Rocket City Dietitian Rachel Brown shares advice on wellness, healthy eating for National Nutrition Month

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (WAFF) – March celebrates National Nutrition Month and the Rocket City Dietitian, Rachel Brown, joined 48 Now to share healthy nutrition tips and advice on wellness and taking care of your body through what you eat and exercise.

Brown is a Registered Dietitian and Certified Diabetes Educator. She has her own platform called “Rocket City Dietitian” where she shares dietitian tips, recipes and explores places to eat in Huntsville.

Brown said she has always loved food from a young age, and once she learned that studying food was a profession, she knew it was a career path she wanted to pursue.

“I have always loved food. My parents claim that my first word was hamburger, so it started from there,” Brown said.

“I just loved food. Before cameras on your phone, I had real cameras. I was taking pictures of my food, and I learned you can study food and nutrition and how it affects your body, and so I just went from there.”

Brown moved to Huntsville from Nashville, and she wanted to explore the Rocket City. She said she used to write restaurant reviews and take pictures of food for her college school’s paper. She combined her passion for writing restaurant reviews, taking pictures of food, and wanting to explore the city of Huntsville to create her brand “Rocket City Dietitian.”

“When we moved here, I wanted to explore but somehow have a platform since I didn’t have a school paper to put it in anymore and my husband mentioned why don’t I just start a page, so I started sharing food that I found, Piper and Leaf and Pizzelles were the first two and I just went from there,” Brown said.

“I got a lot of good feedback from people who said they’ve lived here their whole lives and didn’t know this existed, and I was like, ‘Oh well, I love sharing delicious food like you guys add this into this recipe,’ and I just love sharing and spreading happy food news.”

Brown said she believes a lot of her success with her Rocket City Dietitian platform comes from starting it pre-COVID, being consistent and constantly engaging with her audience.

“I started pre-COVID. I feel like there’s the post-COVID social media crowd and pre-COVID crowd, so I started in Huntsville, I think it was 2018, and I think there was a real need for it,” Brown said.

“The food scene was just now growing, it was getting out there, so I feel like I got in at the right time. I also feel like I share pretty frequently, so I do daily posts, and I love talking to my followers and meeting them in-person, and I try to keep it real and not too pretty, so a little realistic of what it would be like if you go.”

Brown also started a new group called “Taste Buds” and it is a “foodie” meetup group where people in the community meet up once a week to try local food places together.

“That is a really fun way to explore local and with local people who love food,” Brown said.

There are many influencers and videos on social media that give complex diet and nutrition advice to people. Brown said she tries to create more simple nutrition tips for people to follow.

“After practicing for about 15 years now, sometimes you have to break it down to the basics, and it doesn’t have to be complicated like some of the diets out there are,” Brown said.

“I try to just break it down and after talking to people for so many years, you really do need basic things to work on and then going from there.”

Brown takes a different approach when it comes to her advice by reminding people that they can eat whatever food they want in moderation and to remember that maintaining a healthy relationship and balance with food is key.

“I am an all-foods fit dietitian. Some people don’t like that. They assume dietitians are very strict, very calorie counting, very not eating dessert ever, and I have found that over time, that style doesn’t actually work long term,” Brown said.

“You might have temporary success with that, but I do get hate from saying, ‘You are allowed to eat that cheeseburger.’ It can be part of a healthy lifestyle. We’re not going to say eat that every day, but we’re going to say, ‘Yes if you want that, that relationship with food matters.’ I try to dive into how your relationship with food is really important, not just what you’re eating, how you feel about food, how you talk about food, how food makes you feel.”

Brown said she loves the connections she’s been able to have with the Huntsville community through her brand as the Rocket City Dietitian. She has helped bring attention and customers to a lot of local businesses and people in the community have followed her nutrition and wellness advice. She said it is always an honor to meet people who find her advice helpful.

One of the biggest nutrition health misconceptions that Brown said that she notices people have is that carbs are bad for you. She works to break that misconception by reminding people that if you have a healthy balance, you can still enjoy carbs.

“People are scared of carbs and carbs are important,” Brown said.

“Our brains want carbohydrates and people kind of demonize those, and they demonize gluten. If you don’t have celiac disease, gluten is fine. I feel like those come up a lot like, ‘Oh you can’t eat a banana, there’s so many carbs,’ but you can eat a banana, we need to balance it with protein. A lot of it is about balance.”

The main three components to living a healthy lifestyle according to Brown is managing your diet, sleep, and stress.

Brown said, for managing a healthy diet, think about a dinner plate and make half of your plate fruits and vegetables, with a fourth protein and a fourth of greens.

“That’s an easy way to structure your meal. We want to have the concept of more so instead of, ‘I can’t have this, I can only have this much,’ we want more, more color, more fruits, more vegetables, more variety, more spices and the mindset shift of more not less is game changing.”

When it comes to sleep, Brown said it is important to prioritize good, quality sleep and create a sleep routine.

“If you can just take this week and take 30 minutes, go to bed 30 minutes before normal, and just work on that for a month, and if you need to, up it to an hour before you normally go to bed, depending on when you go to bed, that can help, Brown said.

“Finding something that’s stress relieving that’s healthy for you like listening to music, walking, calling a friend…find something that gives you joy that is healthy.”

As we’ve finished National Heart Health Month in February and enter into National Nutrition Month in March, Brown advises people to balance their plates by increasing more fruits and vegetables on their plates and increasing the amount of fiber in their diet to maintain good heart health and overall health in general. She also said if looking for a specific diet to help with heart health, the Mediterranean diet is a good diet to follow.

Brown said that having a balance of eating well and exercise will lead to a healthier lifestyle. She suggests starting where you are in your fitness journey and slowly work your way up to more exercise and to maintain a balance of both cardio and strength training exercises.

“Start with where you’re at. If you are from couch to something, walking is probably your best bet, if you have good knees. If you can’t move your knees, move your arms. If you can’t move your legs, move your arms, back and forth,” Brown said.

“I think start slow. Walking is great, then move up from there. Weightlifting is really good for heart health, bone health, so if you can just add some weights to your walk, that would be good as well.”

Brown reminds people to take their nutrition and wellness journey slow and steady, celebrate the small wins, create a plan, a backup plan, and have an accountability partner to keep you on track with your wellness and health journey.

To hear more about Rachel Brown’s journey to becoming the Rocket City Dietitian and to hear more advice from her on maintaining a healthy, nutritional and fitness lifestyle, the full 48 Now interview can be viewed at the top of this page.

To follow more of her journey and to get involved with her work, visit her website, Instagram, and Facebook pages.

If you would like to join her Taste Buds group, visit the Taste Buds group Instagram and Facebook pages.

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