Ner Tamid Greenspring Valley Synagogue congregant Adina Meister, 39, loves working with the Jewish community to heal individuals’ struggles with food.
After graduating from Bais Yaakov of Baltimore and attending the University of Maryland to receive a nursing degree, Meister began an intuitive eating business called Nurture with Compassion, LLC. Intuitive Eating is an evidence-based approach that focuses on listening to our bodies’ natural cues and letting go of the pressure to change how our bodies look, according to Meister. It helps people move away from dieting, rigid food rules and body shame, toward a more peaceful relationship with food and body.
Meister lives in Pikesville.
How would you describe your relationship to Judaism?
My relationship to Judaism is ever-growing and changing. I feel so grateful to my shul, Ner Tamid. When you find a shul that is accepting and inspiring, it really helps you. It motivates you to continue your journey and to become the best you can be.
Why did you feel the need to start your business?
I worked for over a decade as a psychiatric nurse, which I loved. Now, I really feel incredibly passionate about this framework called intuitive eating because it personally helped me overcome my challenges with food and body image stuff. Through this framework, I was able to heal my relationship to food and body, which I struggled with for most of my life. Once I recovered, I saw so clearly how much this disordered eating stuff really took over my life in such a negative way and how my life was completely different post-recovering that I felt I needed to pay it forward. I needed to share with others who are still in that boat of struggling. I thought it was a responsibility for the community that I needed to share with others, to help others come out of that space into a much brighter place.
What’s your favorite part about your job?
Really being able to help others so they can focus on the things that are actually important to them in their lives. They don’t have to be stuck in those cycles of dieting and restricting and feeling out of control with food. My favorite part is seeing clients move away from this struggling, dark place to a place with light and freedom. Seeing that transformation is the most rewarding part.
What do you want people to know about your profession?
I don’t work from a medical standpoint. It’s not a clinical service that I provide. I don’t work under my nursing license, and it’s not nutrition therapy. It’s coaching.
Why would someone go to you?
Some of them come to me if they are in a place where they aren’t necessarily struggling with a full-blown eating disorder, but they do struggle with feeling peaceful around their food choices. I’m especially passionate about people who really want to pass this on or don’t want to pass on their current relationship with food and body to their families and their children. They want to make a change and stop that cycle of diet-culture mentality.
They want to model for their family another way, a more peaceful, compassionate way to relate to food and their bodies.
Do you think that that can be done by one person?
Absolutely, yes. If there’s one person in a family that is more positive and gentler, that has a domino effect on the rest of the family members. I feel similarly with this type of thing. When there’s someone modeling this and teaching this, I absolutely think it can have a ripple effect in the family.
Do you think there’s any relation to Judaism and intuitive eating?
Something I tell my clients all the time, and I try to live by it also, is hishtadlut, which is things that are in your control and things that you can actually do versus emunah, which is your faith. The way I view intuitive eating is [one in which] we try and do all the things that we can do in terms of health behaviors. So, we are going to try to move our bodies in a joyful way and eat foods that nourish us. Ultimately, the way our bodies look and present to the world is not in our control as much as our culture would like us to think that we absolutely have control of how our bodies present.
Is there anything else that you want to add?
In our Jewish communities, if we can adopt this idea of size diversity, which basically means that bodies come in all shapes and sizes, we need to respect that. We don’t all need to be a certain size. People have different heights, and we’re not all trying to be the same height. When we really adopt that in our communities and have that as a mindset, I believe that the struggles that so many people have with food and bodies will decrease dramatically. It’s very hard to have an authentic relationship with food and body when you’re still so focused on the fact that you need to change your body and make it smaller.
Shira Kramer is a freelance writer.
