Get ready for a jaw dropping conversation with Holly Bertone.
Holly Bertone is a former FBI Chief of Staff for Counterintelligence turned Certified Holistic Health Coach. She helps midlife women find the clues to prioritize their health, so their high-achievement lifestyle no longer clashes with unwanted weight gain, lack of energy, and restless nights.
Holly spent 20 years in Project Management consulting and federal government service. After her own experience of breast cancer, healing herself from an autoimmune disease, and creating a no-conflict divorce, she learned there’s more to life than burning the candle at both ends, and living according to everyone else’s agenda.
As a Certified Holistic Health Coach, she helps women combine the principles of high-performance and mindset to ditch diet culture and create SUSTAINABLE RESULTS that are an effortless part of their lifestyle.
Holly is also a Keynote Speaker, #1 Amazon bestselling author, and Host of Your Midlife Comeback Story Podcast.
Quiz: https://pinkfortitude.mykajabi.com/weight-quiz
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/holly.bertone/
Your Midlife Comeback Story Podcast: https://pinkfortitude.mykajabi.com/blog/
Web: https://pinkfortitude.mykajabi.com/your-comeback-coach
www.coachlaurie.com
lacoach@comcast.net
in the weight loss industry. 92% of diets fail. We are literally relying on an industry that expects us to fail 92% of the time and we keep going back for more. Has your life your dreams been interrupted? Good news. It is possible to reinvent our lives. People are doing it every day and some are brave enough to share the struggles, disappointments and challenges. If you are looking for a new beginning, a do-over or to rediscover your passion, maybe even find a new one, then grab a cup of coffee and let's talk. Interrupted. Act 2. Reinventing your legacy with your host, Coach Lori. Holly Bertone is a weight loss coach. I wish you could see her. She has beautiful red hair. Holly, welcome. Oh, thanks so much for having me on the show. I really appreciate it. We always start with what your life is like now, what you're doing and what you love about it. In simplistic terms, I'm a weight loss coach. The longer answer to that is I'm a former FBI Chief of Staff for Counterintelligence, turned certified holistic health coach and I use everything that I learned as a Chief of Staff for Counterintelligence to help women not just lose weight because we think weight loss, we think diet culture, we think the quick fix and all of that. But to look at it from a holistic approach, meaning we address the emotional eating triggers that got us here in the first place, looking at it from a place of holistic health, metabolic health, especially in midlife, each year that we get older, the disease is just start coming. So how can we make this next chapter of our lives the healthiest, the best, like we're going to travel and be with our kids and our grandkids and do all the fun things and be healthy doing it and not just keep getting saddled with all of these diseases and then figure out a way to make it stick, to make it a part of our lifestyle so that we're not going back to those old habits of restarting that diet every six months. And what do you love about what you're doing now? Oh my goodness, everything. Number one, it took me quite a while to get to this place and figure, figure everything out. But you know, and I've heard so many people talk about that journey and all the twists and turns and those twists and turns are necessary. They're necessary to learn all the lessons they're necessary to get to where you want to be. Had you asked me five years ago that I would be doing this full time, that I'd be divorced, that I would be living in Pennsylvania and have a dog. I would have been like, no, that's not my life. But here we are. So far I've had two jaw dropping moment. You were working for the FBI and then you had something happen and you left and now you're doing this. Can you kind of set the stage for that? Yeah, kind of crazy. My life was turned upside down on my 39th birthday. I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I went through the traditional surgery chemo radiation. Let me back up for a second. So in my 20s, I was 40 pounds overweight. In my 30s, I became a competitive athlete. I lost all the weight. I was 110 pounds soaking wet. Just this tiny little thing, a five foot mouthache, right? I was a competitive mountain bike racer. I'd stand on a podium and get a medal around my neck or sometimes they give out pint glasses, which was kind of cool. I thought that I was the epitome of health. So this breast cancer thing just kind of, what I thought at the time came out of the blue. Now I know, oh, gee, Holly, having a diet that's 95% processed foods, this go, go, go lifestyle, completely adrenaline junkies stressed out, all of the toxins, all of the factors, it all adds up. These diseases that we seem to keep collecting, 95% of it can be minimized, even eliminated with lifestyle factors. I didn't know that then, but I know that now. But what happened was I never got better after breast cancer and I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. So it was like a one, two punch. At some point, my health just kept deteriorating that I needed to resign. So I did. In 2017, I left my dream job. So were you just heartbroken? Oh, God. Yeah, that was the rock bottom of rock bottoms. From there, you left, but you weren't. You didn't leave because you had something else on the docket. So how did this all transpire? Kind of fast forward after several months of just marinating in my misery, I became a certified natural health coach, a certified holistic health coach. Kind of went down that path. I learned about root cause healing. I actually healed myself. And I kind of, I feel like I'm glossing over this. There's like so much to this. Like, oh, I just healed myself. Oh, I just have breast cancer. Like there's so much to the story to unpack, but I really want to make sure we get into the, to the meaty stuff. And along that way, the big moment, my interrupted moment, as you said, was on my 49th birthday, because I was a health coach starting to work with clients. And I looked in the mirror that day. And I just remember feeling after everything that I had been through, after a rock bottom, after rock bottom, after rock bottom. And literally, I was on that trajectory of healing. And I remember looking at myself, I was probably 10 to 15 pounds overweight, like not significantly overweight, but enough that on my five foot nothing frame, my face was totally blown up. My body was just, I just felt frumpy and flabby. And I didn't have any energy. I was just absolutely fried. And I just felt gross. And it was more than that. It was that level of embarrassment, because I'm a health coach. Like, I should, I thought that I was doing all the right things as a health coach based on what I was taught in school, but it wasn't working. Like, it healed me, but I still felt just, I felt like an eight year old woman trapped in a 49 year old body. And I felt like I was a horrible representation to my clients. You know, they kind of say, if you want what they have, do what they do. And I'm looking in the mirror saying, no one's going to want what I have. What flipped what happened? Yeah, that was when I really decided to just start flipping everything upside down. I dusted off my FBI hat and put it back on. And I'm like, okay, let me go grab all the skills that I learned my career and figure this out. Like, let's go find the clues. That's when really, I realized like this methodology that I use for weight loss, I've been using it almost my entire life. It's just kind of morphed over the years. I even used it when I was going through a divorce. So it's, it's that universal. But really what I realized is that when we hit in life, things are different. They're just different. Our bodies have changed. You know, we blame our hormones, but even one of my best friends just wrote a best-selling book on menopause and hormones. And even, you know, she said very specifically, hormone therapy is great, but it's, you got to address those lifestyle factors first. That's where I come in. It's like, okay, let's go back to the basics. Everyone who who's the basics, but the basics are where it's at. You look at any professional athlete, what are they doing every single day to get better? They're doing the basics. I think we just as a society, we live in this microwave quick fix society that we think that we can just do whatever we want to do and have this everything in moderation kind of mentality. The next thing you know, there's 20, 30, 40, 50, 70 pounds. We're facing things like autoimmune disease and diabetes or prediabetes or cancer and all these diseases. I'm like, there is a better way. And again, I'm not saying pure at all. What I am saying is there is a better way and going back to the basics with these lifestyle factors is a component. It's not the only component, but it's a component. And the other piece that I think is so often in this kind of health wellness, even diet industry, everyone just is very laser focused on one thing, not a lot of people look at the body holistically. That's what I really like to do is look at us like this big puzzle that we're just trying to put back together. I was talking to a friend, we were talking about how you know how you untangle the yarn to kind of get to the conclusion. I said, sometimes you've got to untangle the yarn. Sometimes you just got to collect the string and start knitting things together. That's really where we're at in midlife because this is a time when a lot of things have come completely unraveled. Divorce, empty nest, you know, aging parents, you know, paras though or passing away, friends that are passing away. This weird age where your best friend can either have kids who are in elementary school or grandkids who are in elementary school, it's just like this weird time or instead of everything unraveling, this can also be a time where we say, you know what, I've spent the last 15, 20 years focusing on everyone else and everything else and building my career and my family. It's time to focus on the that chance to put yourself first, put your health first. Everyone likes to start with weight. I look at everything from a holistic perspective, but everyone's like weight's always the first thing that everyone's screaming about and that place and that time to just focus on, okay, let's start picking up pieces of string and let's start figuring out what we're going to knit for this next part of our lives. It seems like there is such a theme through all of my interviews, whatever the specific thing that the person is talking about, it goes back to self-care and when we look at people kind of in the midlife and beyond, we had a theme growing up of being seen and not heard. So it seems to go back to that. One of the ladies I interviewed, she has this amazing career, a magazine, she's a photographer. She went to a doctor to get help for weight loss. She just needed to lose weight and the doctor sent her to a counselor and said you have trauma and once you deal with your trauma, you're probably going to lose weight and I thought how insightful of that doctor because they could have just given her some pills, some shots. I mean that seems to be the instant fix and it sounds like when we first start talking that you address that emotional part. And a couple of things that you mentioned that I really want to touch on. So the first one is self-care and the second one is the trauma. So I want to just touch on self-care just for a second. Self-care is kind of a slippery slope because when people think self-care they think oh I'm going to go take a bubble bath or oh I'm going to go get a massage or go get my nails done, that's important. That is important to have that quiet time for ourselves, to pamper ourselves, to treat ourselves, to do something special for ourselves. I'm not saying it's not important but there's bigger issues. You get out of that 60-minute massage you're like oh I feel like jello. You get in the car that key goes into the ignition. I guess you push the button, that's how old I am. You push the button. All of the weight of the world just comes right back onto your shoulders. That to-do list starts going through your mind. All of that stress that you had going into that 60-minute massage is right back. So slippery slope to the self-care is important but I think it's important to understand that those root causes really need to be addressed and when you're talking about trauma and if you could relate to turning the key we're talking to you. Yeah, exactly. And especially with trauma too everyone likes to point the finger at childhood trauma and again not saying childhood trauma is legitimate, 100% legitimate and there's more people than not that have those invisible scars from childhood trauma even coming from the best of parents in the best of situations but there's also a lifetime of accumulation of events that feed on top of each other. It's going back, it's getting to that root cause and it's looking at our kind of trauma from a holistic perspective and not just a singular event and really to kind of give that comparison from the weight loss perspective. When you think about lottery winners. Okay, so I'm going to give you a couple statistics here. Number one is that in the weight loss industry 92% of diets fail. We are literally relying on an industry that expects us to fail 92% of the time and we keep going back for more. If you compare this to lottery winners now 70% they have a little better average but 70% of lottery winners go back to either not having money or even being bankrupt within several years and it's actually there's a phenomenon and it's called the lottery curse and if you think about it from that perspective they never addressed what got them so they have all the money. They have all the money in the world like they don't have another care under the sun but they didn't address what got them there in the first place. They weren't good stewards of their money and they didn't change their habits. That's really how we need to look at this weight loss journey just like that. That is so good because as a coach one of the things that every New Year's I do some sort of recording about resolutions because resolutions don't work. I'm sure there's a statistic because we say oh I'm going to change my life but the truth is it's those tiny habits that begin to make the big difference and the people that I've interviewed that have found cures for health and weight loss it's always addressing the whole person. Reducing it to the ridiculous and looking at the basics the basics are underestimated because like we water breathing all these techniques that are so important we just take for granted. You know and sugar is one of those things and others look or something because some people first of all it's very addicting. Some people can have a bite of a cookie and put it down. Most people can't. When you can actually look at yourself in the mirror and realize that like okay do I eat half a cookie? Can I actually eat half a cookie or is it the sleep? I was a person ice cream was my arch nemesis and I would drive home so from Quantico to false church where I was living at the time was a 45 minute drive when I was down at the FBI and I went from Quantico to headquarters but driving from Quantico home was like 45 minutes. I'd get out of work stop at the convenience store get a pint of ice cream eat the pint of ice cream driving home get home then say you know what I had a long hard day I'm just going to reward myself and dig into another pint for dessert and my spoon would be scraping the bottom of the container. We live in this kind of everything in moderation society and when everything is everything in moderation everything becomes too much to be able to look at this from a holistic perspective. One cookie is not going to kill you but a sleeve of cookies often and it's not just that it's the habits that go with it and not just that but then the cortisol increases the inflammation and then what happens you're stressed you don't get a good night's sleep you wake up you're like I'm too tired I'm not going to go to the gym then you're craving processed food and junk food and sugar all day so what are you going to eat and load up on so I feel like this spiral either kind of goes one way or it goes the other way. If somebody wants to work with you how do they get ahold of you? The best way actually is my podcast your midlife comeback story I would write down this number episode 136 where we actually get into the FBI tactics that I used to to help you uncover your your weight loss. I also have a free quiz you can learn about that in that episode as well and then Instagram is where I hang out at holly.bertone b-e-r-t-o-n-e come say hello there too. Two things I want to talk about before we go can we talk a little bit about divorce? Yeah absolutely the framework that I used that I used with healing myself with losing those extra 10 pounds in midlife that I use with my clients that I've perfected over the years like going back and looking at it and realizing I've been doing this framework for years and just kind of perfecting it as as a health coach when I went through my divorce two years ago I wasn't sure what was going to happen I was expecting the worst I incorporated the framework that I that I use and I was like you know what let's see if it works on the divorce and what happened was I showed up in a place taking full responsibility for my part in the marriage and my part in the divorce I also showed up in a place of complete forgiveness with that there was no anger bitterness resentful anything I hear so often oh I gave you the best years of my life there was none of that when I showed up in that place it kind of took the sales out of his wind and he's like oh there was nothing to fight against so we ended up coming to a very mutual agreement in seven days flitter assets and figured it out and we got really creative we consulted with our professionals and they said that we were crazy but they're like hey if it works for you we're in full agreement divorce is still hard I'm not saying it's not I'm not saying it was a great experience but like you look at it from there's the depth of it and then there's how long it takes to heal and healing's always a you know a journey it's a horizon it's but the dark depth wasn't as deep as I expected it to be the healing window didn't take as long as I thought it would be and people are so a lot of people need to go no contact and I 100 agree that there's a lot of situations that that needs to happen for me in the place that I was in I welcomed every time I got triggered by him because every time I got triggered I saw it as an opportunity to grow I saw it as an opportunity okay it's not the trigger there's still something going on there's still a root cause that I haven't figured out how to heal and I haven't gotten to that other place in the healing yet so every time I got triggered I just shut down everything for a couple of days and just did a lot of reflection journaling meditation prayer all the things pulled out the entire arsenal that I figured out over the years I was able to get to the other side of it and has really helped me basically using my own methodology to help me to get to that place where I mean divorce is hard but it was probably the best one that I can imagine if that even makes sense it's so important for us to take responsibility of our part remember that saying about if you're pointing one finger out three or pointing back and so when I went through my divorce as well I really tried to take those moments like at one point there was a point where in my mind I was blaming him for the reason that I wasn't pursuing my next career my next thing and when I looked at it I realized oh my goodness I could blame him till the cows come home but this is actually on me and that's when I turn things around for myself you have a podcast and you already mentioned episode 136 so you've been doing this for a while so many people that I coach have just that hard time pushing record what was it that helped you get to the point of just do it oh my goodness this is such a crazy story I'm glad you asked this I never get asked this I this is such a crazy story I actually launched my podcast by accident I was back then scared to death to speak my truth to speak my voice hashi moto's is the whole library thing so blocked throat chakra the whole if you want to get into the whole thing right and I did not want to speak my voice I did not want to speak my truth I operate on the kajabi software platform and they had just rolled out this podcast thing so I was like you know what let me just do some like little five minute things just for my community not to go to the external world but just to keep in house and the next thing I know there's confetti all over my screen and my podcast is like live out there for the world and I'm like well shoot I guess this means I'm a podcaster now like if I had I didn't even think about turn it off go back like birded at like in my head I'm like okay I guess I'm gonna do this I literally accidentally launched a like podcast I love it I love this story and I kept going it's been rebranded three times it's we've had a journey we have definitely had a journey because again I accidentally launched it so I didn't know anything about podcasting I didn't know anything of what I was talking about I just actually just kind of get on the mic and just talk yeah so it's definitely been a journey so we're coming up on we're getting ready to hit 150 I'm packed like in my in my planning right now I'm planning up to 155 it's pretty epic it's been such a great journey I have a producer who I use and it's been a lot of fun just to be able to grow and use this kind of creativity and to be able to just reach so many women with this message of like having your comeback story in midlife whether that's with your health your life your career all of the things you know again just looking at us from that holistic perspective if you go back to any of your favorite podcasters and you listen to the first episode you'll see a difference so just push record and go and do it and I love it that it gave you a voice so funny I mean now I've got producer we've got pillars we've got a studio like it's it I've got equipment like right now I'm in my recording studio like it's a whole thing back then I'm like wait what and consistency is the most important because we want people to know like and trust us and if they can listen and they can gain from our free content then they're going to be able to trust us if if they want to go deeper and work with us on a deeper level and pay and I know for me if I'm going to pay somebody I want to know like and trust them I want to feel like I know who they are and what they represent in their philosophies so kudos to you for that I love that story before we go holly this has been so amazing what is it you really want us to know I really feel like it's never too late when we get to this kind of certain age and and I'm 53 by the way when we get to the certain age we so often we say I'll do it when I'll do it when work slows down I'll do it when you know my last kids out of the house I'll do it after the holidays I'll do it after summer break I'll do it after this kid's school break is over I'll do I'll do it when the thing calms down we're in this place in life where things aren't calming down they're not they're getting different they might get a little more difficult sometimes but they're not calming down it's just a matter of how much do you want it and just taking that scary first step and doing it really we do a lot of decision trees at the FBI it's like do you want to do the thing regardless of what that thing is whether it's losing weight getting healthy you know getting it of worse getting re-married like whatever the thing is new career do you really want to do the thing like is it in your heart to become a better version of you by doing the thing yes or no if it's no that's okay there's always going to be seasons that really know is the best answer and if it's a yes back to what we talked about earlier you know if you want what they have do what they do find that person that's going to get you there find a coach like you or like me or like someone who you resonate with you feel like they have the system the process the structure they have the heart they know how to get you there because i know just from you know my own experience and journey it can be long and it can be lonely and it's really nice to have people there i want to touch on accountability really quick too because we think oh you know this coach is going to hold me accountable a good coach is going to teach you how to hold yourself accountable when you're like oh i need to do the thing because dot dot dot versus i'm doing this for my coach i'm you know what i mean there's a big difference there and when you can get to that place where you can hold your own self accountable it would be unstoppable i love that that is so good if you love this podcast here's a big ask will you share with your friends and family subscribe give us a review and a five star rating so that others looking to reinvent their lives will be able to get the help they're looking for thank you in advance
