Ashleigh grew up in Northern Virginia and attended James Madison University where she completed a BS degree in Dietetics and graduated summa cum laude in 1999. She was then accepted and completed her year long dietetic internship at The University of Virginia from 1999- 2000. After completing the BS and internship she sat for and passed the Registered Dietitian Certification Exam to become a RDN, registered dietitian nutritionist.
Dreams of California called so she packed up the car and drove cross country, camping along the way, on her way to moving to San Francisco. Ashleigh wanted to work in outpatient counseling and to work with children so she was thrilled when she was hired at The University of California at San Francisco Medical Center to work with pediatric patients and work in the Nutrition Counseling Center. At UCSF Ashleigh worked with multiple pediatric populations in outpatient clinics including children with kidney failure, transplants, Cystic Fibrosis and Failure to Thrive. After 7 years living and loving living in California the first child came and it was tempting to come back to Virginia to be closer to family.
Ashleigh moved back to Charlottesville and began working at The Nutrition Counseling Center at The University of Virginia Medical System. For the next 10 years Ashleigh counseled and supported hundreds of clients, both in individual and group settings, toward health and resilient relationships with food and body. Ashleigh’s love of pediatric nutrition continued and for 2 cycles, 10 years, she was a Certified Specialist in Pediatric Nutrition (CSP) from The American Academy of Nutrition, allowing her to do more clinical work with children with nutritional needs. This is where she was able to really pursue her interest in intuitive eating in children, building healthy food and body relationships starting from birth throughout the lifespan and working with parents to support these healthy developments. Ashleigh often spoke and gave classes or lectures on these topics in the community, at UVA, to fellow interns and was always received with engagement and high marks for her passion for the subject.
Ashleigh became a trained Motivational Interviewing nutrition counselor and a Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor as well as completed Coach Training through WellCoaches which she still weaves into every session today. Her interest and passion clearly began leaning more and more toward working with clients struggling with disordered eating and eating disorders, body image issues and body distortion. After 10 years at UVA, Ashleigh left to become the lead dietitian as part of a talented team of therapists opening Prosperity Eating Disorder Treatment Center in Charlottesville. For 4+ years Ashleigh worked full time as the lead RD seeing Eating Disorder Clients both individually and running multiple popular IOP (Intensive Outpatient Programming) and PHP (Partial Hospitalization Programming) groups. She has studied and trained to use a combination of approaches for dietitians working with eating disorder clients including CBT, ACT, DBT, coaching, and motivational interviewing.
After such a wonderful experience at Prosperity Ashleigh was ready to put her energy into her own practice which she opened in October 2019. She has absolutely loved having her own practice which has been highly successful. She is able to now pursue more education and training opportunities to continue her ability to support her clients. Ashleigh’s 20+ years of experience working with clients is evident in working with her. She weaves together her exceptional clinical training, her experience working with and counseling clients for 20 years, her high level of understanding of eating disorders and how to treat them, her own personal recovery success, and her natural ability to connect and hold space with clients into a valuable and productive working partnership with clients.
Personally, Ashleigh lives in Charlottesville and is the connected and content mom of three amazing humans and the lovely wife of an incredible and patient man and public middle school teacher. They share space with two very lucky SPCA rescue dogs and two very vocal and opinionated cats. If you can’t find her, likely she is in the woods on a trail or in her kayak on the water, headphones in connecting with herself and nature. An active traveling and camping family with “Poppy” the pop-up camper you will find her camping all around in the spring, summer and fall in National Parks or at music festivals enjoying the music and friendship of her festival family. Living an intuitive and embodied existence through parenting, partnership, movement, meditation and the 5-Rhythms Dance practice Ashleigh continues her connection with the journey she is on and all of the openness to continue being on it.
Note from Client:
Associations
- National Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics
- Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor
- EDRDPRO – Professional Organization of Eating Disorder Dietitian Training Resources
- International Association of Eating Disorder Professionals.