Tanya Fasnacht Jolliffe is one of the coaches that we found this month and we did a little interview with her. She impressed us with her expertise and experience.
She is a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist, Licensed Dietitian, and Certified Integrative Mental Health Professional passionate about helping people live whole and healthy lives filled with purpose.
She started as a research dietitian, she specialized in medical nutrition therapy and lifestyle behavior focused instruction to patients with end stage kidney and liver disease and those who had received solid organ transplants of a kidney, liver, or pancreas. For nearly a decade, she worked as a healthy eating expert and health coach, assisting thousands of mothers, teenagers, and adults in managing medical issues and maintaining their health using a web based platform and resources for an online health and wellness company. That’s just the beginning of her career. The best is yet to come and you are going to read it in the interview.
Her biggest obstacle was learning how to manage her passion so she can channel and deliver the right information in the right way so people can understand it and use it, and oh boy she mastered that. Her approach to coaching is focused on helping people realize that a diet, in and of itself, is not the solution to their problems. Here is what she said.
Meet Life Coach Tanya Fasnacht Jolliffe:
Name: Tanya Fasnacht Jolliffe, RDN, LD, CIMHP
Pillar: The Mind, The Body
Who is this coach for: Anyone, especially business leaders who want to find balance and create healthy environment in their work space so they can integrate health in every aspect of their life.
How they can help: Through various tools and techniques she developed to help people discover their wellness values, personality types, and lifestyle well being needs, as well as a four phased journaling program she created to help people become mindfully attuned to the habits, rules, routines, and rituals they follow relating to food and exercise.
First of all, how are you and your family doing after these Pandemic times?
We are all doing well.
How did the coronavirus pandemic affect your clients? Did it affect you at all?
I was beginning my company when the pandemic broke out, so my clients were eager to establish a lifestyle wellness approach to health management.
What are the biggest lessons that you learned in this pandemic?
Nothing is more important than your health.
Doctors can provide information, but the old saying of “trust but verify” is essential as you take charge and become your own health advocate to make the best choices for you and your family.
The Origin:
Tell us about you, your career, how you started with your coaching career?
I am a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist, Licensed Dietitian, and Certified Integrative Mental Health Professional passionate about helping people live whole, healthy lives of purpose.
I have been married to my husband Scott for over 33 years, and we live in the greater Cincinnati, Ohio, area.
We have two married children who live nearby and have enjoyed adding the title of grandparent this past year.
I started my career as a research dietitian in an NIH multi center cooperative study focused on protein calorie malnutrition in patients with alcoholic hepatitis.
I went on to specialize in medical nutrition therapy and lifestyle behavior focused instruction to patients with end stage kidney and liver disease and those who had received solid organ transplants of a kidney, liver, or pancreas.
After taking a few years off to stay at home with my small children, I RE entered the workforce with a shift in focus to health coaching and have never looked back.
For nearly a decade, I worked as a healthy eating expert and health coach, assisting thousands of mothers, teenagers, and adults in managing medical issues and maintaining their health using a web based platform and resources for an online health and wellness company.
After a corporate wide reduction in force of a third of that company, I moved into the field of transportation wellness.
I served as an onsite CDL wellness coach and then progressed to the Director of Wellness for a transportation wellness company.
As the director, I hired and trained a nationwide network of CDL wellness coaches and helped develop a cutting edge approach to transportation wellness.
Those developments led to the company’s acquisition and national recognition as one of The Nation’s Best and Brightest in Wellness in 2017.
All these experiences revealed diet culture’s breadth and impact on medical intervention outcomes, personal and family well being, and health care costs.
As I reviewed my own experiences with disordered eating and my many observations regarding lifestyle behaviors and health outcomes, the many health and well being benefits of incorporating a non diet approach to health maintenance and disease management became more and more apparent and led me to head out in a new direction.
I published a mindfulness based journaling program entitled “The Mindful Me Journey: A 40 Day Guided Journal Toward a Healthier Relationship With Food and Exercise,” which was based on the behavior management approach I used personally to break free from chronic dieting and disorder decades before.
It was released in October of 2019 and received an Amazon #1 New Release designation and has now reached international distribution.
At the same time, I decided to venture out on my own to bring non diet nutrition therapy, wellness integration, health coaching, and strategic culture design to market via a health and wellness coaching and consulting company.
Thus, L I T Wellness Solutions was born.
What was your biggest obstacle that you had to overcome in your life that made you who you are today?
Honesty is good, but learning how and when to speak honestly has undoubtedly been a journey.
My father used to tell me that it wasn’t WHAT I said but how I said it that got me in trouble as a child.
This has proven true for most of my life.
My passion can come across to some as yelling or anger, and learning how to convey information in a way people can best receive it has been an obstacle for most of my life.
But, as the saying goes, practice makes perfect, and while I know I am not perfect yet, I keep speaking and thus keep practicing to convey my heart for truth and information that helps people live their best life.
The Coaching Style:
How do you innovate with coaching your clients?
Businesses are beginning to recognize that promoting employee well being is a crucial component of good corporate citizenship and a key performance strategy for boosting morale, vitality, and productivity.
They are also discovering that it is a rising expectation among the talent they want to attract, access, and keep, and an imperative for maintaining healthcare costs.
I help companies shift their focus away from simply providing wellness programs to incorporating a wellness culture as a company core value.
What’s unique about your coaching approach?
I help people understand that diets and fitness plans only address one aspect of who they are, their physical well being.
With that limited approach, lasting health and well being transformation is challenging and has failed many people over the past few decades because it ignores the stress and triggers that influence health management efforts.
A culture of wellness is the antithesis of diet culture.
It helps people recognize and affirm what is working well in their life while learning to be honest and fair concerning what needs to change and improve to support stress reduction, mental clarity, emotional resiliency, health, and happiness.
I use various coaching strategies that help people see their values, personality, and well being more clearly and how they impact food and activity behaviors and health outcomes.
We use the information they discover to create a way of living, working, and connecting that weaves health and well being into every aspect of their life, creating a lifestyle or workplace culture that supports their physical, emotional, and mental health dimensions as well as their relational, financial, spiritual, and social well being.
What benefits do your clients get after working with you?
My individual clients benefit significantly from improved biomedical readings, weight stabilization, family life work balance, body acceptance, and irrational versus rational thought.
They also gain insight into their triggers, mindset, and choices and how they impact them mentally, physically, relationally, emotionally, financially, and spiritually.
My corporate clients benefit from connecting the vision and value of health and well being with the workplace’s people, practices, environment, and atmosphere to create a shared foundational vision of health and well being that helps their company live and work effectively within the stated company values and goals.
This culture ultimately improves productivity, promotes creativity and work quality, amplifies inclusivity, builds trust and resiliency, limits turnover, attracts diversity, boosts morale and loyalty, and reduces healthcare costs.
Do you use any specific tools to be efficient with your clients?
I have developed many tools and strategic solutions to help people discover their wellness values, personality types, and lifestyle well being needs.
I also use “The Mindful Me Journey: A 40 Day Guided Journal Toward a Healthier Relationship With Food and Exercise,” the journaling program I wrote to help people become mindfully attuned to the habits, rules, routines, and rituals they follow relating to food and exercise.
Using this four phased guided journal, clients use non diet intuitive principles and journaling to get in touch with their bodies physically and emotionally as they journey away from reactive diet culture and disordered practices toward nourishing choices for health and wholeness.
This program also helps bridge the gap between eating disorders and intuitive eating.
Group leaders, health coaches, counselors, dietetic professionals, and treatment centers can use this tool to help clients identify triggering food and activity emotions and feelings.
When clients develop expressive language skills surrounding triggers and what they are experiencing, it allows health professionals to get the most from their coaching and counseling time together.
The Impact:
If you had a super megaphone that, when you speak into, the whole world will hear your message, what would you say?
Diet culture is a propaganda lie you have believed for far too long.
There is way more to healthy living and lifestyle well being than the number on the scale, the number of reps you can do, or the size of clothes you wear.
It’s time to live in truth and IGNITE the change within for lasting health and well being transformation.
What is the greatest lesson you have learned in your life?
As a senior in college, I heard Oprah say on her show one afternoon that you can have it all, but you can’t have it all at the same time.
That saying has resonated with me ever since and allowed me to live with a balance that brought family and career success without unnecessary stress and burnout.
I have enjoyed parenting and career seasons that continue to enrich my life and enhance my skills simultaneously.
You indeed can have it all, just at different seasons of life.
Your final thoughts?
Moving away from diet culture to embrace and master attuned eating and intuitive living is an individual process.
It requires targeted tools and mindful strategies to make the shift, as well as the support of an integrative coach that can help people bring all dimensions of well being into focus.
We are each an experiment of one, and the path to lasting health and well being transformation is individual, there is no one size fits all.
I love helping people and companies discover all the well being puzzle pieces and how to put them together to create their perfect picture for life, health, and happiness.
Where Can You Find Tanya Fasnacht Jolliffe?
If you liked this interview and if you’d love to embody a healthier life and master attuned eating, go to http://www.litwellnesssolutions.com/ and see how Tanya can help you.
If you want to learn more about her, go to https://www.litwellnesssolutions.com/speaking. You can get her book here.
If you’d like to get a glimpse of her coaching, make sure to subscribe to her YouTube channel, or follow her Instagram and Twitter accounts.
If you’d like to connect more personally with her, you can do that through Facebook and LinkedIn or by sending her a message on her Email [email protected]. It was an honor having this interview with her.
