New Orleans has a special relationship with food. One might think that making your career about nutrition in New Orleans could pose a difficult feat, but Maria Sylvester Terry has created an entire in-person and social media community following that is showing what it really means to be healthy and strong in a city full of endless delicious options.
How did you get to New Orleans and into nutrition? This is actually my second career. Ten years ago, I was a teacher in Camden, New Jersey and I got offered a position to be a school leader — which is not unusual in the charter network when you’re young and you have a lot of energy and you’re not burned out yet. I got pulled into the fellowship program to become a school leader and I loved it, except the system basically just beat the hell out of you. What suffered was my mental health and my physical health. My nutrition was basically clean eating on steroids. I’d cry at the table if my husband got the wrong vegetables. I was an unwell person. I was so hardworking and super high achieving, but I abruptly left my career on a leave of absence. I had to recalibrate, so I thought, what do I love about teaching and makes people feel excited. I was going to grad school in Philadelphia, and I matched at Tulane for my internship. I had started social media before coming to Tulane [while] I was teaching yoga. When I came here, I taught a few yoga classes and that’s how I met people and pivoted my social media account to nutrition. It went from “hey, please come to my yoga class,” to “hey, please eat today because you are worthy and deserving of lunch.”
Is it hard to be a nutritionist in New Orleans because of its rich food and food culture? It’s actually the best place to be a dietitian, really. I felt that when I moved here. I had gotten my master’s degree and was moving to New Orleans and my culinary instructor at Drexel said, “That is the city for you. You think about food differently and people in New Orleans appreciate food and also protect it. They protect their culture. They protect their recipes. They protect the way it is.” And there is beauty in that. I love it because in the very first session with someone, I get to ask, “What krewe do you roll in? What do you do for Mardi Gras? What is your Jazz Fest relationship like? Are you a king cake person? A boudin person?” I learn about them through their culture and it disarms them because they think those are the things that make them bad, but I think those are the things that make us amazing. For me it allows the food conversation to be really light and fun and also lets them know I’m not the person who is going to point out the banh mi in your food journal; instead I’m going to see you had water and a side salad and got lemongrass chicken instead of bulgogi this time. We live in a city that has a lot of options and I think it’s way more fun. Planning a hydration and food plan for someone’s two-week bender at Jazz Fest is the best part of the year.
Tell us about Strong + Sturdy, your online support group. This kind of came out of an interesting need for me and my clients. I was seeing clients one to one, and I had a huge waitlist, like 90 people on this waitlist. My dad got sick. My dad had Crohn’s disease his whole life. I’m the eldest daughter, so I wanted to be there for my dad. I had just left my job at Ochsner and thought, this is why you work for yourself, to be able to make these choices. So I thought, I need to pivot to group. I ran three very successful groups in the in early 2023. And at the end of the group, they all said the same thing, ‘I feel like I was at summer camp. When’s the next one?’ A lot of them took all three of [sessions] and became kind of a cohort. And they said, ‘Do you think there’s a membership or a community that you could make so we can all stay in touch and support each other, because now that I’ve done all this work on how to support my blood sugar without dieting and how to get strong in the gym without fixating on my body fat percentage, like I need that support.’ I opened this membership online and ran a couple of classes a month just as check-ins and accountability and would post things. It was a safe social media presence for them.
What has been the impact of the group on you? I ran my first session on [the topic of] fiber in a hotel room in Georgetown. I was staying in Georgetown because my dad was getting evaluated to see if he’d get a liver transplant, because he had cirrhosis of chronic disease. it was a support group for me as much as it was for them. Now it is home to a lot of folks that maybe don’t have insurance, but they have $29 a month for now. There’s 20 or more classes a month. My team run them. There’s a full resource library so if someone has to get a colonoscopy, they can go into the membership library. Click, download, and everything they need to know about prep, everything they need to know if their A1C goes up. What do I do if my body image is spiraling? There’s a topic for everything related to nutrition. We have guest speakers. It’s an online community that people in New Orleans join, and we do in-person meetups too. Last night we did a session on ‘Why don’t I look like I work out?’ A body image session of the month. It was a highly hot, requested topic, and it was really special to have it because it allowed everybody to kind of grieve and talk and, and express themselves and then set up, an identity of, ‘OK, what is strong and sturdy to me?’
True confession
I run a Mardi Gras dance krewe call the Cosmonaughties!
