Throughout my entire life I have observed the connection between my lifestyle choices and my mood, energy, and wellbeing. At a young age I started the journey of noticing these connections and upleveling my choices, tweaking my strategy along the way, in the hope that I could enjoy life more and show up as close to my best self as possible. I saw a huge correlation between the sugar and processed foods I ate, and my mental and physical health.

The dining hall of my boarding school was a scary place for a young person unfamiliar with unpalatable institutional food. I soon found myself living off the white bread with the huge vat of skippy peanut butter, the fried chicken sandwiches in the upstairs grill, and the Lance nekot crackers in the vending machine in the downstairs laundry area of my dorm. It wasn’t long before a full-on raging eating disorder emerged. My body was starving for nutrition and while the choices I was making brought in calories, those choices wreaked havoc with my hunger hormones, exponentially raised my overall inflammation levels, and deprived my brain of what it needed to thrive. Oh, if only I knew then what I know now.

During the fall semester of my freshman year in college I reluctantly had to face the fact that I was required to complete one science course. “Take this new one we just started offering. It’s all about nutrition,” suggested the registrar. Well, I did take that class, sitting on the front row on the edge of my seat for every session, and I could not have loved it more. I still have the textbook 36 years later!

Many years later, when my two children were teenagers, I was invited to join an executive coaching organization working behind the scenes. Once I became an empty nester, I knew I wanted to train up to be a coach myself. I wanted my niche to be high net worth individuals and business leaders, supporting them in both how they lead and live. I wanted to help my clients answer two main questions: (1) What does it feel like for other people to work for/with me in the workplace? And (2) What am I doing behind the scenes in my life that limits my wellbeing both at work and at home? I began comprehensive leadership coaching training. Then, for the second half of “how they lead and live”, the lifestyle aspect, I did a one-year program in functional medicine health coaching, ultimately becoming nationally board certified.

I am currently credentialed by the International Coaching Federation (ICF-ACC) and board certified by the National Board of Health and Wellness Coaches (NBHWC).

Our traditional medical system is not set up to do the deep dive into causation when it comes to non-acute health issues. Instead, it focusses on what some people say is “diagnose, dose and adios.” Of course, if you break your arm, you go to the ER or your doctor to get it set. But so many non-acute health issues are either caused, exacerbated, or healed by our own lifestyle and behavior choices. In stark contrast, I love the functional medicine approach because it dives down deeply to plumb the depths of causation and empowers people to make lifestyle and behavior choices to improve their health conditions and outcomes. The functional medicine approach takes the time to ask WHY is this happening and HOW can we deal with it at the root cause? 

I watched my father die slowly over 13 years from Parkinson’s and my sister die at a young age due to the fatal trifecta of trauma, mental health, and addiction. I am passionate about health and wellness and calling people higher in their choices, using a combination of accessible information and understanding the art and science of human behavior change (hint: motivational interviewing). If you would like to learn more about me or work with me, you can go here or here.

I am honored to be part The Pounce Pot team!  Let’s do this!