we’d love to hear the story and details.

A defining moment in my life and career was when I became pregnant during my dietitian internship. I had already been working as a Nutritionist in many different realms including Fitness Ridge resort in Malibu, Diet for Health in La Canada, Whole Foods as their Healthy Eating Specialist and more. My internship was through Public Health Foundation where I was working at the time. The internship had multiple rotations including skilled nursing facilities, hospitals, public health and food management. I found out I was pregnant in August, due in April and the dietetic internship went through March. I was expecting pregnancy to be no issue, but ended up with 24/7 nausea until the third trimester, fainting episodes and what felt like every random, uncomfortable symptom in the book. Along with working, interning, and studying I now had to add in prepping for a baby. I started looking at each rotation in the dietetic internship in a way more serious light, thinking in each about how I could make it work with a family.
Shortly after completing the internship, our precious son was born and the second I held him I knew that I wanted to be home with him as much as I could. I went on to pass the dietitian exam and decided to start my own private practice from a blog idea I had been working on for over ten years – Healthy Medium Nutrition!

Jessica , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I am the founder of Healthy Medium Nutrition, a nutrition counseling service based in La Crescenta, Ca. The idea behind “healthy medium” came from my own struggle with health and nutrition that lasted for years from high school into college. I had tried what seemed like every diet imaginable, along with making up a few of my own. I was uncomfortable in my skin, had horrible body image thoughts and battled with binge eating. It took years of working on myself, becoming a nutrition major with an emphasis/minor in psychology and then interning at a local nutrition practice for me to realize there was more to health and weight than just a certain diet and the scale. There is no one solution for all, it is so much more than the food alone! My love for nutrition counseling just continued to grow with each client that I would see, being able to personalize each person’s plan and dig deeper into the why along the way. I am a dietitian that likes to focus on non-diet solutions with an intuitive eating approach. My goal as someone’s registered dietitian is to help them rekindle their joy of eating, build a better relationship with their body and help them to navigate through the mess of diet mania that is so rampant. I love finding ways to make favorite meals work, make practical plans alongside clients while focusing on their goals.

Putting training and knowledge aside, what else do you think really matters in terms of succeeding in your field?

To become a dietitian you have to take a whole slew of chemistry, biology, anatomy etc. courses – way more than I ever expected truthfully! There were countless labs testing your own blood sugar, studying cadavers, fermenting and exploring chemical reactions and then some. The internships are insane to get into and put you through rotations all over the place including working in hospital settings all the way to food service management. All of these things of course lay some groundwork for becoming a successful dietitian, however in my opinion, the most helpful thing for succeeding in this field is your own personal life experience. To be able to have walked the walk and sincerely understand where clients are coming from is a huge part in connecting with someone and finding ways to make nutrition counseling work in the real world. I used to hide my personal experience from my clients for years because I was embarrassed to share that I had struggled with binge eating and negative body image. I have found that in many aspects of life, and for sure in this career, it helps to share real life experiences with all of it’s ups and downs and lessons learned. Nutrition is also something that is so personalized and ever modifying that it needs to be more than just the training from schooling. I will continue to share personal experience as well as work to stay up to date on new studies, trends and more with continuing education each year.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

A typical nutrition lesson that took me years to unlearn, even as a Dietitian, was taking all the importance away from BMI and the scale. The diet industry has done a truly remarkable job of making it seem like weight and “calories in, calories out” is of the upmost importance. It messes with your hunger cues, confidence, food preferences, social interactions and so much more. I am so happy to have divorced from the scale and to be trusting my body with intuitive eating, and I absolutely love helping clients find that peace with eating and their bodies!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.healthymediumnutrition.com
• Instagram: @healthy.medium.nutrition
• Facebook: Healthy Medium Nutrition