We are dietitians, not a diet.
We are dietitians, not a diet. Copperleaf works from your actual labs — fasting insulin, A1c, triglyceride-to-HDL ratio, blood pressure, waist — and builds an eating pattern you can still be following in three years. No elimination lists, no cleanse, no supplement we sell you. Just the food, the numbers, and someone qualified reading them with you.
- 2017
- 1,400+
- 12
- 0
Six positions, and we will defend each of them.
These are not values on a wall. Each one costs us something — referrals, revenue, or the comfort of telling people what they came in hoping to hear.
The scale is one number, and it is not the best one
Weight moves for a dozen reasons, half of them water. Fasting insulin, triglyceride-to-HDL ratio, A1c, waist circumference, and resting blood pressure move for one reason: what your metabolism is actually doing. We track all five, and we have watched plenty of people improve every one of them while the scale sat still for two months. That is a win, and we will say so out loud.
If you can't eat this way at your mother's table, it isn't a plan
Any protocol survives contact with a Tuesday. Almost none survive a wedding, a deployment, a night shift, or a grandmother who is offended by a declined plate. We build eating patterns around the life you actually have, which usually means the plan looks less impressive on paper and works considerably better in practice.
We add before we subtract
Nearly every client arrives expecting a list of banned foods. The first four weeks are almost entirely additive — protein at breakfast, thirty grams of fiber, a vegetable you will genuinely eat. Restriction has a compliance half-life of about eleven days. Addition changes the composition of the plate on its own, and it does not require willpower to sustain.
Food first, medication respected
We are not anti-medication and we are not a substitute for one. Roughly a third of our clients are on metformin, a GLP-1 agonist, a statin, or all three, and our job is to make the nutrition around those drugs work — protecting lean mass, managing the gastrointestinal side effects, and keeping the eating pattern intact for the eventual taper. Anyone who tells you food replaces a prescription is selling something.
You get the reasoning, not just the instruction
Every recommendation comes with why, and with how confident we are. Some of what we advise rests on decades of randomised trials. Some of it rests on mechanism and clinical experience, which is a weaker footing, and we will tell you which is which. Clients who understand the reasoning adapt the plan when life changes it. Clients who only have instructions abandon it.
We are transparent about what we cannot do
We do not treat eating disorders — we refer, promptly, to colleagues who do. We do not diagnose. We do not order labs ourselves in every state we practice in, and where we cannot, we tell you exactly what to ask your physician for. A dietitian working outside their scope is a liability dressed as a service.
Three of us. You will know which one you are seeing before you book.
Every article on this site has one of these three names on it, and every one of them sees clients. There is no content team and there is nobody here who does not treat.
Naomi Okonjo-Bell
Founder & Clinical Director
Founder of Copperleaf. Eight years in hospital diabetes education before deciding eleven minutes per patient was not enough.
3 articles · Type 2 diabetes and prediabetes
Full profile
Elias Vondracek
Dietitian — Performance & Corporate Programs
Sports dietitian who got interested in the metabolic health of people who are not athletes, and stayed there.
3 articles · Lipids and cardiovascular risk
Full profile
Margo Ilesanmi
Dietitian — GLP-1 & Behavioural Nutrition
Built the practice's GLP-1 support line after watching too many people lose muscle nobody warned them about.
3 articles · GLP-1 nutrition and lean-mass preservation
Full profile
Nine years, one room to three dietitians.
Including the decision that cost us a year of referrals and turned out to be the one that mattered.
A borrowed office on Westminster Street
Naomi Okonjo-Bell left eight years of inpatient diabetes education at a county hospital, where she had roughly eleven minutes with each patient at discharge and no way to follow up. She rented one room, saw fourteen clients in the first quarter, and wrote the first version of what is now the twelve-week block on a legal pad between appointments.
The lab-first intake
The practice stopped taking clients without a recent metabolic panel. It cost us referrals for about a year — plenty of people want a meal plan, not a workup — and it is the single decision that most changed our outcomes. You cannot coach a metabolism you have not looked at.
Groups, because one-to-one does not scale to a waitlist
Ninety people on a list and one dietitian is a queue, not a practice. The Reset Table ran its first cohort of eight that January. Group turned out to be better than individual care for a specific thing we had underrated: hearing someone else describe your exact 4pm problem out loud.
GLP-1s arrive, and the questions change
Within eighteen months half our intake calls mentioned semaglutide or tirzepatide. Almost none of those clients had been told anything about protein, lean-mass preservation, or what to do when food stops being appealing. Margo Ilesanmi joined to build that side of the practice properly rather than improvising it.
Writing it all down
The same twelve questions kept arriving by email. Rather than answer them twelve hundred more times, we started publishing the answers in full, with citations, for free. It is now how most people find us — which is, we think, the correct order of operations.
What we don’t do
We do not treat eating disorders. If that is what is going on — and it is more often than people expect, including in clients who came in about their cholesterol — we will say so and refer you to a colleague who specialises in it, usually within the week. We do not diagnose, we do not prescribe, and we do not sell supplements, powders, meal kits, or anything else with a margin on it. We are paid for our time and for nothing else, which is the only arrangement under which you can fully trust the advice.
Read us before you hire us.
Nine articles, no signup wall, every one under a real name with the reasoning shown. If you disagree with what we write, you will probably disagree with what we would tell you in a room — and that is worth finding out for free.