Meet Coach Ethan
At age 22, I was 312 pounds and had been dieting for a decade. My midwest, suburban upbringing often meant each member of my family was either “on” or “off” the fad diet on any given day, and I was no different. Food was reward, entertainment, comfort, and celebration. Food was vacation, the weekend, boredom or procrastination. And, depending on the diet I was trying at the time, food was a point system, a “cheat”, or, most of all, something to restrict as much as possible, and something I would be able to control if only I had more “discipline” or “willpower”.
All of this skyrocketed when I had total freedom going off to college. My “Freshman 15” was a “Freshman 50”, and I remember my family barely recognizing me coming home to visit after my first year living on my own. I was a natural hard worker and entrepreneur, and was working 12+ hours a day, living on what to this day is easily the least healthy diet I have ever heard of.
In 2016, after maintaining this lifestyle for years, everything changed and the switch finally flipped in my head. At the time, I owned a successful boutique talent management firm, with an office in downtown Los Angeles that I had started my junior year of college, and had the fortune to be doing full time by the time I graduated college. The hustle was real, and I poured myself endlessly into my clients, my team, and my business. Everyone but myself.
If everyone’s body, tastes, schedules, home environment, community and resources are all totally individual to them, I realized, how could millions of people all follow a matching list of “good” and “bad” foods and all expect results? I also realized that any fixed dieting program didn’t take into account my actual schedule. What if my diet plan tells me to eat something but I have a wedding, a friend’s birthday, work travel or a death in the family?
I started rethinking everything I thought I knew about food and exercise, and diligently worked to unpack my entire mindset and relationship with all of it. Then I got to work. I used myself as an experiment in ignoring all of my usual dieting behavior, and instead focusing on a combination of habit development and mindset shifts. One by one my habits changed, and over a 1.5 year period I lost (and have kept off) 130 pounds.
This completely changed my life. It had nothing to do with the scale, but everything to do with the person I became through those 18 months. The mindset shifts, my life priorities, the people around me… everything improved and evolved, and I felt like I had unlocked endless tools that improved my own life and ultimately could improve many other peoples’ lives, too.
Deciding I wanted to use this to help others as much as possible, I became certified as an Integrative Nutrition Health Coach from the Institute of Integrative Nutrition, and began working with my mother-in-law as my first “client”. We worked for a year together, she lost 50 pounds and got off all of her Diabetes medication. I started doing a group workout class for fun (and for free) with my wife’s group of college friends, every week for more than a year. Slowly but surely, I was helping anyone who would talk to me about any of this, both to gain experience myself, and as an investment into the future business I knew I wanted to start but was too scared to.
One Friday, a music industry friend called to ask if he could hire me as his health coach. He asked for details on my company, services and to send him my website. I told him I would get back to him Monday, spent the weekend putting together the entire concept I had planned in my head but was too scared to launch, and got back to him Monday with my website, logo, and services offered. He became my first paying client.
I started adjusting my music business work hours to invest more time into my health coaching business that was steadily growing, with new referrals coming in after each client success, and ultimately got to a place where I was splitting my day 50/50 between the two. Many people thought I was insane, as I was rescheduling meetings with some of the most high-power entertainment executives in the world to talk to my mother-in-law about her protein intake, or to navigate a nutrition label with a client who was grocery shopping and needed help in real time.
Finally, after much soul searching, I took the leap, dissolved my music company that I had ran successfully for a decade, and poured myself fully into my health coaching work. I didn’t just dissolve my music company, but I dissolved a part of my identity, as my music work was the thing every person in my life associated me with.
Fast-forward to today, and our work at Optimized Health utilizes many of the tools I learned in my own journey to help others of all backgrounds, whether their goals are weight-focused or simply to move and feel better daily, and to discover a sustainable health plan that lasts for life. We have five coaches on the team and our goal is to provide the most customized, personalized health coaching we can, navigating real-life scenarios in weekly coaching sessions across our Five Pillars Of Health: Nutrition, Movement, Sleep, Stress and Mindset.
I went from 312 to 186lbs, from not being able to carry in the groceries to holding a 10-minute plank, and from not being able to walk up the stairs to completing two half marathons. More importantly, I went from someone who did not understand my body to someone who can describe with certainty what makes me feel, move and live my best life every single day.
When people think I am insane for leaving my high-paying, glamorous lifestyle to do what I do now, I remind them that I go to bed every night thrilled to wake up and start the next day.