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Love Your Body

by Jennie Nunn

A holistic nutritionist, wellness expert and author, Kelly LeVeque, dedicates herself to helping clients (and celebrities) transform their bodies

Kelly LeVeque, Los Angeles-based holistic nutritionist, health coach, author and founder of Be Well By Kelly (bewellbykelly.com), doesn’t believe in rules. Strict food rules, that is. “We don’t have to follow what everyone says is perfect and healthy,” LeVeque explains. “People get to a point where they create strict rules and they box themselves in. The minute they don’t eat on-plan the way that they wanted to eat, they binge, because they’re not following their own created rules,” she continues. “When perfectionism backfires, people create binging behaviors and then they are in a diet mentality where you’re either on-plan or off-plan, and I think that’s really destructive.”

The Orange County native first fell in love with nutrition when she was a freshman in high school. “My first science class was Health, and I just loved it,” says LeVeque, whose book Body Love: Live in Balance, Weigh What You Want, and Free Yourself from Food Drama Forever came out last year. “It sparked a fire in me to want to know more. And, back in the day, the internet was accessible, but no one was really writing about health, so I started reading diet books and that became a hobby of mine,” she says. “I read diet books all through high school from Atkins and The South Beach Diet, and as I moved into college I started reading more niche science, lifestyle books.”

“Food is a very emotionally charged part of our lives, and it’s all so intertwined with who we are.”

From there, LeVeque went on to University of Southern California where she studied business. “I didn’t really think I could have a career in nutrition,” explains LeVeque who followed her father’s footsteps with a degree in Business Finance. She ended up taking a health class in senior year and wrote a thesis on Type 2 Diabetes. She ended up being a pharmaceutical rep her first year after college and then went into medical device sales for breast cancer treatment, followed by genetics of cancer where she taught West Coast oncologists about using technology specifically for tumors. “It’s personalized medicine and targeted treatment, and it’s definitely the future of cancer,” she adds.

Five years ago, after a heart-to-heart with one of her best friends, she decided to pursue nutrition and health coaching full-time. “It happened really fast,” says LeVeque, who enrolled in postgraduate classes in clinical nutrition at UCLA and UC Berkeley and took her company full-time in 2015.

She created her Fab Four Food Model—protein, fat, fiber, and greens—and now, she’s working with Jessica Alba, Molly Sims, Chelsea Handler, Emmy Rossum, Kate Walsh and more. “Food is a very emotionally charged part of our life, and it’s all so intertwined with who you are,” explains LeVeque, who provides delicious recipes in her book for salmon poke bowls, sweet-and-salty walnut butter, California avocado microgreen salad, blueberry coconut crème-flavored smoothies and more.“

There is so much stress and anxiety related to food choices,” she says. “I wanted to make it really easy for people to understand the biology of blood sugar without having to be a biologist. I created the Fab Four as a way for my clients to eat balanced meals, increase vegetable and greens intake, and really help them understand how fat slows down digestion, how fiber stretches their stomach to turn off hunger hormones and how protein lowers cravings for carbohydrates and turns off the hunger hormones in their brain. I was thinking, ‘How can I make this accessible and really easy for my clients without the food drama?’”

LeVeque is now working on a sequel to Body Love with archetypes for how to eat the Fab Four for vegetarians, on-the-go types and domestic goddesses. She dreams of one day having her own television show. “I love making people happy and healthy,” says LeVeque. “And, when my clients are feeling good, that’s all I want.”


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