We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Michaela Smith. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Michaela below.

Hi Michaela, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about the best boss, mentor, or leader you’ve ever worked with.

I’ve been lucky enough in my life to have had overwhelmingly positive experiences with my bosses, but there is one that stands out in particular. My boss, Ron, who was the head chef at a private school where I worked for a couple years after college. He taught me about what it means to find a career that lights you up and brings you joy but he also helped me in a more personal way I’m not sure he even knows about. It requires a bit of backstory and put into context why working with him was so transformative for me.

The dietetic program I was in required service hours in different areas of the field; food service, clinical and community. I originally met Ron as he was my supervisor for my food service hours. While I was in school, I was struggling with disordered eating. My eating habits were becoming highly restrictive and I felt a lot of stress and anxiety around food. This culminated in my deciding that moving forward with my dietetic internship was not the right thing to do for myself or my future patients. When I graduated, I was a bit lost. I wasn’t moving forward with internships and didn’t know the next right step for my career.

This is where Ron comes back in. He offered me a summer job as the sous chef for the summer program at the school he worked for – an all girls private school outside of Seattle. My summer job turned into two years of working under Ron and with his team. Ron was one of the most enthusiastic people I have ever met, he arrived at work before 5 am every day to prepare breakfast for the girls and for special events I saw him work over 12 hour days. If you’ve ever worked in a kitchen, you know that a 12 hour day in that setting is no joke, and Ron would do these days with a smile on his face and fully focused the entire time. Aside from showing me what it looks like to truly love your work, Ron taught me how to advocate for your values and inspire and educate others in the process. Ron was highly influenced by Alice Waters and the slow food movement. He wanted to not only feed the girls at the school delicious foods, but get them interested in cooking, farming and local food. He single handedly fought to create school gardens, introduced beehives to the school and wove culinary aspects into their education. We taught the girls about the 3 sisters (corn, beans and squash) and how the Indigenous people planted these crops together to produce greater yields of each. We had the girls come out and learn from the bee keeper about pollination, and how the queen bee runs the hive. The fifth grade girls helped us dig potatoes, then we served them for lunch that same day. Ron formed relationships with local farmers and highlighted seasonal and whole foods cooking. The school had a large exchange program and Ron would invite the girls in to help us cook a traditional meal from their country.

Working with Ron helped me to reconnect with food and what it means to share a meal as an act of love or a means to form a deeper understanding of different cultures. He helped me loosen my grasp on my restrictive eating habits and see all that food had to offer. Fast forward to now, working with women to use food to improve their health, I find that disordered eating or anxiety around food is all too common. Having had this experience of transforming my own relationship with food using gardening, cooking, developing relationships with farmers and sharing a meal as an act of service allows me to help others who are struggling with their relationship to food and show them there is so much more to a meal than they may have originally thought.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I’m a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner, Yoga Medicine Therapeutic Specialist, and Certified Personal Trainer specializing in women’s health. I take a holistic and root-cause approach helping women heal their hormones, nourish their bodies and build a movement practice that makes them feel amazing.

Just like many others – my journey into this field started with my own health challenges. Years of birth control gave me chronic infections, and ever worsening depression and social anxiety that were taking a serious toll on my life. After quitting the pill cold turkey, I was left with painful and heavy periods, gut issues and acne. When my doctors told me the only option was to go back on the pill, but I knew there had to be a better way to support my body to bring it back into balance. So, instead I jumped down the holistic health rabbit hole- studying nutrition, deepening my education in movement through yoga, strength training and reading anything that would help me build a better understanding of how the body works and what it needs to find harmony.

I put everything I was learning into practice was eventually able to resolve my painful period, clear my skin and improve my mental health. I found that the key to this came from taking a functional approach to my healing. My experience with my doctors was to look at the symptoms and try to give quick fixes. Instead I stopped focusing only on resolving the symptoms but use them as a signal from the body that something needed my attention. This allowed me to discovere why they were there in the first place and address the root cause for lasting results.

My experience lit a fire in me to support women to feel their best – especially in areas where they might, like I had, receive little to no guidance or inaccurate information. Now I get to do my favorite thing in the world – helping women heal their hormones, support healthy pregnancies, thrive in motherhood, build strong bones and navigate menopause with confidence and clarity.

I’m particularly interested in two areas of women’s health, fertility and osteoporosis. While these two subjects may seem like that don’t have very much in common, I find they are two problems that women get very little ACTIONABLE guidance from their doctors. All too often I hear from my fertility clients that their doctors told them the labs look normal and they should just take a prenatal, relax and maybe go on a vacation. This can be a very frustrating experience for someone who has been trying to get pregnant (sometimes for years!) and is often displaying other common (but not normal) symptoms like fatigue and painful periods. From my osteoporosis clients, rarely do they learn from their doctors that specific and targeted strength training is a highly effective, researched backed tool to improve bone density. In fact, they are often told just the opposite – that they need to stop doing the activities they love, be extra careful and are often suggested pharmaceutical medications as the only option. My goal in either of these cases is to number one, make sure they feel heard and supported and to put them back in the drivers seat of their life by offering them solutions and tools to improve their outcomes through lifestyle, nutrition and movement.

I run a Strength Training and Yoga for Osteoporosis program along with my business partner, Sarah Avery both in person and online. Our in person program is held in Saratoga Springs, NY and we have small group classes specifically designed around improving bone health. For our online program we partnered with Kaari Prehab to deliver the program. We have a truly unique program that takes our in person success and translates it into the virtual space. We run small cohorts lead by qualified coaches every 4-6 weeks, the participants in these cohorts get group meetings where they can have face time with their coach along with digitally delivered workouts that are researched backed and access to a coach to support them individually. We have seen some incredible results with our clients in both programs!

I also offer 1:1 nutritional therapy programs for both osteoporosis and fertility. Nutritional therapy is a holistic and functional approach to health and healing. Rather than waste energy chasing and treating symptoms, nutritional therapy focuses on healing the body by addressing the root causes of symptoms. Nutritional therapy harnesses the power of nutrient dense whole foods and a healthy lifestyle to bring the body back to optimal health.

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

While boosting my knowledge and deepening my education through various trainings have definitely helped me in my career, there is so much more to being successful in this field than being the most well studied.

The biggest of which I think is the ability to really listen to and connect with people. Since I offer alternative solutions than what you will hear at your doctors office, it’s common that by the time someone finds me they have had experiences of feeling unseen, unheard, or even disrespected. The ability to sit with someone and really listen to what they’re telling you and even to be able to hear the deeper story and kindly reflect back to them that you heard and understand them and you are here to support them through whatever challenges brought them to you creates trust. That trust and feeling of being heard are so nourishing to their nervous system, it creates a shift right at the beginning. This connection also allows you to be able to reflect stuck areas back to them in a way that feels productive and compassionate rather than authoritative.

While I work with food and movement, both of these modalities often spark deeper subconscious blocks. To be able to really dig into this type of thing, trust and compassion have to be established and I do that first by being a really good listener. This is a skill that can take time, I often catch myself, still, wanting to jump into solutions mode. But slowing down and just listening gives so much insight that you can then use to support the client in discovering what they really need to feel better.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

I have two main business partners, both of whom I met through yoga connections. My first partner, Sarah and I met through our local yoga studio. I had just moved back to my home town in upstate NY from Seattle and was a little lost in what my next step was. I had decided I wanted to go into teaching yoga full time, but really had no idea what that looked like or plans to turn it into a sustainable career. I just picked up as many studio teaching positions I could find. This meant I was sometimes teaching over 20 yoga classes a week. Sarah had also recently moved to town and she started taking my yoga classes. Eventually we started talking before and after classes and a friendship formed. It came out that she was a Physical Therapist and had just started her first iteration of the Strength Training and Yoga for Osteoporosis program and asked me if I would be interested in teaching the yoga portion. We spent about a year working together in that capacity then the Covid pandemic happened and it was shut down. As Sarah puts it her 5 year plan, became a 5 month plan and she left the practice she was working for and started her own. She reached out to me at this point and together we re-vamped and re-started what is now our signature program for osteoporosis, Osteovitality. My other partner, Jenni is the founder of Kaari Prehab. Jenni and I both did some of our yoga training under the same program, Yoga Medicine. I had learned about her through the Yoga Medicine community and followed her work on instagram. We met virtually during the Covid pandemic, when all the studios shut down it cause yoga teachers to turn to teaching their classes online. Jenni started teaching weekly online classes, so I jumped on the chance to practice with her. This sparked a connection and I later joined her team as a coach when she started Kaari Prehab. Eventually we decided to merge Kaari’s online systems to bring our osteoporosis program to a wider audience, creating the virtual version of our Osteovitality program.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://michaelamoveswell.com
• Instagram: @michaelamoveswell and @betterbonesmovewell
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@michaelamoveswell2956

Image Credits

Molly Leon
Brian Themes