Hi, I’m Gillian Hood-Gabrielson, the founder of Healthier Outcomes. You’d probably think a fitness expert is someone who has always been healthy and fit. Well, you’d be wrong if you thought that about me.

I’ve been training and coaching clients for over ten years, but that doesn’t mean it was easy to eat healthy, exercise regularly and maintain my weight. On the contrary, since age 13 I have had to battle with weight gain and weight loss over and over again.

I spent a good part of my childhood and teenage years engaged in emotional overeating and obsessing over food. I then spent the majority of my 20’s dieting. There aren’t many diets that I haven’t tried. Since diets are supposed to provide you the guidance and support to lose weight, you can imagine my frustration and angst, when, at one point in a 5 year period, I actually gained 40 pounds by dieting!

Discovering Exercise
In my early 20’s I discovered exercise. I was never active as a kid and I didn’t play sports, however, I really got into exercise and was able to take off 30 pounds in six months. Then my friends started asking me to help them exercise and show them how to effectively lose weight and keep it off. Like it was for so many of my colleagues, what had started off as exercise for myself blossomed into a career as a personal fitness trainer and coach.

It wasn’t until an upsetting and stressful call with a family member  that I began to discover the missing link between losing weight and keeping it off. Up to the point of this epiphany I had been studying for my certification exam and hired my own personal trainer to continue my weight loss and fitness journey. Part of this process involved a lower calorie eating plan and writing down what I ate in a journal.

Immediately following the distressing call with the family member, I hung up the phone, and much to my surprise, went straight to the kitchen and started eating before I knew what happened. Because I had been writing down what I was eating, for the first time in my life I was able to see that I was eating emotionally. This realization not only had a profound impact on me personally and emotionally, but it has been at the heart of my work with clients.

Compulsive Overeating
Discovering my emotional eating patterns was a huge revelation for me. I was compelled to research as much as I could about eating disorders. I knew I wasn’t anorexic or bulimic, and finally discovered a condition called “compulsive overeating”. This seemed to aptly describe what I was doing.

Although I discovered this pattern (which I later could trace back to starting when I was 8 years old) I continued to follow the eating plan my trainer gave me (except when I binged!). For the most part, I followed it very strictly and did my exercise and wound up losing over 13 inches in two months. I was so proud of myself! Three days after getting these results, I went on a four day binge. Needless to say, this was a disappointing set back. Rather than get down on myself, I was determined to not only learn why was I sabotaging myself but how to overcome this once and for all.

Certified Personal Trainer
During this period of discovery and research I became a certified personal trainer and got my degree in Exercise Physiology. From 1994 to 1998 I successfully grew my personal training business and began to garner a respected reputation at what I do, due to the success my clients were getting with their fitness and overall health.

Despite all this, my clients would come back, frustrated that they were not being able to keep off the weight they lost working with me. I didn’t feel comfortable giving them an eating plan as I am not a registered dietician.

It didn’t take long to determine that the issues and eating patterns of clients were quite similar to my own. They too were compulsively overeating, and just like me they were also sabotaging their efforts. There was nothing that I had learned in nutrition classes that addressed this situation. These “real-life” issues, coupled with the research and study I had done to that point, finally led me to the realization that dieting was not going to be the answer to helping myself or my clients. Of course, this flew in the face of conventional wisdom as we are led by the major dieting companies that dieting does, in fact, work. The truth, however, is that it doesn’t.

Phone Coaching
In 1998 I discovered a quietly emerging approach to helping people get and stay motivated to exercise that was soon to revolutionize the way people got in shape. It was fitness coaching done over the telephone, as opposed to in-person training.

After getting certified as a fitness coach, I began offering this alternative means of getting and staying in shape. The more clients that I coached in this method the more and more I saw incredible results with my clients. They exercised on their own; they were consistent, motivated and getting strong and fit. It was amazing to me that coaching clients over the phone was even more effective than being there in person!

However, there was still one problem. Many of my clients didn’t lose the weight they wanted to. This was about to change.

Intuitive Eating
At least 80% of all the clients I have worked with, over the years, on fitness are compulsive overeaters. It’s a very common situation. Most of these clients were also professional dieters. By this I mean they tried multiple diets. The issue wasn’t whether they would lose weight, but how much they would gain as they shifted to one diet after the other. In fact, I was still experiencing this same problem with little relief because all I knew was dieting.

Through the fitness coaching community I met a dietician who had an entirely different approach, called Intuitive Eating. I started working with her to understand this new method. I was shocked when she told me she wasn’t going to tell me what to eat. She also said I could eat whatever I wanted as long as I was hungry and stopped when I was full. I didn’t believe her. Everything I learned up to that point about eating and dieting was at odds with what I was being exposed to.

Eating What I Want & Loving It
As we progressed in our work together, I was learning what was true hunger and fullness. We tracked how I ate and for the first time I began to recognize the patterns of eating as it related to my emotional state. I was beginning to directly deal with my feelings instead of eating them away.

We worked on self-esteem and focusing on myself. During this entire process we never once talked about losing weight, yet I began losing weight! The less we focused on weight loss and dealt with the issues that caused the weight gains, it came off.

Because of this I was able to learn how to eat to feed my body and give it what it needs to keep the weight off. And the best part – there are no “bad” foods anymore. I eat food with high nutrition value, but I also eat cheese, hamburgers, chocolate, fast food, and my favorite, french fries! Needless to say, I haven’t been on a diet since we completed the program over six years ago. As a result, I’ve been in the absolute best shape, mentally, emotionally and physically of my entire life.

Transition Past Obsession & Guilt
I’ve since combined my years of experience as a personal fitness trainer with my own research and expert knowledge on Intuitive Eating to develop my own comprehensive Intuitive Eating coaching program. It didn’t take long to discover that the logical approach to Intuitive Eating I was teaching was the answer my clients had been searching for.

I have been coaching a wide diversity of people in the areas of Intuitive Eating now for over 6 years. The relief and exuberance my clients feel when they learn how to transition past the obsession, guilt, pain, and isolation that compulsive overeaters live with, regularly brings tears not only to their eyes, but mine as well.

To be doing something that so profoundly changes the lives of people such as this process does could not be anymore joyous or fulfilling for me. Of course, it helps that the clients not only lose weight, but they are equipped with the proper tools and understanding on keeping it off without dieting!

The Beginning
While this is the end of the story behind how Healthier Outcomes and myself came to reach this point, our story, and the stories of the hundreds of people we work with, is only the beginning. My sincere hope is that by reading this story you come to realize that if emotional eating is a challenge you’re facing, you’re not alone. And most importantly, there is a solution beyond dieting.

Thank you for taking the time to visit Healthier Outcomes and on behalf of everyone involved with our company, I look forward to hearing your personal success story using the Healthier Outcomes’ approach.

To Your Health,

Gillian Hood-Gabrielson