Randi Colton appears energized, busily working for the cause of health and fitness. With seemingly inexhaustible reserves of patience and attention, the health and lifestyle coach plies her craft by coaxing self-revelations from clients, nudging them toward those elusive truths they hide from themselves. And then, Colton coaches them to change.
“I consider myself a health and fitness professional,” said Colton. “It covers a lot of different things — I teach people how to eat healthy, I do health coaching, and personal and group fitness training.”
Colton and her husband moved from Pomona to Sloatsburg several years back because they felt the area has “one of the best school systems in the county.” Now, she carves out time from her fitness business to help out at Sloatsburg Elementary, where her kids attend school and where she currently serves as president of the Sloatsburg PTA.
Colton’s own eight-week Lose To Win class recently celebrated its own graduation. Held at the Sloatsburg Library and sponsored by Nyack Hospital, Lose To Win is a workshop where Colton teaches people how to lose weight safely, make healthy food choices and exercise correctly. The program is one of the many ways Colton helps people solve their problems of personal health and wellness. During one class, just short of the final course celebration, a Lose To Win attendee shared how the class had made a difference in her life. “I tried everything, Weight Watches and other diets,” said shared with the room. “But this class really changed my thinking.”
Saturday Colton returns to the library to teach a very different kind class, a specially designed CPR course for people who want to know how to handle themselves in an emergency. “Basically, they’re going to learn how to perform CPR safely on an adult, child and infant,” Colton said. “It involves what to do in a choking situation. And then after the course, they receive a competition card. It’s not a certification, but in case of an emergency they’d know what to do.”
Certified through a number of organizations and practices –NASM, ACE, AFAA, Colton’s real passion is coaching health and wellness and helping people discover that specific plan just right for them.
Like in the film What About Bob?, where Richard Dreyfuss’s character Dr. Leo Marvin wrote a whole book on the subject, Colton said success is all about baby steps. “Many people I talk to say they don’t have time to do the things they need to do — but then, they don’t know how much time it might take to do what they want. I find it’s often time management that people need to work on.”
Colton said she works to change people’s vocabulary in terms of how they discuss their own personal health and wellness needs. “When someone tells me that they want to lose weight, they’re already setting themselves up for failure, telling themselves that they’re going to later find it — hence the yo-yo diets, the up and down,” she said. Losing weight implies you misplaced it, like your keys or glasses. “Tell yourself that you want to get rid of the weight, you want to be done with it, you want to shed these pounds,” Colton said.
Since spring has sprung, it’s that time when people start thinking about vacations and beach bodies. Colton will also make a return engagement of sorts to the library Monday and Tuesday of next week to help people jump-start their lifestyle and health attitudes. She will hold two free health and fitness workshops that will work with Colton’s Health & Wellness Wheel, a self-evaluation tool that helps illustrate how a person relates to his or her personal health.
Colton stressed the collaborative nature of health coaching and said the Wheel acts as a tool to focus the discussion. “We’re working together as a team to come up with solutions and those solutions vary,” she said. “Some people need to focus on hydration, where other people may be focusing on stress they’re having or fun and recreation they’re not having.”
A simple thing such as hydration can have significant impact on a person’s health. And most people suffer from some dehydration, which can lead to increased stress, a build up of toxins in your system, fatigue, and digestive ailments. Colton said that if you’re thirsty, you’re already dehydrated. Three sure signs of dehydration are dry mouth and skin, with cracked lips and nails, thirst, and bright yellow urine. Dehydration often ranks high on the Wellness Wheel.
Colton’s Wellness Wheel helps people clarify personal health perceptions and practices, balancing out too much attention on any one area such as nutrition, stress or recreation. “There are different areas of health that we cover, not just nutrition and exercise. I help people improve their health and overall wellness by using goal-setting strategies,” Colton said. “We identify obstacles that are standing in their way and I serve as their accountability partner to keep them on track.”
Randi Colton‘s CPR Course will be held at the Sloatsburg Public Library, Saturday, March 24 from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Fee is $35. Her free Health Coaching workshops will also be held at the library Monday, March 26 at 10:30 a.m. and Tuesday, March 27 at 6:30 p.m. For more information, call the library at 753-2001.
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