The Name Says It All
by Melissa LaScaleia
Emma Ware has been a certified nutritionist, clinical homeopath, and doctor of holistic nutrition for over fifteen years. She is also certified in Zone for weight loss, which teaches the art of combining proteins, starches and fats optimally.
“It’s one of the best programs for balancing foods for weight loss,” Emma says.
With her business, Common Sense Eating, Emma helps coach people through the often complex world of healthy eating to achieve their goals. She offers consultations, gives presentations, teaches cooking classes, and teaches people how and where to shop.
“I teach people how to get organized both in the kitchen, home, and personal lives all-together, so they can change their lifestyle and live a healthier one,” she says. “I get a lot of requests for weight loss. Often in the process of helping people to lose weight, my clients start changing a lot of the other health issues that they have.”
When Emma begins a new consultation— she starts with probing questions to empower her clients into self-discovery. Things like: What are your challenges? Where do you think your issues for gaining weight lie? Cravings? Emotions? Because you don’t cook? Because you’re eating the wrong foods? Because you’re overeating?
“What I try to implement is a lifestyle change,” she says, “which means common sense eating. It’s a return to the basics. If you look at photographs of people from the beginning of time to the 1960s, the majority were thin. Looking from the 1970s to now, they are not. The only thing that has changed is the introduction of chemical-based foods; the outcome is disturbing the metabolism and gaining weight. On top of that, people today overeat.
“Previously, we didn’t have a lot of sprays for the environment. Today, the goal with manufacturing companies is to give foods a shelf life.”
Emma encourages her clients to cook at least 50% of the time, and gives them the skills so they can do so. She even wrote a cookbook to assist her clients.
“Now they have great, easy recipes to follow,” she says. “And from there, I teach them how to cheat with junk food. We take bad junk food and replace it with good junk food.
“If you stay with the program, which stabilizes you and your life, you will gain less weight. I will teach you to eat everything you want without deprivation, without starving, without limiting your caloric intake to 800 a day, or counting points. By stabilizing your body and your life, you can live a satisfying lifestyle. It protects you from yo-yo dieting.”
Stability for Emma means balance and moderation.
Want a soda? Go for it— once a week. Alcohol? Yes— but not all the time. Love nuts? Go ahead. Just don’t eat pounds a day. It’s the practical application of common sense to your eating choices.
“The biggest challenge with all the gimmicks we have out there,” Emma says, “is that by counting calories or points, you gravitate towards eating bad food rather than the right foods that nourish your body. My approach teaches you to think differently about food.
“By eating the right way, at least 80% of the time, you’ll feel better, and you have a better chance of not having a lot of sugar problems. And sugar causes problems with yeast and infections and weakens the immune system.
“If you keep this lifestyle, it also helps to reduce inflammation, cravings and portion control. I find that when people come to me and do not lose weight, it is because they give up too easily when trying to make changes. They believe that if it doesn’t happen fast enough, it’s not working, and that’s not true.
“The same way that it takes time to change habits, it takes time to change the body to alter the body from before to after— from the bad to the new. You’re transforming your entire human body.”
Common Sense Eating
at Emma’s School of Healthy Eating
2798 Howard Ave., Unit D
Myrtle Beach, SC 29577
843-997-7037
Open M-F 10am-4pm; or by appointment.