My relationship with my body was less than ideal for a long time. Even though during my teenage years, I was very active and practiced lots of sports, I was still slightly chubby. In my country of origin, being thin and having a great body was the definition of being beautiful and accepted, so the pressure from society to keep a slender body was also incredibly stressful. The exercise was not enough for me to get me there, so every year, a couple of months before summer, I’d start freaking out and frantically go for the diet that promised me a thinner body the fastest way possible… I did the “Lemon Diet,” the “Soup Diet,” the “Atkins Diet,” it seems like I was constantly finding creative ways to deprive myself of food. I would eventually abandon the diet of the moment (mostly because of its unsustainability), and I would almost immediately regain the weight I had lost. Every pound I gained, I sank more and more into self-loathing and blaming. The following summer, I would start all over again. 

 

My struggle with weight loss was so prominent in my life that when I had to decide what my college career was going to be, the choice was a no brainer: Nutrition.

 

At that time nutrition was not what it is today. At college, the main focus for weight loss was on the calorie paradigm: if you ingest fewer calories than you burn, you will lose weight. As a result, along with my degree, I also got an obsession with counting calories. I figured out how my metabolism was, and how many calories I burned in an average day, so the equation was easy: I would eat fewer calories than the ones I burned, and I would keep my “ideal weight”. Easy peasy, right? As a matter of fact: no, this system is actually quite messed up. The obsession for counting calories took over completely the quality of the food I was eating. I lived on “light”, “sugar-free,” and “0% fat” food. I ate very little, and I couldn’t even enjoy it for fear of gaining weight.

 

As a consequence, I was feeling tired all the time, my face was breaking out, I felt bloated, had uncontrollable sugar cravings, and I was starving! I would always carry something sugary in my bag, like candies, Kit Kats and Snickers bars because I would experience moments of such low blood sugar that I had to eat something sugary immediately if I wanted to avoid fainting. 

 

At the same time, I was working as a Nutritionist, and every day I started to feel more like a robot: giving everyone the same 1200 or 1400 or 1600 Kcal diet with very small differences based on the patient’s taste. It seemed to me that something was missing. I started to observe that, more often than not, people knew perfectly what they needed to eat to lose weight; however, they still struggled. I began to suspect that a standard meal plan was not enough to lose weight efficiently and to stay healthy.

 

Suddenly my mom died at 54, she had diabetes and always struggled with food as well as stress and anxiety. She never worked out how to manage her internal struggles, and that got me pondering. I left everything and went on a long travel to deal with my loss and grief. Once I was done with traveling, I had it clear: I wanted to change, change of country, change in my job… I wasn’t helping people the way I wanted and the way they needed it. 

 

Not too sure about what to do, I moved to New York, and only by chance I got to know about “Holistic Nutrition”. This new approach to nutrition was radically different, and it finally made sense: not only the weight is impacted by the food that we eat, but by how we nourish others aspects of our life ( career, relationships, family, etc.). The individual’s situation and background came first, and it determined the changes they had to make to have a healthy lifestyle. Losing weight was just a natural consequence of viewing the whole person first. It made total sense to me, so I became a Holistic Health Coach and started to help people losing weight with this new approach, considering each person as a whole, mind, and body together.

 

My health also changed as I applied the principles to myself: my symptoms disappeared as well as my cravings for high sugar “fixes.”

 

I was much happier with all these changes, as I was now able to help people to get to the root causes of their problem. Nevertheless, I noticed that even though they knew exactly what to do, my clients were still not making the changes they needed to have a healthier lifestyle and weight. It wasn't a lack of willpower; something deeper was preventing them from reaching their potential. This was when I realized that the root cause of the problem was residing in either deep emotional wounds or in an unconscious, self-sabotaging behavioral patterns that were not possible to change only by wanting. The problem was I still didn’t have the tools to act directly on these issues, to heal traumas, or to change unhealthy patterns, which was what I wanted to do. If I could make people see their deeply held issues and help transform them, their whole life would be different, not only their weight! So my search started again.

 

In 2017 I had a very bad skiing accident, and I ended up with a concussion and whiplash. For weeks I had daily terrible migraines, I couldn’t see well, and my neck hurt so badly! Doctors would tell me that I couldn’t do much about it and that it would have eased off with time. I decided I was going to look for something alternative as I didn’t want to live for months like that. A friend talked to me about BodyTalk System®, so I went for training to try it out. After a week, I was 100% recovered, and my mind was just blown. I decided I had to incorporate this incredible technique into my professional practice, and so I did.

 

You might ask yourself what does this has to do with weight loss, so here it is: in the body, everything is connected. This means that there’s no such thing as the treatment of the part without treating the whole… at least, not if you want to treat efficiently. Emotions and the physical body are intrinsically connected, and if we want to balance one, we have to balance the other. We can’t separate the treatment. So Bodytalk System® helps to find the root causes of the problem and shift it from Body, Mind, and Soul.  I could finally help people to understand and transform the real cause at the base of an unhealthy lifestyle. 

 

Once I opened the door to these kinds of techniques and could see the astonishing results I just got more and more curious, and this led me to add other techniques to make my session more and more complete. I now also use the Psych-K® technique, and I’m constantly training on subjects that can give me a deeper understanding on both myself and women's sense of worth and relationship with food (check my training here)