Dietician/Nutritionist: Eatin' Right, Feelin' Fine

Introduction
If you want to enter into the field of medicine, but blood is not your cup of tea, and you like to cook, becoming a nutritionist might be just the thing for you. There is a whole host of things you can learn at school that will make you well prepared to be a nutritionist, but I must stress, becoming a skilled cook will help you greatly in your work. A big portion of the job is explaining to people how to prepare dishes that are healthy, and if you cannot tell them how to make good food that also tastes good, they will not follow your orders. Learn what it takes to make a dish healthy at dietitian school, and learn how to make it taste good elsewhere.

Job Function
I work at a hospital. Patients who need my help are sent to me by their doctors. For the most part the patients I come into contact with have high blood pressure or some heart condition who need to get salt out of their diet, and sometimes diabetics, as well as the dangerously obese. There are other ailments which require my intervention, but high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity constitute the vast majority of my work. The worst part of my job is conferring with doctors. Advertisement
Lifestyle
I used to love eating. My theory was, when cooking, butter + salt = delicious, and when baking, butter + sugar = delicious. I was right, too. But now I eat healthy. As I said earlier, learning to cook is an important asset for a nutritionist, and I have taken my own advice and learned a thing or two about the culinary art...even still, I miss all that butter, salt and sugar.

Additional Information
Being a nutritionist is a rewarding job with pretty good pay. I work at a hospital, but that is certainly not the only place a nutritionist can find employment: you can work at out patient care centers, nursing homes or for state and local governments, though the pay is, as a general rule, better at a hospital.