SEQUIM — Chiropractor Leslie Van Romer, who as a self-proclaimed cheerleader for a plant-based diet and physical fitness helped countless women lose weight and fit into their pants, is leaving Sequim after 34 years of practice.
Van Romer, the author of Getting Into Your Pants who is still thin and strong as a steel rail at 60, is leaving Sequim by June to be with her new husband in Vaca-ville, Calif., where she said she will continue to exercise her love of writing and consulting about healthy living.
The book was inspired, she said, by women who repeatedly told her, “I just want to get into my pants.”
Van Romer said she will no longer practice as a chiropractor in California because it would require her to return to school.
The reason she earned her chiropractic doctorate degree in the first place was simple.
“I just wanted to help people,” Van Romer said at her office in the historic former Sequim Library building at 415 N. Sequim Ave.
“It’s the doing that’s difficult. I’m that cheerleader who helps people connect the dots.”
She has owned the office building since buying it from the city in 1983 and will remain as owner, leasing it to the chiropractor who is buying her practice, Timothy Card.
She started her practice — originally in partnership with her former husband, Joseph Urquia — when she was 26.
They have three grown children.
After 10 years and 120 monthly community health presentations, Van Romer’s farewell presentation, “10-minute Salad and Juicing!” will be at 6:30 p.m. tonight at the Olympic Theatre Arts Center, 414 N. Sequim Ave.
Van Romer plans to throw a farewell party at her office May 7.
Van Romer graduated with a bachelor’s degree with honors from the State University of New York at Cortland and obtained her degree of doctor of chiropractic as a valedictorian and summa cum laude from Sherman College of Straight Chiropractic in South Carolina at 26, she said.
Since then, she has built a full-time practice in Sequim with more than 100 regular patients, giving weekly health presentations and writing a monthly health newsletter
that evolved into a
biweekly e-zine.
Some of her watchwords:
“We have to take advantage of these pivotal moments,” she said.
“We’re very spoiled and tend to be lazy.
“You have the discipline in you, you just haven’t used it.
“We’re addicted to food. We’re all addicted to the sugar, the fat, then meat,” said Van Romer, a vegan for nearly 20 years who works out three to four times a week, three days at the gym and once outdoors.
In effect, she leads by example.
Her routine includes a cardio workout, weight training and core exercises such as sit-up, push-ups and pull-ups.
She first became interested in food and fitness after she had her first child, she said, who at 11 was overweight.
“She ate plant foods and in six weeks she lost 20 pounds,” Van Romer said.
“That was a real pivotal moment for me.”
Van Romer early on began to look into the roots of the diet most Americans unconsciously follow, with its heavy emphasis on high-fat, high-cholesterol, high-protein, high-calorie, highly refined, and highly processed foods.
People’s eating habits, she said, have been further skewed by pressure from the food industry and public ignorance, confusion, and conditioned taste buds.
She said over time and study she became aware and appalled that theories behind the focus on meat and dairy products were flawed.
She remembers one inspiring patient who came to her weighing 220 pounds and is today a much more healthy 135 pounds.
“She hung in there, eating more fruits and vegetables and no meat or dairy,” Van Romer said.
“She did it for her husband, who had high blood pressure” and after dieting brought his pressure down.
“I don’t take any ownership of that,” she said of the weight-loss success story.
“I am a voice, a messenger, and I don’t take any credit for it.
Specifically, she recommends eating 80 percent vegetables and fruit, and said the occasional intake of meat is not out of the question.
She draws the analogy that you do not have to eat meat to be big and strong.
Just look at elephants and cows, she said, with huge muscle and bone mass as herbivores.
Van Romer said about 60 percent of her patients are seniors.
“They have a lot to give,” she said. “That’s who you truly learn from.”
She said she will miss “the everyday miracles where people come in in pain and then leave OK,” adding that it is evidence of the human body’s resilience.
“Americans love to justify their bad habits,” she said. “We just have to think about what we put into our bodies.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.
