Ayana Habtemariam MSW, RDN, LDN
I have over 10 years of experience managing relationships and educating the public on the relationship between the nutrition environment and health outcomes. I have worked with community leaders and politicians as a nutrition policy advocate and community nutrition educator; in the healthcare field as an acute care and long-term care dietitian; and as an award-winning, top-performing account manager for a Fortune 500 company.
I rep Philadelphia but live in beautiful Arlington, Virginia with my husband. My hobbies include practicing and volunteering at Bikram Yoga Works in DC, reading science fiction (my favorite author is Octavia Butler), and hanging out with my loved ones whenever I can.
I earned my undergraduate degree in Foods and Nutrition from Morgan State University (2005), completed my dietetic internship through the University of Delaware’s distance program (2007), and earned my MSW with a concentration in community and policy arenas from Temple University (2010).
My Approach
Eating behavior, like any other behavior, is largely influenced by our environments and experiences. It is not possible to improve your relationship with food without first understanding the factors that have shaped it. These factors are many and can be as simple as the way your kitchen is organized to as complex as how you function in social spaces as a result of of diet culture. Restrictive diets don’t work because they are unrealistic and unsustainable. They do not consider you, your environment, or your relationship with food, and that makes them counterintuitive to natural human behavior.
My approach to nutrition and the general lens by which I view the world is influenced by the social work concept, Person-In-Environment (PIE). I recently became interested in intuitive eating and non-diet approaches, and I have begun to incorporate them into my practice.