SCIENCE, HEALTH
Our founders, Liz Dickinson and Shannon Shearn, were recently interviewed on the Rock Bottom Wellness podcast with Tiffany Flaten (listen to it here). On the podcast, Liz and Shannon share why addressing the root cause of your weight gain is pivotal to success, and why Relish Life is the last weight loss program you’ll ever need.
In this post, we’ll summarize some of the show’s highlights.
Liz created the Mio heart rate monitor, the first one without a clunky chest strap. After having her kids, she also struggled with her weight and found a doctor who helped her with a medical weight loss solution. Learn more about Liz’s story here.
Shannon was a professional athlete, gymnast, and circus performer. She experienced body image issues in the cutthroat industry and struggled with her weight after having children. She found a sustainable, healthy way to keep a healthy, manageable weight with easy lifestyle shifts and now helps her clients do the same.
We constantly transform through trauma and life changes, yet we tend to get hung up on getting back to where we were, weight-wise and image-wise.
“I want to get back to my pre-baby weight.”
“I want to get back to my wedding weight.”
“I want my high school measurements.”
We need to let go of that pressure because all it’s doing is adding undue stress to our lives (and stress isn’t good for our waistlines!). Instead, we need to focus on looking forward and moving gracefully and healthily through our transformations with ease.
What do you want now?
What’s important now?
How can you keep what’s important to you while living the healthiest life possible?
Liz explains that a big mistake people make is missing the major levers of weight loss. Instead, they slave away in the gym, count calories, and overlook the entire metabolic process and its role in effective, lasting weight loss.
To lose weight and keep it off, fitness and nutrition do play a role; however, mental health is just as (if not more!) important. Your mind is a massive part of weight loss, because “where the mind goes, the body follows.”
When you lose emotional weight, you’ll lose body weight, too. That’s because things like emotional eating, unhealthy eating behaviors, and food addiction is linked to that emotional weight, leading to physical weight.
Relish Life works with people who are working through food addictions to stop from using food to escape from psychological challenges and trauma.
Chronic stress impacts the way you approach life and how you handle any stressors that come your way. Sometimes, that stress can be self-imposed. Liz explains that she has always been an over-achiever as the child of immigrant parents. As a result, she put a lot of pressure on herself to perform, and that constant stress caused her to put her health and well-being on the backburner. This generates an overload of cortisol in the body, which leads the body to hang onto unnecessary weight.
With weekly small group therapy sessions, Relish Life members can quickly identify and resolve the underlying psychological issues leading to their weight gain. See, the mechanics of what it takes to lose weight is no secret. Many Relish Life members have lost hundreds of pounds before, but the problem is keeping it off. That’s why they come to us.
With psychological support and a designated health coach, members tackle their issues with weight from all angles in a sustainable way.
Relish Life prescribes certain weight loss medications for those who qualify. They are not the dangerous appetite-suppressants you may have heard of but are rather prescriptions to heal compulsivity and impulse control where they start, in the brain. We may also prescribe an antidiabetic medication like Semaglutide, which is used to treat type 2 diabetes and long-term weight management.
The body is intelligent. It knows what to do, so long as the mind isn’t getting in the way. The intention is to get the body back to balance in a way that works—finally—and not to rely on medications forever. Then, when you begin to taper off the medication, you will have created new, healthy habits that allow you to keep the weight off for good.
Relish Life is the last weight loss program you’ll ever need because we’ve cracked the code on how to keep it off. You’re supported through the entire weight loss journey, from now, to your target weight, to beyond—so you get and stay healthy, as you should!
Our team of dedicated professionals will ask about your story, learn why and how you started gaining weight, and listen with empathy, understanding and a lens of experience. You’re in good hands in the Relish Life community.
As a critically acclaimed circus acrobat and elite athlete, Shannon did what it took to maintain the weight to look the part, no matter how unhealthy the path to get there. This led to disordered eating – a common issue in the world of professional athletics – and a loud inner critic who constantly told her she was never thin enough, never small enough, and never quite good enough, either.
When she became a mother, her struggle with “bouncing back” and weight gain contributed to her feelings of failure at this new chapter in life, which led to depression and an inability to be fully present for herself, her life, and her family. She needed to make a change to save her life and reclaim her happiness, so she embarked on the journey of redefining what it meant to live fully and win in the ways that matter most. Shannon rose to a place of sustainable health and self-love and began guiding her clients through the same journey with incredible and lasting results that didn’t feel like work, sacrifice, or suffering.
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