A post by integrative health and nutrition coach Marissa Vicario:
Thank you to Barbara for letting me take over her blog today! Many of you don’t know me so I’m excited for the opportunity to say hello. I’ve been health and nutrition coaching and writing my healthy living blog, Where I Need to Be, for about 7 years. I always knew I wanted to write a book, but until I found my passion in nutrition and wellness, I never knew what I would write about. So today, I thought I’d tell you a little bit about my journey and my inspiration behind my new book, Your Holistically Hot Transformation: Embrace a Healthy Lifestyle Free of Dieting, Confusion and Self-Judgment.
People often ask me if I was always as healthy as I am now and I laugh because I wasn’t at all! My life as a single, corporate professional in New York City meant that I traveled, worked and dated a lot. My meals consisted of takeout, a slice of pizza or whatever I could scrap together in my kitchen – like fluorescent orange cheese melted on top of butter crackers and topped with salsa. I never cooked. I didn’t know how, but now I teach sold-out cooking classes in New York City!
Your Holistically Hot Transformation is a peek at my own health transformation and the lessons I’ve learned along the way. I wrote it because even as I type this, I’m sitting in a cafe listening to two women who are co-workers talk about the office juice cleanse, which is inevitably full of high-sugar juices, and how hungry they are. It pains me that women put themselves through this and I see first-hand everyday that there’s a need for more honest and straightforward conversations around wellness. That’s exactly what my book delivers.
The health and wellness industry is at a crossroads. Evidenced by the growing rates of both obesity and eating disorders, women are simultaneously starving and overfeeding themselves, and it goes beyond food. They’re starved for a more meaningful, purpose-driven life and overfed by media messages telling them who and how they should look and be. As a result, they’re using food to punish or self-medicate. Every day I turn on the television, open a magazine or read an article on a popular wellness web site touting a new workout, promoting a trendy diet or spouting misinformed advice.
As a gender, our relationship with food has become severely damaged and something needs to change, but the question many women have is where to start and how to do it with limited time and/or money.
Women constantly tell me there’s too much information and contradictory wellness advice to sift through. They’re confused, misinformed and pressed for time. I totally get it and that’s exactly why I do what I do, so I can help people make sense of it all.
I whole-hardheartedly believe it doesn’t have to be as complicated as we make it. This book is my way of making it clear and simple for those who feel lost, overwhelmed, stuck and confused and if it can empower just one woman to feel that she has the knowledge, tools and motivation to make nutritious choices and take care of herself the best way she knows how, then it has done its job.
If you’d like to explore Your Holistically Hot Transformation for yourself, download a free chapter.
Already convinced you need this book in your life, purchase it in paperback on Amazon.
Marissa Vicario is a Certified Integrative Health and Nutrition Coach, Women’s Health & Lifestyle Expert, and the author of Your Holistically Hot Transformation: Embrace a Healthy Lifestyle Free of Dieting, Confusion and Self-Judgment. She teaches women how to trust themselves to make slimming, nutritious and energizing choices without fad dieting.