I had the pleasure of interviewing Natasha Leigh Bray. Natasha is a Bestselling Co-author of She Is Unstoppable, and Certified Nutrition & Transformation Coach for busy women who want to take their power back, learn to love and believe in themselves again and experience rapid transformation in their health, lives and eating habits. Natasha lives in South Wales, UK with her 2 year old son Jenson.
Thank you so much for joining us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path as a nutrition & transformation coach?
I was that kid in school who was bullied for being overweight. I genuinely hated myself and my life.
When I hit my late teens, I tried anything and everything I could to lose weight. Even things I am ashamed of: Weight Watchers, Atkins, eating ‘half meals’ and taking diet pills using laxatives. I lost 49 lbs and still looked in the mirror thinking I was fat.
My relationship with food and myself was terrible and I seriously damaged my health. I struggled with binge eating, food addiction, exercise addiction and ended up with adrenal fatigue, fertility issues and 2 slipped discs in my back as my body was so weak.
The fertility issues were the final wake up call for me, as I desperately wanted children some day and deep down I knew I was damaging myself. At the time I was working with people who had drug and alcohol addictions, helping them break the addictive cycle. It gave me a huge insight into my eating and exercise behaviours and I knew what I was doing was not healthy.
I started learning more about how to heal my body naturally through nutrition and a combined it with my career background in psychology and addictive behaviour change into a holistic approach that focuses on body and mind transformation. I successfully healed my body, going on to have my miracle baby who is now 2.
But I also healed my bad relationship with food by finally working on the deeper issues at the root of everything: my relationship with myself. I see so many women struggling with the same issues I went through who don’t have enough awareness of the importance of an approach that not only addresses nutrition, but also involves working on self love and your thoughts and beliefs for long lasting transformation.
How have your personal challenges informed your career path?
My personal challenges have hugely informed my career path. I am a very spiritual person and I believe all the struggles have led me to my soul’s purpose. I went through those experiences so that I could stop other women going through the same mistakes.
My business is a direct reflection of my own personal health journey, the learnings, the struggles and successes. I learnt the hard way what works and what doesn’t. I was meant to walk this path to make an impact on the people I am here to serve. I lost too many years of my life in a battle of self hatred and causing myself damage in the pursuit of the ‘perfect’ body.
When you focus on nourishing the body and mind with good nutrition and self love, food no longer becomes a battle and weight loss becomes easy. Just helping one more person realise that makes it all worthwhile.
Can you share five pieces of advice to other nutrition coaches to help their patients to thrive?
- The importance of a body AND mind approach is often missed. This is why so many women get trapped in the yo-yo diet cycle. It’s very hard to help someone make sustainable changes to their nutrition without understanding the psychology behind change and the barriers that can come up for them due to their thoughts and feelings about themselves and what they deserve.
- Self worth and the clients relationship with themselves is a huge contributing factor to the success rate of a nutrition coaching programme. If a client has low self worth, they will not be able to stick to the changes required of them as they don’t value themselves enough to spend time on their nutrition or exercising more. When a client presents with obvious low self worth and deeper food issues, I advise working with them around their self worth prior to the nutritional changes for greater client success in what I refer to as a 2 stage process.
- Identify and treat the root cause. If the client presents with autoimmune health conditions it is very likely they have leaky gut. Use a gut healing protocol with them to get their body in the best place to better absorb nutrients and gain the most from your nutrition plan. Also remember that there are thousands of people with undiagnosed autoimmune conditions and they are much more common in women. It may be worth learning more around this so you can spot the symptoms with your clients and support them accordingly.
- Food or sugar addiction is very common and almost always a sign of deep rooted beliefs around the client feeling they are not enough or not lovable. In these instances food is often used a replacement for love. If you don’t feel comfortable working on these deeper issues please refer them onto someone who can help them with this as a nutrition plan alone is not enough to help them change such deeply ingrained beliefs around food..
- Don’t promote or expect perfectionism or make your client feel they have let you or themselves down. Perfectionism and feelings of failure lead to giving up completely or binge eating and disordered eating habits. I have had far more success with my clients with a flexible eating plan and being understanding if they go off track- making them feel guilty will just lead to shame and self sabotage behaviours that you really want to avoid.
Social media and reality TV create a venue for people to share their personal stories. Do you think more transparency about your personal story can help or harm your field of work? Can you explain?
I definitely feel sharing your personal story can help your work to a certain extent. Since I have become more open about my own experiences I have seen huge success in my business. My clients also love the fact I am real and relatable and that I am not perfect. Your ideal client can connect with you better and is more likely to chose you from all the other nutrition coaches out there if they personally trust you and feel you understand them on that deeper level. However there is a fine line. Your sharing should be relevant to your clients and serve a purpose for helping, healing or inspiring others.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Do you have a story about how that was relevant to your life?
“The most important relationship you will ever work on is your relationship with yourself.” It really does transform everything. My life has changed so much from what it use to be all from the power of self development and working on self love. The final layer of the inner work through Rapid Transformational Therapy saw my business quadruple in revenue in the space of 7 months, reinforcing for me the power on working on YOU.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I would love to inspire a movement around helping people recognise their worth and learning to truly love and accept themselves. So many of life’s problems would disappear and the world would be a happier place.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
You can follow She is Unstoppable at http://instagram.com/she_is_unstoppable_bookon Instagram.
You can follow me on Facebook over at www.facebook.com/guiltfreehealthor my instagram account @guiltfreehealth.
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!