Meet Jiordana Saade

We recently connected with Jiordana Saade and have shared our conversation below.

Jiordana, sincerely appreciate your selflessness in agreeing to discuss your mental health journey and how you overcame and persisted despite the challenges. Please share with our readers how you overcame. For readers, please note this is not medical advice, we are not doctors, you should always consult professionals for advice and that this is merely one person sharing their story and experience.
I believe I have struggled with mental health disorders since I was a very small child. I was obese as a child (the only obese kid in my school at the time) and I was bullied quite a bit at a very young age. I learned early on, that who I was inherently was not good enough, and desperately wanted to change and fit in. When I was 8 years old I went on my first diet and essentially starved myself. I lost a lot of weight and people around me noticed. All of a sudden I had friends and even my parents commented on how beautiful I was becoming. Little did I know this would be the start of a life-long battle with eating disorders, addictions and low self esteem. From that moment on I fell into cycles of overeating and starving myself until I went to high school where I began using drugs to fit in. The drugs were also a source of numbing my inner pain, and had an added benefit of suppressing my appetite. By the time I was 18 years old I was addicted to cocaine, and spent all of my money for my education on drugs. By 21 I was kicked out of university and shifted my addiction to alcohol, and eventually ended up pregnant– that baby actually saved my life. I could no longer engage in substances and was forced to face myself and my deep underlying self loathing. I began to notice that I had actually been using substances to numb my inner pain from the tender age of 4 years old– but instead of alcohol and drugs, the substance I had always abused (where this all started) was food. When my son was 9 months old I vowed to get down to the bottom of my eating disorder and went to school to become a nutritionist. I graduated as valedictorian with first class honours and was hired to work with a medical doctor. I began to see parts of myself in the patients that would come in. The reality is, most people know what’s healthy and what’s not, they just chose the unhealthy option anyways. I became obsessed with understanding the motivation behind human behaviour so I went back to school to study behavioural psychology and what I learned changed me forever. I learned how to really love myself so much to became easy to treat myself well. This was so powerful I knew I had to share it with others. I am now a clinical nutritionist and an expert in eating behaviour. I run a global practice helping others to change the way they see themselves and the weight loss journey.

I firmly believe that the struggles in life we are given are designed to teach us something profound. I am so grateful for all of the challenges I experienced because it forced me to do the deeper work which led me to my passion in life.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
I believe it’s my mission to revolutionize the weight loss industry and teach others the value of viewing weight gain as an imbalance in both the mind and the body. Obesity is an epidemic where rates continue to rise despite the ever growing dieting industry. It seems that every day a new weight loss drug, surgery, or restrictive diet is being marketed to a vulnerable population of people who are just desperate to look in the mirror and like what they see. Diets have a 98% fail rate, and have single handedly led to a population of individuals who have no idea what to eat anymore. Eating is a very intuitive process. We are born with the signal of “I’m hungry” and “I’m full”. Unfortunately we unlearn this process by trying to follow a specific meal plan which just brings us farther away from what our bodies really need. The Mind-Full Clinic inc. offers a new solution for releasing the unwanted weight and increasing confidence through healing your relationship to food, and using functional medicine to balance and optimize the body.

Currently we offer The Mind-Full Method (MFM) which is a one of its kind 12 week online program with 6 months of live coaching. This is designed to reprogram your brain so the body inevitably follows and weight loss is effortless, but most importantly you get your life back!
MFM has a 99% success rate and has seen over 1000 women to date.

Additionally, we are hosting our first LIVE EVENT! Hosted at 1Hotel in Toronto global experts come together to offer a transformative experience in reprogramming the mind, healing the body and connecting to the soul. BE WHOLE: Mind, Body, Soul is available for those who want instantaneous results, with the power of live healing.

I am also the proud host of a popular Podcast: Head to Heal, which can be found across all popular streaming devices.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
The most important skills and area’s of knowledge that brought me to this level of success was; a) being able to face my shadow side, b) building psychological resilience and c) not taking myself or my thoughts too seriously!

a) Facing my shadow side meant me taking an honest look at my current reality, and the parts of myself that I felt guilty or shameful about. Instead of trying to numb myself or hide those parts, meeting them with love and compassion allowed me to get out of damaging self sabotaging cycles because I stopped seeing myself as “bad”.

b) Building psychological resilience means viewing my failures as growth opportunities. You do not build psychological resiliency by feeling good all the time, you build psychological resiliency by getting better at feeling bad. The problem is most people feel the negative feelings and get stuck in the cycles of “I’m not good enough”. Challenges are often our opportunity to level up, and building that kind of mental strength means I can trust myself to pick myself back up in any situation.

c) Thoughts are not things! Thoughts are often not even our own. they are usually encoded into us at an early age, and the brain can tell you a number of crazy things to keep you stuck in the familiar– even if the familiar is not the place you want to be! Being able to disassociate from my thoughts and not take myself too seriously has allowed me to move past fear and break up with my inner bully.

Who is your ideal client or what sort of characteristics would make someone an ideal client for you?
I have the best success with individuals who are ready to get the fu*k over themselves and are ready to disrupt their current pattern of behaviour. My ideal client is someone who struggles with low self confidence, has unwanted weight to lose, and is ready to give up dieting for good. This type of transformation is not just about weight loss, it’s about getting your life back! NO ONE is destined to suffer and I believe that if there is self sabotage occurring with eating behaviours, the food is usually not the problem, but the solution to a much larger problem that needs to be addressed. My ideal client is ready to step into the best version of themselves without having to give up their favourite foods.

Contact Info:

Image Credits
Adrienna Elcome- Photographer Emma Plan – HMU

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