Nutritionist Baltimore | Julia Oliver, Registered Dietitian
The challenges many of us face in our relationship with food, movement, and our body seem to persist despite trying so many self-help, wellness, and diet products or interventions. This can leave us spinning our wheels while not getting any closer to the life we picture for ourselves. Perhaps you desire a change in your mindset or your behaviors but feel uncertain about what would actually 'work' - you are not alone! We want to walk alongside you on a journey toward healing and well being for your whole self.
Eating and moving in a way that nourishes your body doesn't have to feel confusing. Working with a dietitian can help bring clarity and understanding to this process. The truth is, "health" and "healthy eating" don't look one specific way. A non-diet dietitian can help you develop habits that work for your unique body and life. The dietitians at Rooted Recovery are happy to serve clients across Maryland, from Baltimore to Bethesda with virtual nutrition counseling using a secure telehealth platform.
If compassionate, personalized nutrition counseling is something you are seeking, please visit our contact page to set up a free consultation today. You deserve to feel at ease with food, movement, and your body.
Meet Julia Oliver | Baltimore Nutritionist & Registered Dietitian
Bridging nutrition therapy with mindfulness skills, registered dietitian and yoga teacher, Julia Oliver, offers nutrition support and intuitive eating guidance for individuals seeking recovery from eating disorders and disordered eating. She has worked with both adolescents and adults in residential eating disorder treatment centers and in outpatient nutrition counseling settings. As a registered yoga teacher, Julia provides weight-inclusive, trauma-informed yoga classes in eating disorder treatment centers as well as in studios across Maryland. Her online platform, Embodied Yoga, offers a library of on-demand yoga and meditation classes for those in eating disorder recovery or anyone seeking to develop an attuned connection with their body.
Julia, and all of the clinicians at Rooted Recovery, provide care that is weight-inclusive, trauma-informed, grounded in the Health at Every Size (HAES)® movement, and aligned with Intuitive Eating principles. We believe that your health and nutrition goals can be reached through changes that support sustainable wellbeing without punishing the body or sacrificing mental health.
The dietitians at our practice provide nutrition services for adolescents, teens, adults, and families. We specialize in nutrition therapy for eating disorder recovery as well as nutrition coaching support for anyone wanting to improve their relationship with food, exercise, and/or their body. With the flexibility of telehealth nutrition counseling, we are able to see clients virtually, so whether you are in Baltimore or anywhere else across Maryland, our services are not out of reach!
Our approach to nutrition counseling services in Baltimore, MD and beyond
At Rooted Recovery, we help our clients make peace with food and their body so they can live a life that is not overwhelmed by food rules, guilt, or fixation on body weight/shape/size. We do not promote intentional weight loss (dieting), so instead, we favor evidence-based approaches while helping clients discover what holistic health looks like for them. We reject the idea that health is equated with thinness, and we aim to support the wellbeing that can be found in all bodies, regardless of weight, shape, size, or ability.
Because our nutrition counseling services are rooted in HAES and Intuitive Eating, we create space for clients to explore how they can integrate lifestyle changes to support their unique needs in a non-judgmental, flexible way. We believe providing nutrition education and care that is based on the principles below best supports our clients as they navigate toward optimal health physically, mentally, and emotionally.
Health at Every Size®
Health at Every Size (HAES) is a framework for health that promotes ending weight discrimination and improving health equity regardless of body size. It is built on the principles of:
Weight inclusivity
Health enhancement
Eating for well-being
Respectful care
Life-enhancing movement
We recognize harm is often unintentionally caused by healthcare practitioners who carry weight stigma and view weight loss as the primary way for someone to improve their health. We honor inherent size diversity, and we encourage our clients to support their 'here and now body' through changes that support their individualized definition of health without using weight loss as the primary marker of wellbeing.
Read more about the HAES approach here.
Intuitive Eating
You are not alone if you feel overwhelmed by all of the different pressures of how to eat, what to eat, how much to eat, etc. Together, we will practice turning down the noise of the external rules while reconnecting with the internal wisdom we were each born with. The practice of intuitive eating is a lifelong journey- it involves cultivating mindful awareness of internal body cues that prompt our understanding of how to feed ourselves in a way that honors us both physically and mentally. Listening to the body's cues can bring the freedom you need to nourish yourself without a rigid diet plan. You can feel good while eating in a satisfying and nourishing way.
Read more about the physical and mental benefits of intuitive eating and how to embrace the intuitive eating approach in our blog post.
Non-Diet Approach
Here we are not talking about the diet someone may follow to manage a chronic health condition like celiac disease or diabetes. We are also not talking about 'diet' in the literal sense of just 'the way someone eats'. We are talking about the diets that are primarily sold in our culture, the ones that focus on one thing only: making your body smaller. While dieting may produce weight loss initially, research shows that in even the most controlled diet plans, about 90% of people gain back the weight lost and the majority gain back more weight than they lost. As you can imagine or as you may have experienced, physical and mental health often suffer through the dieting process as well.
We will work together to support your overall health with long term solutions instead of the quick fixes that often lead to mental distress and a ruptured relationship with food.
Why choose Rooted Recovery
Working with a non-diet dietitian at Rooted Recovery means that you will not be expected to follow rigid food rules or ignore your body's signals. As HAES-aligned dietitians, we respect your body's needs and limitations while honoring your unique background and lived experiences. We are here to walk alongside you as you practice making changes that nurture your whole self. As specialists in intuitive eating, we will encourage you to reflect on the food choices and eating patterns that feel most supportive to you, and we will guide you to let go of the harmful messages around food and exercise that you have internalized over time.
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Avoiding the Harm Diets Cause
It is widely experienced that dieting leads to suffering mentally, physically, and emotionally. On one hand, diets often involve cutting out specific foods and avoiding entire food groups. This can bring up anxiety around certain foods and even cause emotions like fear and guilt to come up around eating eating times. We also know that dieting is a leading risk for the development of eating disorders. Often, individuals feel like they 'failed' their diet, when in reality, their diet failed them. Restriction while dieting is unsustainable because the body is not designed to sustain eating itself in the absence of getting enough food. Eventually, the body fights back by seeking the nourishment it needs which can trigger overeating experiences or binge eating. Many individuals who diet also experience weight cycling (weight loss followed by weight re-gain) which has been found to be very damaging for the body and leads to poor health outcomes long term.
At Rooted Recovery, we believe creating rules around food in an attempt to manipulate our body weight/shape/size does not improve health and actually causes harm overall. We support clients' health goals by encouraging habits that benefit long-term wellbeing.
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Learning to Trust Your Body
Dieting inherently creates a disconnect between the mind and body; this blocks our ability to lean into body trust. Whether you are yo-yo dieting or in the midst of an eating disorder, feeling disconnected from or ignoring hunger and fullness cues is common. You may also be keeping yourself from enjoying food culturally and socially. Beyond food, movement can turn into an unpleasant burden as it is forced on the body rather than something that could be joyful and pleasant.
Through the journey of intuitive eating, you can reclaim trust in your body. We are here to help you learn how to recognize internal cues and make choices that honor your entire being. This way of approaching nutrition and physical activity can naturally guide us to make choices that are satisfying and supportive for a healthy lifestyle.
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Evidence-Based Care
As you have probably figured out by now, here at Rooted Recovery, we are not influenced by the latest dieting fads or 'wellness' traps. Our nutrition counseling services are grounded in our knowledge of significant nutrition research and our commitment to meet each individual where they are with kindness and compassion. We offer guidance that is evidence-based while tailoring our interventions to accommodate each client's lifestyle, background, and needs.
We stay up to date on the best practices in nutrition, particularly in the areas of Health at Every Size, eating disorder and disordered eating recovery, intuitive eating, sports nutrition, chronic disease and stress-related health conditions, and more. In our sessions, we can bring an understanding of the nutrition science and build personalized nutrition plans– you bring the expertise on yourself. Working together, we can create lasting change that works for you.
FAQs about working with a Baltimore nutritionist
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Registered dietitians, also called registered dietitian nutritionists, are credentialed, licensed nutrition professionals that have a bachelor degree or higher in nutrition and have completed 1,200 hours of supervised practice. They must pass a credentialing exam and complete continuing education requirements throughout their career to maintain their certification. 'Nutritionist' alone is not a protected term across the US. This means someone could use this title regardless of training and without being credentialed or licensed.
All members of the Rooted Recovery team are registered dietitian nutritionists and have advanced training in nutrition therapy for eating disorder and disordered eating recovery.
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Guided by the principles of Health at Every Size, weight is not a focus of our nutrition counseling. We support our clients so they feel empowered to make the nutrition and movement choices that are right for their life. A session with one of our dietitians is not a visit with the "food police." We provide shame-free, evidence-based nutritional counseling that goes at your pace and promotes long-term change for health. We do not use weight as a marker of health because improved health behavior, not weight loss, has been linked to better health outcomes over time. To celebrate progress, we encourage clients to instead notice:
• Changes in how they feel
• Higher energy levels
• Better sleep
• Improved digestion
• Improved strength and sport performance
• A more positive relationship with food, movement, and their body
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We all have been the one googling nutrition advice. If you are tired of sifting through contradictory and seemingly endless 'how to eat' messages, you could benefit from going straight to the source of nutrition information and sustainable nutrition plans. If you are healing from an eating disorder or disordered eating patterns, struggling in your relationship with your body, stuck in a cycle of diets that don't work, or are seeking support from a professional who understands the strong connection between what we eat and how we feel, seeing a dietitian at Rooted Recovery could help. Together we can uncover the behaviors, feelings, and thought processes around food and body that get in the way of fully thriving.
Our Baltimore nutritionists can help you feel more at home in your body.
If you are seeking greater peace with the role nutrition plays in your life, reach out today for a free consultation. No prep work is necessary– you are welcome just as you are.