One Year As A Registered Dietitian…
October 16th. This day may mean nothing to most people…unless, of course, someone you care about has a birthday that falls on this day. Then it might mean something to you. However, in general, for most people, this is just another day. For me it means a little more than that.
Today is officially one year since I passed my dietitian license exam. It is crazy how fast time can fly. Life looks a little different a year later. But it has not been easy. Jobs did not just drop into my lap in the moment I passed that test. I had to send out a million resumes just as I did before. And go through a million interviews…and a million rejections.
Ok…maybe not a MILLION rejections…but there was a LOT of rejection. Even though I now had these initials, I still had no experience. I had spent so much time studying, I had no “real world” dietitian skills. Who was going to hire me? Why had I bothered with all of this?
Today, I was doing a wellness table that I have been conducting regularly for a fine dining catering company that has corporate accounts across Southern California on rethinking the consumption of sugary beverages. Typically, when I am creating these tables, I line up several canned/bottled beverages from the cafeteria’s beverage cart and align each beverage with the amount of sugar it contains in grams, via sugar packets. I had a man come up to my table today looking a little bit unnerved. He stood next to me and pointed his finger at a 12 ounce glass of orange juice I had on my table and asked me why he couldn’t drink that if it was natural sugar from fruit. I asked him, if given a bowl of oranges, how many would he eat? Naturally, he said one. Then I asked him how much juice one orange would make and pointed to the cup. I watched him stammer a bit and point to about an inch below the bottom of the cup. So wait…you wouldn’t typically eat 5-6 oranges? Because that is the amount it would take to fill that 12 ounce cup. He was pacified by this example. Then we discussed portion control and diluting juices that are too heavily concentrated.
I hold a raffle at every wellness table and have the patrons of the café guess the amount of sugar in a specified drink. Today, I used a DIET Snapple. When I was reading thru the guesses, I noticed that no one had read the drink was sugar-free. Did they even know where to find that on the label? One guy had guessed 100 grams of sugar…in a diet drink.
You are probably wondering…what does that have to do with anything?? Let’s get back to WHY HAD I BOTHERED WITH ALL OF THIS? Those examples in the paragraphs above, my friends, are my reason why. HEALTH EDUCATION. Sure, some people don’t care about health or nutrition. Maybe they will when they get their diabetes wake up call or have a massive heart attack. Then there are the people who genuinely don’t know what to eat or how to eat better. When I can reach those people, the stubborn ones who hide their juices and soda cups behind their back when they walk by me, but come tip-toeing by a few minutes later because they see a crowd around my table, I know there was a reason for me to pass that test.
Aside from becoming an avid health screener and traveling a bit with some screening companies, I have become gainfully employed by two amazing companies who have me on their teams not because of what I can say about their brand, but because of what I KNOW ABOUT NUTRITION. That is the coolest feeling in the world…I’m going with it!
Opportunities keep coming. I have been fortunate enough to get to do some online consulting for a company that actually has dietitians consult clients through pictures of their food, which is a pretty cool concept. I have also been interviewed for an instructional learning video on portion sizes and will get to participate in some major health fairs in the upcoming months.
So work has been getting busy and I am hoping in the year to come, it will only get busier. Last year, I celebrated my dietitian license exam passage with my loser alcoholic boyfriend at the time and got to watch him pass out on the floor of his apartment. He is probably still laying there now. This year, I will be conducting my FIRST lunch and learn seminar where I got to write the ENTIRE script from scratch. Very exciting! Moments of feeling lost slowly lead into moments of hope and triumph. Everything else will fall together. That’s what people tell me, at least. I am hoping it is all just a matter of time.
Happy Dietitian Anniversary To Me!
