FROM A NUTRITION COACH: Kimberly Zehnder
As nutrition coaches, we have the privilege of building close relationships with our clients as we help guide them towards their goals - be those related to aesthetics or fat loss goals, performance goals, or goals of optimal health. Along the way, as we work on building a better relationship with food and our habits, we get to share parts of our stories that are relevant to our coaching styles. We’re taking time this year to share more about us, our nutrition journeys and transformations, our road to becoming nutrition coaches and educators, and the amazing clients we have the privilege of working with.
HOW I BECAME A NUTRITION COACH
I grew up with a very troubled relationship with food, with a silent spiral into a near-fatal eating disorder that nearly ended my life in 2012. I was a high-achieving student and athlete all throughout my childhood, teenage, and early adult years where body dysmorphia and astonishing food myths always had a lurking presence. A large part of the recovery process from my eating disorder was scrapping everything I thought I knew about both food and exercise and instead diving into the science and psychology behind how our bodies actually utilize our food choices and why it can be easy to find an identity in diet culture. It seemed as though diet culture was all around me in sports, locker rooms, grocery stores, restaurants, and among the conversations of my friends and family. Nutrition and physique change are much too nuanced to have harsh standards of what folks are allowed to eat, what is considered healthy, and what you MUST do to lose weight or gain strength.
I was in an honors program for biological sciences (future orthodontist at the time) and trained over 20 hours per week as a division 1 swimmer in college with two options to continue to improve my performance: eat “cleaner” or lose body fat. NOT something that would help me continue to thrive in recovery or further my positive relationship with food, right?! I had always had a passion for nutrition and behavior change surrounding efficient & effective eating habits, but it was in my collegiate athlete experience that I recognized the desperate need for educators that truly saw folks as individuals in understanding their “why” into habit change rather than just another generic template of unsustainable approaches fitted around one’s insecurities.
MY FAVORITE PART OF BEING A NUTRITION COACH
I create very close bonds with most of my clients as our nutrition coaching experience involves working through many of life’s stressors and establishing coping mechanisms for when those stressors might pop back up at a later point in time. In creating close bonds with my clients, I get the opportunity to learn about their lives, families, aspirations, relationships with food, and their own personal journeys with body confidence & self-love. My favorite part of being a nutrition coach is witnessing clients stepping into the confidence of their own choices and recognizing their worth beyond numerical measurements. By owning their confidence and self-worth, my clients redefine their goals and achieve those goals without missing out on the precious moments that life has to offer.
My clients are like my family, and with big wins often come big hurdles. Oftentimes clients get discouraged when hurdles arise in our work together, but those hurdles are often where the biggest growth opportunities are fostered. It is my mission as a nutrition coach to create a safe, supportive, and nurturing space to explore coping strategies, myth-bust food behaviors that might not foster a better headspace, and have my clients take back control of their choices surrounding food. There is no greater joy than getting to see clients celebrate freedom from food and body confidence in ways that change the ways they experience life.
MY OWN PERSONAL NUTRITION JOURNEY
I was always an extremely active child within a very active family. I played everything from competitive soccer to field hockey to diving to tennis to swimming. Even with competing in multiple sports that adopted the “no rest days” mentality, I had always felt like the “bigger” kid in all of my friend groups. My nutrition always evolved with the times: carbs were scary (but needed for exercise), fat was bad, meat was unhealthy, then dairy, then gluten, and so on and so forth.
Throughout my teenage years, I never thought about food as having any other purpose than fuel for my sports, which I treated like jobs. I was hungry all of the time, and I ate what was available to curb that hunger, never fully understanding why or what I was eating. Eating fueled the sports I competed in, where I needed to perform well, so I ate. When the pressure was built to conform to society’s standards of success and beauty from a female perspective, I realized that there were really only two options: eat less and workout more.
I already trained over 30 hours per week as a competitive swimmer well into my high school years, so there was only one option left: eat less. Like a job, that’s what I did. Fad diets, fat-burning pills, templates, points, I tried all that diet culture had to offer.
Eventually, I was forced to cease all sports and seek professional help (both inpatient & outpatient) for anorexia. Understanding the “why” behind individualized food choices and the science behind what all foods do for our body is what really catapulted me into recovery and completely changed my outlook on my own nutrition choices. I began to question every aspect of diet culture and understand the applications of various styles of eating rather than the absolutes that accompanied them. Freedom from food always seemed to be this unattainable unicorn that no one had actually ever seen (so did it even exist?!), but it is alive and well! It exists without “good” and “bad” connotations, absolutes, and definitive markers of success as it pertains to nutrition & lifestyle goals.
MEET MY CLIENT: Michelle
Michelle and I began working together in early 2022 with her goals that centered more around rebuilding health from a restrictive eating disorder rather than physically changing her physique. We knew that we couldn’t necessarily work toward one of those goals without also having changes in both physique and lifestyle habits, especially since Michelle was eating much lower calories than what was ideal for her intended performance goals. Michelle is an extremely driven individual and it was exciting to think that with seemingly small and sustainable changes she could completely change her quality of life.
Michelle was on the tail-end of recovery from a few major foot surgeries, which made the concept of eating more food to support recovery, and her extremely active job as a mail carrier, a bit of a mental challenge. Michelle worked tirelessly week after week to challenge her past beliefs surrounding the concept of rest from activity, carbohydrates as fuel (and not something to be scared of!), and eating enough food to have the energy to do the things she loves. Each week we were side by side battling mental demons that popped up in response to new goals or stressors, understanding the difference between what was happening in reality vs. what diet culture had projected into beliefs, and continuing to build the bond between coach and client in building her towards her goals.
Over the course of a year, Michelle added over five hundred calories to her daily intake while maintaining the same exact scale weight. She also began to sleep soundly throughout the night, improved many of her POTS symptoms (less dizziness and fatigue), gained enough energy to strength train multiple times per week in addition to improving performances in her endurance outdoor biking (without dizzy spells!), understood the need to fuel her body outside of just physical activity, began to take rest days (before our work together she took zero), and packed on some serious muscle mass. She is a more positive person, speaks to herself more kindly, and is able to enjoy social eating without any negative feelings. To be a part of Michelle’s journey was an honor and a privilege, and I cannot wait to see what she accomplishes now that she recognized her worth outside of the scale number and acquired the energy from food to tackle the physical pursuits she adores.
I had a distorted view of how I was and definitely wasn't eating enough. Kimberly met me where I was at and pushed me when I needed a push. Now I know how to take rest time, keep stress levels low, when to workout, when to eat, and to eat. It's okay to eat, nothing bad is going to happen.
- Michelle
We are committed coaches who work with committed clients and love nothing more than helping our clients find a sustainable approach to nutrition that allows them to work towards their goals without white-knuckling their way through yo-yo diets. Learn more about our KLN team here!