Willpower isn’t real, it’s just a myth. What’s real is creating a healthy environment where habits can thrive.

Ethan Schiff is an Integrative Health Coach and the founder of Optimized Health. He has a passion for helping everyday people unlearn the harms caused by diet culture, achieve their health goals, and sustain results for life!

Ethan shares that, for the majority of his life, he has been on a diet. He shares that dieting began in his adolescence in a family where dieting was a regular part of life. He recalls a harmful cycle of yo-yo dieting that eventually resulted in him reaching a peak weight of 312 pounds. This precipitated a quest to unlearn everything he had been taught about nutrition, weight loss, and health, in order to create a new approach. Experimenting first on himself, he lost 130lbs, which transformed his entire life.

The key to achieving a healthy weight is building healthy habits gradually and focusing on your emotional well-being, including understanding stress eating, body image issues, and how mental health impacts our relationship with food and fitness. The hardest part isn’t starting; it’s staying consistent and not letting one off-day derail everything. Self-compassion is the key to consistency—no one is a failure because willpower didn’t show up today. It is essential to understand, deeply, that one moment doesn’t define you.

Show notes:
🏃‍♂️ Ethan helps people achieve their health goals: practical wellness for your real life. 02:31
😇 Ethan’s personal journey: the process of unlearning. 06:06
✌️ A two-pronged approach: habit development and understanding emotional health. 08:46
⭕ Diet culture feels like a battle with ourselves, but Ethan chose to reconnect with himself. 13:32
⚠️ When your self-worth is dependent on external factors, it attacks your identity and leads to a deep spiral. 16:23
🍀 Approaching it with intention: focus on developing one habit a month while making adjustments. 20:03
🔑 Willpower and consistency: Inspiring yourself instead of comparing yourself to external standards. 25:31
🦹‍♀️ Unrealistic expectation of waking up and feeling like a superhero every day. 30:07
🎯 The key to connecting with ourselves: I will check in with myself, not with others. 34:26
🤓 We need practical advice that fits into real life. 36:32
🤩 Ethan offers free consultations. 39:37