Reclaim Your Health — One Meal at a Time
Eat well. Weigh less. Enhance health.
Food is more than fuel or numbers on a label. It influences your health and mood — wellness or illness. The food choices you make each day have the power to prevent, even reverse, many diet-linked health problems — one meal at a time. The choice is yours.
Demystifying Optimal Eating
I am an international nutrition researcher, educator, and author — specializing in how the food choices we make each day shape health, weight, and well-being.
Since serving as Nutritionist on Dean Ornish, M.D.‘s landmark clinical trial for reversing heart disease — then as Director of Nutrition on similar research in European cardiovascular clinics — it’s clear more and more of us struggle with overeating, weight gain, and other diet-linked conditions — from heart disease and diabetes to depression, and more.
This concern led behavioral scientist and my husband, Larry Scherwitz, PhD, and me to decades of research on overeating and overweight, with thousands of participants.
What we discovered: replacing today’s new-normal overeating styles with the physical, emotional, spiritual, and social “ingredients” of our Whole Person Integrative Eating® program can lead to eating less and weighing less. Without dieting.
How Food Shapes Health — or Illness in the Modern World
A growing body of research shows that the food choices you make each day play a pivotal role in wellness or illness over time. These scientific breakthroughs suggest a new, empowering relationship with food — one shaped by the possibility of prevention, health, and healing.
Food Matters in Wellness
and Illness
Eating well is about more — much more — than weight. Weight matters. But it’s just one piece of the food–health puzzle.
Food plays a central role in both wellness and illness, by quietly shaping your physical and mental health over time. What you eat each day influences whether health is sustained — or gradually gives way to illness — influencing not just your weight, but your heart, brain, mood, energy, and long-term vitality.
Eating Well Over Time —
How Health Changes
What matters most about the food choices that lead to health and healing is not perfection, restriction, or any single food.
Optimal eating means making everyday food choices — consistently over time — that have the power to support health and well-being.
The research is clear: what you eat may help prevent and could possibly reverse many diet-linked chronic conditions. This makes eating well one of the most powerful actions you can take for your health. With this insight, food choices become less about weight alone, and more about an everyday way of eating and living that may shape your well-being for the long term.
Whole Person Integrative Eating® — The Book
Whole Person Integrative Eating® introduces a science-backed approach to optimal eating that moves beyond nutrients, calories, and short-term fixes. Drawing on decades of research, it explores how food choices and eating behaviors influence physical, emotional, spiritual, and social well-being — and how this whole-person way of eating supports eating less and weighing less over time. Recognized with the Book Excellence Award (#1, Health category).
Online Certificate E-Course
I created the Foundations of Whole Person Integrative Eating® certificate e-course for individuals and health professionals who want an evidence-based, step-by-step, practical program that supports health and long-term well-being.
Through lectures, readings, and experiential exercises, you’ll learn which foods and eating behaviors contribute to overeating and weight gain — and conversely, how a whole-person approach supports a healthier, lasting relationship with food, eating, and health.
Writing,
Articles,
Reflections
I turn food and nutrition discoveries into insights that empower you to live up to your health potential — for life.
My research and writing are grounded in state-of-the-art scientific breakthroughs and my decades of research — which revealed this key discovery: food influences all of you — not only your physical health, but also your emotional, spiritual, and social well-being.
My passion: to translate cutting-edge science into in-action insights about the healing potential of food. Each time you eat.
Food and Your Health:
What’s Possible
The science is in: 21st century studies reveal that many diet-linked conditions — often associated with aging — are not inevitable. Heart disease, diabetes, overweight, depression, and more — conditions often considered permanent or progressive — may be prevented, managed, and in some cases reversed, through the food choices you make each day.
Current studies also tell us that optimal eating is not about dieting, restriction, or perfection. It’s about tapping into the healing benefits of food — for body, mind, soul, and social well-being — and savoring its power to heal and thrive.
Eating for prevention, health, and healing is possible. One meal at a time.