I Gave Up My Nutritionist Side Hustle And I Feel Relieved — Here’s Why

While I’m in a good place now, my relationship with food and my body has a troubled history. I was self-conscious of my body in my younger years and felt pressure from the media and peers to mould myself to whatever the beauty standards were at the time, as most of us have done or still do, whether we are consciously aware or not.

By the time I was in my late teens and early twenties, I had orthorexic tendencies. This looked like:

• Obsessing and stressing over eating a perfect, “clean” diet.
• Doing HIIT (high intensity interval training) three days a week running only on bullet coffee (it’s okay, you can roll your eyes, I know better now), on top of getting my ass kicked by a personal trainer one to two times per week, and group fitness classes to fill in the gaps.
• Eating huge salads that, in hindsight, were actually an overkill on fibre.
• Demonizing sugar, and nearly losing sleep and sanity when I ate it, fearing that it was causing some sort of disease.
• Taking questionable supplements with dramatic health claims, that may or may not have damaged my liver. Yikes.
• Watching all the trendy health documentaries, and as a result swearing off meat for five years. This is not a bad move on its own and can certainly have its benefits, but in this context, was just another form of dramatic control I was exerting over my diet and body.

I was also at my lowest weight as an adult, but it never felt like it at the time. I always saw myself as much bigger in the mirror and in photos. Every time my grandma saw me she would say “Oh boy, you sure are getting thin.” She said it in the loving tone she always speaks in, and being so wrapped up in my issues around food and body image, I took it as a compliment and a sign that I was doing well. As I developed greater awareness around my behaviours later on, I looked back at that memory alongside photos of myself, with much of the body dysmorphia fog cleared, realizing that she had been commenting on it with such frequency out of concern.

Some of the strategies I used can be beneficial—when the intentions are right and moderation is practiced. My reasons for making these changes, however, were misguided. As healthy as I thought I was being, in reality I was causing long-lasting issues with my self-image, adrenals, hormone levels, and more.

At times, I had a holier than thou attitude around it all too, judging others for their diet and lifestyle choices when I just desperately wanted to care less and relax a little. I’m sure I drove my family crazy. The problem was I’d gone too far, I didn’t know how I’d gotten there, and I didn’t know how not to be the way that I was.

This way of being is actually what led me to enrol in a nutrition diploma program. I had come across an ad for an online, part-time, affordable option and I jumped on it right away, thinking to myself that this would be the opportunity to truly lead the perfect, healthy lifestyle. I’m so glad I did because this training was a catalyst for arriving at a place of greater balance and a more sustainable way of living that I operate within now.

In tandem with the core principles and foundations I was learning in school, I was discovering new social media accounts, literature, methods and structures that encouraged healing. I learned that thinking and stressing about food all the time, always feeling the need to work off calories with vigorous exercise, fearing that anything “unhealthy” is automatically causing illness and disease, and checking the number on the scale every day—sometimes more than once a day—aren’t good signs.

Ironically, my striving toward perfect health had become the unhealthiest part of my life. It had become my life.

Studying nutrition, learning about intuitive eating, and beginning to practice gentler, more sustainable diet and lifestyle habits enlivened in me a greater sense of purpose. Equipped with all this new knowledge and progress within myself, upon completing the program, I felt motivated to guide others on their journeys.

I gave it a good go for a few years, sharing content on social media, running a simple email newsletter and blog with helpful articles and recipes, offering talks and online “office hours” as opportunities for people to ask questions and get to know me, with consultations and packages available at reasonable rates, with a sliding scale to make my services more financially accessible.

I was even a part of a professional association, for which an annual requirement was providing proof of twenty five hours’ worth of continued learning. Through this association, I was able to add an additional designation to my belt and was available for extended health benefits coverage (more on that below).

I will note that I didn’t go full throttle with this business. Since I still had bills to pay, I continued my main gig as a graphic designer. When I wasn’t doing that, I put a fair amount of time, effort and money into building up my business as a Nutritionist—and eventually burned out. Here’s why:

People don’t want to pay money to be told what to do, they want to pay to have things done for them.

We all want the quick fixes, instant gratification, and immediate solutions. This opinion probably doesn’t come as a surprise to you, as humans have been trying to minimize the amount of work required for hundreds of years, constantly seeking or inventing tools, methods, and products for faster results and greater convenience.

People like the idea of working with a Nutritionist because it makes them feel like the act of simply booking the session and showing up is making real progress. While it certainly is a step in the right direction, the disappointment is inevitable when it sinks in that a Nutritionist or Dietician—no matter how skilled and experienced they are—can’t actually make a person healthier.

It’s up to the client to implement the changes and tools that are recommended, and while part of a Nutritionist’s role is to help hold their clients accountable, unless they follow their clients around all day, choices will inevitably be made that fall outside of the provided recommendations and protocols, no matter how personalized they are to the individual’s lifestyle. It’s ultimately up to the client to hold themselves accountable as much as they can, merely leaning on the support of the professional.

Our world is generally not set up to be supportive of the work we do and the changes we encourage.

Factors such as sedentary jobs, wildly abundant and accessible processed foods, outrageous chronic stress levels, and a reactive rather than proactive medical system, result in Nutritionists and their clients having to work unbelievably harder to accomplish minimal results, such as sleeping better or improving digestive health.

At least 60% of the time, when I would ask a client how making a certain change to their diet or lifestyle was going—even if the change was really small and simple and they’d had at least a couple weeks to start working on it—their responses would be that they hadn’t started yet.

When asked why, the most common reasons were a lack of time, a change in their routines such as travel or an unexpected stressful event, or they just simply forgot. While it’s normal for these roadblocks to come up periodically, I was finding that this was the case almost every single time I checked in with a client.

My Counsellor role as a Holistic Nutritionist was to help get to the root of these reasons to figure out a new strategy to set my clients up for success. For example, starting with one small goal at a time and building on it, switching the routine to work better for their schedule, or adding sticky notes as reminders. Sometimes there’s an emotional reason for not making a change, and I would work with my clients to get to the bottom of that, too.

At the end of the day, it just wasn’t enough. Most of us are too overworked, stressed, unsupported, crunched for time, and financially pinched. In the greater scheme of things, it’s hard enough to take care of ourselves on the most basic level, let alone change or build upon our routines. Suffering is comfortable, after all. And as a result of this comfort, suffering requires less energy than making real, lasting change.

There is a larger, systemic issue at play that needs to be addressed here, and while I’m grateful to have made small improvements with the clients I worked with, the journey had a lot of disheartening moments that left me wondering if it’s the right fit for me.

Most people came to me with weight loss as their primary goal.

With my history, helping clients work towards weight loss proved difficult. I had been through enough to know that long-lasting weight loss and weight management can only be achieved by healthy, sustainable means. Most people wanted to lose a fair amount of weight quickly. One client even wanted the weight loss to be achieved by her final dress fitting for her wedding day. No pressure!

Going back to the first point about wanting quick fixes and instant gratification, people tend to become discouraged when they don’t see the number on the scale dropping right away and continuing to see exponential loss, despite hearing session after session that they have barely done the work or implemented the recommendations that were offered. Math was never my strong suit, but it’s not hard to predict that one plus one equals disappointment.

The thing is, I vowed to myself that I would never recommend that a client drastically cut their food intake, switch to extremely limiting diets, do juice cleanses or fasts, take unregulated weight loss supplements, or any other potentially unsafe, and certainly unsustainable, means of losing weight. The methods I recommend encourage slow, safe, and long-lasting results—beyond just weight loss. My goal was for my clients to actually feel and function better.

Most extended health benefits packages suck.

I was so excited by the idea of being covered under my clients’ health benefits plans by being a member of the association. It gave me an extra layer of professionalism and confidence, and knowing that money is often a hindrance in the pursuit of better health, it felt good to offer a potential solution.

The reality was that employers still have to be opted in to have Nutritionist services covered, and the majority of them aren’t. And while the list of companies my association had partnered with was pretty impressive, it didn’t cover all of the leading insurance providers. Thinking about it now, I may have only had one client that was able to successfully claim their expenses.

The association was always urging its members to provide a letter to clients to forward to their employer, urging them to add our services to their extended benefits plan. It’s amazing that this partnership is even possible and that any employers opt in at all, but the progress in this area is very, very slow moving.

Where I’m at now.

Health and nutrition are still subjects I’m passionate about. I love reading about the latest research and trends. I still practice what I would preach to my clients: an overall healthy and sustainable lifestyle, with regular, enjoyable physical activity, a wide variety of whole foods, with processed and rich foods in moderation, and stress reduction and quality sleep being top priorities.

I’m certainly not perfect, and that’s okay. I know that I never will be and that the perfect diet and lifestyle doesn’t exist anyway. It’s the overall progress and trend that count.

I enjoy answering questions from friends and family about nutrition. Now, if anyone approaches me about signing up for nutrition counselling, it’s not a no off the bat. I’m just very clear about what the process of working with me looks like, that you have to be willing to put some energy in to reap the benefits, and that quick weight loss is not an area I’m willing to provide counselling for.

I was recently approached to run a series of group corporate counselling sessions, and I loved it. I had a lot of fun engaging with the group, putting the content together in PowerPoint slides, and assembling take-home materials for additional learning and homework. This group’s main priority was taking small, manageable steps toward better health in the context of a work-heavy lifestyle. This was exactly the kind of counselling I love to offer.

Long-lasting health is all about the personalized baby steps we can start taking today, and finding ways to hold ourselves and each other accountable to making them a regular part of our routine.