This Medical Meeting Builds Wellness Into the Program

Conference participants share a plant-based meal — and help translate ACLM’s resources, including a Food as Medicine Jumpstart Guide, into Spanish.

In late October in Orlando, the 2024 annual conference of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM) — which aims to transform health care by focusing on root causes of chronic diseases through evidence-based lifestyle interventions — celebrated its 20th anniversary. Seven months later came cause for another celebration: The conference, which attracted 2,300 in-person attendees, 160 of which represented more than 50 countries, and over 2,000 virtual participants, was recognized by the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) with a Gold Circle Award for excellence in the Conventions, Meetings and Marketing category.

ACLM earned that recognition in no small part due to the ways it imbues the practice of lifestyle medicine in its conference, not just in educational content but how wellness is baked into the overall participant experience. Lifestyle medicine is about adopting healthier behaviors, including improving diet, increasing physical activity, managing stress, and reducing or eliminating harmful behaviors — all of which can be undone at a conference. Think unhealthy buffets, long hours spent sitting in sessions, rushing from one room to another to consume a packed educational program with few breaks, and receptions that revolve around a bar.

Julie Holtgrave, CMP, HMCC

When we asked Julie Holtgrave, CMP, HMCC, ACLM’s chief operations and event officer, to share how they do things differently, she began with the organization’s growth. When she joined ACLM 10 years ago, she and the executive director were the only two on staff; there were 500 members. Fast forward to 2025: ACLM’s staff numbers 40 and membership has swelled to 13,000 health-care clinicians — primarily physicians, in addition to nurse practitioners, registered nurses, dietitians, health coaches, and chiropractors. These professionals “chose to go into medicine to heal people and to help people feel better,” she said. “That’s what we hear so much from those who find ACLM: ‘This is why I want to practice medicine.’ It is truly remarkable how far we’ve come — we also now have delegates in the American Medical Association and we are a recognized board specialty, with a lifestyle medicine board certification.”

Holtgrave gave us a rundown on how ACLM’s conference elements coalesce around wellness.

Food

“One of the pillars we stand on is a diet that is plant-predominant,” Holtgrave said. All the attendees’ meals — provided by ACLM during the conference — are plant-based. “It’s a unique aspect of our event,” she said, and “an experience” for participants who may not follow this kind of diet.

Holtgrave said she usually starts about a year out from the conference working with different culinary teams, who may be “a little hesitant at first. Then by the time the conference gets here, they are so proud of what they’ve been able to accomplish and learn and do something new and healthy — and they have a portfolio that they can then offer other clients.”

Beverage

Hotel salespeople, Holtgrave said, “want to know about your bar spend. I’m like, ‘I am not that group. Tell your lobby bar folks to take a vacation that week.’ We stand behind avoiding risky substances, alcohol being one of them. However, we do know that there is evidence about having a glass of red wine a day being good on several different levels,” she said, and “we will serve coffee throughout during the day, as well as decaffeinated teas. Water, of course, is a huge, huge commodity at our conference. We don’t serve soft drinks. Occasionally, I will offer a lemonade or an iced tea to complement a lunch. At receptions in the evening, we offer mocktails. But you don’t need a bar atmosphere to have the networking.”

Physical Fitness

A major component of practicing lifestyle medicine, Holtgrave said, is physical fitness, so it is embedded in the program. “We have 2,300 people in person at our event, and I will have anywhere from 600 to 800 show up for yoga at 6 in the morning or want to do a mindfulness session at nine o’clock at night as they’re winding down and getting ready to get some rest.”

Another scheduled physical activity, patterned after the organization Walk with a Doc, Holtgrave said, “is exactly as it states — a doctor will have a topic and say, ‘I’m going to go for a 20- to 30-minute walk outside, come with me, and we’ll talk about this topic, and we’ll share with each other.’”

In addition, seating at sessions is intentionally set for only 60-65 percent of attendees, Holtgrave said. “A good number of them are at the back of that room, walking, standing, marching in circles. They want to be on the move. They don’t want to be sitting sedentary in a chair watching a PowerPoint onscreen.” 

Time Spent Outdoors

Holtgrave said ACLM seeks out “an environment that is conducive to lifestyle medicine — and by that, I mean being able to be outside. Can we go outside and get a walk in at the beginning and at the end of the day? Are we able to sit outside and have lunch? Fresh air is a big thing.”

For this reason, ACLM leans toward resort-style venues with indoor-outdoor meeting spaces. “Just being outside when you’re at a two-, three-, or four-day conference,” she said, “makes all the difference in the world.”

Under One Roof

Hosting the conference at a resort venue also meets another organizational requirement: The board and leadership, Holtgrave said, are “really adamant” about bringing everyone together in one place instead of holding the conference in a convention center and spreading out across multiple hotels. “Being at the conference [means] I want to bump elbows with somebody in the elevator that I might make a connection with or to know that when I am in the restaurant, everybody here is attending my conference. That’s been a format that’s really worked well for us.”

For good reason: Social connection is another pillar of lifestyle medicine.

Table Stakes

When we spoke in June, Holtgrave was figuring out the logistics for a new food initiative for the 2025 conference at the Gaylord Grapevine in Grapevine, Texas, in November. “It’s a lot of logistical coordination,” she said, “but I think it’s going to be so interactive.”

In the past, ACLM has made use of two teaching kitchens at the University of Central Florida’s Rosen College of Hospitality Management in Orlando “for hands-on culinary classes with chefs who come in and teach plant-based cooking during the conference,” she said. “It’s very much a hands-on learning environment. Those kitchens can only hold about 25 to 30 people each — I probably have 900 people that would love to be in that class. They’re very, very hard to scale.”

So this year, for the first time, Holtgrave is moving the class out of the kitchen and into the general session space at the Gaylord, transforming it into an evening “culinary edutainment session.” Four different groups of chefs are going to take the stage at various times over two hours, cooking live some of the same items that were served to attendees at dinner earlier that night. If there was something they loved, “they’ll be able to see it prepared right in front of them,” she said, “and learn how it was done.”

Michelle Russell is editor in chief of Convene.

On the Web

Learn more about LM 2025, Nov. 16-19, at the Gaylord Grapevine at LifestyleMedicine.org/aclm-conference.