“Back to school”: three words most kids dread to see come mid-August.   You see the phrase plastered all over general stores and hear it in about every other commercial when you’re watching TV (typically followed by the word “sale”).   How is it possible for two and a half months to fly by so quickly?   I ask myself this same question every year.   It feels like I just began at Kindred Nutrition yesterday and here I am now packing all my things and preparing to head back to Blacksburg to take on another school year at Virginia Tech.   Although I am by no means dreading my return to school, I still feel like I didn’t have enough time at Kindred Nutrition as there’s so much more that can be learned from Amy, Dawn, and their clients. I want to use this blog final blog post before returning to school as an opportunity to make a short reflection on my time at Kindred Nutrition, but first I would like to thank both Amy and Dawn for allowing me to be one of thei...

Oh Macros, how I love thee. You are the foundation of my nutrition recommendations. You should be individualized and different for everyone although you are "prescribed" routinely the same person to person. You are scientific , there is not a one size fits all , and frankly you are misunderstood . A couple of years ago Macros started to become more popular in the www world when a brilliant someone decided to market magical macro percentages to induce weight loss, body massing, and everything else under the sun. The thought process is to start with grams of protein needs dependent on body weight, to then look at range of fats between 25-35% dependent on goals and body type, and to provide the remaining of your macro goals from carbohydrates.  How easy, especially since everyone has the same protein needs, insert sarcasm here. A food label providing grams of fat, carbs, and protein Right away many bought into this bullet proof hope and we now have too many folks determi...

When we look at foods and are deciding what to eat, we will often label certain foods in our minds as “good” or “bad” usually in respect to their calories, carbohydrates, fats, or sugars.  For this reason, if we were choosing a dairy product to add into our meal plan for the day, we would probably chose something like Greek yogurt over something like ice cream.  But, what if on whatever particular day you’re having a strong craving for some ice cream?  Do you go ahead and just give into your craving or do you settle for something a little less satisfying like the yogurt?  Often times, people will refuse to give into their craving and will eat the yogurt, but will also eat a number of other things in order to attempt to get the satisfaction they may have gotten from just eating the ice cream – Amy would refer to this as “eating around” the craving.  Since I have begun at Kindred Nutrition, I’ve heard many clients speak of “eating around” the craving.  In th...