Meet Sravya. She’s one of our online nutrition coaching clients, who started receiving online nutrition coaching with at what some people would call a “bad time” – during COVID-19 (May 2020). Besides everyone else going into panic mode, Sravya went into “buckle down” mode, and saw this as an opportunity to drastically improve her health and fitness – from reversing her diabetes risk (which ran in her family), to losing 9 inches off her waist, overcoming emotional eating without having to eliminate certain foods, and so much more.
How did she do it? That’s exactly what we’ll cover in this article. We’ll go over:
- What Sravya’s goals were
- What she’s tried in the past to achieve those goals.
- Why she decided to start working with us.
- The results that she achieved
- Challenges that she experienced along the way, and how she overcame them
- How her life is different now
If you’d like to hear Sravya tell her own story, check out the video below (it’s 13:30). Sravya was a bit too shy to appear on camera, so you’ll just hear her voice.
And if you’d like to achieve results like Sravya for yourself (lose inches, overcome emotional eating, lower disease risk, and more), just email me with the words “online coaching” in the subject line.
What Sravya’s Goals Were
I first spoke at Sravya’s company (Northbridge Financial) back in September 2019. She liked what I had to say, so like you, she signed up for my newsletter. After seeing tons of success stories of our other clients, she decided she wanted to be our next success story.
When she first started working with us, she had a few goals:
- Lose body fat
- Establish healthy eating habits that are sustainable. Not just go on another diet
- Lower her diabetes risk. Diabetes ran in her family, and she didn’t want to be next in line
- Improve her energy levels, so she could do her housework with greater ease
As a successful professional in her field, she was doing great at her job, and overall, a high performer. Unfortunately, as sometimes happens with very driven individuals they trade in their career for their health. And although she’s 35 years old, she felt older than her age, and decided to get her health under control before it seriously declined.
What She Tried in the Past
The first place that women start when they try to lose weight is diet. They try different diets (interestingly enough, usually, men start with exercise).
One of the diets Sravya tried is the keto diet. Although she lost weight on it, she knew she couldn’t maintain it long term, so the diet was abandoned, and the weight was regained.
The other reason that the keto diet didn’t work for Sravya is because she’s a near-vegetarian. She eats fish, but not meat.
Besides trying keto, she’s tried a number of diets, and after trying different ones, she noticed that most of them worked… in the short term. But people can’t stick to them. So smart people realize that the problem is not the diet. The problem is adherence to the diet. Problems with adherence are caused by emotional eating, stress eating, cravings, unconscious snacking, lack of planning, etc.
And we don’t solve emotional, behavioral and logistical problems with nutritional solutions. Emotional, behavioral and logistical problems are solved with emotional, behavioral and logistical solutions (ground-breaking concept, I know). Despite that, most people continue barking up the wrong tree (seeking the next diet), when the problem isn’t the diet itself.
Sravya was smart enough to recognize that, so she decided to find those emotional, behavioral and logistical solutions. At that point, we set her up with her coach, Shaneh, and away they went.
Why She Decided to Start Working with Us
As mentioned earlier in this article, Sravya first saw me do a presentation at her work, 6 months before she started working with us. But she didn’t sign up at that time. Fast forward 6 months, and her doctor told her that if something doesn’t change, then she would become a diabetic in the not-too-distant future. She didn’t want to go down that road.
That, in combination with all the articles that she’s seen from me about helping our clients (like Mandy) reverse diabetes, she decided to give it a shot.
Not to mention that one of the things she was looking for was accountability, which she wasn’t going to get out of either a book, or another article on the internet. For accountability, you need a person.
Sravya’s Results
In the 3 months that Sravya worked with us, her results have been nothing short of extraordinary.
She:
- Lost 9 inches off her waist
- Lost 4 inches off her hips
- Lost 2.5 inches off her thighs
- Reduced her symptoms of pre-diabetes (like sugar cravings and fatigue)
- Spontaneously decided to add exercise to her lifestyle (remember, she hired us for nutrition-only coaching, so we didn’t even touch the exercise side of things)
Challenges She Experienced Along the Way
The most obvious challenge that Sravya experienced during our time with her was COVID-19. Everything was closed, and she was only grocery shopping once a week.
The solution to this one was simple, actually: her coach, Shaneh, helped her identify the foods to get at the grocery store that she shopped at. Additionally, he had her prep foods for the following 3-4 days in one go. This way, when it came time to eat, she didn’t have to think “what do I want to eat?” She just popped it out of the fridge, and ate it.
Another challenge that she experienced is that at first, she wasn’t losing weight, which was her original goal. That’s where measuring circumferences came in – although her weight wasn’t dropping (as much as she’d like), her inches were dropping, so it reassured her that she was making progress. And really, your clothes don’t care about your weight – as long as you can get into those pants, and look good in them, what does your weight matter? Circumferences are really what matters.
And yet another challenge was work stress. Work had really piled up for her, so she turned to food for comfort. Again – an emotional issue that wouldn’t be solved with a nutritional solution. The challenge was that she was snacking mindlessly. The food that she was eating wouldn’t “register” in her mind, because as her mouth was moving, her mind was thinking about her work. The solution: she was to track what she was eating. In order to track, you have to pay attention. Tracking forced her to make mindless eating into mindful eating, so she realized that she wasn’t snacking because she was hungry. She was snacking to relieve stress.
Tracking was the simple “fix” for a behavioral/emotional issue. It worked for Sravya, but it may not work for everyone. Different people have different mindsets. That’s why we have a number of tools in our arsenal to be able to adjust somebody’s behavior, in a way that’s comfortable for them. After all, if we use the same tool for different people, it may work for some, but not for others. And since we’re after lifelong behavior change, we need multiple tools in our toolbox to adapt to the many different clients we work with.
One book we frequently recommend to clients to help with emotional eating is the Beck Diet Solution, so Sravya picked it up, and found it very helpful.
How Her Life is Different Now
Yes, we track progress in numbers. Inches lost, strength gained, etc. But all those markers are just a proxy for what’s REALLY important to our clients:
- Fitting into their clothes, so that they like they way they look in them, and feel more confident
- Peace of mind that they are healthy, and won’t have to go on medications
- Having the energy to do their favourite activities, whether it’s travel, play with their kids/grandkids, etc.
- Just having enough energy to get through their day, and get their housework done
So how is Sravya’s life different now that she’s accomplished so much? Drastically.
First of all, her relationship with food is much better. As she mentions around 5:45 of her video, with previous diets, certain foods were off limits. Well, in the absence of an outright allergy, no foods were off limits. As I outline in my articles on The (Un)surprising Truth About Why We Get Fat, and What is Good Nutrition, there’s no single food that will make or break your efforts. As long as you meet certain minimum criteria (just total calories and total protein), the rest is just details. You want to have a piece of chocolate every day? You can have it, as long as it fits within your “caloric budget.” Want to have that glass of wine? Same thing – you can have it as long as it fits within your “caloric budget.”
Too many “gurus” classify certain foods as “good” or “bad”, when really, there’s no universally good or universally bad foods. And because nothing was really off limits for Sravya, it improved her relationship with food.
Another big change that happened for Sravya is she started exercising. On her own. Since she hired us for nutrition-only coaching, we didn’t even touch the exercise side of things with her, but she felt so good with her progress from nutrition only, she decided to start exercising as well, which was a huge victory for her. Nobody was forcing her to do that, but she chose to do it.
And one of the biggest reasons she came to us for – her diabetes risk has been significantly decreased. With many of our clients, we’ll have them fill out a very detailed questionnaire, asking them about various different symptoms. Sravya’s symptoms in the blood sugar section before she started were quite high (41%). By the 3-month mark, it dropped to only 23%. In other words, she no longer felt the symptoms of blood sugar dysregulation, like frequent sugar cravings, tingling in her fingertips, and lethargy. Those completely went away.
Because she’s no longer lethargic, she has the energy to complete all of her chores.
All in all, she feels and looks much better now than at the beginning of her program.
If you’d like to achieve a similar body transformation, you can see if you qualify to work with us by simply emailing me with the subject line “Online Coaching.”
