Meet Cary Cuevas

We were lucky to catch up with Cary Cuevas recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Cary, great to have you with us today and excited to have you share your wisdom with our readers. Over the years, after speaking with countless do-ers, makers, builders, entrepreneurs, artists and more we’ve noticed that the ability to take risks is central to almost all stories of triumph and so we’re really interested in hearing about your journey with risk and how you developed your risk-taking ability.

For me, the ability to take risks requires commitment, consistency and a never look back mindset. For as long as I can remember, if I truly set my mind to something, I will accomplish it. I don’t believe I have ever conscientiously walked into the most significant risks of my life. Looking back, I recognize that failing would have substantially impacted my life, but I never believed I would genuinely fail. I’ve had to pivot and find new ways, but giving up and failing wasn’t an option.

I started a private nutrition counseling practice as a non-profit organization after being laid off from a job I didn’t love. I learned a lot professionally and personally from it, but the job never brought me joy.

While receiving unemployment benefits, I was introduced to a program that supported my desire to start my own business, helping people live healthier lives through diet and lifestyle changes. I was accepted into the program, which allowed me to continue receiving unemployment benefits while I started HealthyU Nutrition. Rather than looking for another job that I knew I wouldn’t enjoy, I put all my effort into starting a nutrition counseling practice without any business experience or knowledge of starting a non-profit organization.

I looked for opportunities to learn. I looked for opportunities to get exposure as a nutrition professional. I looked for opportunities to grow as an organization that gives back to my community. Over the last 6 years, I’ve grown a successful practice that provides individual nutrition and exercise support to hundreds of people and offers community nutrition and cooking skills classes through local community partners for little to no cost to participants.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

HealthyU Nutrition is a 501c3 nonprofit organization. I provide individual nutrition counseling and dietary support in Portland, Oregon. I also partner with local community organizations to offer live nutrition education and cooking demonstration courses.

Nutrition and lifestyle play essential roles in health, while food and eating are centered around culture, comfort, and enjoyment. Finding the balance between the joy of eating and living healthy, productive lives is challenging. In the United States, knowing what to eat has become increasingly difficult. Between endless choices in grocery stores, restaurants, and online markets mixed with media hype and quick-fix solutions, Americans have become increasingly unhealthy and confused.

As a nutrition professional, I aim to build a collaborative relationship with clients to help them make the best choices to live the healthiest and best versions of themselves. I work with clients to help them make small, sustainable changes that they feel they would benefit from to create new healthy habits or break old unhealthy ones. Working under the belief that one-size-fits-all diets don’t work, I help people find the best solutions for themselves to make realistic and lasting changes.

One way I give back to the community is by partnering with Happy Valley Parks & Recreation and the Happy Valley Parks & Recreation Foundation to offer a four-week series of nutrition and cooking demonstration classes. The classes are interactive, and we spend time discussing the DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) eating patterns and how to include healthier foods in our daily diet while I demonstrate how to prepare healthier meals and snacks. Participants are sent home with ingredients for one of the recipes used in class to make at home. Adults learn best through conversation and opportunities to reinforce knowledge on their own. Using facilitated dialog in the class and providing ingredients to take home has been a powerful combination to helping people live healthier lives.
 
From the beginning, HealthyU Nutrition was set up to accept most major health insurance plans offered in Oregon, including the Oregon Health Plan (Medicaid). Accepting health insurance removes significant barriers to working with a nutrition professional for personalized nutrition, diet, and lifestyle support. Most health insurance plans cover at least three preventative nutrition counseling sessions a year. Several health plans, including most BlueCross BlueShield products and Oregon Health Plan, offer unlimited nutrition counseling sessions. When nutrition counseling is covered as a preventative health benefit, there are typically no co-pays, and deductibles do not apply.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

Being determined to succeed, willing to learn, and able to adapt have been key to my success as a private practice dietitian. I kept an open-mind to new opportunities as they presented themselves and the ideas of others to help turn my vision into something tangible. I had to learn a lot about running a business, billing insurance, and marketing while working with individuals and becoming a better dietitian.

Without being open to the input and ideas from friends, family, and peers in the nutrition world, I wouldn’t have been as successful as I am now. Having a vision for what we want to do isn’t always enough to make it happen, and it can be hard to be open to feedback and criticism. Being willing to take feedback and try something new or different can significantly impact long-term success in business and life.

What would you advise – going all in on your strengths or investing on areas where you aren’t as strong to be more well-rounded?

I live by the motto “jack of all trades, master of none.” Personally, I do better in life and business when I invest time and energy into doing many things well rather than focusing my energy on doing just one thing exceptionally well. In my personal life, I’ve learned how to play and engage in various sports and physical activities. I am also an avid gardener, I love to travel, and I’m learning how to cook better. While I could focus my energy on one or two activities to excel at, life is more exciting to me to have many different experiences and challenge myself mentally and physically in various ways.

Not limiting myself to doing a few things exceptionally well has helped me immensely in starting and running HealthyU Nutrition. To run a private nutrition counseling practice, I’ve had to improve my communication and counseling skills, learn how to bill insurance and document correctly, market a business, manage the organization’s finances, and develop and lead group classes. To be successful, I had to learn to do many things well first to save money and grow the business. Investing my efforts into those areas has allowed me to understand what it takes to be successful in healthcare and business while being a compassionate practitioner who truly wants to help the people I work with and give back to my community.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.healthyuwellness.org
• Instagram: @healthyu_nutrition
• Facebook: HealthyU Nutrition
• Linkedin: HealthyU Nutrition
• Youtube: @healthyunutrition7112