Supporting Health At Every Size Framework – Exclusive Interview With Amparo Penny
- Apr 4, 2023
- 6 min read
Updated: Apr 5, 2023
Amparo Penny is a licensed clinician and health and mindset coach, who helps people stop obsessing about food and their bodies and get their sanity back. She helps people end black or white thinking around food and exercise and change their mindset to developing healthy habits FOR LIFE. This was what helped to end her 20+ year battle with her body, yo-yo dieting, and using exercise as punishment. And now it's her mission to help others end this battle and find food freedom.
Amparo Penny, Health and Mindset Clini-Coach©️
Introduce yourself! Please tell us about you and your life, so we can get to know you better.
Hi there! My name is Amparo Penny, I hail from Raleigh, North Carolina, where I lived until I was about 35, then I moved to Asheville, NC in 2013, where I currently live with my hubby, school-aged kiddo, and 18-year-old rat terrier, Billie Jean (yes, I love Michael Jackson. A LOT.).
In my spare time, you can find me listening to true crime podcasts, catching up on RuPaul’s Drag Race episodes, or watching anything from the Law and Order franchise (the regular series, SVU, or Criminal Intent episodes). I also have been in love with kickboxing for over 26 years – my dad got me into it when I was an adolescent and we would watch all the Rocky movies together – I love them all, especially Rocky IV, which I have memorized. And I love to strength train, which became another interest of mine in my early 20’s and has stuck with me since then – it is such a great stress reliever.
In the daytime, I’ve been a licensed mental health therapist for over 15 years and specialize in borderline personality disorder, eating disorders, trauma, sexual assault, and mood disorders. I recently added the role of health and mindset coach to my work hat because that will expand my reach to serve the communities that I want to support. What inspired you to start your business, and what is the mission behind it?
Ah yes. I have struggled with my own issues with dieting and body dissatisfaction for a good part of my adolescence into my 20’s, always comparing my body size and weight to my classmates. This translated to some disordered eating behaviors in my college days – lots of restriction and over-exercise (I was working at a gym so I could hide it) and using exercise as punishment for overeating. I caught myself in a picture once, packing a lunch of rice cakes and a protein bar and looking super emaciated, and realized that I was really unhealthy and under-nourished.
I was getting back to a healthy weight when my dad died unexpectedly in February 2007, when I was 29. It was a devastating shock to our family, and I dealt with my grief by eating and drinking to numb my feelings and escape my thoughts. This led to a long period of inactivity and a substantial weight gain, which also felt horrible because the pendulum had swung in the opposite direction from where I was before.
So, fast forward to the pandemic of 2020, I had gotten back into the routine of regular exercise and had gotten back to a size that was right for me, although I still had a lot of “all-or-nothing” thinking around food, which bothered me. I decided I wanted to work on that issue and that’s how I stumbled into the world of Intuitive Eating. I wanted to learn how to have more peace and freedom with food, to let go of the restrictions and rules, and not be so obsessed with food and dieting, and that’s what I learned from the concepts of Intuitive Eating. It helped me to restore the balance between food and my body, and to view food and exercise in more neutral ways. I loved it so much that I got certified in Intuitive Eating in 2020 and made it my mission to spread the word about how people can incorporate intuitive eating and healthy habits into their daily routines!
Can you tell us about some of your most popular products or services, and what sets them apart from competitors?
One of the things I think that sets me apart is the way I look – I don’t look like the average health and mindset coach that you see on social media, talking about battling diet culture. Usually, you’ll find a thin, white female coach, pretending to eat a huge donut or piece of pizza to advertise Intuitive Eating coaching. I don’t look like them, and they are sending mixed messages about what the Intuitive Eating framework is all about, and I would like to clear that up for people. It’s not all about eating donuts and pizza when you listen to your body and eat intuitively, there’s a lot more to it, and that’s what I want to educate people about!
I offer coaching courses to help teach the 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating and discuss ways that people have been affected by diet culture, and how to create healthy habits that they can stick with for life. This is a 12-week mindset program to teach them to unlearn habits and beliefs that haven’t been serving them and replace them with new beliefs and habits that they can live with and that will help them reach their healthy identity. The coaching courses are available for one-on-one, group, or self-study options. It’s meant to challenge you so come with an open mind! You can find out the pricing for the courses here. At my website, you can also get a free copy of my 16-page e-book “Creating Sustainable Health Habits” if you want to get started right away!
Who inspires you to be the best that you can be?
This might sound so cliché and I’m going to say it anyway: my clients. I really get inspired by my clients, some of whom I’ve worked with for several years as a therapist. These clients motivate and inspire me just as much as I hope to do the same in their sessions. In fact, it was in a couple of therapy sessions with a few clients where something that they said was the exact thing that I needed to hear to take the plunge into the coaching world last year – can you imagine that? They didn’t realize that they did that!
If you could change one thing about your industry, what would it be and why?
I would love for there to be more “middle ground” out there between diet culture and anti-diet culture. There seems to be a very “black or white” mindset out there between diet culture and the anti-diet culture, which can be a little confusing for people who might be somewhere in the middle, like me.
It seems like you must be in one camp or the other – there is no in-between. It makes it sound like you must choose between loving yourself as it is or wanting to lose weight. What if someone feels they want to do both? What if losing some weight so they can run and play with their children is the gift of loving themselves? I believe in people being treated with respect and dignity at every size and supporting people if they choose to lose weight for their individual reasons because it’s really none of my business. I don’t know why people feel like they have to choose between one side or the other, and why there has to be so much gatekeeping on this subject.
So, I try to take a more “middle-of-the-road” approach with my coaching business. I am a certified intuitive eating coach who supports the Health At Every Size framework and I also believe that people can love themselves and choose to lose weight for personal reasons. I don’t think it has to be mutually exclusive.
Favorite Quotes:
“The only limitations one has are the ones they place on themselves” – Muhammad Ali
“When people show you who they are, believe them.” – Maya Angelou
“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Life the life you’ve imagined.” – Henry David Thoreau
“Start before you’re ready.” – Prince Brathwaite
