Changing from Consultant to Health Coach

rom Consultant to Health Coach

Consulting life from the outside might seem glamorous, traveling around the world, different cities every week, being a preferred member with multiple airlines and “platinum for life” with the hotel of your liking.

Reality cannot be further from the truth.  As a consultant you live a stressful life, make long hours on top of all the travel.  Your food intake can vary, from the vending machine one night to a three star restaurant the other.  In your conversations, you start to call your favorite hotel “home” plus you sleep in their beds more often than you sleep in your own.

I enjoyed this lifestyle for 20 years but it started to take its toll.  Slowly I started to gain weight over the years and none of the fad diets were getting me back to the weight I wanted to be.  Stress did its magic on my blood pressure and most of our neighbors thought my wife had a boyfriend that just showed up from time-to-time.

Big decision

In 2014 I decided to make a big step and stopped work.  The main reason was to work on my health and enjoy the Florida beaches, camping and boating that I knew were there but never had the time to enjoy.

Looking back, to get to where I am today was not an easy ride.  Having enjoyed biking as a teenager, I thought I would be back in the saddle in no time.  How wrong could I have been!  I got dropped by the 14 to 16 mile/hour group, had to spend the remainder of the day on the couch recovering and every muscle in my body felt sore, even the ones I thought I did not have.

To make sure that I would be able to keep-up and be able to ride most of the days, I started looking into ways to improve my recovery time.  Because if I could recover faster, I would be able to train more and that would get me to ride with the groups I wanted to ride with.

Education and steps I took

I started to read multiple books on this topic, multiple papers on health in general and experimenting with my own body to see what would work.  I also signed-up with the Institute for Integrative Nutrition (IIN) in New York, to get a more structured health education vs. me jumping from health topic to health topic.  At IIN I got exposed to a variety of dietary theories and practical lifestyle coaching methods.  After a while I realize that going back to using “Real Whole Food”, making sure your body gets the nutrients it needs (lots of Plants) and having fun, started to have a major positive impact on my body.  Even my wife, who just played the second fiddle in all of this, started to see major improvements to her own body too.

Where I am today

Fast forward two years – today I am 55 pounds lighter, have normal blood pressure and all my blood work came back very healthy.  I ride my bike almost every day, I total about 250 miles/week on average and I feel comfortable riding with the 22-miles/hour groups.  In short… I feel GREAT!

What changed?

Of the weight I lost, 80% was fat and my BMI changed from a little over 30 (obese) to 22.5, which is a very healthy number.  My blood pressure is 118/65 and my resting heart rate moved from 71 to 58.

As a good consultant (which is still running through my blood), there is always room for improvement but I cannot be happier these days.  Having the energy and being able to do what you want to do without pain, is a major life changer.

I cannot advice people to stop work tomorrow but I can encourage and teach you to change what you eat on a daily basis and look into using “Real Whole Food” while making your meals.

For more information on what I do these days with my company JvVHealth, checkout or ”like” my Facebook Page, follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn.