stores for allowing us a beautiful and healthy location. More location thank-yous to Bill Sorrell and Rob Smith, Michelle Martello, and Jennifer Elsner and David Shields for allowing us access to your homes. To Lauren Thorsen for her production skills, and to Jennifer Saunders and Mary Dandridge, the two styling angels.
Robin Colucci, for coaxing this book out of me, with so much gratitude.
Pamela Henning, for being a wonderful, supportive friend from the very beginning.
Bill Couzens, for founding Less Cancer, being a great friend, and making me laugh.
Karin Witzig Rozell, Leni Onkka, Erika Lyremark, Nisha Moodley, Tara Sophia Mohr, Danielle LaPorte, and Marie Forleo, for your wisdom and inspirational coaching.
Janice Formicella, for your research, support, and everything else.
My girlfriends—you know who you are. Thank you for listening and cheering me on. I love you ladies and could not have written this book without your help; dragging me out of the house, encouraging me to keep going, and making me laugh.
My mastermind and entrepreneur colleagues, we’re in this together, and I’m so happy to be in your circle.
Mom and Dad, I love you and I am grateful to be your daughter, and thank you to my sisters and your families for your support.
My son, Nathanael Ormsby Nikolai Anatoly Thompson. I’m sorry my head was buried in my Mac so much this past year(s). Thank you for being you.
Moses, I will always be yours. Thank you for listening and being there for me.
And to my adopted furry companions, who are by my side each day.
From Down and Out to Discovering My Nutritional Style
I’m a health and nutrition coach, a certified natural health practitioner, and to make it fun, a nutrition stylist. The stylist part is my nod to my “glamorous” past life as an executive in the fashion and fine jewelry industry. (Anyone who’s ever worked in fashion knows the glamour part is way overrated, but that’s another story.)
As a coach, I work mainly with women, many of them entrepreneurs, most of them in their thirties or older. It’s a time fraught with hormonal changes, aging issues, energy issues. As I like to say, it’s the time in life when you reap what you have sown. It’s when you realize you can no longer get away with eating whatever is in front of you. The women I work with want to feel fabulous every day, they want to live life as beautifully as possible, and they want to take their family and partners along for the ride.
I work with these women to help them find their own Nutritional Style. Through food, we change their lives. We go back to the nutritional basics and take a holistic approach to eating and living, one that’s connected to the seasons and all they have to offer.
The people I coach are often successful, hard-working, and overachievers. They’re passionate about their lives, but sometimes they need help understanding their own needs. My clients are so competent they think they’re infallible—until they start to look older, or every meal upsets their digestion, or until aches and pains or a lack of energy forces them to take a look at their lifestyle and their food.
Fashion Exec to Mom to Health Coach
I can help these women understand how and why they need to change their diets because I was one of them.
I was in my midthirties, single, and a vice president for Chanel, with an office overlooking Central Park and a clothing allowance that kept me in head-to-toe Chanel—including the handbags. I helped develop and then launched Chanel’s fine jewelry and watch division; it was an amazing career. I traveled back and forth to Paris and worked with incredibly talented people. I absolutely loved my life and my job. I couldn’t have designed anything more fun or more perfect for me at the time.
Then I met my husband. He lived in Virginia, and had his own company, a young daughter, and lots of responsibilities. It was love at first sight—well, maybe first lunch— and the dear friend who’d introduced us was shocked. She didn’t intend for us to fall in love and get married within eight months.
Each weekend, I traveled back and forth from New York City to his idyllic home in the Virginia countryside surrounded by acres of fields, horses, cows, and more horses and cows. We started riding every weekend. My instant mom status was a lot of fun and very quickly became an important part of my life.
After about a year or so doing the weekend commute, our first fine jewelry collection for Chanel launched successfully. Needless to say, by then I was tired. The travel was getting to me, and switching between big city fashion executive during the week and country stepmom on the weekends made my life seem too disparate. I realized one day that in a year of marriage, my husband and I had never spent more than five days together at a time. A change was needed.
I sadly resigned from Chanel, leaving the best job in the world. I shipped my furniture and piled dozens of overstuffed garment bags into my new husband’s SUV, along with two fancy city cats who could not imagine where their new life would lead. Get ready, city cats, this’ll rock your world.
I loved living with my husband (I guess that’s always a good thing!), but living in the country full-time was a challenge. I hadn’t yet made friends, and I was lonely. As someone who’d been working since age 12, I decided I finally needed some time off. My husband suggested that maybe some self-exploration was in order.
Wow, time to think? That would be new.
I signed up for painting classes and bought a horse. I started running every day for miles on dirt roads, hung out at the barn where we boarded my mare, and spent most of my time alone. It was a big change, but I was happily in love and sure that my new passion and career were on their way.
That was true, but I had no idea how painful the process would be.
One day a few months later, we took my stepdaughter and her cousins to a horse show. It was early June in Virginia, and the heat was over 100, with high humidity. I was worried the kids would overheat, so I pushed them to drink more water. I forgot about myself.
Suddenly, while sitting in the sun with the children dancing around me, I got a searingly painful headache. I managed to stand and murmur to my husband, “Please get me out of here.”
My head was splitting in two, I was dizzy and nauseous, and I needed my husband to hold me up as we staggered to our car. I tried to play it down so I wouldn’t scare the children, but by the time we reached our house I was unable to walk.
A friend decided I must be dehydrated and went out to buy electrolyte drinks. I lay in bed thinking I was going to die. An hour later, the pain was so severe I could no longer speak or move. My husband called an ambulance.
I stayed in the hospital for days while the doctors ran every test possible. The pain was unbearable; I was on a morphine drip to keep it at bay.
The frustrating part was that no one could say what was wrong. There was no diagnosis, although one doctor, after hearing about my drastic switch from high-powered VP to country mom, did venture to say, “Some people aren’t meant to retire.” I remember wanting to slug him, but instead I just said, “OK, thanks,” and left to go home.
My
