You know what goes to Brentwood to waste away? Nothing. Nothing withers on the vine in Brentwood, because Brentwood is the elixir of life, a rarefied, beautiful life. Kindly go elsewhere if you need to stumble or wrinkle. Brentwood is sunshine and Mexican palms and Porsche Cayennes that repel dust and dismay.
The uniform here is any version of Alo yoga pants, Goyard totes, and $15,000 gold bracelets that clang together like the haughtiest of high-school girls. Filler always helps, but kindly, not too much. This isn’t Beverly Hills, for God’s sake.
The primary point of entry into our Utopia is the Brentwood Country Mart, which—fun fact!—is neither. Notably, and without a wink of irony, the coffee shop inside the Brentwood Country Mart is called Caffe Luxxe. And it’s here, on a bright, optimistic morning in late winter, that I meet the woman who calls herself “the Sorority Nutritionist.”
“I am very well aware that I am extremely triggering to people,” says the Sorority Nutritionist, whose real name is Lauren Hubert. Hubert and I have taken our Luxxe coffee drinks to a picnic table in the courtyard of the Country Mart. Hubert may not be the poster child for Brentwood, but in this most elite of Zip Codes, we are surrounded by her clients.
“What’s triggering about you?” I ask her.
“As my husband says, ‘You’re blonde, you’re beautiful, and you’re smart. It’s very intimidating,’” she says. And continuing her husband’s point: “‘But you’re also talking about looking hot and being thin.’” She stops for a beat and considers this—then corrects it. “Well, looking hot, not necessarily being thin. I work with clients who … their goals are literally just to get to 200 pounds.”
The Sorority Nutritionist, as you have pieced together, is Hubert’s weight-loss company. This is usually the part where you would read something like: But it’s more than a weight-loss company—it’s a lifestyle. It’s built on an ethos of body positivity and female empowerment. Come to think of it, they don’t even use the term “weight loss.”
Except that the Sorority Nutritionist is very much a weight-loss company and doesn’t pretend to be otherwise. Hubert and her team of coaches teach clients how to eat in a new way so they lose weight or feel better in their clothes, which is a distinction without a difference. Hubert’s company offers myriad ways in. They have a general membership, which includes calorie recommendations, grocery lists, online support, and access to the community of other clients (ergo, the sorority part). You can kick it up to “The 90 Day Fit Babe Body,” which comes with access to Hubert. Or you can go for broke and hire a private coach, which costs $10,000 for four months.
As an industry, weight loss is hardly new. But in recent years, as the body-positivity movement has grown, it seems to have lost much of its power and influence. Even weight-loss companies have started pretending they’re not weight-loss companies. Given the simple fact of its name, Weight Watchers couldn’t avoid finding itself in a real pickle. So what’s a Weight Watcher to do? Go with your initials and claim WW stands for “wellness that works.” Weight Watchers and Noom and all those places are selling the same thing as Hubert. They’re just pretending the focus is self-care wellness cleansing green-smoothie Mediterranean-diet holistic bone broth. But really, we’re talking about calories in, calories out. Simple math.
So there’s something shocking, almost renegade, about Hubert’s approach. The Sorority Nutritionist wants you to have a “Fit Babe Body,” and the method itself is called “Hot, Healthy, Never Hungry.” She advocates weighing yourself every day and has a post on her Web site called “How to lose 20 (or more) lbs and keep it off!” If you dig deep enough, you might expect to find a jazzercise video and a free gift of leg warmers with purchase. (You can’t.)
When you join the Sorority Nutritionist, you take a quiz to find out “why your weight loss is a hot mess,” says Hubert. “I have four different types of women: the businesswoman who really needs a plan and structure; the party girl, who loves going out and drinking mimosas with her girlfriends and is a really big foodie and struggles with balance; the gossip girl who gets in her own head, gossiping to herself about how shitty she is so she self-sabotages. Then we have the basic bitch—she’s overcomplicating weight loss and needs to just get back to the basics.”
Hubert doesn’t claim to be doing anything new. On the contrary, she’s a big believer in “translating the science.” (She is, after all, a licensed dietician with a master’s degree in clinical nutrition.) Ultimately she’s taken a simple idea—eat less, lose weight—and delivered it to an audience eager to receive it. (The Sorority Nutritionist currently has about 600 clients.) And you don’t have to look any further than the ubiquity of crop tops, baggy jeans, and the resurgent popularity of Eminem to know that if it happened in the 1990s, 2024 will eat it up, so to speak. If any wheels are being re-invented here, they’re ones of timing.
“Yes, my audience wants to lose weight, but a huge aspect of it is actually the healthy relationship to food, healthy body, and healthy weight that they can actually maintain. And a big thing too for me is body composition. So you could be the same weight, but if you lost body fat and built muscle, you’re not only going to aesthetically look better but you’re also metabolically more healthy. Yes, some of my clients do want to be thin. But that’s a taboo word right now.”
Counting calories? Apparently not taboo. The Sorority Nutritionist urges followers to log every bite into an app, much like Noom, and though she is quick to point out that there is room for “fun foods,” ultimately Hubert doesn’t sugarcoat the process. “I don’t consider it harsh. I think it’s honesty,” she says. “I’m not afraid to say what I think a lot of coaches sometimes are afraid to say.”
A lot of this comes from a personal place. When Hubert was a freshman at Florida State University, she, like many other freshmen, gained weight. “I got Instagram the summer after my freshman year of college, so started to really become aware of food. I wouldn’t want to be around other girls in bikinis,” she says. “So that summer I went home to Massachusetts,” where, she says, she “started just really restricting my food and intermittent fasting slash being unhealthy vegetarian slash just completely skipping meals. I gained 20 pounds freshman year, and that summer I lost 30 pounds.”
Hubert started the program four years ago, and the name, like the elevator pitch, doesn’t pretend to be anything but what it is, which might be exactly the point: “It was inspired by the idea of helping women and creating our own sorority of really feeling hot and healthy and wanting to be successful and just feel our absolute best.”
Hubert’s mission seems to fly in the face of body positivity, the idea that beauty comes in every size, that we should all love our bodies no matter what they look like. That’s not how she sees it. “I want every woman and every person to have a healthy relationship to food. But teaching someone that weight doesn’t matter … I don’t think that’s right. There’s this balance that our culture is missing right now, which is how do we teach people how to actually eat to improve their body composition and improve their health, but also love the way that they look and not be obsessive over their weight? The 90s, super-thin Victoria’s Secret model [standard] can be really detrimental for young women. But at the same time, the gluttonization of food … There’s just so much nuance to it.”
The sun is high over Brentwood, and around us, the sunglasses are coming out. Nuance will have to wait until another time. For now, the Sorority Nutritionist has clients to see.
Danielle Pergament is a Los Angeles–based writer. The former editor at Goop, she frequently contributes to The New York Times