What Makes Us Different

Puzzle

Teamwork

We work with you and everything that makes you unique, including your priorities, preferences, conditions, and history, to help you achieve your goals by establishing a healthier relationship with food.

You will not find scripted sessions at Soolman Nutrition LLC. We start every consultation with a clean slate in order to create a treatment plan perfectly outfitted for you. Regardless of where you are at in terms of your readiness to change, we meet you where you are and help you move forward.

Reaching your goals takes teamwork. Rather than judging you or telling you what to do, we treat you as the equal that you are. We may be experts in nutrition, but you are the expert in your life, so formulating a winning strategy requires pooling our knowledge and yours. This equality and respect is expressed not just through our counseling styles but also in the roundtable format of our offices, including patient chairs that are just as comfy as our own.

Teamwork also means collaborating with the rest of your treatment team, including your primary care doctor and any specialists you may have, such as a therapist. We make sure your team is kept up to date regarding your nutrition care and always welcome their comments, questions, and concerns.

 

Weight-Neutral Approach

A desire to lose weight is one of the most common drivers that brings people to our practice. However, weight and health are not as synonymous as common perception would have us believe. For example, researchers who have examined long-term data have concluded that weight loss failed to correlate with improvements in cholesterol, blood pressure, and blood sugar

Behaviors, rather than body weight, seem to be better predictors for health. Research has shown that healthy lifestyle habits are associated with a significant decrease in mortality regardless of baseline body mass index. Similarly, other researchers have found cardiovascular fitness to be a predictor of cardiovascular disease and all-cause mortality, independent of body weight.

Given that, we take a weight-neutral approach that is aimed at directly improving whatever health concerns you may have. Our approach entails:

  • Respecting that bodies naturally come in different sizes, shapes, and weights
  • Pursuing better health directly, as opposed to using weight loss as a proxy, in a fashion that takes into account the various social, cultural, financial, and emotional factors that influence your relationship with food
  • Working to bring an end to the stigma and biases that patients face in healthcare because of their weight, size, shape, sexual orientation, religion, gender, skin color, ethnicity, age, or physical ability
  • Focusing on building, enhancing, and honoring internal eating cues that provide invaluable guidance regarding what, when, and how much to eat
  • Encouraging enjoyable and comfortable physical activity

The general approach that we just outlined is called Health at Every Size (HAES)®. Unlike weight-focused approaches, the HAES approach is associated with improvements in blood pressure, blood lipids, diet quality, and eating and activity habits. HAES has also been shown to improve psychological or emotional issues, such as binge eating, depression, self-esteem, and body image. While diets have high rates of attrition, the HAES approach better enables people to maintain long-term behavior change.

Sometimes people do lose weight as a side effect of taking a HAES approach. If weight loss does occur and that is an outcome for which they are hoping, great, but losing weight is neither the primary goal nor the focus of our work.

Despite the trademark, HAES is not a program like one would find from a diet company. In fact, HAES is not a program at all. Rather, HAES is an approach to healthcare much in the way that the field of psychotherapy offers different approaches to talk therapy: cognitive behavioral, psychodynamic, dialectical behavioral, and family systems, just to name a few.

In order to prevent the diet industry from co-opting the term HAES and warping its message, the Association for Size Diversity and Health (ASDAH) trademarked HAES. However, Soolman Nutrition and Wellness LLC is an entirely separate entity from ASDAH. We do not speak for ASDAH, they do not speak for us, and we do not pay them – or vice versa – in order to use a HAES approach with our patients.

 

You Are Our Number-One Priority

When we formed Soolman Nutrition LLC, we resolved to make quality of patient care and professional ethics the foundations of our practice. Our top priority is providing you with the highest quality nutrition counseling experience possible. The trust you put in us to help you with your health is an honor, and we respect and reinforce that trust by providing you with accurate, up-to-date information and conducting our practice with the high level of integrity that you and your health deserve.