"clients have provided feedback that what they get on working with me is what they wanted"

by Monika Woolsey

I was always chubby as a child, and when I started paying attention to nutrition as a teen and lost weight, it seemed natural to pursue a college degree in nutrition. Upon graduation, I arrived at my clinical internship ready to help others do what I had done. In the first six weeks of this internship, we were required to follow various diets that we would be prescribing to others, so that we could understand what it felt like to be on the receiving end of nutrition counseling. I sailed smoothly until I hit the "weight reduction" assignment.

For one week, I was supposed to follow an 800 calorie, low carbohydrate diet. It only took three days until I bottomed out. I became moody, obsessive, and finally tossed the assignment out for a secret binge on sweets. I realized right then and there that weight loss diets didn't work, and that I wasn't going to be able to teach them to others knowing what they had done to me.

I worked for two years as a hospital dietitian and saved up money for graduate school, thinking I would focus on wellness and exercise. Upon graduation, master's degree in hand, I moved to San Francisco with the intent of being a sports nutritionist. It was the height of the corporate wellness craze, so it wasn't hard for me to find a job. In fact, I landed a job in a prestigious suburb, working with professional and collegiate athletes and in some fancy wellness centers. But I noticed that even adding fitness knowledge to my nutrition counseling left something to be desired in what my clients were able to achieve. I was almost ready to leave the profession when I received an offer to develop the nutrition component of an eating disorders treatment center.

It was during the three and a half years in this center, working alongside psychologists, social workers, and psychiatrists in addition to physicians that I finally started to understand what my clients had needed all these years. They needed a mind-body connection and the ability to express themselves outside of their food behaviors. As I now call it, they needed the "3-C's"--skills for communication, conflict resolution, and coping.

When I left this center to start my own business, my first project was to write a book on eating disorders for the American Dietetic Association. A massive task to take from the ground up, so I sent out a query looking for other dietitians who were either doing similar work or were interested in doing similar work. Linda Omichinski wrote me and introduced the HUGS program, and I immediately decided to use it in my work. It had all the components I was looking for, nutrition education, encouragement to exercise, skill building for developing emotional expression, and group/social support.

The past few years have been the best of my career. It has been the first time that I feel that I am doing what I wanted to do, and that clients have provided feedback that what they get on working with me is what they wanted. I recently did an outcome study on the teens who participated in the program, and learned that not only were they improving their self-esteem,through working with HUGS, their self-esteem was higher than that of the average teen in our local high schools! I cannot think of a better way to focus my energy than to be a part of creating the self-assured adults of tomorrow.