— Jessie Lease

So I can just say I've been working for 35 years and I've seen a heck of a lot, um, have a lot of success with, uh, people with just generalized and I, this explains a lot of women, very few men, but a lot of women, brain fog, achy joints, um, their stomach gets really distended after they eat just these like symptoms that don't point to any one disease. Uh, I have done a lot of success with that. The success of the patient, however, is up to them. So I will tell you when I walk in a room, what I usually get, because we're all really super smart, don't tell me I have to get off dairy 'cause I'm not gonna do it and I know it doesn't agree with me and I can't take that away from me kind of thing, right? Right. So then it's just starting where the person's at. So I wouldn't take dairy away from them right away. And I'm not the one taking dairy, it's their choice. But I have to say that it's not so much, again, it's not the information I can give people the correct information whether or not they wanna make a complete dietary change, it's really up to them, which is why the modular approach is really, really effective. Um, and there is research to support that. I did research with Yale, Tufts, Dartmouth, and, and we showed that b m I improved as did attitude, behavior, and ease of following a healthful diet when you focus on just one small thing at a time. So the other reason I added motivational interviewing as a foundational element of the Food Coach Academy is because the pa the client, the person, the patient, whatever you wanna call them, is really the expert in their own life and only they know what they're up against. And so the 10 minutes they see a clinician or the hour they might see a dietician isn't enough time to really understand what their life is like. And so when I set up the, um, wait and wellness center at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, I got everyone trained in weight in, uh, motivational interviewing because I really think the patient is the expert in their own life. And the success there were people started to cry because usually when they would go into a clinician's office, they would be told what they're doing wrong and not doing right. And you don't know, like the, I do this special kind of needs assessment called, um, experience groups. And one reason might be they don't have a refrigerator that works or they don't have access to healthy food. So I cannot answer that question, won't give you an accurate representation of the science behind what I do. And the art, it's, it's a lot of art. It's really just connecting with that person because I believe that food is the ultimate connector. It's what connects us to ourselves, each other and our planet based on our decisions. And so once you have that connection with somebody, then that's what I really feel most people are craving and then we start really to go to work.