Stefanie Ginsburg, RD, CEDRD is the Owner of UNRESTRICTED NUTRITION Counseling and Consulting LLC and bases her practice on the principles of Intuitive Eating, Health at Every Size and Body Kindness.

What is your current position? 

Owner/Dietitian at UNRESTRICTED NUTRITION Counseling and Consulting, LLC since May 2020. She confidently treats the gamut of eating disorders and specializes in the treatment of ARFID, both for individual clients and also conducts trainings for clinicians so that they can feel more competent treating the newest eating disorder on the block.

How did you get started in your career? 

One of my dietetic internship rotations was at Princeton’s Eating Disorder Program and my preceptor was moving onto a different job when I was beginning my job search and I was able to take her position, despite it being a specialty area of practice.  I spent three years working at Princeton’s ED Program and then went into the Peace Corps and returned to the field of eating disorders upon returning to the US, getting a job at Eating Recovery Center’s Child & Adolescent Program, where I worked for eight years before beginning my private practice.

What advice would you give to someone new to the field? 

Find your specialty and run with it!  Don’t be afraid to take a bunch of jobs to find your niche and then use your innate skill set to hone your place within a dietetics specialty area. You will become competent and confident in everything that you do – just be patient with yourself as the steep learning curve takes place.

For more information on Stefanie and her practice:

Phone: (720)-541-8684

Email: [email protected]

Website:www.unrestrictednutrition.com

Stefanie also has a PDF document available for purchase called ARFID: Further Assessing Your ‘Selective Eating’ Patients/Clients. This document will help hone in on background information that can better prepare you to treatment plan for a restrictive, aversive or avoidant ARFID case. The document can be downloaded here https://rd2rd.com/downloads/avoidant-restrictive-food-intake-disorder-further-assessing-your-selective-eating-patients-clients/

Kristin Williams, RDN, LD, CEDRD owner of Wonderfully Made Nutrition Counseling, works with eating disorders, disordered eating and chronic dieting through a Health at Every Size and Intuitive Eating lens.

What is your current position? 

I am a certified eating disorder registered dietitian and I own a private practice in DFW called, Wonderfully Made Nutrition Counseling. I work with adolescents as well as adults, offering in-person and virtual sessions for eating disorders, disordered eating and chronic dieting. I use a Health at Every Size and Intuitive Eating framework while helping clients to heal their relationship with food. I also practice from a faith-based standpoint for clients who are interested in incorporating faith into the treatment of their eating disorder.

How did you get started in your career? 

I started my career as a clinical dietitian in the hospital setting. Mentors encouraged me to “get my feet wet” in the hospital setting, though I knew that my passion was in eating disorders early into my career. During this time, I attended as many eating disorder networking and continuing education events as possible in order to add more tools to my toolbox. From there, I went on to work as an outpatient dietitian offering general nutrition counseling. In this position I was able to practice my motivational interviewing and counseling skills while working to build up the referral base for eating disorder clients at that particular clinic. I later transitioned from this position to working in two different eating disorder treatment facilities. While working at a treatment center, I started building a private practice on the side. I later transitioned to solely private practice and I absolutely love it!

What advice would you give to someone new to the field? 

I would encourage someone new to the field to apply to their dream job! Don’t feel like you have to wait to get experience to at least apply for the job! I strongly believe that passion precedes performance and, if you are passionate about something, you can be trained and develop a skill set for it. The most intelligent people, if lacking passion for the field, will not do well in the treatment of eating disorders.

I’d also encourage you to get involved in professional organizations within your area to network and learn as much as possible. IFEDD and iaedp are great organizations to look into and both have local chapters.

Continuously learn! Read books, listen to podcasts and shadow mentors. Don’t stop learning. And remember that eating disorders are a tough, yet incredibly rewarding field. You do not have to have it all figured out, just constantly be willing to show up, listen and learn.

To learn more about Kristin:

Instagram: @wonderfullymadenutrition

Website: https://www.wonderfullymadenutritioncounseling.com

Book: Unworthy Weight. It can be purchased under the “shop” tab of my website.

Upcoming event: Body Image Conference for Teen Girls and Women- November 14th 2020 (you can register through the events page of our website or at Kristin’s website)

Paula Quatromoni DSc, RD is an Associate Professor of Nutrition and Epidemiology at Boston University and Chair of the Department of Health Sciences. She is also a senior consultant to Walden Behavioral Care, an eating disorder treatment organization in the greater-Boston area.

What is your current position?

I am a tenured Associate Professor of Nutrition and Epidemiology at Boston University and Chair of the Department of Health Sciences. In that role, I am a faculty member, researcher and administrator. I teach Nutritional Epidemiology in our graduate program and an undergraduate summer study abroad course in Italy on the Mediterranean Diet: Food, Culture & Health. I am launching a new course next semester, Eating Disorders Prevention and Treatment. My research program includes population-based epidemiology of diet and chronic diseases, including work on the Framingham Heart Study, community-based child health promotion, and eating disorders prevention and treatment.

My work in eating disorders spans research, education and training, and the provision of clinical services. I am a senior consultant to Walden Behavioral Care, an eating disorder treatment organization in the greater-Boston area. Several of the Walden RDs are alumni of our graduate Nutrition program at Boston University, and Walden offers exceptional training opportunities for our graduate students and dietetic interns to train in eating disorders care across the entire continuum of care from inpatient and residential to PHP and IOP programming. I serve on the senior leadership team helping to guide the Nutrition department forward, providing clinical supervision to the RD team, leading monthly journal club discussions of emerging research that informs evidence-based practice, and conducting research on treatment outcomes.

How did you get started in your career?

In 2004, I had been a Registered Dietitian for 18 years but was relatively new in my faculty position after having finished my doctoral work in 2001. It was then that my work in eating disorders began. I was teaching Medical Nutrition Therapy and was still very much connected to my clinical roots. From this place, I started the sports nutrition consult service at Boston University, serving the needs of Division-1 student-athletes in terms of sports nutrition education and counseling. That partnership uncovered the salient need for eating disorder screening, identification, treatment, referral and prevention. What grew from that was a thriving outpatient practice treating eating disorders in sport. The researcher in me knew I needed to publish this work, and that led to a shift in my scholarly focus when I realized how little the RD’s voice was in the eating disorder literature. We went on to build up the sports nutrition and eating disorder clinical services on our campus over the next 15 years and I have continued to publish on these topics, often with my colleagues in sports psychology.

After an initial brief consultation for Walden in 2015, they asked me to stay on longer-term. I agreed – on one condition – that together, we build an eating disorder treatment program for athletes. Having attended the first Eating Disorders in Sport conference hosted by the Victory Program at McCallum Place in St. Louis, I came away convinced that we needed a program like theirs here in Boston. Together, we built the Walden GOALS Program (https://www.waldeneatingdisorders.com/eating-disorder-treatment-programs/intensive-outpatient/eating-disorder-treatment-athletes/) and before long, we had outcomes to publish showing the positive effects of an athlete-specific ED treatment program.

I am extremely proud of this work and where it has led me in terms of opportunity, visibility for this niche of practice, and its impact on the field, our clients and population health. This work has truly been life-changing.

What advice would you give to someone new to the field?

Be curious and read! Research is the foundation of evidence-based practice. If you learn how to read, think critically, discern and apply research, you are going to be a strong and respected clinician. These are skills learned largely in graduate school. These skills need to be practiced! So read, and read often; discuss research with colleagues; make it part of your commitment to being a lifelong learner. Read books and blogs in the consumer sphere also. Understand the lived experience and the diversity of the lived experience as much as you can. In addition, get as much specialty training as you can through webinars, podcasts, courses, conferences, clinical supervision, etc. Take your first job in an ED treatment center where you have lots of dietitian colleagues and a multidisciplinary treatment team at your side so that you can learn from their wisdom, experience and collaboration. This kind of on-the-job training and supervision is both invaluable and necessary to develop your clinical competence in this challenging niche of practice. Learn to be an effective listener. Your listening (and counseling) skills will endear you to your clients, allow you to build empathy, and cultivate effective and sustainable working relationships with your clients. Above all, practice consistent self-care. This work is demanding and hard but it is also incredibly rewarding.

You can learn more about Paula and the work she does at the links below

Twitter: @terrierpaq