Wellness Reimagined: 5 Things That Should Be Done To Improve and Reform The Health & Wellness Industry
This was an interview with Maria Angelova & Dr Lara Zibarras - initially published on Medium
Thank you so much for doing this interview. It is an honor. Our readers would love to learn more about you and your personal background. Can you please share your personal backstory? What has brought you to this point in your life?
Thank you so much for having me. I am a registered psychologist (I completed my PhD in Psychology in London about 13 years ago) and have worked in both academia and as a freelance consultant. During my training years, I was also recovering from an eating disorder. This experience sparked an interest in nutrition and years later I trained as a health and nutrition coach. However, I was trained in a weight-centric approach, so with my first few clients the focus was weight loss, until I learnt about intuitive eating. Now, in my coaching practice, I focus on food freedom as an ethos and help women use both mindset and habits to create a sustainable healthful lifestyle (without focusing on either weight loss or food restriction).
What is your “why” behind the work that you do? What fuels you?
Having experienced, and recovered from, two eating disorders, I’m very aware of how damaging diet culture can be. As with many of my clients, I’ve tried all the diets, all the healthy eating plans, and they helped me create an extremely disordered relationship with food. It was only in discovering “food freedom” through intuitive eating that I’ve finally healed my relationship with food and my body image. This is 100% what fuels my passion to help women create a healthier relationship with food and their bodies, all without food restriction.
What are some of the most interesting or exciting new projects you are working on now?
My most exciting project to date is my Food Freedom Matters program. I spent (literally) thousands of hours reading books, research papers, attending courses and seminars to really understand why diets don’t work in the long-term (and why we continue to fail on diets). I wanted to understand the science and psychology behind binges and emotional eating, and then to create a program where women could go from feeling out of control around food, to totally in charge and confident. I wanted to empower women so that they had all the knowledge and understanding (including mindset, habits) of how to actually to create a sustainable healthful lifestyle (without restricting food), so that they never had to start over on a Monday again.