About Denise Holz: Weight Loss Coach
My experience as a nutritionist working at a weight loss clinic long ago, as well as my own personal experience with emotional eating from a young age, has shown me that most people know how to eat, they just don’t do it. I enrolled in coaching school to learn how to help people discover and change their inner causes to have real sustainable change.
Beyond this, I get to witness over and over again that the ways people needed to grow for weight loss, were the ways their heart wanted them to grow – for a richer life.
I received my Bachelor of Science degree in Nutrition from Washington State University in 1986 and my certification in professional coaching from the Academy of Coach Training in Bellevue, WA (now inviteChange in Edmonds) in 2004 – the year I started Enlightened Weight Loss. I have earned the Professional Certified Coach (PCC) credential from the International Coach Federation (ICF).
To make sure I deliver the best service and information, I regularly attend seminars, workshops, and retreats related to nutrition, emotional eating, and personal growth. I also find that my clients are my greatest teachers.
To learn more about me, scroll down to read my personal story with emotional eating.
If You Would Like to Explore
how we might work together, please email me or call me at
(206) 24-COACH (242-6224).
I look forward to speaking with you.
My Personal Story with Emotional Eating
I started emotional eating at a very early age. My father, who lived through the Armenian Genocide during which hunger was a constant reality, loved to see me eat. I easily won his affections by eating—too much and too often.
Once I discovered how to use food as a tool to manage feelings, needs, and desires other than hunger, a painful pattern of compulsive eating began to dominate my emotional life. I learned to be a quiet “good girl” by subduing my energy with too much food. I found a comforting friend in food when I wasn’t allowed to take ballet class. And when my parents divorced, it was all too easy to stuff my feelings of being invisible with food.
I did finally get to take ballet classes, but not as often as I wanted. And of course there was the dancer’s uniform: the revealing leotard and tights. I over-ate to quell the energy I couldn’t express through dance, and then my heavy thighs reinforced my deep sense of inadequacy. Food filled my need to dance and love and accept myself, but the comfort was fleeting. Like a caged bird, I became trapped in a vicious cycle.
In an effort to ease my growing insecurity, I would binge and then try to recover with either a diet or fast. As a chronic compulsive overeater, I fell even deeper into the cycle and a daily battle with control.
Fortunately, in college, a curiosity about my body and its true biological needs awakened in me. I longed to understand how my body wanted to eat. On a much deeper level, I longed to be set free. So, I decided to study nutrition.
For the first time in my life, I learned how my body works. I even learned how to eat in order to lose weight. I also began to uncover my emotional reasons for turning to food and how my extra weight was serving me. Through a rich process of self-discovery, I started to write a more positive and truthful story for my life and alter the dynamics that caused me to overeat. Over time, I got just what I was missing through all those years of emotional eating: more freedom and confidence, more of my genuine self, and even more dancing.
That was over 30 years ago, and I’m happy to report it has stuck. Today, I have a charmed life in Seattle, WA with my husband, kitty and Bernese Mountain Dog, Wally Bear.