Healthy Habits Formed in the Palisades

By SARAH SHMERLING | Editor-in-Chief

Growing up in Pacific Palisades, Amanda Steinberg shared that her family always had an interest in healthy living. Her father trained for Ironman races and her mother kept up on the latest cooking gadgets and trending diets, preparing healthy options for the family.

First, they lived in The Highlands, until they moved when Steinberg was around 10 years old, to a house off of Bienveneda.

“I loved it,” she shared of her childhood. “It’s such a nice, quaint town.”

Steinberg recalled that she and her friends would walk around the Village area without their parents because they felt so safe. They’d grab smoothies at Robeks or get a “fun” drink at Starbucks, then head over to CVS to buy makeup.

“It was great,” she continued. “It felt so safe and I loved it.”

Though Steinberg now lives in Venice, her parents still live in the Palisades—and now, inspired by her childhood, she is helping people in the Palisades and beyond discover their own path of nutrition.

“There was just some slight misunderstanding,” Steinberg explained of her family’s relationship to nutrition. “We didn’t quite understand fully the whole scope of nutrition, but we all had an interest in it.”

After attending school at Kehillat Israel, Marquez Charter Elementary School, Summit View and Westmont, Steinberg headed to the University of Arizona to earn a degree in nutritional science with an emphasis in dietetics.

After working at an eating disorder rehab and as a dietician technician at Cedars-Sinai, she completed 1,200 supervised hours with dietitians in order to become a registered dietitian nutritionist in May 2019.

“I love helping people, I love volunteering,” Steinberg shared. “I knew that helping people was something I needed to do in my career, so it seemed like such a great match to help people through nutrition and understand that whole scope.”

She also wanted to help her family better understand nutrition—helping her dad with athletic competitions and her mom understand all of the latest diet trends, “because those can get really tricky and confusing.”

She said that it seemed like a very useful career to her, her family and her future family, allowing her to have a great impact when working with people.

“Ninety-five percent of diets fail,” Steinberg explained. “It’s important for people to understand that it’s not them—it’s not them that fails, it’s the diet that fails them.”

She said that new diets that pop up can be so restrictive that they take over a person’s life.

“I don’t believe in dieting,” Steinberg added, “I believe in making healthy lifestyle changes that will work with your life, so you won’t fail them and you can do it lifelong. It’s not hard to incorporate, it’s easy and it works with you.”

Steinberg now operates a private practice with an office in Westwood—but she is able to do home visits with Palisadians or consultation online and over the phone.

She also recently completed two corporate wellness events with about 200 people from each office, which she explained was really rewarding.

“It was really rewarding to have an impact on such a big level of people,” she shared. “In such a short amount of time, I could have an impact on so many people, teaching them how to eat a little healthier.”

She added that the most rewarding aspect of her job is giving people what they need to be healthy long term.

And if you’re looking for advice on how to jump start better eating habits in 2020? Steinberg said that nutrition is very individualized, so it would depend person to person, which is why she tailors her program to each client based on their needs.

For more information, visit amandanicolerdn.com.