Where Katonah Yoga Meets Functional Nutrition: A Meal Garden Dietitian’s Perspective

Have you ever wondered how embracing a fully balanced wellness practice can elevate your nutrition services?

This week we have a very special guest as we are talking to one of our very own registered dietitians here at Meal Garden, Lesley Seto.

Not only does Lesley provide support for recipe development and programs, but she is also a yoga instructor and the owner and founder of Embodhi Nutrition & Yoga based in Halifax.

Lesley’s mission is to provide nutrition and wellness education that helps you become more in tune with your body’s signals and gets to the root cause of concerns using a functional nutrition approach.

Specializing in digestive and hormone health concerns, she is well versed in strategies for weight management and of course, healthy eating while integrating yoga techniques as a method to improve and manage physical pain.

If you want to learn how nutrition and yoga complement each other, tune in to discover how Lesley combines her skillsets for a fully balanced wellness practice.

How did your career path take route?

I never thought yoga would be part of my career path as my background is in Dietetics and Bio-Chemistry. I worked in research for a long time but then realized I didn’t want to work with bacteria, but instead, with people.

After working several years in clinical and nutrition research I started to see that a true whole body or whole-person approach was really needed, which led me to study a little bit in functional nutrition and integrate that approach into my practice.

Functional nutrition: an approach that understands the whole person, understands the science and symptoms that caused your symptoms to manifest, and teaches you how to really take control of your health.

Functional nutrition encompasses a thorough assessment and timeline of events in the person’s life like history, family history, triggering events, what’s really causing things to continue, and is it all nutrition-related or is it other body systems like environment, sleep, exercise, or stress. Once these different aspects are assessed, then you know where to start to support them.

Because Lesley struggled with her own digestive issues and PMS issues for a long time, functional nutrition helped her get to the root of those issues hence why she loves helping people empower themselves to support their own health and take control.

Lesley never thought Yoga was never something she thought she would be doing as she felt she had a very rigid body or as she likes to call it, a “stereotypical old man style” body that can barely bend over. That, mixed with her scoliosis (a sideways curvature of the spine) which caused a lot of sporadic pain while walking.

“It felt like someone was stabbing me in the back of the hop and my leg would burn out.”

When she first started practicing other styles of yoga, she felt as though she couldn’t do the things that other people could do and ended up developing shoulder pain from the style she was practicing.

Although she felt good mentally and it helped manage her stress, her practice never progressed until she found Katonah Yoga.

“That is where the career path became something more real to me and something that I really experienced within my own body and was really driven to share it with others.”

How did you merge nutrition and yoga? Can you explain how these two things complement each other?

In the simplest of forms, when looking at the whole body and whole-body approach, yoga is beneficial for many things and stress management is one of them.

Anxiety is personally something that I’ve dealt with but even depression and a lot of other mental concerns can benefit from Yoga. And at the same time, it’s a physical form of movement so that is something that helps people become more comfortable in their bodies.

Within functional nutrition, we assess muscular-skeletal and how stress can impact digestive systems and gut health. Nutritional management can impact someone's health but you can't do that without considering other things like sleep, for example.

Could you share the results that clients achieve when incorporating both together versus just nutrition or just yoga?

Sometimes a client just needs nutrition counseling, perhaps it’s just a triggering food and they already have other mindfulness practices and only need only that type of nutritional support.

But a client that ends up doing both with me, practicing yoga either privately and/ or in a group as well as working on nutritional concerns, start to develop a new sense of body awareness, intuitive sense, and also a form of sub inquiry which is when you start to understand your own body and notice some of these other things that are coming up.

How do you use Meal Garden in your own practice?

In the beginning, Lesley found herself aligning with “anti meal plans” but then started to find that a lot of people wanted them or needed them so she understood the value of them and started to use them in her professional approach.

Although she uses meal plans often, she finds the recipe collection to be another excellent tool because it allows you to cycle through two weeks of recipes. However, the meal plans are beneficial for the people that actually need it to just get started or reset and develop a pattern to encourage repetition.

"Repetition is when we start to create new paths and develop insight." - Lesley

And if a meal plan is what’s going to help you get started, then that's what I'll help you create and create for you.

I love that the resources are available for other practitioners because it helps to speed up the process for people like me and help build up the community. I also love the ability to pull recipes from amazing food bloggers and other recipe developers in one place and to make recipe collections.

And last, here is some advice that Lesley’s last bit of advice for both practitioners and health seekers:

1. What you do and how you live creates ripples in your community. Working on your own patterns, belief systems, conditioning and healing starts to come out in your work with others
2. There are so many styles of yoga, types of breathwork, and meditation. Explore them, understand what they’re helpful for and try it yourself.
3. Go to classes you wouldn’t normally go to, in-person classes create a sense of community which is also great for your health and try it at least 3 or 4 times before deciding you don’t like it.
4. Want to see some of the amazing meal plans that Lesley has created and shared with our community in Meal Garden? Here are 25 Immune Supportive Dinner Ideas you can share with your clients today (must be a Meal Garden member to access).

Inviting your feedback: What value did you get out of this podcast episode? What could we have done differently to make it a more successful listening experience for you? What questions do you wish were asked or elaborated on further? Let us know! Email the host directly: kiki.athanas@mealgarden.com

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