During her early years as a health professional in continued education, she heard other practitioners fearing that people would all get well and they would no longer have work or be needed.

Ethically, she  felt, “If I know how to help someone feel better, why would I hold that back?” She decided to simply do her best to deliver and see what happens.

Guess what? After over 30 years of delivering, what she found is that people DO get better, and they don’t need their practitioner so much, but people are mortal, life changes, new generations all have to learn, and we still need a trusted mentor to rely on that respects us enough to know they don’t need to hold our hand forever.

She believes every person counts! People need a strong individual baseline for success and throwing them in with a generic group program without that does not work. While the camaraderie and social aspects of groups are important and beneficial to the psyche, they are not enough to carry someone in their quiet challenges alone. Each member of the group must be strong to be strong as a whole. With a tailored concierge-style approach focusing on the individual, she spends less time and gets better long-term results than any group program.

By giving intense attention to an individuals health, and teaching them how to integrate healthy changes into real life, answering the quesitons as they come up, and providing any needed support up front; she helps them to learn their body, their things that work for them, so people can feel in control of their health and feel great!

She has so much experience translating healthy lifestyle to people that they are able to quickly learn, while gaining the strength to be independent. She then becomes a mentor they can rely on when they need it, while she is freed up to help the next person.

She would rather see you while out on a fun adventure enjoying life than see you in repeatedly the office, suffering. It’s her goal to help make living a full life a reality for you.

With the honor and priviledge of working so closely with people in some of their most human moments, she believe it’s important for people to know it’s ok to be human, and she is human too.

With all the things shared with her through peoples journeys, in honor of your story, your struggles, your triumphs, Sydney shares below some of hers, in the hope to comfort, uplift, and inspire you in return.

She was the oldest of six and learned when Mom wasn’t feeling well, delegating was the best way to get some free time time to play.  When siblings were crying or hungry if she could teach them how to help themselves, they would feel better and everyone could be free to laugh and play.

That perspective still caries over into her work with clients today.

Sydney’s Story  (short version)

Building the pieces

Sydney loves to be active and began teaching exercise in 1987. Looking back she see’s what a strong foundation physical activity provides for health and everything builds from there. Recognizing that nutrition was often a missing link to people’s success, she added nutrition consulting to her services by 1997.

Through a continuing education seminar she attended, Sydney learned that what she was doing was providing two of the three components of “therapeutic lifestyle change” programs aka Lifestyle Therapy for people.

Lifestyle Therapy has well over 100 years of  research establishing its ability to prevent or reverse numerous health conditions, so it made sense why people were getting such good health results.

She observed that just when people were starting to feel better and get results, life would happen and they would sometimes fall off the wagon, get stuck, or go backwards.

At that point it became clear that addressing stress was needed. People need relief to turbo charge the results from exercise and nutrition, and help keep what they earned.

Stress relief is the third and most elusive element of lifestyle that can undermine people’s best efforts. Stress is most often  things we can’t see and don’t want to look at anyhow, but thats what can make us fail at performance or eat the wrong things, or even get injured, so it has to be addressed.

Sydney learned exactly what neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, Ph.D. learned through hooking people’s brains up to study, life, and other research in the lab. Stress relief, which covers a broad variety of introspection and self-care modalities, in Dr. Hubermans case he termed it “psychotherapy”, is as important to ones brain as working out is for ones body and needs to be done regularly to promote happiness, growth, and success. There is not one thing happy, or sad, etc. that is a thought or emotional feeling that does not elicit a physical response.

She is older than Huberman, and therefore claims learning it first, as well as that some of her best qualities come from sharing the same birthday (not year) with Chuck Norris.

Getting Results

It wasn’t until hammering out solutions (yes it takes more than one) to stress relief that she was able to dramatically reduce the time in which people get results and increase how long those results last.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is easy to track so well researched, and therefore often the first thing one finds in early study.

While it is helpful, and by necessity aspects are integrated into nutrition and exercise programs, it just is not strong enough alone to combat the intense stress that people experience in todays world.

CBT requires consciously deciding, and learning to make better choices, then practicing until you get good at them. This takes time. First Responders, trauma survivors, and frankly anyone in the thick of things, knows this just isn’t enough. You don’t often have “time” in the middle of life’s battlefield.

Eventually Brainspotting was discovered by David Grand Ph.D., and Sydney quickly recognized this as a powerful tool that is needed to make the stress relief component of Lifestyle Therapy just as strong as the exercise and nutrition components. Since then, she is also excited to have added, Stress Relief Mapping, Quantum Healing Hypnosis Technique (QHHT), and developed an Emotion Release & Repurposing (ERR) technique to compliment other stress relief modalities and better serve people.

With an estimated 70% of obese people suffering from childhood trauma, leading to increased health challenges, and the demands of todays intense stress levels, stress relief modalities are essential to long-term weight loss, health success, and happiness.

It’s amazing how many aspects of a persons  life: health, relationships, career, etc will naturally improve with less stress and a greater sense of knowing-self and self-acceptance.

Additional Focused Training

Sydney has achieved other advanced trainings, specializing in helping people with weight loss, athletic or career achievement, and trauma — specifically adults with childhood trauma and First Responders. She holds 10 different fitness certifications, three nutrition certifications, ski instruction, and college degrees in Health Science, Kinesiology, Biology, Nutrition, and Math & Science. Each of these were important components needed for Sydney to be the effective Lifestyle Therapy Practitioner that she is today.

Personal Experiences

Personal experiences are often of the best education that one can have, and help Sydney to relate to others, and understand how to help them.

She is the proud mother of two boys, has one grandchild, and enjoys a variety of activities including: mountain biking, skiing, snowboarding, snowshoeing, wake boarding, running, hiking, backpacking, camping and has had fun dabbling in kite boarding.

Being so active, she has experienced her fair share of injuries and knows what it takes to recover. On September 1,  2004, she had a horrific hiking accident. With a heavy back pack on, she slipped while crossing a steep sheet of granite suffering several injuries, nearly tearing her left foot off her leg, and fracturing her skull. Miraculously, she lived, but recovery was long and hard. Among other things, doctors said she would never run again. After over two years of trying and failing, Sydney recovered and was able to successfully run again. It took another two years of training, and adapting to structural changes after the injuries, to successfully reach her goal  of running a marathon distance without injury. While she wouldn’t wish the experience on anyone, it helped her embrace a deeper level of compassion and sense of “I can” that she now delivers to others.

Being “second mom” handling skinned knees, baby bottles in the night, and monsters under the bed, she finds she often  relates on a smaller scale to First Responders. They help to make sure people have the chance to live through an emergency. The general public has very little understanding of the challenges that First Responders face and how a “normal” day for a First Responder could be someone elses worst nightmare. Sydney has a deep compassion for First Responders and is committed to helping them enjoy the healthy, happy lives that they deserve.

Sydney has had the joy and privilege to work with a variety of populations of different cultural backgrounds, and special differences such as blindness, dwarfism, hearing impaired, TBI survivors, First Responders (fire, military, nursing, law enforcement, corrections, mental health professionals, etc), and every-day people like yourself.

She has studied the most popular nutrition approaches and has a unique understanding of the complexities of how nutrition combines with energy and performance, and how stress affects a persons nutritional needs and different areas of performance.

Summary

Sydney strives to help people build the critical foundation of health through Lifestyle Therapy, knowing that this will help them achieve their greatest genetic potential, increase or improve the outcomes of many other health or life endeavors, help them be more present in relationships, and provide a strong foundation for health and happiness.

Combining the most successful techniques with experience, and dedication, Sydney has developed a unique, targeted, approach to Lifestyle Therapy that gets dramatic results to help provide the health needed to support the quality of life and happiness that every person deserves.