Exercise Science and Wellness Chair Tiffany Reiss Promotes a Holistic Approach to Health

The newest core faculty member in the nutrition and exercise science departments, Tiffany Reiss, PhD, admits she's still actively evolving. Like constructing a baseball, she keeps adding layer after layer of learning to a core of basic knowledge and beliefs.

"My first interest was exercise science," says Dr. Reiss (pronounced REES). "Then I added nutrition to that while in graduate school, and I added spirituality while working on my PhD. Now I'm adding to all of that by joining Bastyr. I try to keep broadening my mind. My interest in holistic health just keeps expanding."

Reiss comes to Bastyr from Boone, NC, located in the northwest mountains of North Carolina. "It's very beautiful there," she says. "Very green, but a different kind of greenery than Washington. Because the area gets lots of snow, we have plenty of ski slopes."

The 32-year-old has always enjoyed sports. Even as a little girl, when asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, she answered "a football player." "My mom let me know that particular career choice was out of the question," she laughs. "I was always doing pretty much everything I wasn't supposed to do - every sport, every dangerous escapade."

It was an easy decision for Reiss to pursue an undergraduate and then graduate degree in exercise science. "I was working on my master's degree when I became much more interested in the nutritional aspects of exercise and health," she says. "You just can't separate them."

By the time Reiss was pursuing her doctoral degree, she was already taking a closer look at natural health. "It's been within the past three or four years that I've been exploring it," she says. "Herbal science piqued my interest initially."

In May of 2001, Reiss received a PhD in health and wellness promotion from Virginia Tech. She explains that "promotion" in this sense is not about advertising and marketing; it's about educating the public. "Health promotion is encouraging and motivating people to look at all the facets of good health, such as exercise, nutrition and behavior modification," she says. "It's introducing them to alternative things like yoga and tai chi and the use of herbal medicines."

Reiss has a particular interest in the effect society's expectations have on body image. Her doctoral dissertation was on body image and eating-disordered behavior in female college athletes. She points out that women athletes are under a unique kind of pressure. "They're expected to be strong as well as graceful, muscular yet still slender. They feel pressured to have almost impossibly low amounts of body fat," she says. "And then you add to that all the pressure of striving to perform well, to be the best and to win the game."

Before coming to Bastyr, Reiss had been working as a graduate teaching assistant at Virginia Tech and a research assistant at Appalachian State. For a year she also worked as a nutritionist for a federally funded program for women, infants and children.

But Reiss's goal was to work in the Pacific Northwest. Because she had an interest in holistic health, she was researching schools offering training in complementary and alternative medicine. "I had visited the Pacific Northwest in the past, and I fell in love with it: the kind of people here, the beauty and the respect for environment. I felt so strongly that this is where I belonged."

Now that she's at Bastyr, Reiss hopes to bring more to the school than her knowledge and expertise. "I want to make the teaching process more dynamic between students and instructors," she says. "I particularly want to help exercise science students understand that there are more dimensions to health than just exercise."

It's been only within the past few years that the spirituality component of health has come into sharper focus for Reiss. "I've become much more aware of the spiritual side of life," she says, "and the role it plays in people's health and well being. I've delved into spirituality in the past more on a personal basis for personal growth, and now I would like to look at it from a scientific perspective."

Reiss looks back at the circumstances that brought her to Bastyr, and she continues to be amazed by the journey. "Peoples' paths are unique," she says. "I had no clue when I started that I'd end up here."