Sarah Menlove is a Certified Mastery level coach through the Health Coach Institute. She specializes in body image and intuitive eating last, helping clients around the world break free from body shame and restrictive eating to live their most bold, authentic lives.

Sarah combines principles of intuitive eating, health at every size, self compassion, transformational coaching techniques and energy healing to support her clients to re-build trust with their body and themselves.

In today’s episode, Sarah shares her journey into health coaching, and how sustaining a stress fracture changed her life, for the better. She shares three of the most powerful things she learned during this time, and how she found herself and her joy.

Her body had been giving her signs that the way she was eating and exercising wasn’t working any longer, but it wasn’t until the injury that she started to listed. At that moment, she was forced away from her main passion at the time, competitive triathlon. She hadn’t had a regular period in a number of years and had a very restrictive, ‘health’ focused diet. She realized during this time of transition how much her worth, value and identity was attached to her abilities as an athlete and her body looking a certain way. Through her own journey out of competitive sport and the associated struggles with body image and regaining her menstrual cycle, she began her own healing process.

As Sarah shares, she went from thinking she lost herself and her joy, to actually finding herself. She never imagined that she could feel the way that she does in her body or that she could have the freedom with food that she does today. As she so beautifully shares, our worth is not determined by a body size. We carry this self-worth within us, we are all born inherently worthy and when we tap into that place of knowing our inner worth, we really are capable of amazing and incredible things in this world.

As a NZ age group representative triathlete and personal trainer, she took "physical health" to the extreme. This led to highly restrictive eating habits, an obsession with weight and the loss of her period for over 4 years. When she sustained a stress fracture in 2016, she was forced to look at what it really meant to be healthy and began the long and deeply challenging process of regaining her period and healing her relationship with food and her body.

Through the power of coaching and by investing in her own coach and online group coaching programs she was able to reclaim her identity from that of an "athlete" and free herself from food and body shame. Four years ago, Sarah would never have imagined it was possible to be where she is today. She believes that "when women feel safe, comfortable, confident and free in their own body, they become liberated in all other areas of life and they free up precious brain space to share their gifts with the world." Sarah holds the vision that when women do this work and access their inner power we have the potential to change the world.

“What I’ve noticed from my own experience, and the women that I’ve worked with, is that body image healing goes far beyond food and body. When women feel safe, comfortable, confident and free in their own body, they become liberated in all other areas of life. They free up precious brain space to share their gifts with the world. I believe that when women do this work and access their inner power, we have the potential to change the world.”

— Sarah Menlove

Tune in on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7bZHrtjAzbksbLWNaak1NM

Tune in on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/stories-of-inspiring-joy/id1510488632

To learn more Sarah and her work visit her website http://sarahmenlovehealthcoaching.com/ and on Instagram @sarahmenlove.health and you can find her private Facebook community here

Stories of Inspiring Joy is a production of Seek The Joy Media and created by Sydney Weiss. To learn more and submit your story, click here.