The moment that changed Ruth Clark’s life is one she’ll never forget.
When Clark was in high school, she was unsure of her next step in life. She wanted to go to college, but until she decided what exactly it was she wanted to study, there was no way Clark was going to put the time, effort and resources into pursuing her secondary education.
She took some time off and worked as a waitress for a few years. To this day, Clark can’t remember who gave her a copy of Adelle Davis’s “Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit.” But once she dove into the nitty-gritty details of the nutritionist’s guide to better health through proper diet, Clark knew she had found her calling.
“As I read about nutrition and nutritional science, I thought this is something I can do and excel at,” Clark said.
Looking back, Clark said the seed for her work was planted many years before that – she just didn’t know it at the time.
When Clark was nine, her father died at the age of 43 from heart disease and her mother died at the age of 60 from the same condition.
“I wanted to help families not go through what I went through,” she said.
It was difficult to lose her father at such a young age, but as she worked through her studies, Clark realized that more often than not, health conditions boil down to the choices people make every day.
“75 percent of your outcomes have to do with your lifestyle,” Clark said. “And there’s so much people can do to make the right choices every day.”
She soon found the immense value in maintaining a balanced diet, exercising daily, getting enough sleep and reducing stress – and how they were all connected to a person’s wellness.
“You have to be vigilant every day,” Clark said. “Not having your health is the hardest thing to deal with and once you lose your health, it’s a really hard thing to get back.”
She did her undergraduate and graduate work in human nutrition at the University of Massachusetts and went on to receive her master’s in public health from the Boston University School of Medicine.
“It was just so empowering,” Clark said.
After an internship, Clark landed her first job in the field at New England Deaconess Hospital in Boston, now known as Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
But she quickly realized it wasn’t the job she had spent all those years in school to get.
“The job was basically checking menus for patients to make sure they were filled out right,” Clark said. “I just kept thinking ‘what am I doing here?’”
Luckily for Clark, her next career move fit more into the mold of what she had planned for her career.
She basically had carte blanche to design her perfect job – with the only caveat being that she brought in enough money to cover her salary.
“It was a huge opportunity because I got to essentially be an entrepreneur and get a salary,” she said.
Clark developed programs and workshops that she felt were making a real difference, and it had her hooked.
She then worked with a doctor whose practice centered around morbid obesity, and while Clark was a big believer in the model, “it gets expensive to do it in a way that’s the right way,” she said.
“But we were able to create a program where people had long lasting success,” she said.
By the time the early 1990s rolled around, Clark had enough experience that she was ready to branch out on her own. A lot had changed since she entered the field of nutrition, where at one point wellness was what Clark referred to as a foreign word.
“But people’s attitudes around wellness had changed a lot by the 1990s and have changed even more in the last 15 years,” Clark said. “It’s really been widely accepted and it’s kind of fun to look at how it all changed.”
These days, Clark looks at the whole package when working with a client. Through her Peterborough-based practice, Clark offers “custom designed nutrition programs for individuals and groups. Her core philosophy centers around a holistic, personalized approach to health and healing based on a variety of nutrition therapies including whole foods, tailored supplements and mind-body modalities.”
It’s not just about the foods that people eat, but why.
“People eat for a whole lot of different reasons,” Clark said. “And if you’re going to hit the nail on the head, you need to give them a program that will really work for them because it’s not easy to change.”
And it’s her job to get to the bottom of some of those behavioral habits. So when Clark first connects with a client, “there’s a lot of information I want to know about people,” she said.
Clark is a firm believer in a long term approach. She’s spent too many years studying the ins and outs of nutrition to know that things are never an easy fix.
And it’s those success stories that fuel her passion.
“There’s nothing more rewarding than when someone you work with loses 25 or 30 pounds and becomes a completely different person in that time,” Clark said.
Clark grew up in Framingham, Massachusetts and spent 15 years in the Boston area before moving to Marblehead for a decade. But then she and her husband, Karl, were looking for a change. But both had very different ideas of what they wanted that change to look like. Clark wanted to move back toward the UMass area, while Karl wanted something more rural.
Karl had been through Peterborough “on the way to somewhere” and liked the idea of southern New Hampshire. They decided whoever found the right house first, that is where they would go. It was Karl who came across their property in Sharon.
“When I saw the house, I loved it,” Clark said.
So in 1999, they moved to the Monadnock region and as Clark puts it “for both of us, it’s been the best decision we ever made.”
As someone who lives an active lifestyle, living in the middle of the woods, surrounded by nature, was the perfect answer.
“You can walk out my back door for hours and eventually days,” Clark said. “And you could go out my front door and do the same thing.”
Clark loves to go for hikes and has spent many hours exploring local trials. She’s hiked Mount Monadnock a number of times and other 4,000 footers in the state, but prefers to find a nice walk in the woods for her all-important exercise.
“The saving grace for me the last month has been the woods,” Clark said.
She practices yoga five days a week, and enjoys the physical, emotional and spiritual benefits of it.
“I’ve found it’s made a huge difference in my life,” Clark said. “It’s just such a wonderful thing to do for your mind, your body and your soul.”
Through her work, Clark has compiled a long list of recipes and ideas that she thought would one day make for a good book.
She finally sat down and wrote one, “Cool the Fire: Curb Inflammation and Balance Hormones,” which was released last year and became an Amazon No. 1 Best Seller. The book is based on her experience with thousands of clients and includes 28 days of Mindful Menus along with more than 150 delicious, easy, healthful recipes.
The process has her thinking about a second publication and has even chosen a topic – diabetes.
“It’s a treatable disease,” Clark said. “And half of us have a problem with it, either having the disease or prediabetes.”
As a person who is both fascinated and driven by nutrition, Clark is an avid gardener and has gotten into the fine art of mushroom hunting, learning how to identify five different mushrooms in the summer and fall, which she then uses to cook with.
“I make a mean mushroom strudel,” she said.
She’s an avid reader, and will pick up any fiction but her true love is historical fiction.
But for Clark, every decision she makes is centered around living the most well-rounded lifestyle to promote her own wellness. Because nutrition is more than just her job, it’s her passion.