Today we’d like to introduce you to Farrah Fernandez
Hi Farrah, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
About 3 years ago, I went through a divorce after 17 years of marriage and 4 children. I had been a stay-at-home mom throughout most of our marriage. When we got divorced, I was starting from scratch with no recent work experience, an expired license and certification in the field of recreational therapy, living at the poverty level, and driving a broken-down old car. I also needed to find a way to refinance my house in order to keep the home that my children had grown up in, which seemed an impossible task without a good-paying job. I realized that I would need to reinvent myself and my life by doing things I had never done before to attain the future that I wanted for myself and my children. I gathered my courage and faced each challenge as it came, trusting in God and leaving the outcome in His hands. After submitting many applications and getting my hopes dashed in interviews that ended in rejection, my perseverance finally paid off and I got a job in a field that I had no experience in but which paid me twice as much as the job I had at the time. This enabled me to refinance my house and to buy a new car. I have excelled at my new career which gave me the security to also return to my true passion, health coaching. While life didn’t go anything like I had planned, I love where I am now, living my dream life as a non-diet health coach specializing in Intuitive Eating. I’m passionate about what I do as a coach because of how healing, empowering, and liberating my own Intuitive Eating journey has been.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Intuitive Eating was different than anything else I found throughout my dieting history, so in the beginning I struggled with some of the principles. But the beauty of the Intuitive Eating journey is that it isn’t about perfection in the least. It’s about learning. I was in the process of relearning skills that I had at birth, such as being in tune with my body’s hunger, fullness, and satisfaction cues. There was no failure because every single experience I had with food taught me something that benefited me in healing my relationship with it. The Intuitive Eating approach is in stark contrast to the diet mentality which often leaves us feeling like a failure if we “mess up,” eat something “off plan,” or can’t maintain the rigid rules.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
My journey to becoming a non-diet health coach specializing in Intuitive Eating can be traced back to my teenage years when I became obsessed with my weight and the size of my body. I had developed severe body image issues which were intensified by the images of models in glamor magazines and media of the day. I soon learned that by severely restricting my food intake and calorie count, I could lose a lot of weight. I also began to binge and purge, despite how awful it made me feel emotionally and physically. Weight loss was what mattered most to me though. Ironically, I remember being the most miserable when I was at my thinnest, and no matter how much weight I lost, the opinion I had of my body didn’t improve. I struggled for the next couple of years with this, and although I eventually managed to stop the eating disorder behaviors on my own, I still had many of the same thoughts about my body. For the next couple of decades, I continued to have the desire to be thin. During that time period, I caught onto the idea of focusing on nutrition and the effects of “clean eating” on health. This is when I got certified as a functional nutrition counselor and focused for years on “eating clean,” having a “perfect” diet, and helping others to do the same. But unexpectedly, the course of my life and career changed completely when I was introduced to Intuitive Eating. This revolutionary, science-backed approach guides us to returning to being the Intuitive Eaters we were born as, through relearning to trust in our own body’s wisdom. Through this approach, my eyes were also opened to the negative impact of Diet Culture in my life and in the lives of so many around me. I came to realize that my body image issues, eating disorder, and unhealthy relationship to food were a direct result of the societal obsession with having a thin body, which is equated with worthiness, success, beauty, superiority, and health. Restriction, deprivation, and a hyper focus on my food choices had been how I had been trying to control my weight to achieve that thin ideal. Ironically, while I had been promoting health and wellness as a functional nutrition counselor, the mental space and constant worry around food had been detrimental to my physical and emotional health without me even realizing it. When I finally found the Intuitive Eating approach, it was like my whole body and soul breathed a deep sigh of relief. It was the beginning of liberation, freedom, ease, confidence, and joy. I left behind dieting, deprivation, and restriction around food forever. I found physical and emotional healing and true health through learning to trust and rely on my body’s own cues to guide what, when, and how much I eat. Because of the transformation that my Intuitive Eating journey brought to my own life and health, I committed my life and career as a health coach to helping my clients regain self-trust and heal their relationship with food. I offer a 14-day group program called “Making Peace with Your Plate” and the VIP Undieting Your Life one-on-one coaching program. I also offer workshops around the community and online, appear on podcasts, and teach classes to families in their homes.
Do you have recommendations for books, apps, blogs, etc?
The following books are my primary sources of inspiration for my work: Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, The Intuitive Eating Workbook by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, Intuitive Eating for Every Day by Evelyn Tribole, and Anti-Diet by Christy Harrison. The following podcasts are my go-to’s: It’s Beyond the Food by Stephanie Dodier, Undiet Your Coaching by Stephanie Dodier, and The Maintenance Phase.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://farrahfernandez.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/farrah_the_functional_foodie/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100092576176492
- Other: https://thefunctionalfoodie.myflodesk.com/healthyhabits
