Frequently Asked Questions

Real Good Nutrition provides individual counseling and group classes. To read all about counseling services and pricing:

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Real Good Nutrition offers both in-person and virtual sessions.

In-person appointments are all held in Emmy’s office in downtown Madison at 211 S. Paterson St in Suite 354 (available by appointment only).

To be eligible to work with Emmy, you must be a resident of one of these states per state licensure laws:

• Airzona

• California

• Colorado

• Illinois

• Michigan

• Minnesota

• Ohio

• Texas

• Virginia

• Washington

• Wisconsin

Don’t see your state on the list? Emmy is constantly updating her state licensure, so you may be eligible to work with Emmy soon or in the future. If you’d like to work with Emmy, reach out below to request that your state becomes eligible:

Contact Emmy about state eligibility

Unfortunately Emmy only works with adults. You must be 18 years or older to work together.

This is totally up to you! Most clients like to meet biweekly or at least monthly. With that said, I don’t suggest going more than one month between sessions so we can stay on the right track, see consistent progress, make adjustments to your plan at the right time, and make sure you have all of the support you need.

For sure! You can send Emmy text messages through your secure Healthie portal for up to 1 month between sessions.

What can you message about? Almost anything! Confused about something we talked about, or need a refresher? Having a bad week symptom-wise? Experienced a binge episode last night and want to talk it through? Do you have an upcoming event or meal out and want help reviewing the menu ahead of time ? Do you want to send me a picture of a delicious dinner you made to brag a little? 😉 Or maybe you want to celebrate a big win. Either way, think of Emmy as someone you can count on between your sessions… a trained and certified food and nutrition expert right at your fingertips!

Your initial session will be 75 minutes and your follow-up sessions will be 45 minutes each.

Of course! I regularly collaborate with my clients’ doctors (or PAs, NPs, etc.), therapists, physical therapists, etc. It’s important to me that your care plan is well-rounded and that everyone on your healthcare team are on the same page.

No! A defined medical diagnosis is not required to work with Emmy.

However, if you are planning on using insurance or would like Emmy to prepare a Superbill for you to give to your insurance, then documentation of the applicable diagnosis via the ICD-10 diagnostic code is required. But don’t worry, Emmy can walk you through getting this if you need help!

Nope!

As a HAES-based (Health At Every Size) provider, I strongly believe weight is not the best metric used to track your progress. HAES-based means I don’t use weight as a measure of health. Instead, I love exploring how someone feels, how their energy levels have changed, and how confident and comfortable they feel around food. Other than that, because I am clinically trained, I may look at different labs or blood work ordered by myself or your doctor to see how things are going. However, at the end of the day, how we track your progress toward your goals together is totally in your hands, and I want to honor what makes you feel comfortable.

I’d love to work together to come up with a plan of attack when it comes to meals and snacks (including specific ideas and recipes), but I don't offer specific meal-by-meal plans or recipe guides. Please see below for the one caveat to this for medically-prescribed diets.

If this feels uncomfy, I challenge you to ask yourself:

• Is it realistic for you to follow a strict meal plan?

• Is it a sustainable practice?

• Will it cause more stress than relief?

• Why do I feel like I need something so rigid in order to achieve my goals?

These questions may help us create a nutrition plan together that comes about more organically and makes sense for you. I really believe that following a plan that was made by someone else doesn't always inspire long-term behavioral and lifestyle change. Plus, it's not likely sustainable to follow a strict plan forever, right?

There’s one caveat to this: if we’ve decided together that a medically-prescribed diet is right for you, I will provide you with tons of resources to be able to follow that diet which may include a more defined meal plan if that’s what you feel will help you the most. Here are two examples of when this might happen:

• If we’ve decided that a low FODMAP diet is the best next step to manage your IBS, I would provide you with a sample meal plan that you could either follow, tweak, or get inspo from, as well as lots of meal and snack ideas.

• If you are in the early phases of eating disorder recovery and are having trouble eating sufficiently on your own.

• If we’re doing an elimination diet to help detect possible food intolerances.

These are just a few examples of when a more defined meal plan may be provided (if appropriate).

My goal is to help my clients find realistic solutions for sustainable change when it comes to their health and wellness. Because cleanses are very restrictive and can promote disordered relationships with food, I do not promote or supply them.

However, there may be times when an elimination diet is appropriate, such as when we are trying to determine the cause of symptoms. An elimination diet is not the same as a detox or cleanse diet, and not all elimination diets are evidence-based or even helpful!

If you’re suffering from specific symptoms that you feel a cleanse or detox diet would help you with, let’s chat about other research-backed and less restrictive tactics that could help you out!

I totally understand the draw to try a keto diet, it’s literally everywhere these days! Did you know it was invented in the 1920s as a way to manage seizures in children with epilepsy? Most people don’t know this!

You also don’t hear much about the downsides (and dangers) of following a keto diet like increased cholesterol, fat accumulation in the liver, insulin resistance, and obsessive eating, and decreased lean body mass, exercise performance, and gut health. The most serious side effect is called ketoacidosis, a potentially life-threatening complication, which is why a keto diet should really only be done under physician monitoring to measure urine and blood ketones. More than all of that, it’s just not sustainable for the long term, so why put yourself through it now?

Instead, I take a non-diet approach to nutrition in that I don’t recommend any of the typical fad diets we see today (i.e. Whole 30, paleo, intermittent fasting, etc). I focus more on strategies that are realistic for the long haul, ones that have been really well studied (like high-quality, long-term studies!) without extreme diet restrictions and rules.

After all, 95% of all restrictive diets like keto fail after 1 year and up to 60% of people experience additional weight regained!