Little did they know ~

The doctor basically called me a liar.  I was 13, sitting with my mother in his office as she laid out the story of how her 13 year old daughter had gained a whopping 30 pounds in 3 months.  She told him how she cooked the right foods for me, watched the calorie intake, and still, something strange was happening.  He looked at me, and then looked at my mother and asked “Is she hiding food under her bed? She must be hiding food somewhere.”

At the time, which was around 1970, the school of thought was “burn more calories than you consume, and, a calorie is a calorie.” Plain and simple.  There was no thought given to metabolism, hormones, chemicals, allergies, or any other possible explanations.  Everyone assumed that if you were overweight, you ate too much and were just a lazy couch potato.

5 years later, at eighteen, I had surgery and was in a hospital bed for 10 straight days. And though I can’t quite remember all the details, I do know that for the first few days I was on a liquid diet while the remainder of my stay I consumed nothing more than hospital food, and still unbelievably managed to gain 10 pounds. The doctors had no explanation for it.

Somewhere around my early 20’s, the extra weight just seemed to disappear. It was so gradual that I didn’t even notice.  It just seemed I woke up one day and realized I was no longer fat.  I hadn’t been dieting. In fact, I hadn’t changed anything that I could think of.  No radical exercise regime, no stress, and no change in eating habits.  It was just gone. Through the years I managed to keep the extra weight off. Occasionally I would go up an extra five or sometimes even 10 pounds, but I never took it off by dieting.  It just seemed that somehow without my involvement, it would just disappear.

Now, in my 50’s, I’ve been facing the same situation. But this time I come armed with much more nutritional, emotional, and physical ammunition. I’ve learned a lot.  The biggest and most important discovery I have made over all of these years, as I have struggled to maintain what I felt was a good and healthy weight for me, is that it is about much more than the food.

 

I received my training from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, where I was trained in more than one hundred dietary theories and studied a variety of practical lifestyle coaching methods. Drawing on this knowledge, I will help you create a completely personalized “roadmap to health” that suits your unique body, lifestyle, preferences, and goals. My mission is to help those who have had similar frustrations and are at a loss with what to do next.  Together, we can figure this out.

Learn more about my training and my unique approach to health coaching.

Are you curious about how health coaching can help you? Let’s talk. Schedule an initial consultation with me today.