Hey, y'all welcome to the Be About Being Better podcast. I'm your host, Abbie Stasior, and founder of the health and life coaching company Be About Being Better. And today to kick off this podcast… First episode! We're gonna be talking about what it means to be about being better and how this all started.
And honestly, y'all, I'm just so excited to finally be recording this. This is really a dream come true, long time coming. Very highly requested addition to the business. It's really amazing. I've been running my coaching business for the last four years and we're just starting the podcast now. I know a lot of you have been looking forward to this, and I know some of you are new coming into our Be About Being Better family. So thank you for being here and thank you for requesting this.
I don't know if I could have the bandwidth to start this podcast in the season of life that I'm in and, and I'll get into that, if it wasn't for all of you. So thank you all so, so much.
Over the last four years, through my coaching business Be About Being Better, we've coached hundreds of people across five different continents, specifically on how to sustain a diet free lifestyle. And on top of running the business, I'm also now working to become a registered dietician. And that's why I'm recording this episode in Nashville! Just moved here from New York city.
I finished up my master's degree in Nutrition and Exercise Physiology from Columbia University. And now I'm starting my dietetic internship, which is very similar to a medical school residency through Vanderbilt University's Medical Center. Both a master's degree and this clinical internship are required components to sit for the Registered Dietician exam so that we can make this thing official! So excited.
So it's definitely a busy season being in this internship. But I'm so excited to take you all along with me, for the journey and to be supporting you with your health while I am [00:02:00] finishing up my degree. I didn't always think I was gonna be a registered dietician though. I honestly thought I was gonna go to med school.
And I guess if I really had to be honest, I thought that I was going to end up being a ballerina. I literally structured my whole college search to be a dancer and find the best dance program for me! And I took one semester of dance and I was like, well, I think I'm gonna switch my major to neuroscience.
So pretty big switch there, but I just realized, I love dance as a hobby. I don't know if I wanna make it my career. I thought I did at first, but you know, after being in college for a semester, I decided it wasn't the best route for me. So I majored in neuroscience and I was on my way to apply to med school!
And this was very expected in my family. I come from a whole family line of physicians and surgeons, literally my dad and my grandfather had a private practice together: Stasior and Stasior Eyecare Specialists. So I just kinda assumed that I would go to medical [00:03:00] school and maybe join the family biz. And I actually even took the MCAT twice and had my application ready to go.
But I ended up having a mental breakdown, which Brené Brown might call that more of a “spiritual awakening.” But for me it was definitely a mental breakdown in the middle of San Francisco's Muir Woods. And I don't know if y'all have been there, but it is a really, really special and spiritual place. There's these huge Redwood trees that have just been there for years and years and years. And they're so tall, so magnificent, and… I'm not much of an outdoorsy person. Like I don't mind being outside, but I don't love being outdoors. If that makes sense. I feel like people that don't really like camping and hiking are gonna get me on this, but people that are obsessed with going camping are gonna be like, “what are you talking about?”
But that's me! So I really wasn't expecting to have such a great time just hanging out with these trees in San Francisco, but it ended up being a huge pivotal moment in my story, in my journey. And it really just stemmed from, from walking around. So I'm, you know, in Muir Woods, looking at these huge Redwood trees, and there were some trees that were standing straight up and were just really like, they looked strong, they looked healthy, they had great access to sunlight.
And for trees, obviously sunlight is their nutrients and they just looked healthy. They were thriving. And then there were these other trees, literally right next to these really strong thriving trees, that almost looked decrepit. They grew in a way where they weren't straight. You could tell that they changed the direction that they were growing in to stay within having access to sunlight, essentially. So they grew in a way where they weren't straight and they kept almost bending over backwards to try and reach a little bit of access to sunlight, a little bit of access to, to happiness and health.
And I'm staring at these two trees, such a stark difference, and I just start crying. I so desperately want to feel like this tree that is just on the path of least resistance, is thriving, healthy, strong… but I'm over here feeling like this tree that's just like, ugh, straining to get a little bit of access to sunlight and a little bit of access to, to happiness.
How do I get back on that, on that other path? I need to make a change for my life.
So in that moment I knew. I was like, I know that my family really expects me to go to medical school, but it didn't feel aligning to me; that route and that path wasn't the path for me. And it was really hard to explain that to other people, especially my family, and to go against the grain.
But I knew in my gut that that's what I needed to do. And it really took that spiritual awakening in nature to realize that. So that's when I kind of scrapped the idea to go to medical school. And instead I started doing some other research. Okay. If I don't wanna go to medical school, how can I still help people with with their health?
I'm still very service oriented. I love science. How do I blend these two together? And that's when I discovered health coaching and that this is really a thing and people make this a career. I'm like, all right! So I ended up finding a business coach online that was gonna help me kind of launch the business and customize it and all of the different components that go into starting a business. Who's really gonna give me kind of a blueprint for starting out. So I ended up investing the entirety of my savings into a business coach to launch Be About Being Better.
And it was amazing. And we've really thrived since the beginning and since that moment. It has just felt so aligning for me to help people in this way and to have such a wide outreach to so many different people internationally. It's really amazing!
I knew after about a year in the business that I wanted to become more credentialed. I wanted to go back to school in some way. So that's when I ended up finding the master's program at Columbia. I loved that it was Nutrition and Exercise Physiology. I loved that it was a combination because we need more support with our health and nutrition.
I liked that it was a combo degree. We need to come at things from a more holistic approach and so I liked that. And then once I got into the master's program, that's when I learned about becoming a Registered Dietician and that I could work with more complicated cases or people that have different chronic diseases.
Because as much as I wanna help people prevent chronic conditions from forming, we have to recognize that there are so many people that already have one or more of these diagnoses. So we need to help people better manage their health if they already have this, or a large family history of these things. So yes, we wanna be on the preventive side as much as we can, but we also have to help people manage their chronic conditions as well.
Being a Registered Dietician is really gonna help me be able to do that and help best support you with your health. So that's how we got on this path. And along the way, the business has really evolved and we've become more non-diet focused and having a stronger emphasis on getting away from diet culture.
But we've always been about sustainability and that's really how we came across it. Because if you want to sustain a healthy lifestyle over the long term, You have to get away from dieting because dieting inherently isn't sustainable. So overall we've always been about sustainability and we've always been about helping people be about being better.
Be About Being Better, to me, means continuously striving for a higher level of success.
So in order to do that, we have to make sure that we're loving and appreciating ourselves now, where we are now, and at every step of the journey, while simultaneously we have these goals to change and improve ourselves. Because if you have both of those, love and appreciation for where you are now, and goals to change and improve yourself, you are going to approach those action steps to change yourself out of care, love, and respect for yourself. Which is like a thousand times more sustainable and more enjoyable. It's sustainable because it's enjoyable than approaching your action steps out of obligation for shame, guilt, any of those things, which diet culture wants us to.
Diet culture wants you to work out for the sole purpose of making your body smaller, to burn off what you ate, to make room for that meal to eat less, to fit in a dress. And how sustainable is that over time? Think about it.
How many diets have you been on? How many times have you started a new health kick? How many times have you fallen off the wagon, just to get back on, on Monday? Did you know that 90% of diets fail. And did you know that 2/3 of people who go on a diet gain more weight back than where they originally started?
And some of you are listening right now, probably have that experience where you've tried something to be healthy and you think you're succeeding and you're checking all the boxes, but you're kind of staring at yourself now being like, “I'm in a worse spot now than before I even started that thing.”
So a lot of you can believe these researched statistics just through your own lived experience. My point here is that this is what we do at Be About Being Better. We help people change how they approach the action steps and how they approach their healthy habits so that it is out of care, love, and respect for your body and your life.
That allows you to both appreciate where you are right now and at every stage of the journey, and have goals to change and improve. And here's the thing y'all I want you to have a better life. I want you to have a vibrant, successful, fulfilling life, career, family, everything. But the truth of the matter is that that life isn't available to you if your health is outta whack. If you're bogged down by thinking about your next meal, or you're not sure what to eat, or if you're bogged down by thoughts about how tired you are, how much you hate your arms, or how bloated your stomach is, or when you'll have time to exercise, or how much of a failure you are for skipping a workout.
Or if you're so consumed by what other people are thinking about your food order, or you're too busy totaling up how many grams of sugar you had, or how many macros you have left for today. You're not able to be fully present in conversation or with the people that you're with, if that's clogging up your brain. I guarantee you that you won't have the emotional capacity or the mental real estate to have fulfilling quality relationships, where you're fully present with the family and friends and significant others and coworkers.
You won't have the bandwidth to optimize your finances. You won't think that you're worthy of a raise. And if you do think you're worthy of a raise, you might not have the confidence to go ask for it or switch jobs or change industries, or start the side hustle that you've always wanted to. So this is what we help people do.
And this is what I'm gonna help you with through this podcast, is to clear out the gutters a bit so that you can make way for that vibrant life and just higher level thoughts by optimizing a healthy lifestyle. That's inevitably going to give you more energy, greater productivity, more confidence.
You can harness that. You can use that as leverage, use that as a stepstool to then be better in other areas of your life. And that better life is waiting for you. It's possible for you.
I've seen it happen time and time again, with the clients that I've coached over the last four years. Being about being better means that you'll continuously be striving for a better life and constantly improving your life, doing it in a way where it's actually sustainable and not constantly driving yourself to, to burnout or feeling like a failure.
This is actually gonna feel like you're able to maintain this over the long term and it's going to feel good. It's gonna feel energizing and it's going to be constantly renewing your energy if you're doing it in the right way.
So the first thing that you can do to start optimizing your health is tuning into this podcast and listening to the other episodes that we have. Also following me on Instagram, TikTok, opting into our emails, reading the blog, taking our quiz opting in for our freebies…but all of that will come with time! Oh, and the Facebook group too, we definitely got the Facebook group. So many different things!
But definitely start by tuning into the podcast and if you're not already following me on Instagram and TikTok, it's the same handle @abbie.stasior. That's a really great place to start.
And if you're listening to this right now, know that I genuinely care about your health and the longevity of your vibrancy. Know that you're already a part of our Be About Being Better family. I appreciate you being here!
Honestly, this podcast has been a dream come true. It's really been a goal for some time. And thank you, so many of you, for DMing me that you want a Be About Being Better podcast. We hear you, and I'm so excited to bring this to life. Thank you for being here and I'll see you in the next episode.
