A Note on the Name
Why this site is called what it's called, what you'll find in it, and a request that you don't count anything on my account.
Hello! I’m Julia Prence, MS, RD, LD, a registered dietitian in Houston, Texas, with a little over seven years in inpatient and outpatient care plus time as a retail dietitian in the grocery aisles. It’s the first of October here, which is to say still summer, and nothing else is on the site yet. I’ll start with the name, since it’s the thing you’ll wonder about.
A kilojoule is a unit of energy. It’s the metric cousin of the calorie, and in Australia it’s the number on the back of the package. European labels are required to print it right beside the calories. One food calorie is a little over four kilojoules, which is why the energy line on an imported chocolate bar looks alarming until you do the division. Jules is me. Put the two together and you get Kilo Jules, the only pun on this site. I’ve checked.
Now the caveat, and I want it up high where you’ll see it. I don’t want you counting anything on my account. Not kilojoules, not calories, not points.
My practice is weight-neutral, which means we work on behavior, nourishment, and how you feel on the stairs rather than a number on the scale. I kept the unit in the name because I like what energy means once it’s off the label. Energy is the plain thing you have at four in the afternoon, or don’t. It’s what you spend getting dinner on the table after a long day, and what it costs you to read one more headline about what you should be eating. A unit of energy is a fine thing to name a food site after. It isn’t an instruction.
That’s what the tagline means, too. “Energy, well spent.” Some of that is the food itself. A pot of lentils with a tadka poured over at the end is energy well spent, and so is a warm tortilla, and so is the slice of sheet cake somebody left in the break room. The rest is your attention. There’s a great deal of nutrition writing competing for it, most of it louder than it is careful. I’d rather you spend twenty minutes cooking something than twenty minutes doing arithmetic over it.
The site is laid out like a magazine, in departments. Recipes come with a provenance line that says where the dish comes from, whose version I leaned on, and what I changed. In Nutrition Science I’ll walk through the studies behind the advice and say plainly when the evidence is thinner than the headline. Women’s Health gets its own department because iron, bone, and the years around menopause get less careful attention than they deserve. Culture and History is for the long stories behind ordinary foods, like how corn became a tortilla and why that one step mattered. Grocery Aisle is named for the place I used to work. I still think most of the real decisions get made there, between the cart and the shelf. And then this journal, which will be looser, and where I’ll let myself wander a little.
Every piece outside this journal carries a Dietitian’s Note, a short box where I explain the why in plain words. In clinic, the why is the part that sticks. The what, you could get from a pamphlet. Everything here is education. If you want a plan with your name on it, that happens in an appointment, with your labs on the table and your doctor in the loop.
The newsletter is called Aromatics, after the onions, garlic, and ginger that go in the pan first and make the kitchen smell like something’s about to happen. It’ll carry one recipe, one thing from the research I’ve been reading, and one find from the aisle. It’ll be short, it’ll come , and it’ll be easy to leave if it isn’t for you. You can sign up below.
If there’s a question you’d have asked me in the rice aisle, given five minutes, send it. The best pieces here are going to start that way.
