We were lucky to catch up with Lauren Boline recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Lauren thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Was there an experience or lesson you learned at a previous job that’s benefited your career afterwards?

Before opening my business, I was working as a Clinical Registered Dietitian in acute care. The lessons I learned in this job solidified my understanding of the role “good nutrition” plays in one’s overall health: important, but not even close to the whole picture. In turn, this heavily influences the way I work with my current clients, because I help these women understand that maintaining the “perfect” weight and restrictive diet really doesn’t mean you’re healthy, and certainly isn’t the thing that will help you improve your long-term health outcomes.

As a clinical dietitian, my main role was to oversee patient nutrition and labs, and visit with patients to help them understand the necessary nutrition recommendations they may need to follow after their stay in acute care. This ranged from post-surgery diet recommendations, to new diabetes diagnosis diet educations, to prescribing tube feeding regimens for patients who could no longer eat safely by mouth.

One of the earliest and most important lessons I learned in this role, based on the patient population I worked with, was that many people simply did not have access to the resources that they needed to follow the multiple recommendations and guidelines being thrown at them during their 2-3 day stay in the hospital. Not only would patients receive a consult from me, but they would also receive a consult & recommendations from multiple other healthcare professionals like their doctors and nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists, occupational therapists, respiratory therapists, and more.

In talking with patients and sitting through floor rounds with my coworkers, I would often learn that many of our patients did not have the financial or social support to continue to make the changes necessary for their health once they left the hospital. Many patients didn’t have healthcare coverage at all. Let alone safe housing or stable employment.

I was scoffed at by patients more than once for approaching them with a list of nutrition recommendations, what foods they can or can’t eat, only to be told that they can barely afford food at all, and will continue to eat whatever they can get their hands on.

And I don’t blame them for laughing at me in that moment. I approached them with so little understanding of what being healthy really means.

I grew up personally obsessed with “eating clean” and being as thin as possible to prove how healthy I was. I was taught in my dietetic education that if someone isn’t within a certain BMI, you recommend weight loss, and that certain foods are good and certain foods are bad. Although I had already sort of started to learn about diet culture and the weight loss industry, and how they weren’t actually at all about improving our health, my real world experience in the hospital was a very eye-opening experience about what real health looks like.

Here’s what the hospital and the hundreds of patients I saw there taught that 24-year old version of me: In the real world, people don’t need thinness to be healthy. They need access to safe housing, fresh food, stable & fair employment, affordable healthcare, safe communities, and they need the ability to rest from the constant stressors of our current world.

That job taught me that one of the biggest services I could provide my patients as a healthcare provider was to be the one who actually listens, and supports them to trust & advocate for themselves. And that gentleness and understanding with clients can help you create connections that actually encourage real change, not the all-or-nothing diet culture kind.

We all deserve a chance to live a healthy life, and as a Registered Dietitian, I now feel like it is my responsibility to use my platform and credentials to make it clear that while nutrition & fitness can be an important tool for improving your health, we have to look at the bigger picture and ask what we can do (and especially who can we vote for) that will ensure we are helping people meet their most basic needs so that they have that chance at a healthy, safe life.

Lauren, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My name is Lauren Boline, a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist and Intuitive Eating Coach. I am also a former dieter and binge-eater, which is why I now help women heal their relationship with food, their body, and their health after years of dieting and binge eating.

In my business, I help women stop dieting and binge eating by helping them change their restrictive, all-or-nothing thinking about health and their diets. I help women recognize that there is much more to consider when it comes to living a truly healthy lifestyle than the food you eat or the number on the scale. After years of believing that “being healthy” meant eating “clean” foods, a strict exercise regimen, and weight loss, I now realize that a truly healthy life is one that allows you the space and flexibility to set realistic goals, and consider your mental, physical, spiritual, and social health along with your need for things like rest, pleasure and satisfaction in your life.

In my work, I have also learned that the diet culture standards and beauty ideals I was following, the same ones that fuel our obsession with being thin, come from racist, sexist, ableist roots and I find it important to help women understand how we can each play a role in perpetuating these standards when we stay stuck in this thinness-obsessed mindset around health.

The hardest part for women is breaking free of the automatic thinking and habits they’ve built over years and years of diets. Many of the women I work with are perfectionists, especially when it comes to their diets and fitness routines. That is until they “fall off the wagon”. And it feels like the more times they try to diet, the easier it is to fall off that wagon and end up feeling completely lost and confused about how to actually improve their health (since weight loss does not seem to be a reliable or sustainable solution).

And I agree, passionately. Chasing weight loss forever is not a sustainable approach to health. Putting your body through endless cycles of drastic weight loss and weight gain is not “healthy”. Demonizing foods and labeling them as “good” vs. “bad” does not help anyone, especially women with a long history of this all-or-nothing mindset with food and body. In my professional experience, this thinness-obsessed diet culture does nothing but increase confusion, guilt, and self-blame, and fuels the endless cycle of dieting that women end up stuck in. We don’t have to get into all of the research here, but as an evidence-based practitioner I can safely say that the research firmly backs this weight-neutral approach to improving your health.

After helping myself through this process of challenging my diet beliefs, accepting my body without continuing to put myself through extreme and restrictive attempts at weight loss, and healing my relationship with food and movement, it was clear to me that my passion would be to help other women go through this same process as well. From there, my Empowered Eating Program was born and I have had an incredible 2 years building my business, working directly with 30 women to help them heal their relationship with food and body, and helping hundreds more through my Instagram platform (@dietitian.laurenboline) and podcast (The Empowered Eating Podcast) where I provide free support and education. I am always looking forward to the opportunity to connect with more women and help them realize that you truly can improve your health without having to focus on losing weight or restricting your favorite, fun foods.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

In the years I’ve been growing my business, hands down the most important lesson I’ve learned is that being my most authentic self is the key to connecting with the right clients.

Coming from a science degree with just a minor in business, learning how to effectively market & connect with potential clients has been both tricky and wildly interesting to me. And of course with little background on how to market other than a basic marketing class early in college, I was easily drawn in by people selling the *perfect* marketing formula. I didn’t know what to do, and wanted someone to tell me exactly how to do it.

Gradually, I started to realize that I got much better feedback and engagement from people when I was just being my normal self. Then I started to run into marketing coaches like Simone Seol who teach the same idea: that being yourself is your most powerful marketing and growth tool. Plus, I realized that following marketing rules felt an awful lot like having to follow diet culture rules about how to eat, and I’m definitely not about that.

The more I lean into being myself in the way I teach and speak to potential clients, the more I am connecting with the exact right clients for me. The women who need my help and need to hear my message the way only I can teach it.

Other than training/knowledge, what do you think is most helpful for succeeding in your field?

In order to succeed in entrepreneurship, one thing you’ll need is a willingness to fail a lot for a long time and still keep going. Not only will you have to keep going, you have to decide that you will learn from your failures and mistakes instead of sitting in shame and fear.

One of the questions I’ve asked myself often is, “What would it look like for you to be a person who loves a challenge and figuring out how to solve it?”

I think this mindset shift also helps when you start to feel overwhelmed or like you’re not moving fast enough. It is truly so natural, normal, and necessary to fail in order to build a successful business. And failing doesn’t have to mean falling backwards or giving up. If you are an entrepreneur, just know that there is an abundance of people out there to serve, and you will connect with the right people if you just keep going and learn from the challenges.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.nutritionwithlauren.com
• Instagram: @dietitian.laurenboline
• Facebook: facebook.com/laurenboline.rdn
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauren-boline-rdn/