Health Coaching

Susan Brown 

Working as a personal trainer and nutrition coach the last 12 years in the U.K. and U.S., Susan has always believed “you can’t out-train a bad diet.” Having helped many Balance clients achieve body transformations in the 6-week Goals Program, Susan was inspired to dig even deeper into the science behind different nutritional theories. Completing her Health Coaching degree with the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, she loves helping clients find the right nutritional approach and is passionate about sharing her belief that “food is medicine.”

What is a health coach? Why do I need one

The dieting industry is a 75 billion dollar machine promising quick fixes to 45 million people each year. How many people do you know who find success in a diet plan only to yo-yo months later? Understanding which nutritional approach is the right fit for your bio-chemistry can be mind-boggling the average person. With the conflicting messages about food and exercise we are bombarded with on a daily basis through TV, magazines and social media, it’s enough to make you want to throw in the towel. 

They are like nutritional ninjas: 

Working with our health coaches Laura and Susan will set you on a personalized path. Like an architect who helps you create a cohesive vision for your home and then helps you execute it, a health coach is your partner in building your health - one brick at a time.

They will you help you to cut through the noise and confusion that comes with weeding through diet trends and health overhauls. In your initial 90-minute consultation, you will have the time to dig deep into your health history, to explore the areas where you fall off track, and to create a personalized plan around the four pillars of health – nutrition, exercise, sleep and stress management. Then, weekly or monthly or check-ins are what help motivate you and hold to accountable for executing your daily goals and course correcting when needed. 

They are like diagnostic detectives:

Susan and Carlie believe food is more than just calories; food is information for your cells. Food can program our cells with messages of wellness or disease. They help you find the foods that work for your body.

They put the words nutrients and nourishment back into nutrition and help you to remove dieting and deprivation from your vocabulary. 

They believe nutrition is bio-individual; there is no one-sized fits all approach or magic pill. 

They believe how you nourish yourself off of the plate is as important as what is on your plate.

They are your guide on the side: 

As you move toward new health practices, it is very common to experience some resistance, fear, push-back, and even inner rebellion in making your new habits stick. You may be tempted to return to old automatic patterns and behaviors. Creating mew habits is challenging for most and studies show most people unconsciously prefer to stick with what is familiar. Working with Laura or Susan can provide you with the space to see these challenging feelings and emotions as they arise as well as a supportive place to work through them gently and gracefully. 

Prices

Initial Consultation 1 x 90 minute comprehensive session covering your health history, your nutrition habits, your areas of concern, and your health goals.  During this session, your coach will help you set achievable daily and long-term goals around the four pillars of health and create a nutrition approach that suits your personal biochemistry, symptoms and goals to help you use food as medicine. $300 with Susan, $250 with Carlie

Individual nutrition coaching follow up: 1 x 45 minute follow up session to check on progress, to celebrate successes and to make adjustments as needed. These follow ups hold you accountable for following through on your daily goals and allow you the opportunity to During a follow up session, clients and coaches may cook a recipe together on zoom, create a weekly meal plan of recipes, build a weekly exercise routine, strategize about sleep and stress management or even grocery shop virtually together.  $100 with Susan $75 with Carlie

6 Week Custom Plan: 1 x 90 min Initial Consult + 4 x 45 min Follow Up Sesssions and email check ins between sessions over a 6 week period. $665 with Susan, $525 with Carlie 

Virtual Coaching: This option provides the most flexibility for your schedule and can help establish patterns for long term success. Carlie will be your guide and accountability coach providing a meal plan, weekly check in and motivation. It’s like having a Balance coach in your pocket! Perfect for keeping you on track when life is super busy. $159/month, billed monthly, 3 month minimum contract

A-la-carte Menu

Meal Planning session: 

It’s 5:00, do you find yourself asking, what’s for dinner? Work with your health coach to build a menu for the week for you or your family that suits everyone’s dietary preferences and helps you meet your personal wellness goals. $100 an hour

Pantry reboot: 

We meet at your house and look through your pantry together and discuss how to help your cabinets and fridge align with your goals. We help you get your pantry organized to make “the good food win” and then offer easy swaps that won’t feel like an overhaul. Then, gear up for our grocery store tour tearing apart all the misinformation out there you have heard. We give you practical tools to read nutrition labels and unveil an abundance of new, mouthwatering products you never knew were right there on the store shelves. $100 an hour

Grocery Store Tour: 

Where and how we grocery shop can be a lynchpin to behavior change! It can feel uncomfortable and overwhelming to consider a new dietary approach, a new grocery store and new brands. Our health coaches understand this! Like stylists who pull all the right looks for your body type, our health coaches help you put in your cart all the right foods for your goals. Going gluten free? We know which brands to try and which to ditch. Working on gut health? We can point out the foods to buy organic and how to work fermented foods into the rotation. Need an overhaul to kids’ snacks? We have you covered and can share all of our kids’ approved favorite swaps.  One hour in the store with your coach pays you back in dividends in each future grocery store visit.  $100 an hour

Family Coaching: 

Does it ever feel like a food free-for-all in your house? Do you have family members who need a nudge in the right direction when it comes to healthier eating? Need help getting everyone on the same page to create a family food philosophy? Want everyone to chip in around meal time? Work with your health coach to introduce nutrition in a fun and empowering way to your family to create lifelong health. Sessions are bespoke to each family’s needs and may include things like – a kick off slide show and label reading session to build critical thinking skills and a family food philosophy, a goal setting session to align and motivate everyone to work together,  one-on-one sessions with family members with specific health concerns as needed, a meal planning session that involves everyone’s preferences and assigns roles, a meal prep session with your health coach to learn how to use new ingredients or upgrade family favorites, and follow up visits to check in on progress and set new family challenges.  $100 an hour

Health Coaching TESTIMONIAls

Working with Susan over the course of 3 months, I revolutionized my labwork - my doctor’s jaw dropped. I dropped a whopping 136 points off my triglycerides (without statins!!!), moved my fasting glucose a staggering 7 points and even lost 12 pounds and counting, and dare I say, got a pretty decent dad-bod.

Susan really gets jazzed up about her work and the passion for helping others radiates. Susan is knowledgeable but more importantly, she has a plethora of resources and documentation to justify any recommendation that she makes. Susan and I did the majority of our work together remotely so in addition to her skillset in the field of health and wellness, she is also pretty tech savvy and can help really anyone in the country. Ultimately, Susan was the distinctive factor that increased my fitness level and improved my health metrics.

I was struggling with abdominal pain, acid reflux issues, and gut health. Frankly, my diet was crap and I drank a lot of Sprite. My cholesterol and triglycerides were elevated to the point where my doctor was discussing how statin drugs may be a possibility for me unless I got it under control. My blood glucose levels were borderline diabetic. It sounds pretty dire, but the fact of the matter was I was still very active and working out regularly. I had plateaued and needed a knowledgeable accountability coach. Susan educated me on what a healthy diet really looked like, the nutrients in different foods, why varying your food is important, and what supplements I needed. I can’t thank her enough for helping me achieve true health care without medications.

Jared

Working with Susan has helped me to make small but powerful shifts in my daily routine which ultimately has had tremendous benefits to my overall health and wellbeing. An allergy sufferer, I was using medications daily to control my reactions and alleviate my sinus headaches. Susan's suggested, personalized supplement regime has helped me curb my dependence on daily use of nasal spray and only reserve it on the bad days when allergens are high and I really need it. Her other supplement recommendations have added more balance to my diet and to my sleepSusan's easy, accessible recipes and simple swaps have made it possible for my family and I to enjoy eating healthfully at home and even on vacation. I've lost a few pounds and noticed a reduction in inflammation, bloating, and digestive issues with subtle shifts in my eating. I highly recommend Susan; she is a consummate professional, a great listener, and helps you set attainable and sustainable goals!

Alexa

After years of experimenting with a variety of diets and too much time passing since regular exercise, it was time to press reset on my health. But, I felt overwhelmed with where to begin. Stumbling upon the Detox Program at Balance, led by Susan Brown, proved to be exactly what I needed! In fact, it improved areas in my life I didn’t even realize I was neglecting! 

By listening to my unique needs and goals, Susan was able to suggest a healthy regimen of meals, helpful supplements, ways to relieve the toxic burden in my life, and areas worthy of further investigation to improve my overall health. 

Her expertise, experience, commitment and energy, in conjunction with the tools and recommendations she provided, all made this journey manageable.

Not only have I lost pounds and inches, but my annual physical yielded the best results I have received in over 10 years! In addition, I have gained a community of supportive women, established an exercise routine, and simply feel better overall! 

I am so grateful to the Balance community and especially to Susan for gifting me with sustainable and long term habits that will contribute to my overall well-being! 

I was so excited to work with Susan when I first found out that I was pregnant. I knew there was a lot to learn and that Susan would be the perfect person to teach me about the best nutrition, pre-natal supplements, toxic swaps, and habits to incorporate into my day-to-day as my baby grows.
With Susan’s guidance, I’ve felt great throughout my pregnancy and have had the energy to continue consistently working out. I’m feeling extra grateful for her help and classes as I enter my third trimester this week.
I highly recommend working with Susan if you’re thinking about starting a family, are currently pregnant, or want you and your family to feel your best.

Leslie

For years, I spoke about, tried, and failed to adjust my eating habits.  As with most people, my main goal was to maintain a healthy weight.  A direct result of poor eating is I’ve also struggled with reflux for pretty much my entire adult life.  Recently, my reflux was causing so much discomfort on my left side that I started to miss things I really enjoyed:  Balance workouts, golf, holiday dinners.  After a few conversations with Susan, I decided to give her holistic approach a try where she promised we would get to the root cause of the reflux and get me off the purple pill. She suggest we eliminate potential food sensitives, offered snack swaps, tweaked the timing of when I was eating, addressed mincronutrient deficiencies and supported digestion through supplements  This may seem like a lot, but Susan simplified all this to make it actionable right away.  While only a few months in, I’m experiencing weight loss and more importantly I’m having days where I have no symptoms of reflux at all!  Thanks again to Susan for all help and I look forward to what’s ahead! 

Geoff

My husband and I met with Susan in January 2020 for our initial consultation. We were two people with similar goals in different bodies. We both got sucked into fad diets to lose that 5-10lbs in the past. That weight by the way always came back. We didn’t go into this overweight or completely unhealthy but little did we know we had so much to learn. Susan was a wealth of knowledge! After a week of putting her recommendations into play my bloating and stomach issues almost completely disappeared. My husband’s joints after only 2 weeks stopped hurting. We even got our two children involved. To date they know the difference between what is good for our bodies and what isn’t so good thanks to Susan. We both have never felt better. We lost weight and we aren’t dieting, which in my opinion is the best part. It is a lifestyle change and about what foods honor your health and taste buds at the same time. We can’t thank Susan enough!

Nicole B and family

“Laura is a wonderful listener and helped me to find my WHY for making health shifts, something I had been lacking in every other attempt to change how I eat. I realized how deeply ingrained my emotional eating habits were; Laura helped me become more mindful of my patterns and learn new ways to cope. She helped me to look at food through a new lens and understand the foods that helped fuel my body. We examined how my poor sleep and stress were sabotaging my efforts in the kitchen and in the gym and she provided very accessible ideas for how to gently make shifts to my daily routine. Laura helped me to understand that exercise is not punishment but a celebration of what my body can do. I’m so grateful for her guidance in starting my health journey.”

Susan S.

I began working with Susan two years ago after long years of "powering through" on equal parts adrenaline and caffeine. I knew I needed to make changes to feel better, but I had been having trouble making the genuine commitment to take my own health seriously and to understand what makes me feel good. Over the past 24 months, Susan has helped me to identify and achieve goals which I had pretty much given up on--sound sleep, lower anxiety, and more fun :) I had worked with other trainers previously, without meaningful results. Susan is a stand-out in a crowded field: fiercely intelligent, a sensitive listener, and a super cheerleader. She helped me identify smart goals in the quest to feel better--and then build the daily habits to achieve them. Some were easily measured--from the number of push-ups in 60 seconds, to a lower resting heart rate, to weight loss. Others were more elusive--having more energy and feeling less anxious. Susan brought an evidence-based approach to every goal we identified and worked toward. Way beyond and fad or trend, Susan incorporates cutting-edge research in behavioral and nutritional health into her work with clients. I am genuinely wowed by her commitment and care for every client and her tireless resolve to constantly up her game with more study. She is constantly able to offer more strategies to her clients to identify and achieve their own integrative health goals. She's helped me change my own game, and I feel so much better--and grateful--for that!

Bethany W.

“Working with Susan completely shifted my perspective on nutrition. When we started working together, my only focus was improving my own diet. I found it frustrating that my family was not on board and wanted separate meals. Susan told me to be patient, to involve them in some of the prep and menu, to gently educated them on the ‘why” and to continue to lead by example. This was her “if you build it, they will come” mentality. They slowly began to smell and taste all the nourishing foods I was making and to my surprise my white-foods-only kids began to demand kale salad, spiralized carrot dill salad, zoodles and turkey meatballs and gluten free banana oat cookies. As a mom, it feels great to pass these foods down to my daughters so they can nourish themselves. My girls now know the why behind the swaps we have made and know how to avoid things like inflammatory oils and GMO’s in their snacks. And my cheesesteak-loving husband has been asking for rainbow chard & turkey burgers and sharing my smoothie every morning! I’m so grateful for the help overhauling our family nutrition and understanding how food functions as medicine.”

Jennifer Mc and family

“From Nourish to Flourish! Working with Susan and her food is medicine approach has had a ripple effect on my entire family. Improving my Vitamin D levels made a drastic impact right off the bat on my mood, mindset and metabolism. Eating more of a plant-based diet improved my gut health and brought my cholesterol numbers down without medication. My husband, who didn’t even work with Susan, lost 25 pounds through how we changed our family food culture. My one daughter cleared up her acne and lost 17 pounds without dieting, but removing ingredients that were causing inflammation. Susan met with my other daughter in college via zoom and helped her reverse her iron deficiency and set her up with how to shop and cook on her own. And she met with my son on zoom to give him a crash course on reading labels and dietary changes that would help fuel his brain in college. Making changes to how we eat is hard to do in isolation – having my whole family on board has made these changes part of a lifestyle that we can all sustain together!”

Katherine T 

“Susan Brown was a tremendous help guiding me through a new outlook on my personal nutrition goals and dietary changes. Armed with pages and pages of labwork from my integrative doctor, Susan helped me step by step understand my results and how everything was connected.  Susan and I were able to create a flexible plan and nutritional plan that hits all my nutritional needs and was also exciting and nourishing! She provided me with detailed recipes and informative notes/diagrams of how I can use food as medicine to bring the body back into balance and to heal my leaky gut. Although I know my way around the grocery store fairly well, having Susan’s guidance aisle by aisle in Whole Foods helped me choose the right brands, produce, and products best for me and that would help me shift the numbers in my personal labwork. Susan emphasized the importance of why certain foods, brands, and products are important and key for reaching my nutritional goals. I feel this investment has saved me time, energy, and has greatly increased the likelihood of my success on my nutritional journey. Thank you!! 

Emma S

“Food truly is medicine. After my yearly lab work and 10 minute physical with my doctor, I was on the precipice of taking several prescription medications – I was suddenly pre-diabetic, had elevated blood pressure and my LDL’s and triglycerides were sky rocketing – a text book case of what Susan taught me was called “metabolic syndrome.” Even though I had continued to take my weekly exercise classes and stay active, I was also experiencing weight gain, rosacea, joint pain, acid reflux, brain fog and night sweats which I all assumed were unrelated and a natural part of the aging process. I fortuitously bumped into Susan shortly after my physical and her passion for using “food as medicine” was contagious. She gave me hope and said, “Give me 12 weeks before you fill those prescriptions and then let’s retest your bloodwork.” We started with my initial consultation the next day and Susan talked me through my bloodwork results and the cluster of seemingly unrelated symptoms in a way that actually made sense to me. She was like the bridge I desperately needed between my doctor’s office and my kitchen. I learned about how inflammation, poor gut health and estrogen dominance were the root cause of all of my health issues and that making some gentle shifts to my nutrition, exercise, sleep and strategic supplementation would help my body to heal itself. It’s been 12 weeks, and my cholesterol is down 40 points, I’m no longer pre-diabetic and my gut is continuing to heal- I can tolerate foods that became problematic, my rosacea has settled down and I am regular again and am sleeping through the night. Weight loss was an added bonus. My quality of life has changed dramatically. Working with Susan was what health care should be like. I had been in the sick care lane for many years and was headed for chronic disease. I now have the tools to take back control of my health with each hour more I sleep each night, each color of the rainbow I put into my body, each step I log on my fit bit and each dumb bell I lift. Everyone needs a health coach."

Anonymous