This week, Samantha talks with Havilah Vangroll of Have Strategy Coaching.  Havilah is a nutrition and health coach specializing in teaching the “how” to have a healthy life.  Food and nutrition is what she loves, but she has also learned over time that she needs to focus not only on these things, but the person as a whole.  She understands that having difficult conversations around food and nutrition with your family can be hard, too, so if they aren’t on board with your health-oriented goals, she wants to help with that.

Havilah began acquiring her skills when she was a child because she was raised by a mom who was really into health and food and nutrition.  She grew up not realizing that other people weren’t learning the same things about food as she was.  When she started her own family, she didn't know how much of a challenge these things would be for her.  Her son had food allergies growing up and both he and she herself ended up with bad acid reflux.  

She wasn’t doing well with her own stress, her daughter was sick, and her son had issues with what he couldn’t eat, and something was wrong.  It turned out that she needed to cut dairy out of her diet, which helped with her acid reflux, but it didn't solve the emotional side of things and her stress.  Havilah explains that serotonin, melatonin, and all of these hormones are produced in your gut, not your brain.  So, it isn’t emotional eating, there’s a physiological response to food that happens in your gut that makes you feel happy.

Havilah is a stress starver (not eater), which is a problem just as much as stress eating.  Just after getting her son’s acid-reflux under control, her daughter began to struggle with brain tumors.  She has since gotten them under control, but the struggle that she endured mentally has taught her more about herself than anything else.  All of these things got her into personal development.  

She started out being a cooking coach during the first break she got from her family stresses.  This came from a place of wanting to help people understand the basic principle of how to cook and how to connect to food in a different way.  Eventually, though, she needed to find a way to “function forward” when her daughter went through a second bout of brain tumors.  The second round brought clarity to what was good, right, or indifferent in her life and in her family’s life.  

On top of all of this, she was dealing with her father’s liver failure and a catastrophic achilles injury that kept her from being able to walk.  This got her into a dark place.  It was then that she realized that she needed to get into a healthier headspace herself.  So, she had to get back into self-improvement.  This caused her to get into a more whole-self approach.  The goal with her and her coaching wasn’t just to work on the outside parts of people, but to work on the inside parts.  She thinks about it as having to get through a concrete wall to be able to get to those inside parts.

Havilah is a person who gets stuff done, but there’s a cost to that “get it done” ability, and that’s an emotional disconnect with herself.  This then causes a disconnect to her own spirituality, which got her into a very dark place.  She had to hire a mindset and vision coach to get her out of that dark, sticky place.  Havilah can’t do it all and doesn’t have it all figured out.  It was hard for her to figure out that she didn’t have to do everything by herself.  

You always have a choice about how you respond to the things that life throws your way.

Havilah’s Hot Takes:

How to get in touch with Havilah:

Email - thatcookingcoach@gmail.com

FB - HAVe Strategy Coaching