Registered Dietitian Alix Turoff
Alix Turoff is currently a registered dietitian and says that she went through her own weight loss journey as a teenager. “I can think back to 5th grade, and I always felt chubbier than my friends and peers. Keep in mind, when I look back on it, I was SO normal and probably would’ve grown out of this phase.” However, in 9th grade something just snapped in her and she remembered being in a dressing room in Century 21 Department store. She tried on a pair of pants and just felt so horribly and unhappy with her body. “I remember saying out loud to my mother at the time “I’m not eating ever again”. And the thing about me is that I don’t say I’m going to something unless I’m actually going to do it and the next day… I woke up and I just stopped eating. I had NO idea how to lose weight in a healthy way and to me, the most sensible way to lose weight was just to eat less. I would try to eat as little as I could each day and started running every day. It got to the point where I was eating fewer than 300 calories a day and running 6+ miles daily.”
Alix was diagnosed with an eating disorder and met with a team that consisted of a physician, a therapist and a RD. “While I can’t say I got nothing out of the treatment, I felt completely misunderstood by the RD. I went in there eating 300 calories per day and was petrified of food. Her advice to me was just “here’s your meal plan, I want you eating at least 2600 calories per day… come back to me next week to be weighed”. I knew that this approach was wrong and I lied my way through the process, faked my food journals and wound up with even more issues than when I went in. Long story short, I ultimately received the right kind of help and I am now completely recovered (more than 10 years later).”
After going through this, Alix saw such a hole in the industry and just felt that there had to be a better way to be treating these disorders. “I then went to college and started to see how many people were really dealing with sub-clinical eating disorders and some really bad relationships with food. We can tell people all day long to “love their bodies” but when you are so unhappy, that goes in one ear and out the other. My goal as a professional in this field is to help people to find the balance that I’ve found.” Alix thinks it’s okay to want to change your body but there’s a healthy way to do it. She preaches flexibility, balance and most importantly, evidence based nutrition. “I try to break down fads, take the stigma away from certain things and just show people that they can have it all.”
Alix finds her career to be extremely rewarding. “When women reach out to me before they become a client, they’re often at their absolute nutrition rock bottom. While it might seem like it’s about weight loss or the desire to be “thin,” it’s about SO much more than that. While I do help women lose weight when and if it’s appropriate for them, the majority of my work is spent helping women repair their relationship with food.” In doing that, everything else in their life starts to improve. From their confidence in themselves, to their relationships with their spouse and children, to their focus at work… the amount of transformations that Alix gets to watch is incredibly rewarding for her as a health professional. “I work with these women for a minimum of 3 months (some of my clients have been with me for 3 years and we still speak weekly). These women mean SO much to me and I do not take their trust in me lightly. The most challenging part of my work is probably the “outside voices” and just the overall noise and confusing/conflicting information about nutrition that we as women are constantly bombarded with from the media, friends, mother’s, etc.”
She truly wants what is best for her clients and sometimes that means she can’t give them what they want. “It sometimes means having to tell them “as much as I want to help you lose weight, we have to work on your relationship with food first.” There are times when they want me to say “go ahead and cut your intake down to 1200 calories so you can lose 3 pounds this week”. But I’m not going to say that, even though I know they might walk away from our work together.”
When it comes to to those who are trying to eat healthy but aren’t seeing any results, despite doing all the right things, Alix says she would ask you to identify what doing “all the right things” really means. “If you’re cutting out gluten, dairy, intermittent fasting, not using salt… the list goes on but you’re bingeing every night, then you have to ask yourself if that’s really serving you. If you’re not bingeing and you truly don’t know why the weight isn’t coming off, you’ll want to take a look at how many calories you’re consuming. If you’re not sure, that’s probably the problem. Take a week and document every single thing you’re eating or drinking including the handful of popcorn you grab on your way past the kitchen, or the bites of your kids’ food you taste while you’re making them dinner, the creamer in your coffee, etc.”
Alix shares countless tips and tricks for those who follow her on social media. With her large following, Alix does feel pressure to show up regularly for her audience, even when she is tired or not in the mood. “While many of my clients do find me through instagram (so it is PART of my business), instagram is not where I earn my income and I’m very grateful for that. By not relying on social media to pay the bills, I’m able to be much more discerning when working with brands (I very rarely work with brands unless my followers have already seen me post about them organically). But I think the reason people follow me is because I don’t post what everyone else is posting which sometimes means I have an unpopular opinion or stance but it allows me to be true to myself.”
When looking at her life in 5 years, Alix likes not having a distinct 5 year plan but she does know that she would like to see her business continue to grow so that she can help more people. “Right now, my team is small and while I have people helping me with various things, I’m the only RD in my business which means that I can only work with some many people at one time. I’d love to be able to make more impact and reach more people!”