'I focus purely on happiness': A different approach to weight loss

 

MILWAUKEE (CBS 58) --- Losing weight is often a common new year's resolution but by the middle of the year, most people have already abandoned some of those healthy habits they started back in January.

One Milwaukee woman says weight loss is more about the mind than the body. Vicki Buss is a life coach with a unique appropriate to weight management.

"I don't know of anybody else who does weight loss coaching the way I do because I focus purely on happiness," she said. When it comes to weight loss, Vicki says happiness is the key. Through her coaching practice, she's debunking diet culture and says her clients are seeing the results.

"The food is just a short-term pleasure. That's never going to fix an emotional problem so we're working on the emotional part so when you get happy, weight loss is actually easy which is hard to believe," she said.

Vicki says when it comes to the health and wellness industry, there isn’t enough emphasis put on mental health. "All the diets work. Plant based works, KETO works, Weight Watchers works. I've tried them all and they work but the piece that's typically missing is the piece about your thoughts, your brain...the mental health part of it," she said.

Vicki meets weekly with her clients for 45-minute phone sessions. They talk about the previous week and unpack things that may have happened to impact their wellness journey.

Vicki says it's not about spending hours in the gym or choosing the right diet, it's about training your mind to give your body what it needs from a positive space.

She wants her clients to be able to pinpoint the emotions that may be attached to their food choices. "They're seeking comfort; they're seeking a better feeling inside them so what I do is try to get them to think differently," she said.

Vicki says her coaching method was born out of personal experience from her own weight loss journey.

"I found this correlation between when I was happy… it was easier to maintain and lose the weight but when there were challenges in life, then my weight would go back up," she said.

Vicki says it was when she became severely depressed that she started working to maintain her happiness and realized that the weight came off. She's kept it off for over a decade and now she's coaching folks to be able to do the same.

"I got training in life coaching and also training in how other life coaches did weight loss and it didn't resonate with the way I had done it for myself, so I created kind of my own process," she said.

Vicki says there is no perfect size, it's all about feeling good about yourself. She says when you put your mental health first, the ripple effect yields better results than any diet or exercise routine and that is what she’s seeing in her clients.

"They're improving their careers, they're improving their relationships with their families, all while they're losing weight," she said.