Nutrition Consultant Graduate Simone Miller Loves Helping People Feed Themselves

Simone Miller is a graduate of our Nutrition Consultant Online Program. Her life experiences and formal education combined to establish a foundation upon which her creativity has taken root and continues to grow.

Learn more about Simone and her ever evolving life and love of helping people feed themselves.

I Kept Being Pulled More Towards Feeding People

Ever since I was a little kid, my restaurant-owner uncle used to tell me, “Don’t ever go into the food industry, Simone.” I actually tried to listen to him. I went to college, assuming I’d soon discover a major that interested me enough to make a career out of it. I never chose a major in my 2.5 years of college before giving up on that idea and enrolling in massage school.

Massage Therapy felt like IT, the thing I would do forever. I worked in restaurants while attending, and on and off when I got sick of doing massage. I bounced from spa to kitchen, spa to kitchen, sometimes part time in both, for about 10 years. When I moved to California in 2007, I was still trying to make massage my career; but I kept being pulled more towards feeding people.

Now it’s been almost 15 years since I stopped resisting being in the food industry, and I’m not sure there are two years that have looked exactly the same. I started as a personal chef, then I became more interested in special diets and helping people eat healthier. I attended Bauman College’s Nutrition Consultant Online Program.

It All Felt Very Balanced, and Bauman College was the Perfect Fit

I appreciated that the curriculum at Bauman wasn’t based on the Standard American Diet, but wasn’t overly dogmatic about one way of eating, either. It all felt very balanced. When I started the program there, I saw myself assisting people to eat healthier, and Bauman College was the perfect fit.

I cooked for people, helped them cook for themselves, educated them about how to shop for their needs. Then, I started a gluten-free catering company. I started a blog where I shared my gluten-free recipes, I wrote some cookbooks. I’ve even produced some educational cooking videos. I taught some cooking classes, online, in private homes, and a handful at Bauman College.

I Want Everyone to Feel Like a Pro in Their Kitchen

Currently, I am putting most of my energy into building my community on Patreon. There, I share 3 Things To Cook each week, along with recipes and a shopping list. In my many years of this work, what I hear over and over again is that people are so incredibly tired of thinking about what to cook every single night.

I’m trying to help with that. I’ll tell you what to cook, give you the (extremely organized for maximum shopping efficiency) shopping list, and you’ve just saved a whole lot of time and didn’t have to agonize over what to make for dinner. I love feeding people, but what I love the most is helping people feed themselves. A lot of the hurdles home cooks face look a lot taller than they are before someone helps them over. I want everyone to feel like a pro in their kitchen, or at the very least, calm and capable.

If you haven’t gathered this by now, my career has been very… let’s call it fluid. I’m terrible at sticking with one thing. I had every intention of crafting a whole program for my clients based on the education I got at Bauman College combined with my cooking chops – a kitchen makeover of sorts, except for the food, not the design of the kitchen. I never was able to get that off the ground and in hindsight, it’s probably for the best because I keep moving further and further away from restrictive eating and labeling food in any way.

Learning the Foundations is so Important

There is so much to learn! I didn’t go to culinary school, after all, I wasn’t going into the food industry! 😉 I learned so much in the restaurant kitchens I worked in and as a personal chef and caterer. However, I’m sure that I would be more confident in a lot of areas if I had attended some sort of training program.

Learning the foundations is so important and I think a lot of creatives resist it. It’s great to learn by trying new things, cooking with new people, traveling to new places. Having the foundations nailed down makes it a whole lot easier for you to share your creativity with the world.

Connect with Simone via her website, zenbelly.com or on Instagram @simonetaramiller