After more than 10 years as a Financier, you discovered how to break free to truly live the ideal life. What led you to be a coach?
I was working in finance at decent jobs for over 10 years, but, day in and day out, I didn’t feel I had a clear purpose for my life. Being single and living in a foreign country, away from my family, I had some rough times fighting different health issues while going through breakups. I suffered from exasperating health conditions due to poor diet, lack of exercise, stress, anxiety from work and relationships; Homesickness and loneliness were frequent visitors too. Doctors were not of much help to me as I gradually realized that I was stuck in a vicious cycle of symptom-suppressing prescriptions. After years of struggling, I finally broke free to figure out how to nurture myself back to health and happiness through holistic lifestyle change. I was able to replace side-effect-loaded prescriptions with healthy whole foods, exercising and mindfulness. Now, I’m proud and grateful to have good health and have left my career in finance to study nutrition and holistic health. I’ve started on a mission to help other single professional women, so they can accomplish much more in life with good health and renewed purpose. So, what led me to be a health coach? Years of struggle as a single professional woman, finding healing for myself, and finally embarking on a new journey to help others single professional women shine – I think I found my purpose for life. Being able to help others is such a good feeling, especially in a direct way that could change other’s lives for the better.
Tell us about GoodLiving with Lisa.
GoodLiving with Lisa is my health coaching practice to help single professional women. I help them improve their digestion and lose weight, giving them the energy, health, and confidence they need to embrace exciting new relationships and take on new career challenges. In my program, I teach my clients nutrition knowledge and healthy habits, and, most importantly, help them implement what they learned by taking baby steps towards a life-changing transformation. In other words, 99% of my practice is to provide accountability in the process of encouraging my clients to form and sustain good habits for a healthy holistic lifestyle. Every one of us has a rough idea of how to be healthy – drink more water, eat more vegetables and less sugar, exercise more, sleep well and reduce stress, but most of us are just stumbling back and forth in our day-to-day life. We want to make a change but it rarely sustains without proper accountability to facilitate the process of forming good habits. I took a holistic approach to help myself break free from different health conditions and overcome heartbreaks, I knew that worked for me and it would work for others as well, especially as I am so hands-on, guiding my clients through every single challenge in their transformation.
As a result of the pandemic what are some of the challenges that clients are facing?
Besides weight gain as the most common challenge for the majority of people, being single and living by yourself, poses the biggest challenge. Loneliness is already one of the biggest problems for being single before the quarantine age, staying home and isolating from most of the normal social life is definitely the antithesis of avoiding loneliness. If you look at the root cause of quarantine weight gain, mostly it’s because people turn to food for comfort and company as food is one of the easiest and most affordable escapes for emotional distress. As dating life gets interrupted for most single people, loneliness could easily consume their emotion, if they are not use to seeking other sources of comfort and joy. This is when holistic lifestyle comes into play, you should shift your focus from feeling lonely to immersing yourself in the joy of learning a new skill, developing a new hobby, or simply just embrace the time alone as a perfect opportunity for self-reflection and growing your mindfulness – all the sudden loneliness becomes much less frightening. Also, know you are not the only one who is struggling with loneliness, don’t be afraid to virtually reach out to others, it might open up a new window of deeper communication and understanding, as compared to when we just took daily social life for granted.
You are helping single professional women lose weight and improve their digestion. Share your client success stories.
The biggest win for my clients is that they get to witness weight loss as an effortless result of a transformed lifestyle. They learned how to focus on a bigger picture of being healthy and happy, rather than just narrowly focusing on losing weight. They are able to ditch that fixated mindset of “when I lose those extra pounds, then I will be healthy and happy.” Before my program, they might have stumbled upon different weight loss methods which are not necessarily good for health, such as calorie restricting diets or other fad diets, weight loss supplements, or even surgical procedures. All of those methods put the expertise and responsibility outside of them – but what happens if they stop counting calories or stop taking the supplements? Data shows 95% of people gain back the weight they’ve lost and that weight normally comes back with a vengeance. By adopting a holistic and healthy lifestyle, they learn to make more intelligent choices and take more responsibility for their decisions, rather than solely relying on an external regimen – for example, deciding to eat nutritious whole foods that might not be necessarily lower in calories versus eating convenient, processed snack bars that claim to have less calories. I, myself, am living proof of the sustainability of what I teach. I’ve been able to maintain a lean, healthy weight and one of my clients said that because I walk my talk and she can see the results, that is why she hired me to assist her and she is doing fantastic. Her energy is coming back and she is getting lean in a healthy way. It is important that I’ve gone first and know what works and what is sustainable. Also, the women I work with are able to re-establish their relationship with food. If food used to be their only emotional outlet, by acquiring new tools under their belt, they are more successful when it comes to handling negative emotions in day-to-day life. Only when they establish positive healthy habits, can they begin to have lasting change for better health and sustainable weight loss. Lastly, my clients gain new awareness to balance every aspect of their life, and as a result, their health gets improved regardless of how much broccoli they are eating.
Who inspires you?
My mother. I grew up in a loving family, and well prepared, home-cooked meals were common to me as a young child. As a matter of fact, I was a very picky eater until my teenage years, when I realized how lucky I was to have such a nurturing mother. I started to notice that my middle school classmates loved to come to my house to do homework after school. They would often hang out until my mom calls for dinner, because she would always ask them to stay for dinner. I remember my best friend at the time told me, “I secretly hope that your mom asks me to stay for dinner every time, because she makes the best food!” My friend’s mom rarely cooked – she would normally order takeout or give my friend some change after school, and all my friend bought for dinner was bread to fill up her stomach. Although my mom didn’t intentionally teach me much about cooking and I didn’t start cooking until I moved to the U.S. When I needed to start to cook seriously for myself, my intuition for cooking just took me by the hand. It’s almost like discovering a secret ability I didn’t know, I was able to recreate my mom’s dishes just by searching in my memory – no recipes were needed. I did learn the basics when I grew up by casually helping my mom do the prep work in the kitchen and watching her cooking. But one thing she did teach me is to always cook with love and care, knowing whom you are cooking for and picturing how much joy and comfort the food is going to bring to them. Now as I learned that food is the new medicine – you are what you eat – I had an even better interpretation. Given what my mother had taught me – food is love and food is care for others or for yourself. Medicines are created in the lab and manufactured in the factory, love and care is never part of the formula. When you cook something that’s going to be good for someone you care for, the amount of satisfaction you get and the appreciation other people will have is such an organic process of nurturing our souls, in addition to the nutrients that will nurture our body. Many years ago, as a single young professional living by myself, for a good period of time, I completely neglected the importance of home cooking, as I chose convenience – fast food, take-outs, frozen entrees… When I needed to finally fix my digestive condition, I knew I had to cook for myself as the ultimate way of nurturing myself. Therefore, I thank my mother for passing me the gastronomic genes, but most importantly, her nurturing and caring heart which inspired me to heal myself and now to help others.
Tell us about Be Happy, Healthy, Lean, and Beautiful Starter Kit.
Be Happy, Healthy, Lean and Beautiful starter kit is a self-guided mini version of my program – a sneak peak of the most essential things I would tell my clients to do in the program. It also comes with a personal wellness quiz, covering many aspects of life because wellness is not only about your physical health, it intertwines many aspects of life. Often, a certain area of life is neglected due to other priorities, but if you were able to remind yourself to take care of the part that’s been overlooked, you might find new perspectives and gains on the things that are bothering you the most. Then there are useful tools provided to help you start taking gentle steps toward making small changes. We all know the power of baby steps and perseverance, so this starter kit is an excellent resource for single professional women who have been thinking about improving their health and wellness but don’t know where to start exactly.
Share your goals/projects for 2021.
Without a doubt, I’d like to help more single professional women break free from lifestyle-related health issues to live a happy, healthy life. What would be helpful is to build a strong community among single professional women, to have them support one another while in my program or outside of my program. So, my goal for 2021, is to increase awareness of holistic lifestyle among single professional women and create resources for them to learn and benefit from living a healthy holistic lifestyle.
Please share your social media links.
To download my “Be Happy,Healthy,Lean and Beautiful” starter kit, please visit my website: www.goodlivingwithlisa.com
Instagram: good_living_with_lisa
facebook group: GoodLiving with Lisa
