Lisa Corrado of New Canaan is a chef, nutrition consultant and cancer survivor. And one tough cookie (although cookies aren’t necessarily what she would recommend as part of a healthy diet).
She is celebrating 10 years in business — Lisa Corrado Nutrition — which has the tagline, “Making Busy People Healthier.”
Corrado came to embrace a healthy lifestyle by way of an early life in corporate America.
“In my corporate life, I worked for a large marketing research company, managing technical projects. I enjoyed my work but wasn’t satisfied by it,” she said. “I wasn’t learning anything new and it didn’t feel meaningful. I realized I had a serious interest in nutrition and healthy eating, so I decided to pursue that.”
While she was still working, she went to graduate school on the weekends, earning her master’s degree in human nutrition. She said she was scared to leave her well-paying corporate job, so she stalled a bit.
“While I was stalling, I attended the Institute of Culinary Education in New York City, also on the weekends,” Corrado said. “I graduated from their professional program in 2003. While I was at ICE, I learned about the concept of a personal chef. Different than a private chef who is employed by a single family, a personal chef works with multiple families at the same time. This clicked for me and once I finished my classwork at ICE, I quit my corporate job and did my externship at Solé in New Canaan. This was thrilling, exhausting, humbling and really instructive. Once I finished my externship, I hung up my shingle under the business name Eating Well. I offered both personal chef and nutritional counseling services.”
She thought it would be much harder to drum up business for the personal chef side, so she focused her marketing on that. In only a few months, she was almost too busy cooking for families to schedule nutritional counseling appointments, and said that was fine for awhile.
Growing and shifting the business
In 2006, she created a line of prepared foods with Walter Stewart’s Market called Eating Well with Walter Stewart’s. She did this until 2007, and although she doesn’t supply the store with new recipes, she is instead a featured blogger for the market on their website, StewartsMarket.com. In 2006, she started shifting her business to include more time for nutritional counseling and opened her office.
In 2008, she did her last personal chef work, changed the business name to Lisa Corrado Nutrition and focused solely on counseling.
“I’ve always loved the education piece of what I do, and I couldn’t get that from simply cooking for people,” she told the Advertiser.
Cancer diagnosis
Corrado’s world came to a temporary screeching halt in 2010 when she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. She said that as her doctor stood next to her, launching into his interpretation of her latest scan and showing her the images, she flashed back to another time when she was scared and felt that things were wildly out of her control. It was when she was 8 and her parents took her and her brother on a log fume ride.
“My doctor spoke slowly and gently, knowing that he was breaking some pretty serious news to me. But listening to him was like riding the log flume all over again,” she said. ‘Do you know why you’re here?’ he asked. Up, up, up we climb. ‘Did Dr. R tell you why he referred you to me?’ Click, click, click goes the chain, slowly pulling the car up to the top. ‘Do you see this area in the CT-scan image? There’s a tumor here. And here. And the largest one, here.’ I’m falling,” she said.
She had three tumors in her chest.
“I’m still in remission, waiting for the all-clear at the five-year mark, although I typically say I’m cancer-free because ‘remission’ sounds temporary to me,” Corrado said.
“It sounds trite to say I love what I do because I help people change their lives, but that’s exactly it. Most of my clients are referred to me by their doctors, often with a brand-new diagnosis,” she said.
She works extensively with weight management, gastrointestinal conditions, cardiovascular conditions and diabetes. Because she worked as a chef and food is such an important part of her life, she tells people that she provides food-based solutions for disease prevention and management.
Earlier this week, Corrado started an online group program called Ready-Set-Go: A Jumpstart to Healthy Eating. She created it in 2011 “to help me get back to healthy eating following chemotherapy treatment — my eating was completely and utterly derailed due to the drug therapy,” she said. It is a four-week program of cutting out “noisy foods” and amping up lively and “SuperHero” foods.
“I used it to slash my sugar intake. Other participants have used it to address unhealthy food cravings, lose weight, improve blood pressure, cholesterol and glucose readings, and just generally get their eating on track,” she said. The program details can be found at LisaCorradoNutrition.com/RSG.html.
Corrado’s own blog, A Moment In a Busy Life, is at LisaCorradoNutrition.com/blog.
An apple a day — Lisa Corrado, a New Canaan-based nutritionist, who is celebrating the 10th anniversary of her business, stands in the kitchen of her business, which is in her home on Down River Road. (Julie Butler photo)
More info: 203-972-3447