Eliza Leone is the wellness manager for Restaurant Associates, the food services vendor at Harvard Medical School. MyHMS caught up with her about working at HMS, teaching preventive nutrition, and ’80s horror flicks.
MyHMS: What is your role at HMS?
Eliza Leone: I’m a registered dietitian, or RD, and bring my love for food to everything I do. As the wellness manager for Restaurant Associates (RA), on any given day I could be in the kitchen testing recipes, teaching a cooking class, filming food demo videos for our Instagram, editing and managing educational content for the RA-wide holistic wellness program I helped create, working with our chefs to write our cafés’ weekly menus, or performing wellness assessments in our cafés.
I’m also a co-creator and co-instructor of the HMS Culinary Medicine and Nutrition course, along with Helen Delichatsios, HMS assistant professor of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. RA’s executive chef at HMS, Rahul Moolgaonkar, provided the culinary guidance for the cooking portion of this course, giving us a multidisciplinary team of instructors featuring an MD, an RD, and a chef. The first session was a big success and just wrapped up on March 19. We’re currently planning and sourcing funding for the next session in early 2025.
MyHMS: What was the path to your current position?
Leone: My first job as an RD was at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Charlestown from 2012 to 2018. I had the chance to work with patients in acute care, counsel patients needing help with longer-term wellness goals in outpatient care, develop delicious and therapeutic menus for patients, and provide community-based food and nutrition education.
I came to realize that I most enjoyed the community education and recipe development portion of my job. So I decided to lean toward the preventive side of nutrition.
This role with RA at HMS felt like a perfect intersection of my desire to be creative in a food service-oriented setting and to provide community education while also working with a health care-focused population.
MyHMS: What is your mission as wellness manager for the HMS community?
Leone: Everyone has a different relationship with food, their bodies, and their mental health. I want to help people understand that what matters most is focusing on their own personal health goals, regardless of what others are doing. Diet culture can be harsh and isolating, and many of us unknowingly perpetuate “good” and “bad” judgments related to food choices and behaviors. Thankfully, we can each choose to step out of that world and focus on our own health goals.
I also want to empower others to get into the kitchen. I didn’t enjoy cooking very much before starting this job, and now teaching cooking classes is one of my favorite parts of my role. I’ve found that the more time I spend in the kitchen, the more my culinary skills have developed, leading me to try new foods and cooking methods that have further increased my confidence. I hope the students I’ve taught experience the same thing.
MyHMS: What do you like most about working at HMS?
Leone: My virtual Teaching Kitchen classes and the Culinary Medicine and Nutrition course have become my favorite part of my job. Helping people see how cooking can be fun and showing them different ways to make delicious, healthy food has been so rewarding. It truly warms my heart when my class attendees send me photos of the dishes they’ve cooked during my Teaching Kitchen classes and tell me how much their families enjoyed what we made together.
Join Eliza Leone at the next virtual Teaching Kitchen on April 23, 2024, and the in-person class on April 25, 2024.
MyHMS: What do you enjoy doing when you’re not at work?
Leone: I’m a big plant person. I love having greenery around my apartment. I get slightly ridiculously excited when I see a new baby sprouting out from a spider plant or a new bright-red flower beginning to open on my anthurium.
I’ve also been nurturing a reading habit the past few years that’s more regular than any I’ve been able to stick to in the past. I use the StoryGraph app to track and rate the books I read because it gives me fun statistics about my habits and helps me track my yearly goal. According to the app, the moods I typically read are reflective, emotional, dark, and mysterious.
MyHMS: What are three things that most people don’t know about you?
Leone: Yes, I’m a dietitian, but I also love pizza, Reese’s cups, French fries, cheddar-flavored potato chips, and many foods that wouldn’t be categorized as ‘healthy.’
However, having a healthy relationship with food is equally as important as eating healthy foods, if not more. I eat these foods when I’m in the mood for them, so I don’t get hung up on deprivation. This allows me to focus on how foods make me feel physically, rather than mentally, which guides me back to the plant-based foods that make me feel my best. But I do truly love a good pepperoni pizza from Frank Pepe’s on a Friday night.
I love horror movies: crazy ones from the ’80s with great practical effects, cult classics from the ’90s, like the Final Destination franchise, really scary modern ones (hello,Talk to Me), and the list goes on.
I almost went to art school for graphic design and illustration. I was in the middle of drawing a rose in a vase for my application portfolio when I realized I didn’t want to enter a career that required me to be artsy at all times. So I went to undergrad with no declared major and found my way to nutrition after being inspired by a health class I took in my first semester. I still really love to draw and paint when I feel inspired.
MyHMS: What is your motto?
Leone: Eat what makes you happy.
Images: Eliza Leone
