Introducing Well is More
HAPPY TO MEET YOU
Hello! My name is Clara. I live in Seattle where I wear a variety of hats - daughter, sister, friend, girlfriend, dog-mom, and more. Over the past several years I’ve fallen in love with nutrition and decided to put back on my student hat as well in order to pursue nutrition as a career. It’s a winding journey to say the least, but I am thrilled to be on it. I am passionate about nutrition, health, and wellness and eager to share my passions with others.
For a bit of a deeper backstory, here is a snippet of the steps I’ve taken to get from desk job to starting Well is More. I hope this gives you some insight on who I am and how I approach living well.
Feel free to connect with questions/comments in the comments section and find me on Instagram @wellismore to follow along for more.
NUTRITION IS MY PASSION
Fresh out of college, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my career. I had a great education and a degree to show for it, but once I stepped out into the real world I wasn’t really sure what to do with it all. I was missing my passion.
In going through my day-to-day, not sure of my end goal, I began to take solace in podcasts, especially podcasts about nutrition, health, and wellness. Topics ranging from the top foods for cancer prevention to the healing properties of essential oils streamed through my headphones every chance I got. I was fascinated by the stuff.
I found myself diving into research on all of the topics that came up in each podcast. I had dozens of tabs open at all times about the dangers of pesticides, the best types of non-dairy milks, and the trendiest cruelty-free paraben-free and phthalate-free makeup brands. All I wanted to do was learn more, more, more.
I connected to the nutrition topics the most. I loved hearing new perspectives about food as more than just the stuff we buy at the store and put in our mouths when we’re hungry, more than the structured food pyramid we learned about in school and more than the good food bad food binary that media and diet trends tend to perpetuate. And eventually, after enough time spent listening to countless podcast interviews with food experts and nutritionists, it clicked that this was the passion I was missing in my career.
NUTRITION HEALTH COACHING
It’s been a windy road making my way to becoming a Nutrition Health Coach.
In 2017 I completed eCornell’s Plant-Based Nutrition Certificate program and loved it. This inspired me to go back to school. I spent two years back at community college taking prerequisite courses for M.S. Nutrition programs. I really had my mind set on becoming a Registered Dietitian, because I felt that was the most legitimate title and would allow me the most career opportunities in the nutrition world.
After finishing the nutrition and biology courses, which I truly loved, I was faced with chemistry. It felt so far from what I really cared about learning - did I really need to know stoichiometry in order to help people eat and live healthier? I wondered.
I had a gut feeling that this was no longer the right approach for me. So, in 2019, I followed my gut. Despite all the hard work I had put in in order to apply to Masters programs, I dropped my chemistry class and enrolled in the Institute for Integrative Nutrition to become a Nutrition Health Coach. Now, I finally feel that I am in the right place.
Nutrition health coaching is everything I’ve wanted to do. As a Nutrition Health Coach, I:
Provide a listening ear for you to share your health goals and concerns
Provide custom recommendations for healthier eating and living
Provide practical strategies for implementing healthy eating and living in your daily life
Provide moral and emotional support through your health journey
Help you reconnect with your body through gentle nutrition
Help you build confidence, improve body image, and boost emotional well-being
Help you identify foods, diets, and beliefs that may not be serving your best interest
Offer tools to help manage and minimize stress and anxiety
Offer helpful resources related to your unique concerns and goals
Celebrate the small victories with you, along with the big
THE BLOG
At the end of the day my goal is to help people, to make nutrition more accessible, to educate people and teach them how to take small steps towards eating and living healthier as well as how to connect to food and their bodies on a deeper level.
I hope to spread the messages I’ve received that help remove stress, confusion, and negativity around food and encourage embracing a more simplistic and enjoyable relationship to food. Trust me, it can be done!I’ve started to tap away at it with this blog, in which you can find fun healthy versions of your favorite recipes, tips and tricks for grocery shopping, meals on the run, information on plant-based eating, and more. Occasionally I switch things up with other holistic practices I am also passionate about, i.e. natural beauty and home products, ways to balance your hormones naturally, skincare dos and don’ts, etc.
I also want Well is More to be a place for conversation. If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that health trends are ALWAYS changing, even if there is science behind it. I am happy to have my perspectives challenged and am open to many perspectives because I know that one set of rules does not apply to everybody. So let’s learn together, and share our individual experiences and expertise to gain an even greater collective knowledge, shall we?
A HOLISTIC APPROACH
I believe in a holistic approach. This may have different definitions for different people. For me, it means doing your best in your current environment to use the tools and resources you have available to you to treat your body as a whole. It’s considering how diet, lifestyle, emotional well-being and environment work synergistically to impact your health. It’s seeing the big picture and treating it as a whole rather than treating symptom by symptom. It’s prevention, getting to the root causes, and addressing the “why”.
My overall approach to nutrition can be summarized in the “rules” of normal eating described by Ellyn Satter. I love these guidelines. Satter perfectly captures the imbalance that is balanced, normal eating. Read an excerpt below:
“Normal eating is giving yourself permission to eat sometimes because you are happy, sad or bored, or just because it feels good. Normal eating is mostly three meals a day, or four or five, or it can be choosing to munch along the way. It is leaving some cookies on the plate because you know you can have some again tomorrow, or it is eating more now because they taste so wonderful. Normal eating is overeating at times, feeling stuffed and uncomfortable. And it can be undereating at times and wishing you had more. Normal eating is trusting your body to make up for your mistakes in eating...In short, normal eating is flexible. It varies in response to your hunger, your schedule, your proximity to food and your feelings.
— Ellyn Satter, 1983
IN SUM, WELL IS MORE IS…
A place for conversation about food, health, and wellness
A place to expand our views on nutrition
A source for healthy food recipes
A source for healthier recipes than the traditional not as healthy versions
Somewhere to challenge our current views on our relationships to food
A guide to start thinking about our health more holistically (get the big picture)
A stopping point to consider the practices we’re engaging in and think how they may be helping or harming our lives
A source of motivation to start using cleaner home and beauty products
A place to make food and health more fun!
A guide to making better health and lifestyle choices in our busy, busy, busy, busy lives