Cheryl Buckley- Holistic Nutrition (1 of 5)

Mike Hartman, Performance Mindset Strategist. This is Develop the Mindset of a Champion with former Stanley cup champion Mike Hartman. Welcome to another episode. Today my guest is Cheryl Buckley. Cheryl is a registered dietitian who was also certified in functional nutrition. Cheryl was also one of 70 people, one of the original 70 people with the company Chobani, which was the fastest growing Greek yogurt company. We are going to have different episodes with Cheryl. This is an introduction. She's going to be doing five different episodes and we're going to dig deeper into holistic nutrition with Cheryl. Cheryl, so great to have you here today.

It's an honor.

Well, Cheryl, can you please share your story?

Sure. So I got into nutrition actually because I was overweight as a young child and was picked on in school. So I pretty much had a bad body image growing up and tried to figure out how I could could lose some weight. And I got involved in playing some sports like baseball and soccer. And I remember starting to see some of the weight come off and asking my mom, I think around age 12, if I could join a gym. And she was kind of surprised and wanted to know why. And I said, you know, I just, I'm just not comfortable with my body and I'd like to lose a little bit more weight. So she went and joined a gym and brought me along and she just had a sign off so I could start working out with her. And that's kind of how I got into, like the physical activity part of things and became pretty much obsessed with that and got certified as an aerobic instructor and was teaching that, gosh, like two, three times a day, almost six days a week. I was really into doing that at the time. And that was around age 16. Wow.

So nutrition, what's your passion? I could hear it in your voice. That's, that's a big part of you. Please share more. I know there's more to your story. We've talked about this many times, and the listeners would really love to know more about you.

Yeah. So as I, you know, got older, unfortunately, or you could say fortunate because it's really what led me into the field of nutrition. Around the age of 17, I developed an eating disorder called bulimia. And I'll explain to your listeners what that is. It's basically where you're overeating in a very short period of time. And, you know, when I would do that, I would feel pretty bad about myself and have, you know, feelings of guilt and shame. And what I would do to counteract that is I would go on a fast and I would start exercising quite a bit to counteract what I had done wrong. But it really gave me some bad body image feelings and just, you know, didn't make me feel good about myself. And I ended up, you know, at 17, that's when I started college and I went into pre law. So I was going into college with that going on in my life and continuing to teach aerobics. And by the luck of whatever it was, I was able to meet a basketball coach at my college and had asked me what I had done for working out and told him that I was an aerobic instructor. And he said, you know, I'd love to have you teach aerobics to the basketball players so they could learn a different form of agility and balance. And I thought that was awesome. And through that process, I started to learn more about the importance of fueling an athlete through nutrition. And I learned that it was super important about what you were putting in your body for the athlete to be able to fuel themselves for performance. And I started taking a class at college on nutrition. And that's where I found out, oh, wow, there's an actual career in nutrition. And actually changed my degree from pre law into nutrition and switched out of that college to a different one to work on my Bachelor's of science in nutrition.

Well, that's great. And you also worked in the school district as well. I know you helped out the school district in Rochester, New York for many years. Can you take us there?

Yeah. So after I'd finished my bachelor's of science and nutrition, in order to become a registered dietitian, you have to do clinical work through an accredited program. And there's only a couple ways you can do that. It's either through an internship and I would had to have moved out of state and that's really something I wasn't comfortable doing. Or you have to go and take a master's program combined with a clinical undergraduate program together. And I opted to do that. I moved to Rochester, New York and went to RIT for a master's in, it's called Nutrition Total Quality Management. And that's where I learned that there were all these different jobs outside of clinical that I had been doing with my nutrition degree and my bachelor's of science and got involved in the school systems for K12 and was the food service director in different school districts in the Rochester area and did that for over 17 years and loved it, but realized while I was in it that I was lacking the finance and marketing piece of it, as in my undergrad and even the grad studies I had done, there was no emphasis on how you financially run a program or how you market a program. And I decided I need to go back for my mba. And that's when I changed and, you know, a little bit of my direction in my career went for an MBA and ran into somebody that I had known in the K12 world who was one of the founding fathers of Chobani and said to me, when you're done working on your mba, reach out to me. We're going to be launching the food service division. I'd love to have you come on board and help us grow that. And at the time I was really intrigued because again, I didn't realize there were jobs for a dietitian in the food world, which they call the CPG world, which is basically the consumer product goods field. And I didn't realize there was an opportunity there. And when I learned about Chobani and its story, it really intrigued me. As, you know, as a dietitian, you're always looking for healthy food options. And Chobani being the number one Greek yogurt providing, you know, a nutrient dense item that's high in protein, a good source of calcium. It really appealed to me. And when I got done with my mba, I reached back out to him and the rest is history. They brought me on board and was with them for a little bit over eight years.

That's. That's a great story. And I think what people really have to understand is the first thing is people think, well, if you're an athlete and you, it's all about working on your skills, it's all about training in the gym. But that's not true. The first thing they teach us is how to eat well. And we had a team dietitian that came in and that the dietitian had multiple degrees of nutrition. They would come in and educate us on what we needed to do to fuel our body so we could perform. And later on, I also worked in corporate America as coaching one of the banks and one of the programs we worked on, they brought a dietitian in, is to make sure the employees in corporate America fuel their body so it would get them through the day so you're not tired. The nutrition is so important in everything we do, whether you're in corporate America, whether it's sports, and that's great. I love your background. You have multiple degrees in it and I could hear it in your voice. You have the passion for this and there's one thing I have to ask it because I don't know. I know that there's nutritionists and those are people that might take a class or a certification. But I'm a little confused about then I asked this question what is holistic nutrition? Because I really don't know.

Yeah. So to answer your first question, you know, there's people that call themselves nutritionists and then there's registered dietitian nutritionist. There's a definite difference. Dietitian, nutritionist, which is an RDN versus somebody who calls himself as a nutritionist. There is a lot of that goes into our degree. So an rdn, which is what I am, we had to do our bachelor's degree, but then we also had to do an accredit supervised practice program and meet a certain number of clinical hours studying under professionals that are already RDs to make sure we understand the clinical practice of the programs. And but then you also have to sit and pass the national exam and do continuing education after you pass the exam to stay up on your credentials. So it's a four year degree with a lot of supervised training and then a national exam and then continuing education that you have to keep up on every five years to ensure that you're staying in the latest game of what's going on in the nutrition world. So that's the difference between a registered dietitian and a nutritionist.

Yeah. And I know like in different states, for example, years ago I talked to somebody and she said she's a nutritionist. And I said, great, can you provide me a meal plan? Well, I'm not allowed. I said, what do you mean you're not allowed? You're a new, you're a nutritionist. So I was never clear on what was the difference between a dietitian and a nutritionist. And I'm glad you cleared that up. So I know that you're going to be with us for five episodes and we're going to dig deeper into the holistic nutrition with you, Cheryl, and we're going to go through different things. Can you share some of those five things that you're going to be helping our listeners with?

Yeah, absolutely. And just to back it up a little bit, I got into holistic nutrition from working in corporate America and it's a quick little story. I was traveling quite a bit and had a crazy schedule with flying from east coast to west coast. So I had the time change. My sleep was not in sync like it had been when I wasn't traveling so much. And as you can Imagine you're not exercising maybe as much as you possibly could when you're at home. My meals were changing because I was on the road. I would sometimes miss meals. I wasn't snacking properly and it kind of just led me into this unhealthy rhythm for my body and got pretty sick. And that's where I started doing research on holistic nutrition and understanding that there's many pieces to a healthy person. And it's basically looking at the mind, body, soul approach for holistic nutrition. And that's the area I'd love to spend a little bit more time with you. I know you said we're going to do some other episodes on that, but it's basically five areas. It's your physical, emotional, social, spiritual and mental. Those are the five areas.

That's great. That's everything you need. No matter what you do in life, whether you're an everyday mom, especially now with, with COVID and you're home with your mom all day, you're homeschooling, you need to properly fuel your body with the physical. I know my physical is walking and exercising and I know I properly fuel my body. I'm lucky in that area. So that's great. So you focus on those pillars and that's really going to help people. So I know because you're going to be with us, I know you are going to offer all of our listeners your course that you do that gives us a general understanding and a basic understanding of our body and how we fuel our body. Can you share that a little bit with us that you're going to be offering and where can they message you to get this free course? Because you are going to be with us whether you like it or not for the next, for the next five times we're going to be talking a lot about this. So please, please share where people can get in touch with you and a little bit about the course.

You can reach me at www.CherylBuckley.com and you can sign up for. I'm offering a three day free meal plan with recipes and grocery list included. And once you sign up for that, I can also send you the information on my 12 modular eLearning course as well, which literally looks at the different components of being healthy. So it's the physical, the nutritional and it's also just giving you a good understanding of how the body works and why it's important to keep yourself moving and feeling your body correctly. So those are the ways that you can reach out to me and I can send you the information on that. And I really look forward to, you know, going into a deeper dive into those five different pillars with you and talking about each of those areas.

Okay, so spell that out for our listeners because I could spell CHERYL SH or it's C H E R Y L. So why don't you spell out your website for the listeners so they can get this and they can get in touch with you for the free course and your, your meal plan.

It's WW dot. CHERYL C H E R Y L Buckley B U C K L E y dot com well, Cheryl, thank you.

So much for sharing your story. It takes a lot of guts to do that and to put it out there because a lot of us have gone through things. Again, every story has a beginning and maybe the beginning wasn't so good. And you really have a great story here. So thank you for sharing. This is great information. Thank you for the education that you are going to pass on to our listeners and it's much appreciated. Thank you.

CHERYL thanks for having me.