Holistic Health and Wellness Coaching
Are you feeling tired, overwhelmed, and like you don’t have the excitement for life that you used to? Have you put on some pounds and find that they’re not as easy to get rid of as they were when you were younger? Do you want to work out or just move more but by the end of the day you are too mentally or physically exhausted?
Maybe you are feeling burnt out on your usual routines. You want to thrive and feel passionate about your family, relationships, spiritual practice, or perhaps you want to discover new ways of living but aren’t sure how.
Wellness coaching is about identifying areas in your life where you want to enhance your health and well being, and then addressing those things. Coaching is goal focused. I will help guide you in identifying what your goals are and then beginning the process of achieving them! Your goals might be nutrition or fitness related, but they may be addressing more general feelings of health or well-being like:
- Improving work/life balance.
- Prioritizing your interests, hobbies, and friends, not just parenting and family.
- Integrating self-care into a routine that already feels too busy to add more tasks to.
- Addressing specific health goals like learning about nutrition, improving eating habits, or finding motivation to work out.
- Progressing other wellness goals such as prioritizing rest, taking more time away from electronics and screens, or energy healing.
- Working on lifestyle goals like making new friends or deepening existing connections, focusing on spirituality, breaking free from old habits that no longer serve you.
online health and wellness coaching
I offer online holistic health and wellness coaching to anyone, anywhere in the world! Sessions are 45-55 minutes and take place over Zoom.
I also offer coaching in person in Ridgeland, Mississippi which is a suburb of the Jackson, MS area. In-person coaching spots are limited so please schedule a discovery call as soon as you can!
What is holistic health and wellness coaching?
You may be wondering – what the heck is holistic health and wellness coaching? What does body-neutral wellness coaching mean? In a nutshell, wellness coaching is about identifying areas in your life where you want to enhance your health and well being, and then addressing those things.
Holistic means whole. Wellness is the state of being in good health. Holistic Wellness is everything, your whole body, mind, and spirit, being in good health.
what is body neutral health & Wellness coaching?
Body-neutral wellness coaching means that while your goals may be nutrition and fitness related, we will focus on how your body FEELS not how it looks. While you may lose weight, that is not the goal. Instead, we focus on measurable changes like improving your energy levels, increasing your activity or the quantities of nutritious foods that you eat, and base success on the way you feel in your body NOT on a number. There are plenty of fitness coaches, nutrition coaches, and diet influencers, and others who are ready to sell you dubious programs to help you “lose those last 5 pounds” or finally fit into your high school jeans again. There are dozens of personal trainers who can help you refine your gym routine or yell at you through a fitness boot camp. That’s not wellness. Body-neutrality also means you don’t have to love your body if that doesn’t seem possible. It just means we are neutral toward our bodies, neither loving nor hating them, maybe only seeing them as the vehicle that gets us through life.
Wellness sees each person as an individual. If you have physical limitations or disabilities, if you have dietary restrictions or preferences, holistic health and wellness is about finding what works for YOU not a generic program you won’t be willing or able to follow.
Holistic wellness is about feeling whole. Wellness is about balance, an ease when one aspect of your life isn’t overpowering the others. Extremes are the opposite of true holistic health and wellness. Holistic wellness is whole-body, the word holistic means whole and interconnected. Your body, your mind, your spirit, your relationships, your family, your work, your passion, when you achieve holistic health and wellness, these are all in perfect balance. Wellness is gentle, like a big hug from your beloved grandmother or an old friend you haven’t seen in a while. Our culture over-emphasizes extremes, but happiness and peace come from balance.
Why do i need a coach?
People sometimes ask, “Why do I need a coach? Can’t I don’t this on my own?” The truth is, you can set goals and achieve them without additional help, people do that every day. However, it is easier to do things when we have someone to hold us accountable! A study in 2024 showed that people were 35% more likely to go to the gym when they had a friend who went with them and another study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that people are more likely to stick with their goals if they share them with someone who they view as successful.
Nearly everyone has had the experience of setting an intention to go to the gym after work and then feeling tired and going home instead, or buying healthy food at the grocery store and then not feeling like cooking and ordering delivery instead. If we know that someone is going to be asking us about our progress, we are more likely to stick with it even when we lack motivation.
Coaches have specialized training that most people don’t. Life coaches have general training in helping people achieve life goals; executive coaches have education in career specific achievements; and holistic health and wellness coaches are trained in helping clients set and meet goals related to better balance that achieves true health and wellness.
What an online coaching session with Stacey looks like.
Are you ready to feel more balanced?
Schedule a discovery call with me now!
Who Can Benefit From Holistic Health & Wellness coaching?
I have worked with clients of all ages, races, and genders. I have experience working with people who have ADHD and are autistic. I am LGBTQ+ myself and am LGBTQ+ affirming. Because of my mental health background, I am also open to coaching people who have a history of depression, anxiety, and other mental health struggles as long as you have minimal symptoms or you are actively working with a therapist. If you have a history of eating disorder or disordered behavior, I require that you are either in recovery or that I work directly with your therapist. Coaching is never a substitute for therapy, but it can be complementary.
I find that the clients that tend to really enjoy working with me are:
- Women and feminine people.
- Age 20-60.
- Already enjoy things like yoga, mindfulness, and meditation or are curious about them.
- Spiritual but not necessarily religious.
- High achievers with late diagnosed ADHD.
- People who have trouble slowing down and tend to overbook themselves.
- Have difficulty prioritizing all of the things they need to do. (Everything feels important!)
- Parents who struggle with self-care and put everyone else first.
Clients that have the most success are:
- Motivated to make real changes in their life.
- Want to learn more about gentle nutrition and are ready to move away from the SAD (standard American diet.)
- Are ready to stop going to extremes with diet and exercise.
- Able to commit to meeting for 45-55 minutes once per week and spend at least 1 additional hour per week on their goals.
- Are prepared to stop falling for their own BS.
Meet your coach
In addition to having a Master in Social Work and working as a mental health therapist for almost 11 years, Stacey has a Holistic Wellness Health Coaching certificate from the Holistic Coach Academy. Learn more about the difference between therapy and coaching here. While coaching and therapy are different, the experience that Stacey has working with therapy clients is an additional benefit that coaching clients receive!
Someone who understands
In spite of being a fairly active teen, I struggled with disordered eating and accepting my body, as did many people who grew up in the 1990s. Even though I trained in Shotokan karate and began practicing yoga around age 15, I started to focus only on how I looked rather than how I felt. This caused my mental and emotional health to suffer. It was not until many years later that I came to realize that my body was so much more than just the way that it looked. It could be fast, and strong, and flexible, and that is pretty damn cool! For most of my life I have been a person in a “larger body” or midsize and that has never defined my health. It doesn’t have to define yours either!
I was introduced to the concept of meditation as a karate student. I began practicing Vipasana meditation in 2013. It was then that I realized that as we become more mindful, as we tune in to how things makes us feel, we learn really quickly what is healthy for us and what is not. It might be the friend that you feel exhausted after spending time with; the sugar hangover that you get after stress-eating donuts; or the energized feeling of being completely alive that you get after spending time in nature. When you pay attention, you begin to see how everything you do is impacting you, whether positively or negatively. The journey toward true wellness begins with making more choices that make you feel good – physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
Why Holistic Health & Wellness
I have worked in mental health since 2010 and one thing that became clear to me early on is that we can’t disconnected the mind, body, and spirit. You can’t have poor mental health and great physical health. Your physical health can’t be at its best if your mental health or relationships are lacking. You have probably heard “stress is a silent killer” or “reduce stress to reduce cortisol.” To have good health, we have to be holistic in our approach. No one thing is more important than the other.
I recognize that not everyone is the same. We all have different goals, various limitations, and I approach every client as the unique person that they are. Our goals and limitations can also change over time. In 2024, I broke my leg and developed a rare neurological condition called Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS) which you can read more about on my blog if you’re interested. I’ve had to learn to be more gentle with myself, go more slowly, and have more grace. 6 months of not being able to walk taught me a lot about resilience and about myself. It also taught me how harmful being sedentary is on the body. Finding my way to what ideal fitness looks like for me now: as someone in my mid-40s, postmenopausal, with some physical limitations, has taught me a lot about helping my clients find their optimal fitness and wellness.
I want my clients to challenge themselves but also be realistic about where they are and where they can expect to go. Gentleness is key to holistic wellness.
Start On A New Path Today
Are you ready to feel better and happier in your life? Schedule a discovery call with me now!