Spotlight Series

Topic: Empowering lifelong wellness through personalized, intuitive nutrition counseling.

Guest Name: Allison Tepper

Guest Credentials: MS, RD, LDN, RYT

Discussion Details:

1. Discover how Allison tailors nutrition guidance to meet clients’ unique backgrounds, goals, and individual needs.

2. Learn how Allison and her team can help you break free from chronic dieting and heal your relationship with food.

3. Learn how an integrative approach—including lifestyle movement, body acceptance, and stress management—can bring a transformative experience to health and wellness.

Benefits of Watching:

Understanding of Whole Person Approach:

• Learn the benefits of an Individualized Program.
• Learn how mindfulness and intuitive eating can help transform your relationship with food for lifelong wellness.

Address of Guests’ Business:
Leesburg Office
104 Church Street SE, STE 100
Leesburg, VA 20175

WInchester Office
132 S. Cameron Street
Winchester, VA 22601

Hi, I’m Viraj Chang, the owner and physical therapist at Accelerate Physical Therapy, and this is my professional spotlight series. Today, I’m featuring Allison Tepper from Tepper Nutrition. Hey, Allison.

Hi, Viraj, thanks for having me.

Absolutely excited to have you here. Just a little intro about Allison. She is an intuitive eating counselor, registered dietitian, and American University instructor with over a decade of experience helping clients heal their relationship with food and body image. Her compassionate approach integrates everything from eating disorder recovery and stress management to yoga teaching and nutrition therapy. Tune in as we dive into her holistic philosophy, her work across Northern Virginia and beyond, and how you can cultivate true body acceptance with her services.

Welcome. Thank you so much. I just wanted to share a unique fact about you. Before becoming a dietitian, your love and your focus were in music and theater. That is fun. Tell me a little bit about that.

Yeah. I mean, gosh, I was singing since I was four years old and just always such a big passion of mine. I loved musical theater and really just thought that that was going to be what I pursued long term. But things changed. And going into school, I was like, I kind of want to do something else. So I’m very fortunate with the path that I chose, but it’s fun to think back on those years.

And it was just such a great experience. Yeah. So you made your way into nutrition, and you started studying and teaching.

How does this have a deeper meaning for you than just the medical side of nutrition? Yeah. I think so many people, and women especially, we grow up with so much mixed information around food and body image and just cultural expectations and societal norms. And it’s confusing, and it can be stressful.

And I definitely felt that growing up. There were a lot of conversations around food and body image, and it definitely impacted my approach to food. And I was so grateful to discover intuitive eating and to really learn more about how to combine the science of nutrition with what my individual body needed based on my experiences and based on my cues.

And that’s something that has resonated with me so much that then I apply into my work with clients. So yeah, it’s been true. So the intuitive nutrition part and the intuitive eating part, is that traditional dietitian and traditional nutrition that you would find in a college setting? Or how did you come about the intuitive eating part? Yeah, that’s a great question.

So it might be more included now, but when I was in school, it was not a big topic of conversation. I was introduced to it, though, in college. I had a professor in my counseling class who had us read the intuitive eating book.

But we really didn’t dive into it too, too much. It wasn’t a big part of the curriculum. And I ended up kind of forgetting about it a little bit because we are so… The training is very traditional around nutrition and meal plans and things, all important information to know, but we don’t dive as much into the relationship to food and just our unique experiences with it.

So it was something that, after my first job, I got reintroduced to it. And then, learning more about it, I was just like, I have to get certified in this and learn more. I think this is just such an important way to approach food with clients, and I’ve been practicing that way ever since.

So I got certified in 2013, and it’s been a really big part of our practice. Yeah. Okay.

Well, that’s great to know. So was there a specific moment or experience that led you down the path of owning your own business? It was something that I was always curious about and interested in doing. I worked for many different organizations and was just excited to be able to forge my own path and to practice in a different and unique way.

At the time, I wasn’t really working for people who had as much experience with intuitive eating and eating disorders. So I wanted to be able to pursue that path in a more authentic way for myself. And I just got really excited about business ownership.

And I think it was just something that innately I knew I wanted to do. Okay. And then tell me a little bit about how the yoga kind of came about with some of your services.

Yeah. So part of intuitive eating is really slowing down, tuning into your body. And so is yoga.

And a lot of times too, our clients might feel a little bit nervous about going into a yoga studio. We work with a lot of people in all different body sizes with different experience around movement. Maybe they have a bad relationship with movement and how their body kind of feels during exercise.

So doing the yoga teacher training was a way for me to practice being able to talk to people about relaxation techniques, meditation, breathing, and how to connect body and mind. And then also for a short time, I did offer one-on-one sessions in my office as kind of like an introductory way to get people used to yoga and kind of introducing them to that. But after COVID, I stopped doing it, but that was kind of the intention there.

Yeah. Because there is a body and mind connection when it comes to food and feeling grounded. What I was going to ask you as a follow-up question was: it’s intuitive eating.

Sometimes people aren’t intuitive. And I feel like maybe yoga- it’s definitely you’re going inward, and you’re forming a connection with your mind and body. So you might get a greater sense of that.

And that might help them with their nutritional aspect too. It’s like very grounding, right? Exactly. Yes.

We talk a lot about how stress can impact food intake. And so yoga for my clients felt like a good introductory way to, yeah, tune in and become more aware of their body’s cues. So intuitive eating and also intuitive movement, and how we can kind of take the whole person into consideration when making recommendations.

Whole body. And then so you probably still- it’s probably easy to teach breath in a one-on-one session, right? Pretty easily. So that’s a good way to use that to help with this aspect as well.

Yeah. Especially if someone’s coming into a session feeling like, okay, we’re feeling a little bit overwhelmed or whatever it might be. Just kind of taking a couple of moments to settle in and ground before we start our work together, since our work can bring up some emotions.

So it’s good to start off with that space. Yeah. I love that whole body approach.

Okay. Tell me a little bit about what kind of patients tend to thrive in your care. Yeah.

I would say we work with a range of clients, and with five of us on the team, we all work with different specialties and different needs. I would say, though, that between all of us, since our work is rooted in intuitive eating and the relationship with food and any emotional eating or disordered eating, a lot of our clients are people who have been maybe on the dieting hamster wheel for a while, we’ll say, where they’ve tried everything. Their weight has cycled up and down over the years.

There’s confusion, there’s stress. Maybe they don’t have the best relationship with food in their body. So really coming in to do that foundational work and hitting it from a lot of different angles.

Those are the clients that we probably find have really good experiences in terms of being able to work through all of these different pieces and find this new way of eating that feels more sustainable and enjoyable and doable. And that being said, we do see a lot of different types, though, for sure. We work with a lot of GI conditions, and one of our dietitians specializes in pediatrics, and we have someone who specializes in sports nutrition.

So we’ll see a range, but from the philosophy of we’re not cutting anything out, we’re not doing anything restrictive. I joke that we’re just, we’re not very trendy when it comes to our food. We want to keep it really sustainable and evidence-based.

But yeah, I would say definitely the intuitive eating people are a big part of our population, emotional eating and the eating disorders. I love that you work with Littles as well, pediatrics. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. Well, I’m sure you’ve seen many different patients, but is there a patient success story that stayed with you? Yeah.

I mean, there are definitely a few. The one that comes to mind that I’ll often think about or refer to as I had a client who was just really struggling with thoughts around food in terms of it kind of taking up her day; there were a lot of obsessive thoughts. It was just on her mind a lot.

And through our work, we were able to nourish her body enough that the thoughts around food decreased. And then she was able to think about other things in her life. So one of the things that she’d always dreamed of was opening a business, but she really was focusing so much on food that it didn’t feel like there was enough brain space for that.

So once we were finishing up our work, she was like, I feel like I have the capacity now to open a business. And I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I hadn’t worked on my approach to food. So that just speaks volumes.

And I was just so happy for her. And yeah, it was really wonderful to see. You got a whole big aspect of her life back.

That’s amazing. So tell me a little bit about if someone was being hesitant or unsure about reaching out, what would you want them to know right away? Yeah. I would say that we’re all human in our practice.

I know that food can feel sometimes challenging or vulnerable to talk about. That was one of the reasons I wanted my logo to be a pineapple as kind of like a form of hospitality and welcome, just to know that you’re entering into a space that is compassionate and supportive. We really try to keep things realistic and doable and start where the person is.

I think sometimes when people think of meeting to talk about food, or if they’re meeting with a dietitian, it’s going to feel restrictive or maybe not fun. But we’re here to have fun with it and to make eating enjoyable and sustainable. So I think, yeah, I want everyone to know that we are humans.

We’ve all had our own things with food in terms of, like, some have had family allergies or GI stuff. And so we understand where our clients are coming from and offer care that hopefully feels supportive. So if they wanted to start, what would be the best way? Would they give, like, do you offer a consultation? Do you meet and connect with them on the phone? Or how do you- what’s the best way for them to connect with you if they’re just interested in learning more? Yeah.

So they can email us or call us. And on our website, there’s a contact page with all of our contact information. We offer a free discovery call before meeting.

It’s 15 minutes just to learn a little bit more about them. They can learn more about us. And then if it feels like a good fit from there, then we can set up an initial appointment.

Okay. And then what is one thing someone can do right now to start making a shift in their health and wellness? Yeah. So it’s a good question.

I think a lot of times when I’m talking to someone, they’re like, I need to make changes. There’s so much that they’re saying that they need to do at once. And oftentimes if we zoom out, we can see that maybe there’s one or two overarching things that can maybe use a little bit of attention just to start.

So I really recommend starting slow, taking baby steps so that it feels comfortable. Maybe it’s, okay, I’m going to sleep an extra 30 minutes to an hour, or what foods can I add in to increase my nutrient intake? So I’m already eating these foods throughout the day, but maybe I’ll just add in a variety of fruits and vegetables or different fiber sources just to increase the nutrition. So little tweaks that we can start to make that feel sustainable long-term.

Yeah. It doesn’t have to be anything big and anything drastic for your body. And then can you tell me a little bit about, so if I were to start a session with you, what would that session look like? And then what would follow-up sessions look like as well? Yeah.

So for an initial appointment, we’re really getting a lot of good history. We want the plan to feel really individualized. And again, I use the word doable all the time, and that is the most important thing.

I want you to be able to do this for the rest of your life. So we really get a good, full understanding of history, experiences, preferences, what’s worked, what hasn’t worked, barriers, so that we know what steps to take moving forward. So we’re getting that full history.

And then based on the conversation, okay, what’s the priority? Or where do we start? And so we’ll do nutrition education just to set this good foundational place, making sure you’re eating enough of the good balance of nutrients and coming up with different meal ideas. So depending on what the person is coming in for, that’s what we’ll prioritize. And then follow-ups are 50 minutes where we’re diving deeper into everything, continuing to explore nutrition philosophies and going over different handouts.

And sometimes people are coming in for much-needed components in addition to regular nutrition goals. So we’ll continue to expand on that over time. And then we also have a 30-minute session if that’s preferred.

And then, included in sessions, clients are able to reach out with questions. And we also connect on a food logging app that is not required, but it is a great way for us to connect. And the information on there is more qualitative, where they’re putting in what they ate, how they felt, what their hunger was, what their fullness was, and any stress throughout the day, so that we can get a good understanding of what impacts food intake.

So that’s something that we utilize in between sessions and for our work as well. And then, yeah, depending on the number of sessions, a lot of people will ask that question. It really depends on what they’re coming in for and how much support they need a year or as long or as little as someone can benefit.

Okay. So it seems like a very comprehensive, very thorough evaluation and then follow-ups as well. Well, a very individualized person.

Yeah. Well, this is so great. Thank you so much for coming and meeting with me and talking about your business and telling me a little bit about what intuitive eating is and how it can help different individuals there.

I think it’s going to be really informative because not everyone knows that this style of eating is out there. So I appreciate your holistic approach and thank you so much for meeting me. Thank you for having me.

I appreciate it.