Sisters Allison Mankowski (MVS ’07) and Mariah Lewis (MVS ’13) grew up in Mt. Pleasant, Mich., in a family that loved two things: food and sports.

Both girls ran track and participated in cheerleading and Lewis played basketball, so there were meets and competitions all year round. Food was fuel for all that activity, but it was also something to be enjoyed. Their lives were full of family vacations that centered around searching for the best new foods, campouts with meals cooked over the campfire, and weekend breakfasts featuring their dad’s specialty: French toast with ice cream.

The sisters also grew up smack in the middle of early 2000s diet culture, a period of intense fatphobia and scrutiny of women’s bodies. As they grew older, they both developed anxieties about what they were eating and how their diets affected their athletic performance. There were too many new diets, too much conflicting — and sometimes harmful — information.

At the University of Michigan, both sisters’ interest in the connection between the mind and body led them to the School of Kinesiology, where their nutrition classes helped them untangle the conflict between their inherent love of food and the expectations set up by sports and diet culture. Today, they both work as dietitians in private practice specializing in eating disorders, using the principles of intuitive eating to help their clients repair their relationships with food.

“Part of how I think we both got into this,” says Mankowski, “is we see the importance of food in social interaction and we see food as a way to connect with your family and a way to connect with your friends and connect with your culture.”

Adds Lewis: “We’re kind of like food therapists.”

A lightbulb moment

Mankowski’s interest in nutrition started with sports.

“A lot of athletes feel this pressure like, ‘Oh my gosh, I have to be so strict and have to eat like an athlete and I have to do this and I have to do that,’” she says.

She was not immune from those pressures and anxieties. By high school, her relationship with food had deteriorated.

“I don’t know if I would have been diagnosable [with an eating disorder],” she says, “but I did not have a good relationship with food.”

At U-M, Mankowski continued cheerleading on the varsity squad. Her complicated feelings about food lingered in the background.

She’d initially started college as pre-med because she loved science and wanted to learn about the body but realized she did not love organic chemistry.

Her sophomore year, she transferred to the School of Kinesiology with the goal of becoming a physical therapist and working with athletes. Over time, she became so fascinated by what she was learning in her nutrition classes and how it applied to her own habits and behavior that her senior year, she decided to apply to dietetics and nutrition programs instead.

Lewis followed her sister to Michigan and Kines six years later.

Though the similar path wasn’t planned, it also wasn’t entirely coincidental. Despite their six-year age gap, the two had always been close — “I used to go into her bedroom at night to sleep, for comfort,” Lewis recalls, “and we’d joke that she used to kick me to the bottom of her bed” — and they were very similar in personality.

In addition to the family passions of sports and food, they were also both interested in psychology and in being in a profession that helped others.

And, as the youngest in the family, Lewis had always looked up to her sister. Even now, in conversation, she allows Mankowski to take the lead when answering questions and then provides the follow-up. So it wasn’t surprising when Lewis became interested in nutrition, too.

During her sophomore year, she finally began to understand why food, which had once been such a source of joy, was now causing her so much suffering.

“It was in [professor emeritus] Victor Katch’s class,” Lewis remembers. “We had to do an assignment where we tracked all our calories and our movement for a week. And I remember that being a lightbulb moment. I realized, ‘I am not feeding my body nearly enough for how much I’m moving my body. This is not OK.’ That made me seek help.”

She began seeing a therapist who helped her work through her eating disorder. Her classwork helped, too: it was a way to understand what had happened to her. A study abroad program in Spain introduced her to another way of eating, where she could see some of the ideas she had discussed with her therapist play out in real life.

“I could see that there was so much more beyond just the nutritional content of food or restricting and controlling food,” she says. “It solidified the feeling that yes, this could be a really, really great way for me to live.”

Building a better relationship with food

After their graduations from Kines, Mankowski and Lewis both earned master’s degrees from  the University of Michigan School of Public Health, the first step in becoming a licensed dietitian. (In addition to completing a master’s program, dietitians must also perform clinical rotations and pass certification exams. The qualifications for a nutritionist are more nebulous.)

When she first became certified, Mankowski considered herself a performance dietitian with an eating disorder subspecialty and went to work as a sports dietitian at Eastern Michigan University. Lewis, on the other hand, wanted the creative freedom to develop her own programs and always hoped to go into private practice. Starting out, though, she knew she needed more experience, so she went to work at a partial-hospitalization eating disorders program in Farmington Hills, Mich., while seeing private clients on the side.

Though their work at the time diverged, both sisters shared a common philosophy of nutrition based on the book Intuitive Eating. Lewis first read it at the recommendation of her therapist after her return from study abroad in Spain. Mankowski doesn’t remember when she first encountered the well-known text, but, like her sister, she found it inspiring. 

It reminded both of them of the way their family had eaten when they were younger and showed them that it was possible to eat that way again, even in their adult bodies.

“After working through my personal issues with food restriction,” Mankowski says, “the idea that you could have a relationship with food that was joyful and free really resonated.”

Intuitive eating is based on 10 principles that, at the most basic level, encourage people to stop looking at different foods as “good” or “bad” and to instead pay attention to what their bodies are telling them. When are you hungry? When do you feel full? How do certain foods make you feel? What sort of patterns are you noticing?

“One of the first things I tell people when I’m doing discovery calls with new clients is, ‘I am forewarning you that this is not what you think it is,’” Mankowski says.

To wit: She and Lewis are not the sort of dietitians who give out a list of foods with calorie counts and a meal schedule. Their ultimate goal is to help their clients develop a positive relationship with food. Sessions include lots of discussion of clients’ histories with food and their thoughts and feelings about it as well as about things that cause them stress. Lewis estimates that only about 10 percent of her time with clients is spent talking about nutrients.

“We see a lot of people who get in these cycles of, ‘Oh my gosh, last night was awful, I’m such a bad person,’” Mankowski says. “And they think, ‘OK, I need to make sure I eat less for breakfast or less the next day.’ And then you get into cycles where your body is not only physically reacting to that, but there’s also a lot of guilt and shame that can keep you stuck in those cycles. I’ve worked with those people on reframing, like, ‘All right, I was enjoying myself and that food tasted good. Now how can I use this as data and learn from it?’”

Not every dietitian follows the principles of intuitive eating. During her time at Eastern Michigan, Mankowski found that her approach didn’t sit well with some of her more performance-minded colleagues.

“It started to feel very uncomfortable trying to have these conversations when I’d be saying, ‘She’s barely eating, I can’t tell her to eat less. That’s not what my role is,'" Mankowski says.

Eventually, Mankowski realized that, after 11 years, she had become an eating disorders dietitian with a subspecialty in sports — and that the athletic program was probably not the best place for her anymore.

Both sisters went into private practice around the same time, in the spring of 2020, Lewis in Ann Arbor and Mankowski in Plymouth. They had both been seeing clients on the side while working in their previous jobs but now they decided to go full-time.

“It was an interesting choice,” Lewis says. In retrospect, it turned out to be a wise one for specialists in eating disorders. The number of eating disorders worldwide skyrocketed during the pandemic, especially among children and adolescents. Dietitians were able to work remotely and meet with clients over video calls.

During this time, although they had separate offices and Lewis shared her practice with two other dietitians, Mankowski and Lewis felt like co-workers. Nothing they had learned in college or grad school had prepared them for the realities of running a business.

“There was a lot of sharing,” Lewis remembers. “Like, ‘What are you doing about marketing?’ Or ‘How are you getting more clients?’ ‘How are you managing the accounting?’ It was very nice to go through it with her.”

Their parents, a lawyer and a therapist who both ran their own practices, also gave them advice, as did Mankowski’s husband, who has an MBA.

Five years in, they still consider each other co-workers, talking regularly during the day and consulting about difficult cases. They try to refrain from discussing work during family gatherings, though. “We have a middle sister,” Lewis explains. “She’s an energy consultant, and so we joke that we have to tone down the work talk when she’s around.”

But both sisters consider their family central to their work.

“It’s important that we’re able to help people navigate relationships with food,” Lewis says, “because we both just grew up with so much enjoyment around food that getting people back into that place to enjoy food and have a really positive relationship with it felt natural for both of us.”