We recently connected with Leah Kern and have shared our conversation below.

Leah, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We love asking folks what they would do differently if they were starting today – how they would speed up the process, etc. We’d love to hear how you would set everything up if you were to start from step 1 today

I would’ve spent less time and energy churning out IG content and more time and energy focusing on content with a longer shelf life like blog posts, podcasts, and Youtube videos.

With Instagram once your content is out of the algorithm (or once your story expires after 24 hours), it’s mostly no longer working to reach/ nurture potential clients.

With content searchable through SEO like blog posts, Youtube videos, and podcast episodes, even older content can continue attracting and nurturing new leads, and this has certainly been the case for me.

For example, a blog post I wrote about cannabis and intuitive eating continues to be the #1 page driving traffic to my site, even though it’s more than a year old.

I feel like so many people focus so hard on social media marketing in the beginning and don’t end up learning other awesome marketing tools like SEO.

Actually just a few weeks ago, I fully left social media, even though this was a place I got a lot of clients from, because it wasn’t feeling aligned. I wrote more about this decision in a personal essay here: https://leahkern.substack.com/p/why-im-leaving-instagram

Leah, 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’m Leah Kern, a registered dietitian and certified intuitive eating counselor supporting clients in healing their relationships with food and body. I got into this work through my own journey with disordered eating throughout high school and into early college. I actually decided to go to school to study nutrition from a completely disordered place. I wanted to figure out how to eat “perfectly” and I thought that going to school to become a dietitian was the answer.

Turns out that I did not learn how to eat “perfectly,” and instead learned that I had unknowingly been struggling with disordered eating. I never made myself throw up, doctors never seemed concerned, and people actually praised me for my vigilant commitment to “healthy” eating, so I never saw myself as someone struggling with food issues. But the more I restricted and performed this persona of a “clean” eater, the more out of control I would feel behind closed doors. The binges got increasingly frequent, and I’d feel so much shame for not being able to just eat normally. It seemed like other people could feel totally chill around chips and cookies, meanwhile these types of foods totally took over my brain.

Through my undergraduate curriculum, I learned about an approach to nutrition called intuitive eating and my life was forever changed. (here’s an overview of the framework from my blog: https://leahkernrd.com/intuitive-eating-for-beginners/) This framework helped me personally to stop binge eating, find freedom with food, and make peace with my body. I learned how to reject all the diet rules I had internalized over the years and instead, listen to my own body’s cues. The sense of connection, presence and peace I felt was shocking. I couldn’t believe how much my life had changed as a product of implementing the intuitive eating framework. I knew that in my future career as a dietitian, this was the exact work I wanted to do with clients.

This lead me to open my private practice, Leah Kern Nutrition, where I take a spiritual approach to intuitive eating. I say spiritual because I believe that the work involved with unraveling years of conditioning in diet culture and coming home to one’s body is inherently a spiritual experience. Taking this spiritual approach is one of the things that set’s me apart from other intuitive eatings dietitians. Three years ago I launched my 1:1 program, The Embodied Method, where I work with folks to heal their relationships with food and their bodies. This program combines my personal experience with disordered eating plus my professional experience as a intuitive eating dietitian, giving them everything they need to break free from diet culture and find peace with food. The Embodied method is 4 months long and it’s my highest touch offering. A few years ago, after seeing the success clients were having when implementing the tools I teach in The Embodied Method, I wanted to figure out a way to make my framework accessible to more people (since my capacity for 1:1 clients is limited and also some folks don’t have the time/ money for a high-touch 1:1 offering). This is how my self-paced online course, The Return was born. The Return captures my entire proven method (The Embodied Method) in an on-demand, self-paced, module format. The course includes 70+ video modules worksheets, and what I call the “wisdom library” which is a hub of recommended resources including podcasts, videos, guided meditations, etc.

Two years ago on a sleepless night (I had coffee ice cream before bed not realizing it had caffeine) I had the idea to start a podcast. I opened my journal to brain dump names for the show and the first thing I wrote. down was “shoulders down.” It clicked right away. The idea behind this name is when we’re living in the diet mindset, we spend so much time living in our heads– calculating calories and doing mental gymnastics to “justify” our eating. When we eat intuitively we learn to get out of our heads and instead live shoulders down, from our body’s cues and wisdom. This is what I hope to help folks achieve through listening to my podcast.

I help folks solve the problem of feeling obsessed, stressed, and out of control around food. Most of my clients come from decades in diet culture– Keto, Paleo, WW, Whole-30, Optivia– they’ve tried it all. I help them learn to stop outsourcing their eating decisions to exterior rules/ metrics, and instead learn to use thei intuition as the guiding force for decisions around food. I also help my clients to make peace with their bodies after a lifetime of feeling shame and disgust towards themselves.

The main thing I want potential clients to know about my work is that it truly is possible to stop overeating, emotional eating, obsessing over calories, and find acceptance with your body. I know it might seem like food freedom and body acceptance are things that are only possible for other people, but with he right tools and support, this reality is possible for you too. I also want potential clients to know that this work starts with food but it ripples into all aspects of life… Once you become an intuitive eater, you free up mental real estate, so you can use your limited bandwidth to focus on your work, your passions, and your loved-ones. Doing this work will help you to experience a level of presence that wasn’t accessible when your attention was stolen by diet thoughts. This work is not easy or a “quick fix” but it’s incredibly rewarding.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

So many! I’m currently reading The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin and that’s been incredibly impactful. I love looking at my business through the lens of a creative work of art because that’s really what it is… creativity is about bringing something into existence that didn’t exist previously– to create– and that’s such a fun energy to channel as an entrepreneur. Rick Rubin talks about how ideas come to us, and we must have a sensitive antennae to pick up on ideas when the universe or “source” is sending them to us. He says that if we don’t act on the ideas that come to us, that idea will likely try to manifest through a different person. He explains that this is why it’s not uncommon to see someone else create something that you had the idea for if you never acted on the idea.

Building a Story Brand by Donald Miller was instrumental in learning how to market. The biggest thing I took away from that book is that in the “story” of our business’s brand, we should not be positioning ourselves– aka the brand– as the hero that’s going to save the day. The potential client/ buyer is the hero of their own story. Your services or product are vehicles to help them, but they must be the hero by taking action, buying the product or committing to the service. I am not going to save someone from their miserable relationship with their body and disordered relationship with food. They are going to save themselves by deciding that enough is enough. They are going to save themselves by signing up for one of my offerings to learn how to rebuild trust with their body and develop a peaceful relationship with themselves. I am not going to save them, they are going to take the leap and become the hero of their own story. And this isn’t just a marketing tactic, it’s the truth. It has to come from within, I don’t believe I’m the reason my clients are successful in healing their relationship with food and body. I am a vessel to provide them tools and support, but they are the ones who implement and take action. They are their own hero.

After reading this book, I see how often brands get this wrong, positioning themselves as the hero instead of the potential consumer. I can see how much this hurts marketing, and I’m just so grateful I found this book early in my entrepreneurship journey.

The book profit first wasn’t the most exhilarating read, but it was completely game-changing in how I manage my business finances. I’ll spare you the boring details but essentially, profit first is an approach where you have different “buckets” for your money in business– a bucket for biz expenses, a bucket for biz taxes, a bucket for the pot that you’ll pay yourself from (aka “profit”) and some folks chose to have additional buckets too. Each week, I drop a percentage of the revenue from the week into each bucket which helps bring me peace in knowing exactly how much I really have to play with in the biz at any given time.

The book creating money was a more “out there” money book compared to Profit First, but it really stuck with me. It was essentially about following your creativity and our interests and how money will flow naturally when you do that.

What’s been the best source of new clients for you?

It started out as Instagram, which still blows my mind that social media can be such a powerful free business tool.

But in the last year, I’ve felt this sense that people are burnt out from being marketed to so much on socials. Again, I also made the decision to leave IG recently which was a big leap, considering most of my clients where coming from there for a long period of time. This is a whole story in itself, but essentially I decided to take a chance and follow my gut, hoping that new clients would continue to find me.

More recently I’ve been getting clients finding me from my podcast, which is probably one of my favorite sources. When folks listen to the podcast, they really get to know me and my approach to working with clients. This helps to warm them up in a meaningful way, so by the time they reach out to work together and we get on a discovery call, they already feel a sense of closeness and trust with me just from listening to the pod.

Speaking engagements have been another great source of new clients. I’ve spoken to several college sororities and other groups comprised of mostly women where I present on intuitive eating. I’ll often get an email from someone months or even years after the talk saying that they’d attended a talk I gave and are interested in working together.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://leahkernrd.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/leahkern.rd/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leahkern
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU_Dspj_KAKfgGixTgR7uqQ
• Other: podcast: https://pod.link/1616910063