About: Our Founder

Alexis Beck, M.P.H., R.D., LDN

Perhaps you already know Alexis Beck. You may have seen her as a featured Contributor on ABC's Good Morning America and World News Tonight. Or, closer to home, she has been the Clinical Nutritionist on Boston's WCVB-TV's News Center 5, and the nightly news magazine -- Chronicle. You may have even read one of her columns during her fifteen-year tenure at the Boston Globe as Nutrition Columnist and Feature Writer, or more recently in The Metro - a Boston-based newspaper. And finally, you may have heard about her groundbreaking Clinical Practice -- Nutrition & Diet Counseling Associates that she founded in 1985. More recently, Ms. Beck has expanded the scope of her organization and has developed two new divisions -- NutritionRx™ and PlasticSurgeryRx™ in an effort to better meet the multigenerational and broad-based clinical needs. Additionally, Ms. Beck is the co-author of two nutrition books for children.

Ms. Beck coined the term "Disordered Eating" to describe the broad-based pervasive syndrome that afflicts not only women and girls in our culture, but surprisingly, men, boys as well. Ms. Beck is considered not only a pioneer in the treatment of this disorder but a compassionate expert.

Ms. Beck works closely with many of Boston's leading physicians to provide a unique medically-based weight loss program. Ms. Beck is considered a leading expert in: weight reduction; management of compulsive eating in adults, adolescents, and children; pre-natal and post-natal nutrition; menopause management; and eating disorders including anorexia, bulimia.

Ms. Beck earned a BS in Nutrition at Cornell University and performed a dietetic internship at the prestigious Massachusetts General Hospital. She earned a MA in Public Health from the University of California at Berkeley. More recently, Ms. Beck returned to university to work on her Psych D at Harvard University and is currently working on her dissertation. Ms. Beck is a member of the American Dietetic Association, on the Board of Directors of the Massachusetts Dietetic Association, the Massachusetts Eating Disorder Association (MEDA), the Society of Nutrition Education, and the Better Business Bureau. Of special note, Ms. Beck was recognized as the Dietician of the Year in 1979.

When not spending time with her clients, you might find Alexis hiking the Appalachian Trail, designing her home and garden, exercising or spending time at a Pilates studio.

Learn more about Alexis in the following article written by Madeline Drexler for The Boston Globe Magazine (October 1, 1995); Illustration by Catharine Bennett.

I Don't Do Breakfast And Other Confessions Of A Health Columnist Who Rarely Follows Her Own Advice.

TRUE CONFESSIONS: I subsist on tea and pastry when I write these health columns. I pass up green vegetables unless they're swaddled in cream sauce. I don't do breakfast.

Such confessions are embarrassing for a health columnist, but they're good for the soul. In the offices of Nutrition and Diet Counseling Associates, in Brookline, they were also good for the body. There, clinical nutritionists Alexis Beck and Carolyn Hintlian analyzed what I ate, measured my fat, and asked few questions that knocked my smug irreverence off kilter.

First, they said, I'm lucky. At 41, I'm in the middle of the government weights charts for my height, and at 17 to 20 percent, my body fat is well within the 18 to 23 percent recommended for women. I don't have a medical condition such as hypertension, diabetes, or heart disease, which typically sends people their way. And I'm not disablingly obsessed with food, as are many of their clients.

But I do bring to the table the same laissez-faire attitudes that afflict most Americans: laziness and indifference. And I can't seem to change.

For four days, I kept a record of everything I ate. It was a revelation. On a Sunday, for instance, my total intake until dinner consisted of a quart of cranberry juice and two pieces of vanilla fudge. A few days before, the bulk of the day's calories had come from a hamburger, 17 cherry tomatoes, and a handful of Hershey's Hugs.

Hintlian performed a computer analysis of my meals, her initial verdict, based on aggregate percentages of protein, carbohydrates, and fat: "Not outrageously bad." But then she looked more closely. It wasn't a pretty picture.

I was eating too much fat - more than 35 percent of total calories, if you took out the cranberry juice (basically sugar water) I guzzled, and far more than the 15 to 25 percent that experts recommend. I wasn't eating enough fresh fruits and vegetables, which contain fiber and essential nutrients. And my diet was low in B vitamins, which come from whole grains and legumes.

"One area in which you're definitely low is calcium." Hintlian said. This caught me off guard. Though I was professionally aware of public-health message about the dangers of osteoporosis, privately, I was bored and tuned them out. Besides, as a jogger and gym-goer, I never considered myself at risk for bone-thinning.

I was wrong. Women's bones stop developing around age 35, and they begin to attenuate unless extra measures halt the process extra measures halt the process. Weight-bearing exercise isn't enough; calcium is required to feed bones - about 1,000 milligrams a day, in my case. When I walked out the door, I was handed a calcium-magnesium supplement.

Next, Alexis Beck considered my case. She is a tall, gladiatorially-built woman who can perform a 350-pound leg press and still maintain long, perfect nails. She noted that I must be aware of my insalubrious eating habits. Swiveling in her seat and fixing me with a stare, she asked, "How is that awareness serving you?"

Hmmm. I explained that since I feel hyper-responsible in so many areas of my life, food is one of my few areas of willful disobedience. Besides, I'm drawn to absurdity. Isn't it funny that I'm a health writer who hates vegetables?

"That's very interesting," she said evenly. "It's not particularly adult, but that's OK - without our child, life would be pretty boring."

But, she said, there's a price. My 66 grams of fat calories a day is "dangerously too much for anybody"; 40 grams of less is best. And even with exercise, I'm courting cancer, heart disease, and osteoporosis. "The question is, why don't you want to take care of those diseases?"

Those are questions most Americans need to answer. Six of the top 10 causes of death are diet-related. And growing percentages of both adults and children are overweight.

As Beck sees it, we have intellectual IQs when it comes to food, and the later hover around zero. We seldom know the psychic impulses behind our food choices, nor do we consider how we use food to fill emotional needs.

"If you're lonely, and hurt, and bored, and adrift, food won't make you feel better - whether it's cookies or asparagus," Beck said. People who are anorexic or bulimic develop pathological obsessions around control, while compulsive overeaters often mistake emotional hunger for physical hunger. But your average food schleps, like me, are simply "disinterested and somewhat disrespectful."

Beck has no use for fancy food pyramids. She doesn't expect people to call on willpower. Rather, the key to eating well, she said is changing one's relationship with food. People can start to fathom this relationship by asking: Are there certain times in the day when, without hunger but because of emotional emptiness, I chow down? "When they begin to recognize the difference between hunger and emptiness," she said, "they can get to their relationship with food."

Nancy Clark, director of nutritional services at SportsMedicine Brookline, says that poor eaters set themselves up for trouble by ignoring hunger signals. They skip breakfast and dash through lunch, then feel so ravenous by mid-afternoon that they grab anything that's convenient, from potato chips to candy bars. "I give people permission to eat, which society doesn't," she says. But timing is everything. "They should have breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper." And since we normally experience hunger pangs every four hours, it's OK to savor those 4 o'clock snacks.

Finally, about those vegetables. " If you don't want to eat vegetables, cool," Beck said. "Eat fruit. The major nutrients that exist in vegetables exist in fruit." That made my day.

Not everyone needs a heart-to-heart with a clinical nutritionist. But individually tailored insights can benefit people who have a family history of diet-related-diseases, who eat on the run, who are pregnant or elderly, or who just worry about what they're eating. Before I left, I had intended to pick up a Dunkin' Donuts coffee roll to revive my cherished sense of incongruity. But I couldn't quite shake what I'd just learned. Instead, I passed a farm stand and bought 2 percent milk and fresh corn. And after dinner, I pulled out the calcium tablets. They went well with my vanilla fudge.