Introduction to the coach:
I’ve been a health and life coach for seven years now. I go shopping with clients, and plan menus and fitness programs to achieve and maintain healthy weight. I demystify food and nutrition with all the fad diets and conflicting beliefs about science which I have found to be discouraging obstacles for many people. I offer a drug free option to healthy weight maintenance in contrast to some of the aggressive methods involving medication, or surgeries that I know do have their place, but I strongly believe are used too much. I help clients find a personal connection with food as art, a source of pleasure, tradition, and life instead of it being something more like a drug addiction, nuisance, or chore.
Improving the quality of what we consume also improves our state of mind, sense of self control, discipline, and strengthens our ability to delay gratification, increases our energy level, improves our quality of sleep, mental clarity, capacity for patience and empathy, and can even influence many biochemical balances such as our brain chemistry, microbiome, pH, hormones, and enzymes to name a few.
All of this influences our careers, recreation and play time, sleep, metabolism, immune system, mental health, and more. There is a clarity that we can achieve with a balance of optimal nutrition, consistent exercise, and relaxation techniques, which unfortunately many people may not have felt in a long time. I love when they feel that way, as if they are a little younger again and perhaps feel more alive, and often it is this milestone that strengthens their testimony about what works for them personally.
Background:
I’ve studied “self-improvement” for decades. I like to call “Perfecting the Art of Living”. I remember being the weird 9 year young kid that would read books about vitamins from cover to cover. I fell for some myths too back then like the low fat myth and later on became excited about different fad diets until I found conflicting evidence challenging their “science”. Through all that I’ve always been into the culinary arts. My aunt always went all out for holidays and continues to be very creative in the kitchen. My mother always liked to explore ethnic cuisines and we tried many restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area when I lived in California until I moved here to Boise Idaho in 1989.
Later on, I lived with a woman for a few years who was quite the culinary artist. I always showed interest in learning, experimenting, and playing with food and she would have me do a lot of the food preparation for us while she supervised. I think that is really where I realized how much I love this art form. But the two of my passions, food and health, were still not fully merged until later in life. She and I were not particularly unhealthy in our choices but could sometimes be quite indulgent in the extreme. I don’t regret any of it.
It did catch up to me though. As we get older we change of course. Our metabolisms don’t remain the same. And to add to that, I worked in an office for a decade and the full time sedentary routine took its toll. I noticed I was overweight and even obese at times, and would go on “health-kicks” and diets ultimately fluxuating up and down within a range of about 15-20 pounds, a BMI of between 28-32 always overweight and sometimes obese. I also just felt like in general I was getting older faster. I didn’t sleep as well. My energy fluxuated a lot throughout the day. My eye sight was not as good and I had worn prescription glasses for about 20 years of my life. I would get ear infections. My skin wasn’t as clear. And I would go in and out of depression and anxiety. all of this seemed to just be ramping up along with inflammation and slower healing, etc.
I remember getting to a point where I felt really stuck and what wore on me was having more and more thoughts about what my future was going to be like if I didn’t take control of my health. The different kinds of effort I would put into self-care were small and fleeting until I decided to really commit to making a complete and holistic change. I don’t claim to have had the perfect epiphany in one moment but the things that I changed resulted in a huge transformation where I lost over 40 pounds. I no longer needed my prescription glasses. My moods leveled out and improved. My skin cleared up. I no longer got ear infections like I used to. I slept better and was able to remember my dreams more. My memory improved and my mind just felt clearer as if a fog lifted. I have a nice long list here of improvements in my personal testimony and it was in this new chapter of my life that I can say I really committed to the path that lead me to creating the Sovereignty Health and Wellness Center today.
I am grateful for the help and support I’ve had along the way. This vision did not just appear overnight. I would study, experiment, and share with people, and I started focusing more on college which began as the pursuit of a career as a dietician. But then I went through some soul searching and to make this long story just a little shorter, I fell in love with Public Health which I hadn’t even heard of when I first came back to college. So, I changed my major to Health Sciences – Health Education and Promotion and graduated with my baccalaureate in 2019. So up to the point where I am writing this first article here, I have been working as a health and life coach for several years while attending school and just recently bought my office space in Boise.
Looking forward:
Ultimately, I am devoted to freeing myself, and my clients, from those phases we can all fall into where we feel stuck like I did back when I made my own personal decision to change things deliberately. It took some real pain and suffering, and some desolate thoughts, to shake me enough, and I know that everyone has a breaking point somewhere on the scale of what they are willing to endure. Rock bottom looks different to us all and we can get buried in it too if we compound it with the numbing escape of addictions.
Mine is food addiction, something I am always mindful of. I absolutely LOVE food. I love almost everything. And I love the calming satiating feeling of eating. I really had to get a handle on this, and I admit, to this day I am never really free of it. I love the art of food, the sentimental meaningful traditions and history of different cuisines, and I get so much pleasure out of it that though it may seem strange to some people, it can very much be like a drug to me so I know if I am not mindful, I can and have in the past used food that way, for example, eating when I am stressed or tired or mistaking thirst for hunger, etc. And that’s just my challenge. Others may resort to drugs, drinking, or many other things we might use to distract us from being fully present in the moment because for one reason or another it is difficult for us to be in the “now”.
I have found that through my journey with others working on things like weight management, insomnia, depression, social anxiety and anxiety in general, and many challenges different people face, that addiction is a central theme in them all. I know most of us think of things like drinking, smoking, and other drugs when we hear the word addiction but we can be addicted to something that we need in moderation to survive like food, or we can even be addicted to thought patterns, beliefs and behaviors that become very confining and limiting. And so, in closing I just want to emphasize that this is why I am on the path I am on. Addictions have stung me hard. And yet I know we’ve all seen much worse either personally or with other people we care about. What I really appreciate about my chosen career path is how personal it is. As I constantly evolve, I learn more and more about my own failures and successes, which also helps me to share it with others. I am grateful for the opportunity to do this work.
And I am grateful in advance for you taking some time in the future to take this in. I would really appreciate it if you take an interest in this content and future articles. And if you find anything interesting or inspiring in it, please reach out and engage me on any of the topics discussed at sovereigntycenter1@gmail.com. And finally, if anything you hear here sounds like something that would be of interest to someone else you care about, please direct them my way. CHEERS to perfecting the Art of Living your very personal way. Thank you.
Delicious Sovereignty 