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I get so inspired whenever I meet women following their heart and doing brave things to help the world. Women who are living their lives according to their own rules with a dream of leaving an impact. Their stories amaze me and they may inspire you as well. 

I met Sue Ann online through mutual friends. Then I read something she wrote and immediately I knew we were kindred spirits, destined to one day talk about our shared stories. And that we did. Sue Ann is a fire cracker, a health enthusiast, an ethically sourced organic chocolate for breakfast trailblazer, and a wonderfully comedic writer. She is a wise pizazz of a woman. Read below to learn her unique approach to helping women use food as a healing tool and the much deeper meaning behind being “well-nourished”.
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Chocolate for Breakfast is such an interesting concept, especially for a culinary nutritionist! Can you tell us how Chocolate for Breakfast came about? 

Yes, it’s a delicious concept isn’t it? It comes from a very personal journey around food and nourishment. I spent the better part of my life in a love-hate relationship with food. On one hand food was something to be celebrated and enjoyed. My grandmother was a wonderful cook and I had the pleasure of watching her prepare food with skilled hands and a reverence for all things fresh. Tomato sauce came from the tomatoes in her garden and “canned” tomatoes meant you were going to take bushels of tomatoes to the basement to begin the long, loving process of boiling the jars, blanching the tomatoes, and mashing them into the jars that would line the shelves in our pantry for the blustery Buffalo winters. My father turned grocery shopping into an art form—to my dad, every meal was a celebration. 

Not so with my mother. She was on the life-long diet plan. She had a lifetime membership to Weight Watchers, and Diet Workshop, for back up reinforcement. Yet, no matter how many pounds she lost, she inevitably gained them back. And then some. My mother was trapped in the weight loss war zone. She counted calories, points, fat grams—whatever the collective was counting at the time. Yet, for as long as I can remember, she was overweight—and not by just a few pounds. My mother was morbidly obese. 

I adopted my mother’s eat-repent-eat-repent mentality. You see I believed I was genetically predisposed to look just like her. I believed food was something to be feared. Food could make you fat.

Fast-forward many years. I had just opened my Conscious Bites Nutrition practice after studying the science of nutrition in three separate and distinct programs. I had hundreds of dietary theories swimming around in my head and a steady stream of clients at my door. 

Pretty soon I found myself thinking, “I can’t do this work. I can’t be one more practitioner teaching women how to lose weight, curb their cravings, beat the sugar blues, and wrestle their bodies into the little-black-dress.” The women entering my office knew all about those dietary theories. Only they hadn’t “studied” them. Like me, they had “lived” them. Every woman who entered my door had the same story. 

I’m not thin enough. 

Some of these women really did need to release weight, both physically and metaphorically. Many of them flourished in a gentle shift toward a plant-based diet. Their health improved dramatically as we elevated their eating experience. 

Yet ALL of these women needed something more. They needed to learn how to feed themselves at a much deeper level. They needed to know how to reclaim a more nourishing relationship to food. And their bodies. 

So Chocolate for Breakfast began as a mission to inspire women to savor and ENJOY food while learning how to listen and respond to the wisdom of their own bodies rather than the latest nutrition guru or system. And chocolate became the vehicle: where pleasure meets permission.

So many women struggle with body image and yo-yo dieting to try and reach their ideal body weight. How do you help change women’s mindset around food to help them achieve their goals?

This is such a great question. It’s the heart of my work, the reason I studied the psychology of eating. At a very deep and personal level I knew, it wasn’t about the food. Most women have a distorted view of their “ideal” body weight. Ninety-nine percent of the women who walk through my door are struggling because they haven’t learned how to listen to their bodies. They are trying to wrestle their bodies into a number or a size. That size has nothing to do with ideal body weight.

I watched my best friend fall into the abyss of anorexia because she wanted to conquer her ‘weight problem’ once and for all. But you see, she didn’t have a weight problem. She had adopted a cultural anxiety that would have us believe that gaining any weight at all is something to be feared. 

Attempting to CONTROL our weight keeps us distracted. It keeps us from digging deeper into the reservoirs of personal anxiety that send us scurrying to the refrigerator when we aren’t really hungry. It keeps us from looking at our core needs and what really matters to us in life—love, laughter, serenity, health. 

So my mission is to help women embrace their bodies while they explore the subtext of their lives. What’s keeping them from “releasing” excess weight? Not just physical weight. Weight shows up in the psychological burden of having to be perfect or the FEAR that paralyzes women into thinking that they are going to grow old and fat and no one is going to love them. Or the FEAR that with each pound they gain they lose a pound of beauty.

I believe the healing begins when we take back our plates. I believe food heals. Not just at a biological level. I believe food heals the spirit.

I show women how to explore the sensual nature of food so that the boundaries between appetite and control diminish and, hopefully, morph into the true meaning of what it means to live the life of a well-nourished woman.

Sue Ann, you have such a healthy glow about you. You absolutely radiate. What steps can our readers take to get their glow on?

I think there are so many layers to this question. When do we glow? When we’re healthy. When we’re happy. When we’re in love.

When I first started my Conscious Bites Nutrition Business I was known as the “skin and bones expert” because in my personal health journey I had reversed two major health issues using food as medicine. As I cleaned up my diet and flooded my body with fresh fruits and vegetables and copious amounts of greens, my skin went through a major transformation. But I was so busy tracking my bones and my thyroid scores I didn’t even notice. It wasn’t until I started looking at old photographs that I really saw the change. No more rosacea, No more puffiness. People were telling me I looked younger but I was too preoccupied to notice. 

But it was more than diet. I think we “get the glow” when we slow down a bit and pay attention to the energy leaks in our lives. What drains us? Are we saying yes when we should be saying no? What feeds us? Are we spending time with people who deplete our energy or are we cultivating relationships with people who inspire us and make us laugh? Do we have solid boundaries when it comes to family or work responsibilities? I believe energy leaks rob us of “the glow.”

And then there’s restorative sleep. I know, for me, it takes a concentrated effort to pull myself away from my computer and the work I love to make sure I’m getting adequate rest and rejuvenation. 

I found a great quote that I have sitting on my desk. It says: I used to be driven but then I pulled over.  

I think we need to pull over.

You are clearly so passionate about your work. Did you have any fears around starting a business based on this passion? How did you push past those fears?

Passion fuels me. It always has. I never had any fears around starting this business because I really feel called to work with women in the area of nourishment. I want our girls to grow up with a healthier relationship to food and their bodies. In order for that to happen we, all of us, must cultivate a relationship to food that has nothing to do with restriction and everything to do with lusciousness. 

Yes, we need to give ourselves PERMISSION to eat chocolate for breakfast.

Do the words gentle but powerful resonate with you or your business in any way?

Oh yes! We need to be gentle with ourselves. We need to question whose standards we are trying to live up to when we find ourselves doing too much work and not enough play. We need to cultivate compassion for ourselves and for our bodies as we learn and grow … and age.

We need to gently ask ourselves: What do I really need? What is the quality of life I’m after? If I had only three weeks to live, where would I spend them and with whom? 

We have important work to do in the world. And we have to do it from a place of fortitude and strength but I believe we need to be gentle with ourselves in order to show up powerfully in the world. It’s a biological imperative.