Meet the Founder
Lily Macdonald
M.Sc., RD, founder of Nuome Clinic
Who is the Founder?
Lily Macdonald is a registered dietitian-nutritionist and member of the Ordre des diététistes-nutritionnistes du Québec, and the founder of nuome clinique. Born and raised in Montreal, she is bilingual and practices in both French and English, depending on which makes each client most comfortable.
She completed her Master's degree in Human Nutrition at Columbia University in New York, where she conducted a research project on the behavioral determinants of eating and the dynamics of parent-child feeding. Her academic background also includes a Bachelor of Science in Nutrition from McGill University, as well as clinical rotations in various settings — intensive care, gastroenterology, endocrinology, pediatrics, weight management, and internal medicine — including at the Montreal Children's Hospital, the CHUM (University of Montreal Hospital Centre), and Columbia Medical Center.
This rigorous, multidisciplinary training directly informs her private practice: every recommendation she offers is based on the most up-to-date evidence, while remaining applicable to your daily reality.
Why nutrition
Lily grew up surrounded by sports, between school teams and training for half-marathons, which she still runs today, and surrounded by food, in a family where meals were a time for culture and sharing. It was by experiencing these two worlds in parallel that she discovered how much food influences everything: concentration, performance, recovery after injury, and far beyond sports, energy and well-being in everyday life. This dual passion, for science and for food as a human experience, is what led her to dietetics, and it still guides her practice today.
Our way of practicing
We work with a non-restrictive approach. Our role is not to impose a list of rules on you, but to build realistic and sustainable goals with you, tailored to your life — not to some generic ideal. We often say that everything is a question of balance, but we know that phrase alone doesn't mean much without context.
At Nuome Clinic, balance is a diet that supports your health without mentally exhausting you trying to be perfect — one that leaves room for pleasure, your culture, your real schedule, and that evolves with you rather than remaining fixed in a rigid plan.
We practice with genuine cultural sensitivity and love working with people from all walks of life, integrating their food and cultural reality into the plan, rather than ignoring it or replacing it with recommendations that don't reflect who they are.
Our practice is non-judgmental from beginning to end: we are here to listen and to meet you where you are, not where we think you should be.
Founder's Experience
Academic training
Clinical experience
Why Nuome Clinic
To become a registered dietitian in Quebec, the Ordre des diététistes-nutritionnistes du Québec (ODNQ) requires a bachelor's degree in nutrition from a recognized program, supplemented by supervised clinical placements in various healthcare settings. Lily Macdonald completed her bachelor's degree in nutritional sciences at McGill University, along with all required clinical placements throughout the Quebec healthcare system and internationally, before being admitted to the ODNQ as a registered dietitian.
She also completed a master's degree in human nutrition at Columbia University, where her research thesis focused on parental sensitivity and child enjoyment during early food interactions, conducted at Columbia's Center for Early Relational Health.
Lily Macdonald is currently a registered dietitian-nutritionist at the Montreal Children's Hospital of the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC), where she works in pediatric internal medicine, pediatric surgery, and the gestational diabetes clinic — an experience that shaped her specialization in perinatal and family nutrition. She has also practiced at the CHUM (gastroenterology, neurosurgery, and surgery). Her clinical training was built through various rotations across the Quebec healthcare network and internationally: intensive care and general surgery at Saint Mary's Hospital, internal medicine and psychiatry at the Jewish General Hospital, chronic disease management and early childhood nutrition at a CLSC (local community health centre), as well as a glycemic counseling rotation at the Endocrine Medical Centre in Barbados.
She continues to pursue research on early relational health between parents and children alongside pediatricians and experts in behavioural and emotional synchrony, exploring how feeding dynamics and parental sensitivity influence child development during the first years of life.
Having supported numerous pregnant women and young families, both in Quebec and in clinical shadowing in New York, Lily Macdonald noticed the same pattern: it's not simply a matter of waiting times within the system. It's a deeper gap in the support offered to young families, and to women's health in general, at the precise moments when they need it most.
Seeing this same divide repeated in two different healthcare systems, in Montreal and New York, transformed a frustration into a mission: to build a place where families don't have to start their story all over again at every stage of their journey. It was during her studies at Columbia University that Nuome Clinic was born, to offer Montreal families compassionate, rigorous, and non-judgmental nutritional support — from preconception to pregnancy, postpartum, and the introduction of solids.
This is not a criticism of the public network, which does a rigorous job with limited resources. It is a concrete response to a real lack of continuity, especially for young women and families, a structural rather than an individual problem — and that is exactly what Nuome exists to fill, one family at a time.