IT’S LOVELY TO MEET YOU!

I’m Kaitlin Bolt-Lovett, the owner of A Life Nourished. I am an Anti-Diet Dietitian and certified Intuitive Eating Counselor. A Life Nourished works to embrace each unique individual and empower through reflection, education, and healing. By first focusing on my clients' relationships with food and body image we can then come together to embrace the goal of creating confidence and harmony WITH the body.

A life nourished is one that lets go of societal standards allowing us to seek liberation. Through the journey of understanding our unique stories we can stand in a space of self-nourishment and free ourselves from our skewed perceptions.

For those that are new here, I’ll give a brief outline of how I got here, to this place, passionately serving as an anti-diet dietitian. I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, and moved to Southern California during my junior year of high school. I was a competitive synchronized swimmer from ages 8-21 years old, and as my husband loves to hear me say, I home-schooled my junior and senior year of high school when in California so I could prioritize training. Many of the girls I swam with are still my best friends to this day, and I wouldn’t take that away for anything. I swam at Ohio State for two years before realizing that I was burnt out and needed a shift. I’m not sure when in grade school my eating disorder started, but by college, it completely colored how I functioned in the world. My body was one that showed my ED, but not to the extent that I was ever “too skinny," and when the ED shifted to more bingeing, it was easy to hide behind my “normal” looking body, even when things were far from normal.

I want to give you insight into what propelled me into doing this work. I don’t think it would be fair to say I had a “healthy” mindset when I went back to get my bachelor’s in nutrition after attending pastry school and working in fine dining. I went to school thinking that I wanted to better understand what was going on in my own body. I wanted to prove to myself that I wasn’t dumb (I was a much better athlete than a student the first time around). Being in school fueled my orthorexia and anti-fat bias thinking. I’m very fortunate that when I started my business, I was simultaneously exploring Intuitive Eating for myself after almost two decades of being at war with my own body. The tipping point for me was being on my honeymoon, right after graduating at 30, and being in a constant state of restless agitation. I hadn’t yet gotten the diagnosis for what I know now is lymphocytic colitis, and I had little compassion for myself when I had to stop at a French pharmacy to get Imodium and acid reflux medication. I was so uncomfortable in my body, I didn’t realize so much of it was fueled by my disordered eating.

This work isn’t just “work” to me. I feel it deep in my bones. Finding Intuitive Eating, HAES, and body liberation changed my life. I had no idea what diet culture was or how it pervades our every waking moment. I had no idea how much morality was put into food or how deep the pressure ran to be a certain size. I hold a lot of body privilege in this world and yet I didn’t go unharmed. I might have gone into dietetics for a diet-culture reason, but once you learn the ins and outs of the body liberation movement, you can’t un-see it.

My goal is to make sure each and every one of my clients feels seen and heard. I take an inclusive, weight-neutral approach to my work because if I have learned anything from this work in the last four years, it’s that you can’t judge someone’s health by the size of their body, and you definitely can’t know what or how much someone is eating by their size. Disordered eating and even eating disorders can go unseen in a culture that is so intertwined with dieting and intentional weight loss that even health care providers often see weight before they see the human. Where does this leave us? Disconnected. Disconnected from our bodies, our cues, our ability to TRUST our bodies, and our intuition. So much of this work is about unlearning.

My goal for ALN is to create community. To provide a space for individuals doing this work to know they are not alone, to provide resources for each other, and simply a space to share the ups and downs of stepping out of diet culture and stepping into FREEDOM.